Diet - Change Old Bad Habits, Don't Start New Ones

The notion to lose weight can come from something as simple as an innocent remark, such as, "Haven't you put on a couple of pounds?" Depending on your personality, there's a whole new life issue that you hadn't explored yet, and for some sensitive personalities, it's a dangerous place to go. Skinny people deal with weight issues, too, only in a different way.

When you get the idea that you want to lose weight you should answer as to:

1. Why do you want to lose weight?
2. Do you have any negative influences from others that could sabotage your efforts?
3. Are you keeping weight on as a way of protecting your feelings?
4. Is your life de-stressed enough to take on the demands of a weight loss project?

Always make a realistic plan coming from positive energy. Then, if you really think you have a weight 'problem', consider:

1. What caused it, because you will be going back to that same situation when the restricted diet is over. You may also have a new problem of guilt over the failure of the weight loss program.
2. Drink lots of water to help flush toxins from your system.
3. One way that calories are expelled from your body is through your lungs.
4. A good weight loss trick is to find a picture of yourself that shows you closer to your goal weight and keep it in sight. When you look at it you will see yourself where you would like to be and your subconscious will take care of the rest.
5. If you really want to try a new way to diet, consider the one where you eat foods that take more calories to digest than they give you, besides being full of nutrition. Those foods are fruits (apples, melons, etc) and veggies (broccoli, cauliflower, etc). I first saw this in 1980 in an Australian magazine and now the concept is here again and it won't make your body crazy. Check it out on the Links page.
6. If you desperately want to try a restricted diet, try for a week at a time and listen to the changes that your body tells you.
7. From the moment you decide to is when you start/stop losing weight.

My rules of thumb

1. To eat so that I get the most nutrition out of the smallest amount of calories, which reduces my eating time and leaves more time for other things, i.e., spinach instead of lettuce in salads.
2. I eat raw fruit and veggies, organic where possible, as they have more nutrition and last longer.
3. A variety of flavours (i.e., meat marinade) keeps my palette satisfied.
4. I never add sugar or salt to my food and only use sea salt in cooking.
5. Daily, I take a good anti-oxidant like grape seed extract to counteract the free radicals from certain foodstuffs and pollution. I also take Omega 3 and 5-HTP and have recently found a total food in Spirulina (blue-green algae). Occasionally I take a good multi-vitamin when I feel the need for it.

In 1979 I developed bulimia, which quickly turned to anorexia and I missed out on some wonderful things for quite a spell...and it is like being under a spell. It took a pregnancy to break the cycle and it took me years to find new balance, because of the many changes in lifestyle and eating habits. It all came down to something that I already knew intellectually, but had yet to lose the obsession with, my weight. With low self esteem it was easy for society to judge me and retraining my self image has been a life long task. Today, I am very healthy and I can eat whatever I want. Although, I have never been overweight, per se, my long time problem with weight was in fact a false self image problem.

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The dieting dilemma

There is no accounting for poor eating habits! If you feel that you must go on a restricted diet, remember that they bring their own plate of problems to the table. A healthy diet is a lifestyle where you pay attention to what you put into your body. When you hear of a new restrictive diet, you need to compare it to your regular eating habits and see if it's just someone else telling you the same thing in a new way. For example, the low-carb diet of today, is making money because people are still not listening to the fact that most foods are high in refined sugar which makes for an overly high carbohydrate diet.

When you look at a healthy diet's balance between the body's need for carbohydrates, fat, and proteins, you will see that refined sugar is not there either (refined sugar takes nutrients from your body and gives none). If you look deeper into nutrition, you will learn that there are the unhealthy simple carbohydrates (sugar, sucrose) and the healthy complex carbohydrates (grains, vegetables). Our bodies need the complex carbohydrates for what they bring to the table.

Example – a testimonial on the Dr Atkins Diet Revolution of 1978:

• I followed the diet meticulously, including making the "egg muffins". I lost weight, but after not too long I started feeling lethargic. I had also lost interest in my life and felt uncomfortable in my body. One month, I noticed that my period was lasting longer than normal, it was still flowing heavy after two weeks. So, I went to the doctor and he said that I was deficient in vitamins, especially P and K, which help to coagulate bleeding. I told him the diet I was on and he said that my body had gone too far into a state of ketosis where I was losing muscle and not fat any more.
• I decided to go off the diet and then my hormones started going crazy with weird food cravings. That went on until a time that I was losing 1 to 2 pounds a day for a while. Then all of a sudden, I was gaining that amount per day.
• I started to fear food, so I got a prescription for amphetamines to counter any sense of appetite. Then I went to a naturopath who started fasting and cleansing diets. I remember phoning him in a panic one morning because I had gained 1/4 of a pound. Between the amphetamine instance and the naturopathic shock to my system I developed bulimia. Later in the journey I reached the ultimate with anorexia. Thus was a struggle with myself over weight that lasted for years including a self-imposed no-fat diet and it's problems.

Research shows that the initial weight loss in this diet is water and you can lose 5 lbs of water just by cutting salt out of your diet. When considering fad diets, do your homework.

You may find is some ailments or residues of illness have made themselves at home in your body during the course of your abuse of your health. Diseases or cancers may have also been started and now those too can be healed by your newly-created healthy cells. You may also find that in the healing of your own wounds, you have the natural flowing ability to heal others without thought or hesitation.

This is the line that you do not want to cross.
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Bulimia:
Is where you feel guilty after you eat and cause yourself to barf all the food back up. The hydrochloric acid from your stomach also destroys the protective enamel on your teeth and then you have dental problems, too. Vomiting also causes an electrolyte imbalance in your system and your hormones get out of whack. Socially, it's brings a type of paranoia to the entertainment scene and it's also a signal that you are developing Anorexia.

Anorexia:
Is where you become obsessively afraid of food and every bit of it becomes your enemy. Eating a piece of steak or a yogurt cone can cause your belly to swell up. Your body goes into a different kind of ketosis. When your body loses too much fat, you lose your period. Besides always seeing only the fat on your body, your brain distorts other aspects of your life, too. The other thing about being too skinny, for me it was 118lbs at 5'9", is that your body hurts most of the time.