Posted on 01/01/2022 8:20:11 AM PST by Mariner
It's resolution time again, and if you’re like most people, eating “better” may be one of your goals for the new year. According to a survey on 2021 resolutions, the most common commitments people made were to exercise more (46 percent), improve their diet (45 percent), or lose weight (44 percent).
In fact, as many as 45 million Americans begin a diet each year. But research shows that weight-loss diets just don't work. They’re unsustainable and you're likely to regain the weight.
What if, instead of plotting how you'll restrict your calories in the new year, you resolved to feel good about the food you eat?
That's the advice of eating psychology expert Elise Museles, author of Food Story: Rewrite the Way You Eat, Think & Live. Museles encourages readers to consider their personal food stories--how they were raised around food, their ideas and rules about diet, and the emotions they feel when they’re eating--both positive and negative. She says discovering your story about food is key to creating a healthy new narrative about what, why, when, and where to eat.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
It sounds like you may have developed Metabolic syndrome which is a number of conditions that occur together and eventually become life threatening. I am very glad that you found a solution that worked for you. You are correct that once thing get completely out of whack, and hormones can be a big part of that, the traditional way of thinking about losing weight can become almost futile.
OK. Ignore the science that the body doesn’t burn calories like a calorimeter because a hobbyist laid out the science at a level people can understand. I guess if you can stand spouting debunked theories like eating fat makes you fat and a calorie is a calorie I can still be your fellow freeper & even agree with you in other areas.
Sometimes overly simplistic sees to the heart of the matter, sometimes it’s a miss.
Your theory ignores the complexity of the human machine, something we are still understanding, ignores the multiple chains that breakdown food: some more efficient, other’s less so.
People have variations on common groups of enzymes and some are tremendously inefficient leading to people that eat like horses & don’t get fat. Other people, winners in times of famine, are very efficient and gain weight in 100 calories a day.
There is a psychological mechanism called “Just World hypothesis” where people want to believe doing the right thing gets you results. A calories is a calorie is one example of that process.
SMASH???
Yep. I was diagnosed with diabetes and the doctors wanted to put me on all these meds. I stopped eating sugar, which is very hard to do, but I cut my sugar intake to zero and guess what!
Eating well and low carb takes time and effort and most people are too lazy to bother.
However, there are plenty of great meals that can be made and enjoyed that are low carb.
You just have to want to lose the weight bad enough.
Amen and hallelujah.
Many of the firefighters that I used to work with who were overweight refused to eat anything but meat. This usually resulted in temporary weight loss in the beginning and them smelling bad, feeling bad, and often collapsing at fire scenes when they had to exert themselves. The worst example was one of my drivers who eventually was transferred to fire communications after not being able to do his job in the field anymore.
He was supposed to come back to us after he lost weight. But he never lost any weight despite his apparent strict adherence to his meat only diet. Maybe he had a stash of twinkies and ding dongs hidden somewhere, but sweets other than a generous slathering of barbecue sauce never seemed to interest him. He eventually ended up having chest pains corrected with several stents. After that he was forcibly retired still in his 40s. The last time I saw him he was still morbidly obese and extolling the virtues of whatever carnivore type diet he was on.
Alcohol kept me sane these past two years.....
+1000
There are a lot of flavored carbonated drinks out there that have no sugar or sweeteners.
Like any change, it does take a little getting used to, but you can still enjoy the flavor and the fizz without the sugar.
We have found that making small lifestyle changes slowly works better than going cold turkey. The first thing we did when we got married was get used to eating brown rice instead of white rice. Now we love and and almost never do the white rice.
We also switched to honey for sweetening some things and cut sugar in half and using real butter instead of margarine. Almost any recipe can work well with sugar cut way back.
You make a bunch of excellent points. However, there is another psychological mechanism that you did not mention. The ability to nibble all day without thinking about it or remembering it later.
Almost every person I know who has been forced by their doctors to keep a daily log of every morsel and drink that they put into their mouths has found that they typically have been eating and drinking far more than they realized. And most of what they eat is snack food of questionable nutritional value.
Most people have snack food and drink available to them every minute of the day and eat most of their calories without even thinking about it. In this past year where we live the availability of restaurant food has been reduced, but people just switched to “fast food” where they typically get more empty calories for less money.
Sorry for meandering a bit.
I weighed 275 when I turned 36. Always been a husky kid. I went to the doctor for my first physical ever and found out my cholesterol was borderline high and my triglycerides were over 700. I started a diet and exercise routine to try to get my numbers down and avoid taking medication.
I quit regularly eating fast/processed food, no butter, sugar, oils other than a little olive oil, no sugar soda, beef, chips, etc. A lot of lean meats, hard boiled eggs, and vegetables.
Bought a bicycle and am riding an average of 20 miles a day whenever possible.
It is a constant struggle but 16 years later I am still down 90 pounds. It is a lifetime commitment not a resolution.
SMASH stands for Salmon, Mackerel, Anchovies, Sardines and Herring.
Restrict yourself to 1,500 calories a day. Drink 64 ounces of water daily, eat 4 servings of low-carb vegetables a day and find time to exercise.
I’ve done this and so far have lost over 60 pounds.
I really did like your post. One more comment on this. As many of us reach the age where our friends and associates are starting to drop over dead more frequently... the distribution definitely does not always match the "doing the right thing gets you results" expectation. Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not. Often heredity, luck, stubbornness, and other qualities that are not well understood have a greater amount of influence on life span.
I know you want to believe but...when I was in medical school 40 years ago I believed as you do now.
I bought lean cuisine (or equivalent brand) and ate one for lunch & one for dinner and had a boiled egg for breakfast.
I jogged in center city philly through the smog & car exhaust. I drank only seltzer & ice tea w/o sugar.
I had so little sugar that when I mistakenly took a sip of tonic water the sugar was shocking. I know now that there is sugar in tonic water but til that point I couldn’t taste it and didn’t know.
After a solid month with rigid adherence to 1000 cal/day I had gained 5 lb. What I know now having lost 60lb once and 100 lb after the 60 returned in 5 years, is that for me carbs are the perfect food, digested efficiently & transferred as a layer of fat. On my month of <1000 calories a day I chose the pasta calorie counter meals.
The problem with keto diets is not that they don’t work it’s that after 3-4 years on one my body rebels and I don’t feel well. I have proved two ways through controlled eating that for me at least a calorie is not a calorie and that we can only accomplish so much with our genetics. Most scientists working on obesity are investigating which forms of which enzymes are the most important for how food energy is utilized, stored or wasted. There will be a more nuanced understanding & perhaps even ways to regulate food metabolism.
If you eat 3000 cals per day of fat and protein only, and burn only 2000 per day, you will gain 2lbs per week.
With certainty.
To believe otherwise is insane.
You are right. It is not a just world but we can try. LOL
No, I’m sorry but you can believe that people of all different ethnic background, physiotypes, and sets of enzymes will burn food energy the same way. How do you go about deciding the calorie needs for an individual? Using those useless height weight male female tables?
That is not where the science is but people who just repeat the old saws, including many family doctors, diet counsellors etc., think it is.
It’s so tempting to blame people as having no self control and eating unhealthy diets. That is certainly true for some people but not for many who struggle to be a healthy weight. IOW it’s a cop out, a just world hypothesis that satisfies the need to believe that if bad things happen it’s the fault of the person they happen to. Interestingly up to a point the less you eat the lower your calorie requirements, the body becomes more efficient. Freegards.
Nah...flouting all their incredibly STUPID rules is what kept me sane. I relished all the Karens telling me “put your mask on.” That does wonders for your sanity.
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