Are any of you listening to the free, on-line lectures this week via either Future of Nutrition or the Paleo Con? They’re great! What a wealth of information, motivation, and inspiration. If you want to improve your health or lose weight, you’ve got to change your brain. To do that, you’ll need to fill your brain with thoughts outside of your normal thought patterns. If “diet mentality” has dominated your thoughts, then listening to totally different perspectives, over and over again, will help you shift to thinking of food as medicine/information/how we feel/chemistry; not math/calories/our enemy. These conferences are turning the Diet Industry paradigm on it’s head; I love it! 
Can you think of one other industry on earth that Fails so regularly, completely, perpetually, and yet is promoted, advised, trusted, and believed over and over and over again? Every year people spend BILLIONS of dollars on diet foods, diet pills, diet potions, diet programs, weight loss surgeries, and every trick in the book, to either lose weight and gain it back, or not lose weight at all. It doesn’t make sense: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Diets don’t work. Ever. One of the speakers likened Dieting to holding a volleyball underwater: as soon as you let it go, KaBoom! He also said that when you’re a Dieter, you either have Good Days, or Bad Days. Who relates to that?? How many times have you said that to yourself: I was bad today. ? That’s a sure sign you’re in Diet World; you’ve either stuck to your low calorie diet magic foods, or you’ve blown it. You were either Bad or Good.
Ugh. Please please please, if you’re stuck in that world, you’re doomed to weight gain, lots of failure, and missing out on life because food, dieting, and weight hi-jack your thoughts. Low fat, low cal dieting also makes you fat, sick, and potentially crazy. Look around. Look at the evidence. 70% of the U.S is overweight. 70%.
Go back to when I said that the Diet Industry fails time and time again, yet continues to profit (greatly) and be promoted by main-stream medicine as the solution to your problem. Here’s an except from WebMd from googling, “how to lose weight”:
“You can safely lose 3 or more pounds a week at home with a healthy diet and lots of exercise, says weight loss counselor Katherine Tallmadge, RD.
How to Lose Weight Fast
If you burn 500 more calories than you eat every day for a week, you should lose about 1-2 pounds per week.
For instance, if you take in 1,050 to 1,200 calories a day, and exercise for one hour per day, you could lose 3-5 pounds in the first week, or more if you weigh more than 250 pounds. It’s very important not to cut calories any further — that’s dangerous.”
Do you see the insanity of this line of thinking? It’s NEVER worked. Science has proven for years that reducing calories and withholding nutrients sends our body into STORAGE MODE, not burning mode. Even hours of exercise won’t work, trust me. Exercise for health, not weight loss. Besides that, 1,050 to 1,200 calories a day? Can you say, “starving frenzy”?? I mean, talk about a rebound binge waiting to happen.
When you reduce calories/diet, the body and mind become “stressed” because famine is perceived; when this happens, stress hormones like Cortisol are released into the blood stream. Cortisol increases triglyceride production, it inhibits sensitivity to leptin and insulin, it shuts down digestion, it prohibits the body from burning fat, it turns muscle tissue into sugar/glucose for fast energy. When that glucose isn’t actually used to “outrun the sabertooth”, then the body repackages that excess glucose into fat, and stores it in the belly area. (This is the connection between stress and belly fat.)
I’ve had two emails this week expressing sadness over saying goodbye to favorite foods. Expressing sadness over anticipated, up coming hunger and deprivation. This doesn’t have to happen. Eating a Real Whole Foods/Paleo/Primal type diet isn’t about low calorie, or low carb, or low fat, or hours of exercise. It’s not about small plates, counting calories, putting your fork down, or counting your chews. It’s about deleting processed foods and eating good sized meals of meats, fats, vegetables, some fruits, some nuts and seeds, and some whole fat dairy if you can digest it. It’s being a “nutrient seeker”. If you’re actually hungry, then you need to eat more at your meals. If you did eat adequately, then recognize that your hunger isn’t “hunger”, it’s just your brain wanting pleasure from the foods you’ve been spoiling it with, or it’s crying for the constant stimulation it’s used to.
That might sound a little harsh, but it’s the truth. There’s an upside to that though. Our body, our brain, our taste buds, our neural nets – they’re adaptive. They won’t adapt to starvation, or actually, they’ll adapt with negative patterns, habits, thoughts, and results, but they will adapt beautifully to a lifestyle that focuses on feeding yourself sufficient nutrients to build your cells, repair damage, fight virus and bacteria, and have normal, healthy levels of neural transmitters like serotonin and dopamine. You know, before “dieting” became a “thing” in the 1970s, very, very few people were overweight. It’s time to throw off the diet yoke. It’s never worked for anyone. Quit making yourself crazy, and focus on re-aligning your brain to accomodate planning, packing, and cooking. Start looking at food, even fat, for the nutrients it provides. Start looking at processed foods as the toxic chemical poisons they are.
You are not destined to be overweight, sick, or tired. You can be a healthy weight, unbelievably well, and energetic. Eat foods that nourish your mind and body. Be a Real Whole Foodie.