From: Barbara Lamar (blamar@satx.rr.com)
Date: Sat Apr 12 2003 - 21:08:29 MDT
Greg Burch wrote:
> The combination of all these factors having dramatic results in a short
> time is nothing short of astonishing to me: Being twice as strong, being
> pain-free and carrying 10% less weight has made me feel like I've been
> transformed into some kind of superman: I walk lighter and feel much
> better.
Congratulations on your new body, Greg!
I've been on a reducing diet myself for a couple of months. Since I went
back to the full-time practice of law, I've been leading a more sedentary
lifestyle than I had been before, and my clothes were getting too tight. I
was determined not to go out and buy larger clothes. That would have been
admitting defeat, the first step along the Highway to Hugeness.
I found it quite helpful to change my attitude toward food. Instead of
regarding food as an aesthetic experience, I've switched (at least for the
duration of the reducing period) to thinking of it strictly as fuel, except
for chocolate and coffee. And fresh garden greens with vinagarette dressing.
Those I still regard as an aesthetic experiences. (I don't think chocolate's
all that fattening if you eat 75%+ pure chocolate).
I found lunch the most difficult meal of the day to arrange for, since I
usually eat it away from home. Most restaurants are hopeless. So I decided
to use a liquid meal substitute. I found that the Atkins one was the
tastiest and also one of the few that wasn't loaded with sugar. So I guess
you could say I'm on a modified Atkins diet. But I find that I feel really
crappy without *some* carbohydrates, especially just before exercising.
Here's the deal: stored fat in the body has to be made from food. People
can't photosynthesize. So if you don't eat more calories than you burn,
you're not going to gain weight. I don't see how the source of the calories
could be terribly important, long as you're getting the nutrients you need
and enough fiber to keep everything moving through. From the research I've
seen, it looks as though different people need different proportions of
various nutrients. There isn't any one diet that's right for everyone.
Ideally, one should experiment with different quantities of each kind of
food, pay close attention to one's body, and eat what works best. Which
probably changes over the lifespan of each individual.
As far as quick and easy meals -- for anyone who enjoys gardening, once you
get a garden established it doesn't take very much time each day to keep it
going, and fresh foods don't require elaborate cooking to taste good. I
recently moved to the city and have only a small yard, but at the moment I'm
harvesting lettuce, chard, spinach, and parsely from the garden and
dandelion greens from neighboring weed lots (although the dandelions are
beginning to go to seed, which makes the greens bitter). The fresh stuff is
SO much better than grocery store produce. I can't put my hands on any
published research on the subject, but the fresh stuff HAS to have more
vitamins than stuff that was harvested several days earlier.
Barbara
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