My Dear Hard Drive

Posts Tagged ‘Fat’

Often when we set out to loose weight, what ever the method we choose, we use terms like “whipping myself” into it. I think it’s often seen as a punishment to your body for becoming fat. Now it has to pay for it. However, your body never asked to be fat, nor did it ask for that pizza you ate. If you want to blame a body part for your weight, blame your mouth. It can have some pretty counter productive suggestions as to what you should eat.

When you set out to become lean again, (I’d rather you’d want to become lean instead of thin, as that’s a healthier approach) tell your body that you’re going to pay back all the lard you made it store, all the sugars you made it process, for all the high calorie foods that you pushed down your throat never giving your body enough nutrients to maintain itself. Admit you haven’t been a very good friend to your body, that only wants to keep you alive and take your mind/brain to places where it’s needed. Your body is your servant, and you have been a horrible employer to it, paying it with rubbish forcing it to work for pennies. Pennies, in this case, being the poor substitute for nutrition you’ve given it.

If you differentiate yourself from your body, you will not feel quite as hostile towards it as you would if you say “I’m fat”. It’s your body that is fat, not you. You have a fat body. Your servant is fat, because you made it so. You have the power to become a good employer again, and make your body happy to be serving you. And, then, when you grave for that chocolate cake – and who doesn’t – you can have a piece every now and then and your body will clean it up for you – but you have to give it enough to work with! Being healthy and lean doesn’t mean your mouth will never be happy again, in fact, you can retrain your mouth to enjoy healthy food but  you can’t make your body thrive on the unhealthy.

I know you’ve got a lot of love to give – give some of it to your body and treat it fair!

I'd eat where ever they're cooking!

I just found yet another fad diet advertised online. Of course, it started out by describing all these fad diets out there and then going on to say that by drinking this tea you’ll get thinner without any change of eating habits or exercise! Here’s a tip: If any diet says that, it’s a fad. ANY.

Losing weight or, should we say, fat, is not that hard, but it takes time and determination. Any quick fix will return the weight and then some, this is because the quick loss diets make you lose weight in muscle, not fat, and since muscle is the #1 fat burner in your body, when you have less muscle mass, you’ll burn less fat. So when you return to your normal diet, the same amount of consumed calories will turn into MORE FAT than ever before.

If you’re blaming your genes for your weight, based on the notion that your parents were fat, their parents were fat, therefore you have to be fat, here’s another thought: Could it be, that your fat parents had really shit eating habits, and they passed on those HABITS to you, not “fat genes”? Did your diet, as a child, contain a lot of veggies, fruit and greens as well as home cooked meats on a DAILY BASIS? With very little or no white bread (=breakfast toast)? If you said no, there’s the reason for your weight, not in your genes.

We’ve been brainwashed to think that weight control is HARD and you can’t do it without straining yourself to your limits, without doing massive amounts of training and starving yourself – namely, punish yourself. People like to think that those of us who are thin and beautiful, are that way because they sacrifice everything else in their lives in that pursuit. That could not be further from the truth! In fact, since I started eating healthy, I’ve never felt so full and satisfied in my life – not to mention I’m not farting all the time anymore! It does require a little more cooking and effort in the food preparation area, but as much a I hate it some days, last Monday when I was walking to the grocery store to get lunch salad ingredients, I felt joyful just for the thought of having a good filling salad after a shit food weekend.

As we get more and more used to eating out and buying ready made meals, it’s getting all too easy to never to learn to cook. Unfortunately, if you want to eat healthy and be able to afford eating healthy, learning to cook (or marrying someone who likes to cook) is the key. Of course, you still have to think a bit what you make, and fat laden foods are out of the question no matter who makes them, but at least you won’t be fooled to think you’re eating something that will make/keep you thin when you’re not, because you know exactly what goes into the food you eat.

As for salads, many of us, including myself, might find salads quite unimaginative thing to eat, to start with. However, in a couple of weeks I learned to think outside the box. Things to throw into your salad:

Tuna, ham or grilled chicken (about 100g per person)
Salad, cabbage, green stuff (a mixed salad bag is really handy)
Feta cheese grumbled, about 30 grams
Sun dried tomatoes (rinse off the oil)
Fresh tomatoes
Capsicum strips (fresh or pickled)
Pickled onions
Cucumber
Olives
Chives
Onion rings
Parmesan cheese shavings
Boiled eggs
Avocado (I’m not a huge fan of avocado, but it’s sooo good for you!)

Balsamic vinaigrette based dressing, Paul Newman’s Own is our favourite if we’re not mixing one ourselves.

Oh and pretty much anything you love in the veggie department. You can use all of them together or use some of them for variation or use what ever you happen to have in the house. One key that I found to a successful salad is to chop everything to smaller pieces that is easy to mix and also easy to stuff into your mouth without getting dressing all over your face!

The key to deciding if the diet is a fad: Are they trying to sell you a product or is the diet based on items that you can buy from any producer or grow yourself? Almost certainly, if I had Google Adsense installed on this blog, you’d see a selection of prime examples of fad diets on the adverts right now.

Lastly: Read Donna Aston.

Our bodies are roughly speaking made of these elements: Skeletal structure, lean muscle tissue, organs and fat. They all have a weight, and 2 of these react fast to starvation (and fast weight loss) diets. These two are the muscle tissue and fat. Sadly, the fastest one to go is muscle tissue, which you really don’t want to lose, but there is a way to avoid it.

Quite unfortunately, we’ve been brainwashed to think that the number on our bathroom scale shows how fat or thin we are. This is only half of the truth. While our weight can go down, the amount of fat in our body can remain more or less the same. Also, two people of same height and weight can have a different amount of fat stored in their bodies, and they can wear very different size clothes.

I started monitoring my weight and eating habits at the beginning of the year. Last week, I put on 0.3 kg of overall weight, but my body fat percentage went down for nearly one percent. (Measured with fat calibres.) In four weeks, I’ve gained 3.36 kilos of lean muscle tissue and lost 0.9 kilos of overall weight. That means, that I have lost 2.46 kilos of pure fat, even though the scale only shows 0.9 kilo drop in weight. I did this with very little exercise. (How surprising is it that the Biggest Loser competitors bust their ass off and sometimes only lose about half a kilo a week? They really should be measuring fat percentages, not weight on the scales!) If I had been exercising, the amount of muscle tissue would have been greater, which would have burned more fat – not the exercising itself that much, the thing that burns most fat in our system is the system itself; organs and muscle. While we can’t add to the mass of organs, we can add muscle tissue. While I sit here and type I’m burning fat, because I have given my body enough to food and nutrients to sustain my bodily functions for the day, so it doesn’t have to worry about wasting fat to enable my fingers to move on the keyboard. If I hadn’t eaten enough, it would enable my sitting position and my typing motions by reducing muscle tissue and using that as fuel.

You think I’m kidding, right? Nope, the key to fat loss is not starvation, it’s eating the correct amount (which is shit loads actually) and the right stuff each day, five times a day, at the right time, sleeping during the right time of day and drinking enough water. That may sound complicated, but it’s a lot easier than hardly eating a thing and making excuses to friends and family for it.

Why I bring up anorectics here, is that I want to make you understand that starving yourself will make you fuck ugly, just like over-eating does. There, I said it. You will deprive yourself from the beautiful muscle tone that you can have ONLY by feeding your body. You can exercise all you want and get nowhere; your body won’t give you gifts like that for nothing! You must feed it in order to be beautiful. You have to make peace with your body so that it can give you what you want. Now, you don’t have to feed it fat, sugar and calorie dense food, in fact, it will not like that one bit, but you do need to feed it vegetables, (all you can eat) and a decent amount of meat, be it chicken, beef, fish, organ meat or what ever. I will not give you definite quantities, because I would do you a disservice, you will have to find out the right amount for yourself… And the best way I know how to point you in the right direction is to tell you to buy / get your hands on Donna Aston’s book “Fat Or Fiction”. (And her other books.) I am not an affiliate, I just know she knows her stuff – well, she taught me everything I know through those books. The book is sold out in most stores, so check out Amazon’s second hand offers. It’s still out there. (It’s her on the cover.) To get you started though, I’ll tell you this: You can’t over-eat vegetables. They are very low on calories, and rich in nutrients that your body needs for fighting for your health (and beauty!). If you add a couple of average size tins of tuna each day, you’re already on a good path – but, there’s A LOT more you need to eat and know, so you really do need to read the book because I can’t possibly condense all that information into one blog post. It is very specific, as you can imagine when you do things to the point that even typing burns fat! I promise she’ll be inspiring to read, and as an anorectic, you already have enough self discipline to carry out the program to perfection. Use that to your advantage.

I’ve never been anorectic, nor over-weight, but I have been over-fat. I know what it feels like to have a flab belly, even though people say I’m not fat at all. I felt fat. The reason for it was that there was not enough muscle tissue to support my belly, and it hangs on uncontrolled and flabby. It still does a bit – I’m not at my goal yet, and I am going to add a bit more exercise to my routine to help my body build muscle.

One more thing: The more muscle mass you loose, the slower you burn fat. Don’t you want to make sure you have enough muscle on your body to keep the fat in check? Read that book and get to know what you’re doing. If you know an anorectic, buy that book for them – read it yourself first if you want to make sure you’re not giving them bad information, it won’t hurt you either, reading it!

About Donna Aston

Links to some book stores that still her books:

http://www.holisticpage.com.au/_Donna_Aston.php

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1876462094

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Donna+Aston&sts=t&tn=Fat+or+Fiction&x=36&y=16

This book is not one of those fad-diets that last 6 months before someone debunks them. Donna’s information is valid, real stuff which will help you to make better.. No, PERFECT choices when it comes to nutrition, it takes the guess work out of it.