The Pirate Nutritionist

Again... I am not a licensed pirate, or nutritionist. I am just a guy who lost 60-plus pounds and have easily kept it off for a year. Puts me in the top few percent of weight-losers. Most people fail long before that. That said, I have no particular expertise in eating disorders. But I urge you to read on and see what you think. My wife is a clinician who sometimes deals with eating disorder clinics and I find some of their methods troublesome. They have a pretty wide latitude for things that constitute disordered eating. Let me mention this first: IT IS NORMAL TO WANT TO BE THIN. IT IS NORMAL TO SKIP MEALS OR EVEN FAST ON OCCASION. Yes, I said it. What is NOT normal is to purposely fast after your fat stores are depleted because then your body begins to use muscle and organs as fuel and this is deadly. I assert that these clinics and indeed doctors and nutritionists and dieticians are not getting the message to modern humans that THERE IS A WAY TO EAT HEALTHY, EAT ALL YOU WANT UNT

     I think most heavy people, and I am still heavy even though I went from about 250 to about 187, have the notion that that is their "normal weight." This is not the case. Humans evolved over a couple millions of years eating a certain type of natural food diet and probably even the fattest humans would have had a few weeks of fat stored for times of scarcity. This is not much. Even a lean person has many thousands of calories of stored body fat and that is by design.      If people simply flipped this idea that your "normal weight" should be lean with only a couple weeks of stored fat to use in times of scarcity, then this will help you realize that your fat self is the abnormal one, and that if you simply eat a more natural diet free of processed sugars and grains, and low in starches and legumes (our ancestral evolved diet) then your body will 'normalize' and get you down to that leaner frame that has a normal amount of stored fat.      You can do th

     Why is it that people seem to lose weight both by eating high fat and low fat? I've seen the studies and the data. It seems like both ways work. So how the heck is THAT possible? It only sounds like "a thing" because "fat" is called "fat" and we assume that it has something to do with the fat that is stored on our body.      While it is pretty much the same stuff, the eating of fat, whether that fat comes from animal sources or plant sources, has nothing to do with how much of it gets stored on your body. The thing that controls that is INSULIN.      Insulin is the hormone that decides when you store fat or when you use it for energy. Fat is actually energy, and that is what we should be calling it. The things you eat that determine whether or not you will get fat are foods that raise your insulin levels. When insulin levels are high, your body is ordered to store fat. It's that simple. It will not allow your body to use that stored fat unti

If you are mounting a campaign to drop some weight, here's a tip to get you rolling...      Most people are gonna start on Monday. And they weigh themselves Monday morning. Here's a different idea: weigh yourself right after you eat that "farewell" meal on Sunday night. Don't eat anything after that. When you wake up in the morning, have a pee, don't have your morning coffee quite yet, now hop on the scale. I guarantee you will have already dropped a pound or so from the previous weigh-in the night before.  You can use this momentum to carry you onward. - Dave the Pirate Nutritionist

     While not a licensed nutritionist or dietician, I do have the every-day real-life knowledge of what it's like to go through life constantly overweight. I did a few tours during the diet wars, the low-fat campaign in the 80s.... I was there. I have recently dropped about 55 pounds and I know that this time it's all different. It's the most weight I have lost in one try and I know now that this weight WILL NOT be coming back.      There are TWO THINGS at the top if this list to remember when one embarks on a campaign to lose weight: 1) this is your new normal. If you view it as a temporary sojourn into a weird way of eating, you will return to your old ways and get heavy again, and probably add more weight than you started with (there's a reason for that too). So this needs to be your permanent way of eating. That is not to say you cannot EVER eat something as a treat, you can and will. But your baseline needs to be changed, and I can help you do that. 2) Keep