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 your insulin levels low. This is the only other big thing you need to worry about. As a human being, you have a hunter-gatherer body. It evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to eat a certain way and your body got really good at it. You should try to feed yourself the way they would have, or at least eat foods they would have eaten. They ate plants and animals. They did not eat processed things like candy bars, ice cream, breads and pastas. They mostly did not eat anything that needed to be changed much in order to eat so they did not eat potatoes and beans and grains. One thing that reinforces this notion is that when you do eat these things, your blood sugar levels go way up and your poor pancreas has to go into overdrive to get that out of your blood so that you do not die. Modern desserts are the worst offenders. If you eat a nice big piece of cake with some ice cream at a birthday party, you probably just ate more sugar in one sitting than your 100,000 year old counterpart would have eaten in a year. And humans are doing this every day of their lives -- hopefully not with cake and ice cream, but with cereals and rice and pasta and breads, etc. When your insulin levels go up, your body goes into fat-storage mode and basically makes your fat stores inaccessible. They cannot be used for fuel until your insulin levels go back down. And many of us, maybe most of us, are NEVER allowing that to happen. Foods that raise insulin? Grains, sugars, starches, legumes, fruits. Foods that don't raise insulin? Meat/fish/eggs and non starchy vegetables. Stick to the latter while trying to lose weight. Healthy people who are at a healthy weight can play around with the starches and beans and nuts but they will still do well to cut out the grains and sugars. You heavy folks (I lost 55 and still need to lose another 30 or so) need to be a little more careful.
To recap...
KEEP INSULIN LEVELS LOW (KILL)
THIS IS YOUR NEW NORMAL
If you get these two things down, you can run every other new bit of information (and boy there's a lot of that these days) through these two bits of knowledge and you will know how to process that new information.
Thanks.
- Dave Smith
The Pirate Nutritionist
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 your insulin levels low. This is the only other big thing you need to worry about. As a human being, you have a hunter-gatherer body. It evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to eat a certain way and your body got really good at it. You should try to feed yourself the way they would have, or at least eat foods they would have eaten. They ate plants and animals. They did not eat processed things like candy bars, ice cream, breads and pastas. They mostly did not eat anything that needed to be changed much in order to eat so they did not eat potatoes and beans and grains. One thing that reinforces this notion is that when you do eat these things, your blood sugar levels go way up and your poor pancreas has to go into overdrive to get that out of your blood so that you do not die. Modern desserts are the worst offenders. If you eat a nice big piece of cake with some ice cream at a birthday party, you probably just ate more sugar in one sitting than your 100,000 year old counterpart would have eaten in a year. And humans are doing this every day of their lives -- hopefully not with cake and ice cream, but with cereals and rice and pasta and breads, etc. When your insulin levels go up, your body goes into fat-storage mode and basically makes your fat stores inaccessible. They cannot be used for fuel until your insulin levels go back down. And many of us, maybe most of us, are NEVER allowing that to happen. Foods that raise insulin? Grains, sugars, starches, legumes, fruits. Foods that don't raise insulin? Meat/fish/eggs and non starchy vegetables. Stick to the latter while trying to lose weight. Healthy people who are at a healthy weight can play around with the starches and beans and nuts but they will still do well to cut out the grains and sugars. You heavy folks (I lost 55 and still need to lose another 30 or so) need to be a little more careful.
To recap...
KEEP INSULIN LEVELS LOW (KILL)
THIS IS YOUR NEW NORMAL
If you get these two things down, you can run every other new bit of information (and boy there's a lot of that these days) through these two bits of knowledge and you will know how to process that new information.
Thanks.
- Dave Smith
The Pirate Nutritionist
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