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Thoughts on Anorexia and Bulimia

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 UNTIL YOU ARE FULL, NOT BE HUNGRY ALL DAY - AND NORMALIZE YOUR BODY WEIGHT. We all have bodies that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to eat meat and plants. We did not evolve to eat Pop Tarts and ice cream and bread and pasta.... much as we like that stuff. People with eating disorders are quite often chastised for cutting out these foods. One was refusing SKITTLES for crap sake, and this was evidence that she has some problem. This is wrong. Now the problem is that the people who are cutting out these foods are eating the wrong non-human foods when they do eat, and this makes them gain extra weight, which they do not and should not want. A lean human being with a flat stomach generally has a few weeks of stored energy in body fat. This is by design. Humans only got carbohydrates for certain periods of time during the year and then had to move on to eating animals in the winter time (since human-friendly vegetation may die off and the only plants that were around could only be eaten by prey animals like cows and deer, so we ate those animals and got all the benefits, and then some.)

When a human eats, they should be eating a lot of fat (natural fats from animals and plants that are not processed like Soybean or Canola oil which is terrible for us). It is extremely difficult to gain weight eating to satiety with natural proteins and saturated fats. See this experiment.

It is my suspicion that if young women (the most common suffers of these disorders) had been given the right advice when they first noticed they were gaining weight and did not like it, and then tried to do something about it, they might never have gone down this dangerous path of starvation and binge-purge cycles.

You can eat very tasty food that nourishes you, eat whenever you are hungry, eat to satiety, and stay lean and healthy. See my other posts on this blog for more info on that. I believe firmly that following a natural food diet, like LCHF, NSNG or KETO (Google those) can be this missing link where these disorder clinics are dropping the ball.

I have two daughters and I love women...you all are the universe's most precious resource and it breaks my damn heart that so many of you are suffering this way, and then get advice that sends you right back into the storm, rather than back into a warm crackling fire safe from the elements.

I would be interested to hear comments.

I hope this helps...

- Dave The Pirate Nutritionist




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