Diets, Weight Loss and Health
Diets are like graduating from a school or switching companies, they all involve saying good bye to old friends. Sometimes you keep in touch with those friends and often times you get carried away with life and its hard to keep in contact. Diets are more of a forced approach to saying good bye. Good bye Pizza, good bye ice cream, good bye fried food.
Picking the Diet
There are so many diets out there to choose from, all of them claiming quick results and fast weight loss. They have pictures of people with before and after results. Those pictures always make me feel like they are sucking in their stomachs on the after pictures. There is Paleo, Keto, Atkins, Weight Watchers, etc… all striving for position as the ultimate in diet programs. They all require work, which let’s face it we are all busy. How are we going to put time into this plan of losing weight? Let’s throw all the diets in the, “I’ll try that for a week category”. Diets are inherently temporary until a new idea comes along and new research on why fried foods are actually good for you. I wish they were good for you anyway.
Gist Diet
I’ve started to simplify my ideas around a diet. I call it the gist diet. I took a look at all the diets out there and figured out what they all sort of have in common. The idea of calculating calories is great in theory, but I don’t have time to run some prediction algorithms on what my calorie intake should be or what each food item calorie count is. So, here is what I end up doing:
- Cut out bread
- Cut out sugar, or reduce it (I mean come on how can you get rid of it)
- Balance meat and vegetables
- Reduce juices
- Cut out soda products
- Reduce beer and alcohol
- Drink more water
- Cut down on coffee
- Start moving (walking, running, etc…)
Inflammation and weight
A lot of weight and the old chunky look comes from your body being inflammed or swollen. Much of the food we normally get through a drive through or quick lunch bites cause inflammation. Bread, gluten and sugar cause some of the population to swell up like ballons and feel like absolute garbage. You start to not sleep well and lack energy throughout the day. Cutting out some of those foods helps your body to regulate again. If you have to get fast food, take off the buns of the burger or ask for a lettuce wrap. Try not to order a shake and it gets easier everytime you avoid some type of food that is bad for you. Don’t stock the freezer with ice cream and avoid getting cookies, etc… If you are feeling a bit weak just get a snickers bar or something that is a one time treat.
Coffee and sugar cause dehydration in the body making your cells try and retain as much as possible. Its the term bloating. Drinking lots of water helps reduce water retention ironically and makes you feel a bit better overall. What I end up doing is for every cup of coffee I drink, I drink 2 cups of water. This tends to counter the effects of coffee and allows we me to have my crutch of coffee.
Summary
Figure out what foods make you feel the worst, start cutting those out first. Try reducing portions a little bit at a time. Plan on a long term change vs a short term fix. Make goals of what you cut out (eg. this week I’m cutting out pizza, next week ice cream, etc…). You won’t see dramatic improvement but over a few months you will start feeling better and start noticing a bit of a difference. The more you think about what you put into your body without trying to do calorie gymnastics the better you will eat over all.
