Letters to the Editor
-
The solution is simple
and underscores how deeply fucked up our food system is in America.
I struggled with my weight for decades, trying the Atkins, Zone, etc.
Those diets may work somewhat, for a stretch of time, but they limit what you eat and make you neurotic.
The core problem is the thousands of unnamed compounds the food industial complex puts into our food under various terms including "natural flavors" (cyanide is natural too) for instance. This onslaught, similar to what they do to cigarettes to make people addicted to smoking chemicals, making our bodies have to fight those toxins by encasing them in fat globules. Let's not even get into the metabolic shock these compounds place on our bodies, detroying our bodies from the inside-- diabetes, heart disease-- on their way to making us obese.
I love food. I hate diets. I have posted in the past in detail about what has finally worked for me, I will summarize it here again though...
- Eat as much organic as you can afford. Lots of fruit and veggies. I like frozen for its convenience, though I eat fresh too.
- Avoid as many processed foods as you can stand. Substitute your favorite snacks with organic alternatives. There is a reason Whole Foods is growing like mad- most foods can be found in a healthy version at this store.
- When you do the two above, you can break the rules occasionally and go to your favorite restaurant. Even then try to seek out places that make food from whole healthy ingredients.
- Eat fats, eat sugar. Fats, except for trans fats, are needed by the body for its healthy function. Your brain needs fats to FUNCTION. The French eat pure lard, butter, foie gras and they have no problems keeping their weight down.
As for sugar, well, I finally got off the one packet a day Sweet & Low in my iced tea, and wouldn't you know, my almost painful daily hunger pangs, which I'd had for years, just disappeared like *that*. Aspartame is worse, as is Splenda, they ruin your organs, cause cancers, pickle your brain with formaldehyde and ruin your eyes with methanol.
- Here is the biggest one. Google "Shangri La Diet". I went on this two years ago. A glass of water with 200-300 calories of sugar (as much as in two cans of soda) slowly sipped over hours kills my appetite for days. This PhD discovered that our body associates calories with flavor (sugar is sweet but has no flavor) and in the absense of flavor, it lowers the hunger-stat of the body. For proof, one only need look at how skinny hospital patients get on a glucose drip feed. The flavor sensors do not register calories, but the body is getting nutrition-- the body lowers expectations in kind.
That is all.
American society is epidemically obese. YOU CANNOT BLAME WOMEN FOR BEING NEUROTIC ABOUT FOOD. I want a society of effortlessly skinny people who shun the massive, pernicious food industry like the plague that it is on the planet. The only way to TRAIN corporations to be good to society rather than to metastasize into increasingly evil plagues is to begin to finally abandon their godforsaken spawn.
It is EVERYONE'S responsibility to be good to themselves and to begin to improve our lives and our societies.
(As an aside, since I eat so well, I have become very sensitive to bad food in restaurants, which then increases my health over time as I proceed to look for restaurants where I feel good when I leave.
One thing I had wondered about is why I felt pain in my shoulders after drinking my one a week can of soda. More recently similar pains have cropped up around other foods, like chips and salsa at Chuys.
I finally deduced that what is happening is that the genetically modified CORN in these various foods is indeed producing rogue proteins and/or toxins that my body then senses and rejects.
Another rogue protein is the one that causes mad cow disease and Alzheimers, for instance.
GM food is not just bad, it is BEYOND EVIL. Fair warning, kidlets)
-
That's a goof, Squallor
Oh man, I love those things. They make quitting smoking a delightful romp amidst the daisies. Put one on, get a great little rush -- like doing a keybump of really clean coke. Then you don't want to smoke ever, ever again. And you stay skinny. And also you get the most cinematic, psychedelic dreams. Y'all nonsmokers, and smokers who have never tried to quit, don't know what you're missing.
I myself, quite for shits and giggles, discovered the fun of nicotine patches and gums (I have NEVER dragged on a single cigarette in my life).
-
I final point about my diet post
When I began to eat well and avoided processed/adulterated industri-'food' more and more, wouldn't you know it, my..
Anxiety
Depression
Sleeplessness
Agitation
Cloudy mind
Skin problems
Tiredness
Apathy
all went AWAY.
Oh, and drink lots of clean water.
-
OMG! @ DimBulb65
>>The core problem is the thousands of unnamed compounds the food industial complex puts into our food under various terms including "natural flavors" (cyanide is natural too) for instance. This onslaught, similar to what they do to cigarettes to make people addicted to smoking chemicals, making our bodies have to fight those toxins by encasing them in fat globules. Let's not even get into the metabolic shock these compounds place on our bodies, detroying our bodies from the inside-- diabetes, heart disease-- on their way to making us obese.<<
OMG! You're kidding me, right?
Fat? Cut your portions.
*Handing you an Occam's Razor for said task*
-
bell curve
The bell curve on women's or people's weight probably means that most of us are in the average range, twenty pounds above the low end of the scale.
Fashion and other standards of beauty are set at the very low end, but even more moderate beauty standards are probably set at the twentieth percentile at the highest.
That means that the majority of women can't hang at their natural weight without beings substantially over the beauty standards.
Imagine if everyone (average IQ 100) believed that they had to come across like someone of an IQ of 135 just to be acceptable, and many people thought that a seeming 150 IQ (fashion runway equivalent) was derigeur?
That would be fucked up. Imagine all the thousands of hours people would have to spend listening to NPR and thinking of smart things to say. Probably people would only manage to make themselves miserable in the process.
We can't all be special. Most of us are doomed to be mediocre, because mediocre is pretty much defined by where most of us are at any moment.
Women who are over 25 who want to look 18 are fighting the laws of nature. (Yes, I realize I am using irksomely young ages here.)
When we all resign ourselves to looking as old and mediocre as we are, then a lot of this "disordered" behavior will go away.