I thought I was done with posts on nutrition, but a relative said, "The posts encourage me to talk to my daughters about food."
- Every fad diet with a name is going to rebound with blubber once the victim has built up a terrible craving.
- Habits trump diets...always.
- Our bodies obey the habits.
The magic formula is pretty simple - the cheaper and rawer the food, the better the nutrition and lower the calories.
Taking away the killer foods slowly seems to be the best way to escape the yo-yo diet (the one all the food fad promoters crave love).
One approach is to look at all the ingredients and gradually remove the worst ones, one step at a time:
- Any drive-thru.
- Bread and butter.
- Ice cream, ice milk, and desserts.
- Sugared drinks and fake sugared drinks.
- Milk and milk products (fat)
- Cheese and pizza (fat and salt).
- Hard candies.
- Soft candies.
- Donuts and really good bakeries.
- High salt proportions in canned food (sometimes) and always in prepared food.
- Frozen raw food that is "seasoned," loaded with salt and much more expensive.
- Cereal and other tactics that keep moving calories into the digestive track, all day and all night.
Getting away from one old favorite at a time lets the brain say, "You actually ate that garbage?"
or
"Are you going to save those beans for snow melt during the next ice storm?"
or
"Did my bathroom scale just say - One person at a time?"
Fresh fruit can go bad, so it is important to load up on lots of it, plus varieties of raw fruit. Two big apples will eliminate craving for apple pie. Bananas are a great breakfast with black coffee, much tastier than potassium pills. Citrus is an all-out assault on colds, sniffles, flu.
Fresh salads work for many people - volume is no handicap. I like chopped, frozen greens, which blend into home-made stew for every lunch.
My first epiphany with vegetables was microwaving a large bag of frozen green beans and eating them with a little butter. That was so good and satisfying that I began to start filling up on vegetables and greens.
The last big change is adding - daily - raw walnuts (or almonds) and ground flax seed. They supply all kinds of good nutrition.
My grocery cart now has:
Fresh fruit, usually apples, oranges, blueberries.
Chopped frozen greens and vegetables
Some eggs and sausage to share with Charlie Sue.
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| Charlie Sue - Patterdale Terrier |
