Over the years I have tried more diets than I can count. I have never been an extremely thin person; however, when I look back on my life in pictures or video I was never as large as I thought at the time. If I only looked as bad now as I thought I looked back then in my teenage years. And still even then I was trying different diets.
A new perspective that was told to me once stuck and made the word "diet" not such a bad word after all. A "diet" is simply what we eat throughout our days. It is our daily diet plan. And like anything else in this life, things always run smoother when we have a plan. So we plan grocery lists and do food prep on the weekends and sometime along the way usually mid-week the diet hits a pothole and before we know it half a bag of potato chips has suddenly disappeared.
There’s a man I work with who is on a diet that has one simple rule. You can't eat anything with a mother or a face. Sounds pretty harsh, but I guess it is just a way of saying only plant based foods. He claims to get his protein from beans and other vegetables and fruits. He does not have any fat on his body it seems, so maybe the diet works, yet just writing this makes me crave a steak.
And on the opposite side of that diet is the Carnivore diet which requires that you only eat things with a mother and a face that go moo or baaa or cock-a-doodle-doo. And reports state that most who are strict with this diet can lose up to forty pounds in no time. And writing this makes me want a fresh crisp green salad.
I have gone on one highly successful diet that requires packaged mixes in small portions throughout the day. This was likely the best I have ever felt as an adult, but after a while I became bored with the same meals. And the fasting diet was a good one, but if I am at one of my early schools there is no way I can keep my energy up without eating something before lunch.
Bottom line is that our bodies will store excess calories into our fat cells, which in mid-life tend to hover right around the middle of our bodies. This can cause higher levels of the bad things in blood work, and more difficulty wearing our favorite clothes in comfort. The fact is that as we age it is no longer about being model thin but our feet and joints not hurting and not having to take any added medications.
That leaves me with my favorite diet of all that was introduced to me by a fellow instructor. She calls it the diet that is "nothing from a window." She has stopped eating anything that is from a drive through window. And I told her I would match her with nothing from a processed package. We will see how this goes.
There is no fast or quick answer to losing weight and maintaining a healthy diet. The science tells us it is a formula that consists of the amount of calories ingested in the body and the amount of energy burned by the body within a period of time. Actually sleep can be added into this equation along with good gut health to help in the digestive process. That is it in a nut shell. It all comes down once again to math and numbers.
Pass me a donut, please.
