|
|
|
Home
"Diets" Grains & Seeds Three
Bites II
|
If you want to know how to diet, ask a fat girl. She can give you the skinny on any and all diets out there. I've done them all... Atkins, the Zone, Weight Watchers (or as I like to call it, Waa Waa). Even the grapefruit and cabbage soup diets. And although I am protesting "diets" (that's partly what this website is about), I did take away some valuable information from each of them. Below are a few pearls of wisdom from some of my most "memorable". What I took away from it: I learned to "shop the perimeter of the store". Never buy boxed/prepared meals. I don't care how cute the little oven mitt is on the commercial, Hamburger Helper is NOT your friend and the two of you should never "do lunch". Don't even bring him into your house! Buy fresh or frozen vegetables (the frozen isle being one of the few you can venture into) and eat fresh meat and seafood. I was able to cook a lot with Atkins- I could basically make "sections" of meals such as herb crusted salmon with a rich cream sauce and garlic spinach. I just couldn't eat the mashed potatoes. Hey, I'm Irish. Give me my freakin' potatoes! Basically, the longer it takes to prepare a meal, the longer it will likely take to digest it and the better it is for you. Three minutes in the microwave vs. 60 on the stove and in the oven really does make a difference in more ways than one. First of all, they lost me on "blocks".
The second I have to start referring to my food as something an infant would use
as a basic learning tool, I'm gone. You may as well just hand over the
Twinkie. The Zone, like Atkins, is heavy on the
protein and strictly opposed to sugar and processed foods (unless, of course,
it's the processed foods they're selling.... but you didn't hear that from me). It is a very healthy plan but
it's a lot of work. And I found myself constantly thinking about my next
blocks because I was in a constant state of hunger. I was always thinking
about food whether it was calculating my next meal or contemplating my state of
hunger. I did lose weight but
it was really, really annoying. Is this how a supermodel feels every day of her life?
Pass the butter already. What I took away from it: Eat small meals, eat often, and make them balanced (put a lot of color on your plate). Eating a plate of spaghetti alone is no good. Add a little protein such as grilled shrimp or chicken and you're all set. Fill your small plate with a lot of color and divide it into three unequal sections: 1/2 of the (did I mention small) plate has lean protein, 1/4 of it has a low starch vegetable, and the other 1/4 has some sort of carbohydrate such as potato, peas, rice or corn. The protein should be the size of the palm of your hand and the other sections should each be half that amount. It's much easier to eyeball it on a dish than to calculate the blocks with complete accuracy. Oh, and most important, if you want dessert, you have to skip the starchy vegetables and split the dessert with someone else. That I can do. Weight Watchers: A very good, well-rounded plan. Again, there's counting and calculating. Exactly what I'm looking to avoid. And then there's the meetings. You get to wait in line at the counter behind a bunch of fatties and watch everyone get weighed. It was always a relief to see women bigger than I was so I wasn't the fattest in the room and I could tell others felt the same way. How horrible is that? And then I'd get on the scale and 100 eyes would be boring holes into the back of my head. They were very discreet about the "numbers" but it was obvious when they'd say, "Yaaaay!! Congratulations!!" or "Don't worry.... everyone hits a plateau" which we all know is the nice way of saying "so you had to have the cookies, didn't you fat ass!!". And then there's the boring meetings with everyone listening to the leaders every word like she's holding their lives in her hands. And don't get me started about the groupies. I don't need any "dieting buddies" glomming onto me after the meeting to discuss where they went wrong. I'm tired of obsessing about "dieting" and "successes" and "failures". Can't I just live my life in peace? What I took away from it: Portion control, portion control, portion control ... vegetables, vegetables, vegetables... and WATER TILL IT'S COMING OUT OF YOUR EARS! No complaints about the overall plan - just trying to get away from all the counting and obsessing about "meals". The Carbohydrate Addicts Diet:
Absolutely
the most outrageous diet I have tried. Eat 3 meals a day with a small
snack. Two of the meals and the snack must be virtually free of carbs.
No need to worry about portion size at any meal. Really. But since 3
out of the 4 meals a day you're eating consist of fat and protein, it is self
limiting like the Atkins diet because you feel satisfied or even full relatively
quickly (remember 10 cookies vs. 10 hard boiled eggs). The third
meal can be anything you want, and I mean ANYTHING. You can pound a Big
Mac with large fries and a Coke and finish it off with an entire cheesecake.
No joke. The catch: you have to do it in NO MORE THAN 60 MINUTES.
There's something about the
insulin being released after the 60 minute mark which explains the time limit.
It was a complicated concept involving the pancreas, insulin and other technical
stuff- too much to explain here. I tried this diet to prove a coworker wrong and to show her how crazy it was but
it actually worked. Or so I thought. I lost 17 pounds
and at the time I was in my late 20's and probably only needed to
lose 10 or 15, I wasn't fat. My mother was against the diet and thinks it
was the beginning of the end for me in my plummet to fatness. I, like most
people that do it, take them up on the challenge of "anything for an
hour". It was like a game.... how much crap can I cram into my mouth
for 60 minutes and still lose weight? I was eating a
half pound of pasta with sauce and cheese and eating an entire sleeve of Oreo
cookies for dessert. And if I had time, I'd eat some M&M's until the
60 minute alarm went off. It
was disgusting. My mom thinks it warped my perception of a real portion.
I think she's right because I've gained weight consistently ever since. I
wasn't really fat until after that diet. I
thought I hit the mother load but I really just got
a "wide load". The worst mistake of my life. Period.
Another good lesson: listen to your mother because she's usually right. What I've taken away from it: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Be afraid. Be VERY afraid. Rick
Bayless' take on dieting:
I
am a huge lover of Mexican food and my favorite chef/cookbook author is Rick
Bayless. I find the process of preparing authentic Mexican food to be very
time consuming and labor intensive with all the roasting of the vegetables
before pureeing them into salsas and so on. I recently purchased his
book Mexican Everyday (Recipes Featured on Season 4 of the PBS-TV series "Mexico One Plate at a Time") It's like he and I were having a conversation.... and I am in agreement with everything he says. He slowly cut his portions starting with 10% (he would cut this small amount out of his portion and put it to the side and gradually increased the percentage over time). I did it in a more drastic manner- I just halved everything and stopped mindless snacking on junk. He talks about being overwhelmed about the dieting advice available from Dr. Atkins low carbs to Dr. Ornish's fat damning clinical studies and chose, in his words, "what some might consider the gastronomic equivalent of a nose thumb, and decided to eat a sensible amount of everything you find around the perimeter of the grocery store (the unprocessed stuff)." Sound familiar? Bottom line, he slowly started to exercise (a bit of yoga and weight training) and cut his portions and he is now lean and the picture of health. And he never deprives himself of what he wants. He even talks about his weekend "feasts". Since starting this website/no-diet plan, the weight has been coming off effortlessly and it has left me stunned. Reading Rick's intro was reaffirmation that I'm doing the right thing. Sooooo... ...as I mentioned before, if you want to know about a diet plan, ask a fat person. And if you want to gain weight or maintain your overweight status, hang with fat people. Go to dinner with people that order fries with a side of gravy and have cheesecake for dessert. If you want to know how to be slim and stay slim, ask a skinny person what they do. Eat with skinny people. Walk the few blocks to get a healthy salad or sandwich with your skinny friend. Most skinny people I have encountered have no concept of dieting. There's no stash of chocolate in their desk drawer. There are no "late night binges". If you offer them some m&m's they may refuse or they may take just one. Crazy, right?! They just eat when they're hungry and they eat until they are no longer hungry. And most of them exercise. It's a "lifestyle". Don't you hate it when skinny people say that? So forget the dieting crap.
Call a skinny friend and do a light lunch after a long walk.
|
Recipes:******************* Appetizers
|
|
|
in the hopes that I can make my favorite cuisine more often. I just
happened to read his introduction and was amazed at what I read. For those
of you that are not familiar with Bayless, he owns Frontera, a Mexican
restaurant in Chicago and sells his Salsa (of the same name) in grocery
stores. He has a TV show on PBS and has written several cook books.
He has a great passion for all things Mexican and has spent significant time in
the country immersing himself into the culture and learning the different
methods of food preparation. Needless to say, I'm a huge fan. As I
scanned quickly through the first few pages of his introduction, the word WEIGHT
caught my eye. Apparently Rick, who looks lean on his cookbook covers and
on TV, used to be a bit of a fatty. I flipped the pages back to the
beginning and read the entire introduction. The timing is strange I'll
admit because he discussed the exact premise of my website: Eat everything
in moderation with NO DIETING. "Diets," he states, "are
something I've loudly railed against, having seen too much hype, too many
unrealistic expectations, too many failures." He opposes them on at
least two grounds: "One nutritional, the other social. Most diets
restrict what the dieter eats in quantity or variety, or both. Unrealistic
quantity restriction frequently provokes the fear-of-starvation backlash (aka
gorging), and narrowed variety not only becomes unsustainably boring, but it can
be nutritionally unbalanced, even dangerous- unless you're treating a serious
medical condition." "From
a social perspective, diets can be isolating". I have personally
found this to be true whether declining an invitation out because I'm having a
hard time finding an outfit to wear or not wanting to partake in birthday cake
because I'm dieting. 
