weight thingies

I have decided that the reason most diets fail (well, the diet doesn’t, but once you’re “off” it you gain your weight back) is because of portions. Chips and soda and other “unhealthy” foods are such a part of life for most of us, when we don’t eat them we consider ourselves on a diet.
The main difference between “diet” food and “unhealthy” food is we can eat -more- of the “diet” food and get the same amount of calories as eating less of the “unhealthy” food. The worst part is, the “unhealthy” food offers little/no nutritional value, and so we end up feeling hungry still. The worst part is the “unhealthy” food (at least for me) does nothing but -sit- there, in your stomach, making you feel yucky and gross. Your body is demanding more food simply because there’s practically no nutritional content in what you’ve given it already. So those cheetos may taste really good, but your body can’t really do much with them (except turn them into muuuch needed fat, right?), and it expects you to give it other food too. I suppose that’s why “unhealthy” food isn’t any good. as far as “diet” food, it’s actually more nutrient-rich and shouldn’t even be considered “diet” food. It’s food, it gives you energy, it makes you go. Eating it for the rest of your life shouldn’t be considered a hardship. The easiest way, in my mind, is to take a page from the savings book. If you put money in your savings account, you consider it money you don’t have, and it doesn’t get spent until achieve the amount needed to purchase whatever it is you wanted to purchase, or pay bills. Thinking of the savings account in terms of “I owe the savings account this much” keeps you from thinking of it as money you have to spend. If you think of junk-food in terms of “that isn’t food, that’s plastic,” or perhaps dog-food — whatever it is that keeps you from eating it, you won’t eat it. It’ll stay there for some other poor sap to buy. If we step back to the 17/1800s, prior to the arrival of frito-lay and coca-cola (or pepsi if you prefer), people were ecstatic to get -sugar-. Brown sugar was every-day, but WHITE sugar, pure cane sugar, that was a real treat. The rest of the time they ate Eggs and Milk and Beef and chicken and cheese and Vegetables and Potatoes — some of these things are deemed by doctors as bad for you, even, but we’ve managed to survive on them for hundreds of years. The arrival of coca-cola (or pepsi if you prefer) and frito-lay and other fun companies was the real start of our obesity problem. Mediocre taste in exchange for your daily dose of caloric intake. Twinkies, ho-hos, and other processed foods — they all are really high in calories and really low in content. If you’re like me, your body can’t burn them as easily as they can other things. That’s where the caloric intake comes from, if you ask me — the fact that it takes so long for them to break down, not because they’re actually providing you with energy. A candy bar will, but it’ll almost instantly plummet if you don’t eat the right -type- of candy. Dark chocolate is more pure than milk chocolate, and I find the taste much more agreeable.
Give yourself a test. Stay off those snacks and beverages for two weeks. If you’re truly brave, do it for a month. When that month is up, go grab a bag of chips and a soda and some twinkies, and just see if they taste as good as they did before you stopped eating them. Whenever I eat them, they taste like plastic. Really, that’s most of what it is. Many artificial flavorings come from various extras that come from the breakdown of crude oil. In processing it, various things are created, like kerosene and gasoline, motor oil, etc. It’s carbon-based, yes, but it’s from -crude oil- !! do you really want to be eating crude oil?? That black thick murky stuff that comes out of the ground, the stuff that makes the gasoline you put in your car and the (before the laws changed) kerosene that you used to put in your lights and heaters? Plastic is another derivative. The various plastics in existence are all results of the procedure used to separate the various components that make up crude oil. As I mentioned, a lot of artificial flavorings out there are made from the same process that separates. THE SAME PROCESS that makes PLASTIC. Yuck!! Think about -that- every time you sit down to have a nice artificially-flavored bag of chips.
I’m now off to munch my smashed-together granola bar thingie that’s really crunchy and yummy, yummier even than a twinkie (don’t know why people even like those things. gross!) Mmmm…peanut butter…