Food. Delicious, isn't it? I used to love sucking down a big-arse block of chocolate or enormous wedge of Black Forest cake or three as much as the next blue-ribbon eater. But I've stopped loving how it made me feel, look and live. There are other things and better ways; I'll devote the final part of this endless monologue to my quest to eat like an adult, for general health and weight reduction.
In regard to compulsive behaviour, I dislike the 12 Step programme thing because it contains that maddening sop to the junkie's love of conditional surrender- the acceptance that there is a greater power than you. But when it comes to food and health, there is a greater power- the only one that really matters- biology. Our biology determines what we can and can't eat without harming ourselves. What we eat becomes who we are. If you can maintain a healthy body and mood eating whatever, pat your phenotype on the back; I'm addressing this more to the people who can't. If you're not maintaining your health, you might want to consider your inputs.
In regard to compulsive behaviour, I dislike the 12 Step programme thing because it contains that maddening sop to the junkie's love of conditional surrender- the acceptance that there is a greater power than you. But when it comes to food and health, there is a greater power- the only one that really matters- biology. Our biology determines what we can and can't eat without harming ourselves. What we eat becomes who we are. If you can maintain a healthy body and mood eating whatever, pat your phenotype on the back; I'm addressing this more to the people who can't. If you're not maintaining your health, you might want to consider your inputs.
Paleo for Skeptics & Grunge Eating. I've personally turned my weight and general health around with real foods. By that I mean eating stuff that occurs in nature and requires minimal manipulation, influenced by my own assessment of our evolutionary and technological development alongside my personal reaction to various substances. I emphasise the personal. My father's family enjoys a vexed relationship with alcohol, so I largely abstain; wine makes me feel shitty anyway. Bulk white starch and me don't get along, and my arse doesn't thank me for more than half a glass of dairy in any given day. I know that sounds hopelessly faddish and I deeply regret the association, but the proof is in the (lack of) pudding; when I put the brakes on these substances everything gets better, and that benefit is amplified by cutting back to a biologically reasonable amount of food per se. If it's a choice between being thought a food nazi and spending half my life in discomfort and clinical peril, colour me a fussy twat.
Scaling back grains and dairy and concentrating on a lo-fi intake = Paleo these days, but I don't think a median Paleolithic diet was what many people seem to want it to be. And I really don't think it meant dancing around wearing haunches of beef. Certainly, extreme human niches might have required survival measures which would have included a focus on large prey and the resources they provided, but anyone who's handled livestock knows a ram can break your legs and horses and steers can kill you in an instant if you're careless at the wrong time. In general, where there were a plethora of other options, tiny communities of ancient people couldn't afford the attrition involved in pitting themselves against large wild prey every day, and I'll be damned if they actually did. Successful survival rolls the dice when the reward is greatest; migrations, spawning and seasonal changes would have yielded the best return for the toll on their hunters. So count me out of the paleo = mondo meat equation. It's hands down pants-thinking.
Scaling back grains and dairy and concentrating on a lo-fi intake = Paleo these days, but I don't think a median Paleolithic diet was what many people seem to want it to be. And I really don't think it meant dancing around wearing haunches of beef. Certainly, extreme human niches might have required survival measures which would have included a focus on large prey and the resources they provided, but anyone who's handled livestock knows a ram can break your legs and horses and steers can kill you in an instant if you're careless at the wrong time. In general, where there were a plethora of other options, tiny communities of ancient people couldn't afford the attrition involved in pitting themselves against large wild prey every day, and I'll be damned if they actually did. Successful survival rolls the dice when the reward is greatest; migrations, spawning and seasonal changes would have yielded the best return for the toll on their hunters. So count me out of the paleo = mondo meat equation. It's hands down pants-thinking.
Mammoth Hunter tryhards can beat the undergrowth and shout chunga at this counterpoint all they like. I grew up feral in an extremely isolated part of Northern Australia beside a culture (Yolngu) still attached to its subtle array of precolonial neolithic methodologies, and had the privilege of observing first hand what eating from the land entails. Megafauna have largely disappeared from that continent and I witnessed first hand how superfluous large animals are to a resourceful population, even in a relatively parsimonious environment with a six month dry season. On a walk to collect materials for carving and painting, Yolngu women will eat and collect in an opportunistic manner anything they know to be edible, according to time constraints, seasonal availability and religious directives. Their pattern of consumption is low-fuss and 'nonheroic' in the sense that they're not spearing complacent pachyderms, but that's not what many students of history or paleo superfans want to imagine for their own ancestors.
Let's dial that meaty, masculinized crap back. It's women who form the backbone of most, if not all, pre-agricultural and pre-industrial food economies. We knew where the good stuff was, we took it home and we processed it for the benefit of all. If someone dropped an aurochs on a lucky day, awesome; if no one died in the process, even better, but no one will convince me that the majority of food provision wasn't womens' collection of reliable, unglamorous staples. Masts, nuts, eggs, greens, shellfish, fungi, fruit, insects, wild grains, small game, birds and roots, with intermittent gluts of ungulate and fish meat. All of it is available now and that is probably what we should be eating, according to time constraints, seasonal availability, religious and or environmental directives. That's not hippiness, weirdness or rocket science. I think of it as grunge eating in that it is anti-fancy, egalitarian and concerned with the integrity of its components.
Pro-grain and pro-dairy interests may be able to point to the human herd ability to digest both substances and I agree that rates of mutation and expediency can easily account for the fact that most humans now rely on cereals; my partner can munch on wholegrain stuff all day without ill-effect. But there are still many of us who test the rule. If refined grain and dairy aren't your friends, shit can get real in short order; weight gain, inflammation and cascades of systemic disorders to name a few contraindications. Why do we persist with it? We are brainy omnivores and that is our golden spear; the ability to switch from one food stream to another according to circumstance is relatively rare in nature, confers huge advantage and we're mad to ignore our trump card in favour of mindless consumption.
Obligatory Paranoid Conspiracy Reference As an adjunct to all this biological exhortation, there is a political significance to grain. It's a 10 000 year old macro-commodity and central authorities love that shit, using it as a hammer to control their domestic situations and to assault and/or bolster other economies according to their fluctuating interests. Did you vote for that? I didn't. Ponder this next time you're loading up on sandwich sliced.
Moderation > Elimination That's not to say you need to scrub everything yummy or accustomed from your kitchen shelves. The current fundamentalist craze for avoiding anything ever smeared in a half-literate press release is frustratingly idiotic and plays directly into the hands of interests hostile to autonomy. I don't advocate or practice total abstinence from either grains or dairy myself, but reducing them to a small element of my diet instead of bulk inputs has been revelatory and immensely beneficial. Paying attention to your own reaction to what you're eating is what all this boils down to. Paleolithically, we either paid attention to what we were eating or it killed us, for any number of reasons. We need to reclaim that care and focus. Your body has a language; reconnect to this dialogue. The little corkscrew twist of hunger and the wordless fist-shaped surcease of satiety. The golden rolling wave of pleasure that means you're about to drop into the free fall of orgasm. The whiny little nag of transient discomfort at the start of every workout, the deeper pain of injury. Relearn your individual dialect; listen and react instead of munching over the top of it and drowning it out with convenience and force of habit.
Let's dial that meaty, masculinized crap back. It's women who form the backbone of most, if not all, pre-agricultural and pre-industrial food economies. We knew where the good stuff was, we took it home and we processed it for the benefit of all. If someone dropped an aurochs on a lucky day, awesome; if no one died in the process, even better, but no one will convince me that the majority of food provision wasn't womens' collection of reliable, unglamorous staples. Masts, nuts, eggs, greens, shellfish, fungi, fruit, insects, wild grains, small game, birds and roots, with intermittent gluts of ungulate and fish meat. All of it is available now and that is probably what we should be eating, according to time constraints, seasonal availability, religious and or environmental directives. That's not hippiness, weirdness or rocket science. I think of it as grunge eating in that it is anti-fancy, egalitarian and concerned with the integrity of its components.
Pro-grain and pro-dairy interests may be able to point to the human herd ability to digest both substances and I agree that rates of mutation and expediency can easily account for the fact that most humans now rely on cereals; my partner can munch on wholegrain stuff all day without ill-effect. But there are still many of us who test the rule. If refined grain and dairy aren't your friends, shit can get real in short order; weight gain, inflammation and cascades of systemic disorders to name a few contraindications. Why do we persist with it? We are brainy omnivores and that is our golden spear; the ability to switch from one food stream to another according to circumstance is relatively rare in nature, confers huge advantage and we're mad to ignore our trump card in favour of mindless consumption.
Obligatory Paranoid Conspiracy Reference As an adjunct to all this biological exhortation, there is a political significance to grain. It's a 10 000 year old macro-commodity and central authorities love that shit, using it as a hammer to control their domestic situations and to assault and/or bolster other economies according to their fluctuating interests. Did you vote for that? I didn't. Ponder this next time you're loading up on sandwich sliced.
Moderation > Elimination That's not to say you need to scrub everything yummy or accustomed from your kitchen shelves. The current fundamentalist craze for avoiding anything ever smeared in a half-literate press release is frustratingly idiotic and plays directly into the hands of interests hostile to autonomy. I don't advocate or practice total abstinence from either grains or dairy myself, but reducing them to a small element of my diet instead of bulk inputs has been revelatory and immensely beneficial. Paying attention to your own reaction to what you're eating is what all this boils down to. Paleolithically, we either paid attention to what we were eating or it killed us, for any number of reasons. We need to reclaim that care and focus. Your body has a language; reconnect to this dialogue. The little corkscrew twist of hunger and the wordless fist-shaped surcease of satiety. The golden rolling wave of pleasure that means you're about to drop into the free fall of orgasm. The whiny little nag of transient discomfort at the start of every workout, the deeper pain of injury. Relearn your individual dialect; listen and react instead of munching over the top of it and drowning it out with convenience and force of habit.
Our species has faced a multitude of niches and adaptational bottlenecks and it's survived them all with the help of lipids and adipose and diversity. Some of us need a lot of food to get by and that hot-burning slenderness is an advantage here and there. I personally inherited a body that can do well on very little. Both historically speaking and in any reasonable circumstance that's a spectacular genetic jackpot that has survived our natural selection death match for the best part of a million years. It chugs along on a minimum of basic natural foodstuffs without requiring the 'cheap energy' of bulk grain starch and modern sugars. It does this by depositing fat in an exemplary manner, using its insulating properties to achieve optimal caloric efficiency and accessing that stored energy effectively. I've tested the latter assertion in losing weight slowly, in a steady, non-injurious manner by setting the controls to expend; my body obliged me and that is a healthy response. If your body lays down a good fat pad and doesn't kill you in the process, discard the idea that you're somehow disadvantaged. Then accept that your good fortune isn't a ticket to abuse that largesse.
We eat too much How little you need, even while exercising quite hard 30 mins a day, is a bit of a shock. And how little you feel like eating after acculturating yourself to the reality of your needs is even more of a surprise after a lifetime of Western surfeiting. What I did- Our dinner plates were fashionably huge. I switched to bread plates for my main meals, which are generous saucers. It's a great template and it's virtually impossible to overeat while your gut gets used to smaller portions. And once it does, you don't want more. I eat a modest breakfast (details to come) and a single main meal at lunchtime, with snacks according to my caloric needs.
Reacquaint yourself with satiety- the Japanese Confucian version hara hachi bu is very useful in that it encourages long-term satisfaction over the kind of precipitate gluttony that has become so acceptable. Embrace the idea of moderate, short-term hunger as a return to reality and an essential element in resurrecting your relationship with your body and its requirements. I generally don't eat more in one sitting than can cover the surface of my outstretched hand. That's been a convenient and effective guide.
Here's a quick true story about food volumes. My father's family suffers a lot of fatness, faulty digestive valves, acid regurgitation, bloating, irritable bowel and alimentary cancers. Many of them cannot get through a day without heavy antacids and proton-pump inhibiting drugs. My uncle died of bowel cancer and my dad of oesophageal cancer in their early fifties. My nephew had a stomach valve reconstruction procedure at 16. I suffered some of these things myself. These symptom clusters were declared idiopathic and even unrelated by most if not all of the clinicians I've consulted and no nutritional advice was ever given. I shit you not. So I left the medical establishment to their disinterested myopia, took the empirical route and after cutting down on bread and pasta, eating my main meal at lunch and, I believe crucially, reducing my portions, I don't experience any of these symptoms any more. None. Zippidy. No runs, no gut aches, no heartburn. Losing weight reduces liver fattiness and improves its ability to aid digestion and that will have factored into that process, but I lay this at the feet of eating less. Your mouth is not a clown car. We are not entitled to stuff our faces all day long with whatever takes our fancy. It is killing us with both excess and deprivation, defiling our planet and depriving our fellow creatures of their due.
Reacquaint yourself with satiety- the Japanese Confucian version hara hachi bu is very useful in that it encourages long-term satisfaction over the kind of precipitate gluttony that has become so acceptable. Embrace the idea of moderate, short-term hunger as a return to reality and an essential element in resurrecting your relationship with your body and its requirements. I generally don't eat more in one sitting than can cover the surface of my outstretched hand. That's been a convenient and effective guide.
Here's a quick true story about food volumes. My father's family suffers a lot of fatness, faulty digestive valves, acid regurgitation, bloating, irritable bowel and alimentary cancers. Many of them cannot get through a day without heavy antacids and proton-pump inhibiting drugs. My uncle died of bowel cancer and my dad of oesophageal cancer in their early fifties. My nephew had a stomach valve reconstruction procedure at 16. I suffered some of these things myself. These symptom clusters were declared idiopathic and even unrelated by most if not all of the clinicians I've consulted and no nutritional advice was ever given. I shit you not. So I left the medical establishment to their disinterested myopia, took the empirical route and after cutting down on bread and pasta, eating my main meal at lunch and, I believe crucially, reducing my portions, I don't experience any of these symptoms any more. None. Zippidy. No runs, no gut aches, no heartburn. Losing weight reduces liver fattiness and improves its ability to aid digestion and that will have factored into that process, but I lay this at the feet of eating less. Your mouth is not a clown car. We are not entitled to stuff our faces all day long with whatever takes our fancy. It is killing us with both excess and deprivation, defiling our planet and depriving our fellow creatures of their due.
Think about why we eat too much Commerical food interests have almost succeeded in completely divorcing us from any notion of appreciation and moderation around food. They've recognised the physical, emotional and spiritual wasteland that many of us are mired in and stepped in to plug that hole with lucrative garbage provisions. They want us to ease our pain with this equation- buy/eat/buy/eat/never questionbuy/eat and have spent billions to condition us accordingly. Big Food doesn't want you to associate a chicken meal with the death of another animal, or a bag of fries with a monstrous monoculture soaked in pesticides and for very good reason; they want you to stop thinking and keep eating. But food is intrinsically intimate, should affect us personally and it has a price no matter what. All that is correctly regarded as subversive by our industrial overlords. When we get back to knowing that core truth, logic and appropriate emotional responses toward our requirements are reinstated. Sucking down a bucket of anonymised meat when you're feeling worthless becomes something you might think twice about. Uh oh. Recognise your personal and situational issues as the greedy trolls they undoubtedly are, eating your happiness and contentment; don't feed them deep-fried Mars Bars. When you're ready to deal, get help. Not KFC.
If I'm feeling hungry at the end of the day, I go back mentally over everything I've eaten from breakfast onward, remembering the size and taste and appreciating what it's done for me. Visualising everything I've consumed plugs me back into an authentic consumption and satisfaction loop, retraining myself out of the idle/boredom/mindless munching program of yore. If I've eaten enough, I'll stop there. If not, I'll have something else. Or maybe I'll go to bed a little bit hungry. It's not the end of the fucking world.
If I'm feeling hungry at the end of the day, I go back mentally over everything I've eaten from breakfast onward, remembering the size and taste and appreciating what it's done for me. Visualising everything I've consumed plugs me back into an authentic consumption and satisfaction loop, retraining myself out of the idle/boredom/mindless munching program of yore. If I've eaten enough, I'll stop there. If not, I'll have something else. Or maybe I'll go to bed a little bit hungry. It's not the end of the fucking world.
Calories out must exceed calories in on a regular basis Not very sexy, is it? This equation may not give you wood but it will shift your fat deposits and I know this because it shifted mine. That doesn't entail starvation; it just means using everything you're putting in your mouth and encouraging your body to tap into onboard reserves. And while you're building muscle mass you're you're gaming your metabolism and building a future full of satisfying consumption without fear of undue lard encroachment. What I did- during the first four months of my weight loss I stuck to a sub-1000 calorie regime. Some will tell you that's too little and for many that may be true, but I gain easily and hold onto it like a mofo so the sledgehammer approach was required. I experienced no ill effects, had plenty of energy and still lost mass at a slow/reasonable rate.
Not all calories should be considered equal, and there's a lot of bullshit-flavoured confusion surrounding what we're supposed to be eating. After years of reading on the subject and battling through wildly conflicting science (as it is reported, not necessarily conducted), it seems to me that good nutrition boils down to natural, least-processed food.
Not all calories should be considered equal, and there's a lot of bullshit-flavoured confusion surrounding what we're supposed to be eating. After years of reading on the subject and battling through wildly conflicting science (as it is reported, not necessarily conducted), it seems to me that good nutrition boils down to natural, least-processed food.
Beauty is Truth. And Health I once saw an interesting item on comparative international grocery shopping; what different nationalities typically bought in the course of a week. The one that stood out to me was the Turkish shop; it was a stunning still life of glowing colour and luscious forms and textures that engaged both my stomach and my brain. It occurred to me recently that there's probably a very good reason for that- our aesthetic preferences are often rooted far more deeply than we know in our biology. A beautiful face is a symmetrical face because symmetry indicates health, both acquired and inherent. Beautiful food is the food we were born to consume. Below is a selection of images culled from our own library in support of my aesthetic-based rationale. I don't think the fact that very little here would have been completely unfamiliar to our early ancestors is much of a coincidence.
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Ha ha ha, no- don't eat the baby. Or tell anyone I suggested it. But seriously; I believe we should think of beauty both as guide and reward. Look into vegetables. And nuts. And fruit. And also seafood and shellfish. Remember those? Your body is screaming for them so just get married already. Replace bulk bread with root vegetables; they are starchy but in a better way, full of fibre, won't crash your pancreas through a shopfront and give great satisfaction. Stop peeling everything. Eat the skins, unless you suspect your food supply is heavily sprayed etc. If you ate a big gob of rice and pasta with things like curries and Italian sauces, replace them with a side of stirfried veges. It's still good, I promise. Those big bags of frozen mixed veges are fantastic value and really convenient. As for nuts; I eat 350 grams of unsalted almonds a week, munching on a handful whenever I feel like it. There is nothing better for sustained energy and dealing with hunger.
Trust your eye. By consuming natural, beautiful food, we enjoy the physical, intellectual and emotional dividends of its consumption. I know I have. If all this looks distant and expensive, we feel your pain. But we are pretty poor by western standards, quite possibly less well off than you. Most of the stuff pictured above was or could be grown in our very mediocre garden, cribbed from neighbours or purchased at our crappy local supermarket. If we can get our hands on this sort of food, so can you, probably. Invest in yourself.
Trust your eye. By consuming natural, beautiful food, we enjoy the physical, intellectual and emotional dividends of its consumption. I know I have. If all this looks distant and expensive, we feel your pain. But we are pretty poor by western standards, quite possibly less well off than you. Most of the stuff pictured above was or could be grown in our very mediocre garden, cribbed from neighbours or purchased at our crappy local supermarket. If we can get our hands on this sort of food, so can you, probably. Invest in yourself.
Refined starch is the devil's work. I know; this is what every neurotic bandwagoning food-phobic nut job screeches about and I've tried to sound so logical and reasonable. But come on now- it's just true. White grain starch and the industrial sugars that so often accompany it are endocrine crack, pitching us into peak/trough blood sugar craziness, addictive associations and mood alteration. You won't know what I'm talking about until you level out on real food. You feel the way you've been eating. R and I were pasta and bread fiends (admittedly wholemeal for the last few years) but it was Sunday morning white croissants that tipped us off to a curious phenomenon. We turned into fight-picking, wall-eyed psychos an hour after ingesting them, every time, like fucking clockwork. It was observable, quantifiable, repeatable, and that's enough Koch's Postulate for me.
So hmm... decisions, decisions. The baguette is undeniably delicious. But it does not occur in nature. Yes, that is a tragedy, but then again I do not possess the digestive physiology of a granivore. I won't die right now if I eat one, but what doesn't kill us immediately doesn't always make us stronger and in fact can fuck us up in a huge way if we regularly submit to our la la la impulses. So... how lucky do you feel, punk? What I did- I cut down to the equivalent of one piece of bread a day or a few crackers or half a cup of couscous etc. Wholegrain where humanly possible. A muffin on saturday. No biscuits, no cakes unless there is an actual party to go with that party food. I replaced the starches that used to make up the bulk of my meals with an array of vegetables. I don't miss refined starch feasts at all; bye-bye bloating, the runs, mid-afternoon coma; hello satiety and sane, consistent energy levels.
So hmm... decisions, decisions. The baguette is undeniably delicious. But it does not occur in nature. Yes, that is a tragedy, but then again I do not possess the digestive physiology of a granivore. I won't die right now if I eat one, but what doesn't kill us immediately doesn't always make us stronger and in fact can fuck us up in a huge way if we regularly submit to our la la la impulses. So... how lucky do you feel, punk? What I did- I cut down to the equivalent of one piece of bread a day or a few crackers or half a cup of couscous etc. Wholegrain where humanly possible. A muffin on saturday. No biscuits, no cakes unless there is an actual party to go with that party food. I replaced the starches that used to make up the bulk of my meals with an array of vegetables. I don't miss refined starch feasts at all; bye-bye bloating, the runs, mid-afternoon coma; hello satiety and sane, consistent energy levels.
 | Watch your binge triggers. Do I like white chocolate? Yes. Do I want to eat the whole block? No shit, Sherlock. Do I like persimmons? Love them. Do I want to eat twelve? No. And there it is, in a convenient nutshell. You react to real food in a reasonable way. You react to white chocolate and its legion of guises like a junkie. Learn the difference; choose wisely. What I did- I'd probably kill anyone who got between me and that delicious shit to the left there, so I choose wisely. |
As a compassionate caveat to this tragic injunction, let me put you onto dark chocolate instead. It's recently emerged that, like many foods that contain the indigestible roughage we're evolved to deal with, dark chocolate encourages symbiotic bacteria in our gut both to produce anti-inflammatory compounds and to muscle out intestinal bad guys like Clostridia and E. coli, the ones that trigger systemic inflammation, stroke and heart disease etc. This same indispensable fibre roughage occurs in wholemeal grain products, so no wonder I'm feeling better. See? We are all scientists. Observe yourself carefully and objectively and apply your own findings.
Theory into Practise Here's a few things that have worked for me.
Replace soft drinks and commercial juices with water and flavoured/fruit tea. I like vanilla black tea, chai and a range of tisanes. Go with coffee if you're one of those people. I won't lie- I don't drink much water.
Buy organic. Not just because it's ethical/beneficial- it's fucking expensive. You'll only buy what you need and won't be able to stand wasting it.
Like sandwiches? Me too. Ditch the bread and wrap your fillings in silver beet leaves. Oddly tasty. Go with wholegrain crackers, too. They're less calorific than bread.
Eat full fat, not 'diet food'. I have, the whole time; butter, full fat organic milk, cheese, eggs, steak fat, you name it. Lost heaps of weight, no cravings, no nightmare sugar roller coaster. Satisfaction is important. Natural fat is fine.
If you are seriously craving something, eat the damn thing. If you really needed it, you'll feel better for it. If you were just jonesing, that will become apparent too.
Your shopping trolley/cart should be full of colour and texture and not the kind that rolls off a printing press. Aim to keep packaged foods to twenty percent of its volume You won't always get there, but do try. Also keep in mind that...
Tinned and dried food can be great food. Pulses, fish, fancy mushrooms; all the shit that can be so expensive fresh awaits you in another form. Choose the least processed versions and watch the salt content.
Cook as much of your own food as possible. Inconvenient? Not as inconvenient as diabetes and stroke.
Climb out of the industrial sugar train wreck. Buy plain versions of the things you enjoy like yoghurt and flavour it at home with honey, fruit and home made conserves etc rather than eating commercial ice creams, puddings and other evil treats. Waaay less sugar and preservative shit. Once you've walked away from hypersugar, you'll wonder how you ever tolerated such insane levels of sweetness.
If your partner/flatmates etc. need more starch than you, serve yourself last and add less starch to your own portion instead of mixing everything up and then dishing out. Control is key. Plan ahead.
Stick to one medium potato per meaty meal. Spuds are cool, but you don't need three or five plus a steak.
Replace soft drinks and commercial juices with water and flavoured/fruit tea. I like vanilla black tea, chai and a range of tisanes. Go with coffee if you're one of those people. I won't lie- I don't drink much water.
Buy organic. Not just because it's ethical/beneficial- it's fucking expensive. You'll only buy what you need and won't be able to stand wasting it.
Like sandwiches? Me too. Ditch the bread and wrap your fillings in silver beet leaves. Oddly tasty. Go with wholegrain crackers, too. They're less calorific than bread.
Eat full fat, not 'diet food'. I have, the whole time; butter, full fat organic milk, cheese, eggs, steak fat, you name it. Lost heaps of weight, no cravings, no nightmare sugar roller coaster. Satisfaction is important. Natural fat is fine.
If you are seriously craving something, eat the damn thing. If you really needed it, you'll feel better for it. If you were just jonesing, that will become apparent too.
Your shopping trolley/cart should be full of colour and texture and not the kind that rolls off a printing press. Aim to keep packaged foods to twenty percent of its volume You won't always get there, but do try. Also keep in mind that...
Tinned and dried food can be great food. Pulses, fish, fancy mushrooms; all the shit that can be so expensive fresh awaits you in another form. Choose the least processed versions and watch the salt content.
Cook as much of your own food as possible. Inconvenient? Not as inconvenient as diabetes and stroke.
Climb out of the industrial sugar train wreck. Buy plain versions of the things you enjoy like yoghurt and flavour it at home with honey, fruit and home made conserves etc rather than eating commercial ice creams, puddings and other evil treats. Waaay less sugar and preservative shit. Once you've walked away from hypersugar, you'll wonder how you ever tolerated such insane levels of sweetness.
If your partner/flatmates etc. need more starch than you, serve yourself last and add less starch to your own portion instead of mixing everything up and then dishing out. Control is key. Plan ahead.
Stick to one medium potato per meaty meal. Spuds are cool, but you don't need three or five plus a steak.
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Portion sizes and example meal above Breakfast is wholegrain toast, hummus, a persimmon, figs, prunes, unsalted almonds and whole milk tea. Lunch is lamb curry with a small amount of brown rice mixed in with stir fried mix vegetables to replace the bulk rice I'd otherwise have. Note hand relative to portion. I'd have 2-3 crackers with maybe cheese and relish and a few pickled mussels for dinner, if any.
Just stop buying gross fake food altogether. It's that easy. As I said before, make your vices work for you. Lazy? You know you can't be be bothered to go and get it if you didn't pick it up on supermarket day, so it's a win-win. If you don't have it in the house, you can't stuff it in your mouth.
Don't pretend you don't know what gross food is, but if you insist, here's some handy guidelines. If... You can't pronounce its ingredients. Can't assign it to a known food group. Don't know where it comes from. It needs lurid/excessive packaging to attract your attention. It doesn't grow in the ground, swim or walk on the legs it was born with. You couldn't produce/reproduce it at home. Your great grandmother wouldn't recognize it... Spit, don't swallow. Don't buy it, don't consider it food. When you stop thinking of junk as food, you'll stop thinking of it as a treat. Look at the stuff as though you're seeing it for the first time; tip a bag of frozen battered nasty yellow-grey onto the sink and ask yourself if that looks like something you should be putting in your mouth. Unwrap that greasy, wilted burger and stare hard at it before you suck it down. Beauty is truth. Ugly can and will hurt you.
Let go once in a while and eat a big gutfull of something disgusting that you used to enjoy. Really stuff yourself. See how far you get. When I overindulge these days I feel like someone kicked the living shit out of me, because I'm now a precious healthful petal who physically cannot tolerate the kind of alimentary abuse I used to deal myself. Well fuck me. That was the goal and I'm there. Okay, so if you want the whole truth, I still love my bag of sour cream chips and I do mean the whole thing. I do it once a month and skip a meal and it's no biggie. The more you eat right, the less you want to eat wrong and the more you see the evil stuff for what it is; corrupted, corrupting. Being well-fed and energised replaces and far exceeds the pleasure we got from pigging out on shit food. I never thought that would happen but trust me, it does.
Don't pretend you don't know what gross food is, but if you insist, here's some handy guidelines. If... You can't pronounce its ingredients. Can't assign it to a known food group. Don't know where it comes from. It needs lurid/excessive packaging to attract your attention. It doesn't grow in the ground, swim or walk on the legs it was born with. You couldn't produce/reproduce it at home. Your great grandmother wouldn't recognize it... Spit, don't swallow. Don't buy it, don't consider it food. When you stop thinking of junk as food, you'll stop thinking of it as a treat. Look at the stuff as though you're seeing it for the first time; tip a bag of frozen battered nasty yellow-grey onto the sink and ask yourself if that looks like something you should be putting in your mouth. Unwrap that greasy, wilted burger and stare hard at it before you suck it down. Beauty is truth. Ugly can and will hurt you.
Let go once in a while and eat a big gutfull of something disgusting that you used to enjoy. Really stuff yourself. See how far you get. When I overindulge these days I feel like someone kicked the living shit out of me, because I'm now a precious healthful petal who physically cannot tolerate the kind of alimentary abuse I used to deal myself. Well fuck me. That was the goal and I'm there. Okay, so if you want the whole truth, I still love my bag of sour cream chips and I do mean the whole thing. I do it once a month and skip a meal and it's no biggie. The more you eat right, the less you want to eat wrong and the more you see the evil stuff for what it is; corrupted, corrupting. Being well-fed and energised replaces and far exceeds the pleasure we got from pigging out on shit food. I never thought that would happen but trust me, it does.
I know it's been a long slog, but I hope for those who've made it through this series that my experiences are something you can relate to your own situation. If you want to lose weight and regain your health, please believe that this is within your grasp. Don't be a stubborn, self-destructive dipshit like me. I wasted a lot of years telling myself I didn't need to/didn't want to/couldn't anyway and then thought I would have to fly to the fucking moon to get it done, when it turns out all I needed to do was engage brain and get off my arse. Being smaller hasn't solved all my problems, but it's made all the other stuff that should be happening easier. It's given me back to me.
Value yourself, believe in yourself, invest in yourself. We are all we'll ever really have.
Value yourself, believe in yourself, invest in yourself. We are all we'll ever really have.
Pic credits: Large food display Georg Flegel wiki, Chauvet, Yolgnu bird figure pic my own, Venus of Laussel wiki, Bread pic unknown altered by me, Tametomo being rescued from the Seamonster by Tengu Utagawa Kuniyoshi wiki, white chocolate with rose petals wiki, Clown from Supersize Me, still life with miniature parrot Georg Flegel wiki.
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