OK, this topic has been going around for a long time. I remember posting on April 28 that lawmakers in New Zealand "wanted to add provisions regulating food sold at schools, banning food advertisements at certain times of the day and controlling the quality of food sold within 1km of schools, to a new health law to meet concerns about child obesity." The World Health Organization (WHO) is concerned about sugar or so they said in a report they came out with back in April. It seems someone else is on the bandwagon to try to change the eating habits of our youth. Acidman's gut is rumbling over this situation.
What a lot of people do not know about me is that I am an expert on diet and nutrition.
How I got to be an expert, I will actually never know, but I do know what happens to you if you do not eat right, if the chemicals needed to run your body get out of whack, and from my own experience, a good bit about weight control. I do get a lot of questions about malnourished people. Such is closer to what my actual expertise points toward, but I also get questions from 98 lb. weaklings trying to gain weight and plenty of questions from people needing to lose weight. To a person, if someone asks me about any diet that exists, I tell them to forget it. There is only one way to lose weight. Consume less calories that you intake on a daily basis until the weight is gone. How to do this? My number one rule, do not change your normal diet, except in one regard.
I mean, actually, you can lose weight eating the same old crap you always eat. Just eat less of it. The one thing I say that you do not eat: sugar! Sugar metabolizes to fat faster than anything you put into your body: period. I tell everyone to take a daily multivitamin, as that insures you get the nutrition you need, so it makes no difference if you live off of mac&cheese or Fritos®. An average person needs approximately 2000 calories for a normal day's activity, so if you cut down to 1500 calories, and increase your exercise, you will lose weight. You will not lose it quickly, but you will lose it in such a manner as it will be easy to maintain the new weight.
Any and all fast weight loss diets throw the body's metabolism into turmoil. The body does not understand diet, but it does understand famine. If you starve your body so as to drop a huge amount of weight, as soon as you start eating again, the body will try to store up as much fat as possible so as to prepare for the next famine. If you just gradually adjust the amount that you eat, not only does you body's metabolism adjust but your stomach will begin to shrink after awhile and you will actually feel full eating less.
What is this diet crap anyway. Consider these factors:
Yes, there is a problem. But then again, is there? I hear the term Rubenesque applied to some larger women, and it is true that larger women were desirable back during the Renaissance. Why? Well, mainly because oxen were expensive and hard to come by, so having a large woman with a strong back was beneficial to the family's livelihood. Uh, I think womens lib has done completely away with the thought that any woman was going to volunteer to pull the family ox-cart to market so Rubenesque needs to go the way of the ox-cart.
However, by the same token, the emaciated look is the first step on the road to an early death. Ideally, everyone should be close to 10% body fat and take a good multi-vitamin daily. Don't be too big or too thin. Don't drink, smoke or do drugs. No matter what you do, you are liable to live longer than was the average 200 years ago. You rarely saw too many really obese people, except the very wealthy 200 years ago, because food was hard to come by and people didn't eat real regular. Try skipping a meal or two on occasion if you need to lose weight, but don't fast, don't try anything to take it off too fast.
Everyone (except anorexics*), cut down on the sugar.
*They wouldn't put a grain of sugar into their bodies if you paid them to do it.
Posted by notGeorge at September 16, 2003 09:21 PM