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Why I Had To Change My Mind About Carbohydrates
And How I Did It
I came into learning about nutrition about eight years ago at the height of the carbohydrate argument. And, true to form, I was already talking about it before I fully understood it. The problem was that there were two types of carbohydrates – simple and complex – and I hadn’t quite sorted them out in my mind. To sort them out, I had to call one of them something other than carbohydrates.
As I worked through the “nothing white” concept it occurred to me that simple carbohydrates were starches complex carbohydrates had color. Easy. I began to recommend that my clients avoid starches. They could get their heads around that. It’s simple. You can eat carbohydrates but not starches.
Then I wrote my “Itty Bitty Weight Loss Book” and the information became even more clear. I had to type a comprehensive carbohydrate chart. Meat didn’t have carbs. Fish, eggs, poultry, most cheeses, oils – none of them had carbohydrates. Starches had huge numbers of grams of carbohydrates. Colored vegetables, of every sort, had small amounts. A baked potato (starch) had 63 grams of carbs. Half a cup of green beans 4 grams. Bread 23 grams a slice. Salad 3-4 grams a cup. Carbohydrates began to speak to me in colors. Nothing white except cauliflower and members of the onion family.
I read that if you ate between 45 and 60 grams of carbohydrate in a day – no more than 60 – you would lose weight. I began to puzzle out how to change my client’s eyes when it came to food. A tablespoon of healthy oil at each meal – and no more – a pack of playing cards size protein (and not the giant cards, just normal ones) at each meal – and all the green vegetables they could pile on their plate. Nothing white. The only artificial sweetener I recommend is Stevia. Protein snacks. Stay away from protein bars. Stay away from everything processed. Stay away from supermarket oils, shortenings, margarines and everything that contains them. It’s pretty simple. In the beginning it’s not easy and then it is.
When I was a fitness expert I learned something very important. I exercised 6-9 hours a day and I still had to watch what I ate. I didn’t mind because eating well agreed with me. But if I stopped eating well it showed on the scale immediately. Did you notice what I said? I said, “Eating well.” Why would you ever not want to eat well? It’s not about dieting. It’s never about dieting. It’s about eating well. Making your body feel good. Supporting your continued good health.
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Procrastination is one of those terms we define as negative, yet procrastination can be positive when it is used against another negative. In science and math that is known as, “Two negatives make a positive.”
Procrastination is constructive when you put off doing something that’s bad for you until the impulse to do it passes. Impulses by their very nature are short term. The trick is to allow them to pass without acting on them. That’s where self-hypnosis comes in.”
Think of all those candy bars that are stacked up at the checkout counter of the Supermarkets. They are there to tempt you to indulge in an impulse. You may have successfully negotiated all the candy sections in the market but then you come to the checkout where you have to stand in line looking at candy for several minutes. If you are on a diet, chances are that the pull of that sugar will be monumental although when you are not facing a rack of sugar the pull is hardly there at all.
Using self-hypnosis means distracting yourself from an impulse by thinking about something else, something that interests you. It is important to structure what you are going to think about before you are confronted with that impulse. Self-hypnosis is a matter of making the brain busy while you relax. One of the great self-hypnosis tricks is to stupefy the brain with boredom. Any time you are faced with an impulse, you can count from 100 to one, alternating back and forth between the next number down and 100; 99-100, 98-100, 97-100 and so forth. Keep counting until the impulse has passed.
The things people use for self-hypnosis are very different. I think about my “to do” list. I run the list through my head whenever I’m faced with an impulse. Jane, one of my clients, rearranges the furniture in her house. Alice practices a slalom course on a ski slope. I suggest that you pick something you like to do that will occupy your thoughts while you are faced with an impulse.
The thing not to do is to focus on not eating the candy. Focusing on what you don’t want to do keeps the thing you don’t want to do right at the forefront of your mind. It exacerbates the impulse and makes it more difficult to resist. The mind does not recognize words that include no and not. “Don’t think of a green elephant” is interpreted by the mind as “think of a green elephant.”
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What is it about people with weight issues that they would do anything to avoid exercise and eating right? As if stomach stapling, with its 30% success rate, and unbelievable long term health consequences, weren’t bad enough, the latest GlaxoSmithKline’s instant and completely uncontrollable diarrhea contribution, Alli, is almost laughable. Not only do you have to wear Depends whenever you eat more than 15 grams of fat in a day, but this product is almost as effective as the placebo. Alli is the name of this new contribution to ripping off the overweight population and here’s a couple of reasons to avoid it… beyond the obvious embarrassing probability that you will actually get into deep do-do in public.
1. Alli doesn’t address carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are the big bugaboo of the American diet. If you keep your carbohydrate intake to below 60 grams a day – you’ll lose weight. You can do that easily and effortlessly by cutting out starches. It’s hard to eat 60 grams of carbs if you eat lettuce and spinach and almost every other kind of green vegetable. Meat (if not presented in a bun topped with sugary sauces and dipped in sugar itself to prevent shrinkage during cooking) has zero carbs.
2. You absolutely cannot live without fat in your diet. The big low fat diets of the ‘90s resulted in debilitating loss of energy and severe depression in people who lowered their fat intake to unhealthy levels. Food processors laced low fat products with huge amounts of sugar which completely undid the benefits of their product. The key is healthy fat: virgin olive oil, butter (never margarine), flaxseed oil – as against supermarket oils and prepared salad dressings. If the label says “hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated,” let it stay on the shelf – that’s all those oils are good for – shelf life. They are certainly not good for you.
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Top 10
Reasons to Exercise (In The Morning)
Exercise first thing in the morning is really the only way to assure that something else won’t crowd exercise out of your schedule.
Over 90% of people who exercise “consistently”, exercise in the morning. If you want to exercise consistently, odds are in your favor if you exercise first thing in the morning.
Research has demonstrated that exercise increases mental acuity … on average it lasts four to ten hours after exercise! If you exercise in the evening, you are simply wasting that mental acuity while you are sleeping.
Exercise in the morning helps your lymphatic system clean out the toxins that it has been collecting all night as the body cleanses itself. You want to flush your lymphatic system with exercise so that you can rid yourself of the toxins that your body has collected as part of cleansing itself from life in a toxic, polluted world.
When you exercise early in the morning, it “jump starts” your metabolism and keeps it elevated for up to 24 hours! Roughly translated, that means you’re burning more calories all day long just because you exercised in the morning.
When you exercise your white blood cells get larger and more active which boosts the effectiveness of your immune system.
For many people, morning exercise “regulates” your appetite during the day. People who exercise in the morning find that they aren’t as hungry and that they make better food choices.
If you exercise at about the same time every morning (which suggests that you wake up at the same time on a regular basis) your body’s endocrine system and circadian rhythms reflect that regularity. This means that a few hours before you wake up, your body begins to prepare for both waking and for exercising by elevating both your metabolism and the hormones involved in exercise and activity.
Hormones that are released while you sleep prepare your body for exercise by, among other things, regulating blood pressure, heart rate, blood flow to muscles.
Research has demonstrated that people who exercise on a
regular basis have a higher quality of sleep and thus require less
sleep!
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