…here. One big keeper from the article is poaching eggs in the microwave. I tried it immediately and it worked great!
- Category Archives Health and Fitness
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The 80% principle
I copied these principles from a great post on Mark’s Daily Apple:
I start with these four basic principles to guide my Primal Blueprint eating style:
1) 80% of your body composition will be determined by your diet. Yes, exercise is also important to health and to speed up fat-burning and muscle-building, but most of your results will come from how you eat. I’ll write more on this later, so just trust me on this one for now. Suffice to say, people who weigh a ton and exercise a ton, but eat a ton, still tend to weigh a ton. I think I’ll have that made into a t-shirt…
2) Lean Body Mass (LBM) is the key to life. I’ve said it many times on this site: lean mass (muscle and all the rest of you that is not fat) is directly correlated with longevity and excellent health. Rather than strive to “lose weight”, most people would be better off striving to lose only fat and to build or maintain muscle. Since other organs tend to function at a level that correlates to muscle mass, the more muscle you maintain throughout life, the more “organ reserve” you’ll have (i.e. the better the rest of you will work). Refer back to rule #1 and eat to build or maintain muscle.
3) Excess body fat is bad. Most human studies show that being significantly overweight increases your risk of nearly every disease (except osteoporosis – because ironically it responds to weight-bearing activities). Fat just doesn’t look that great either. See rule #1 and eat to keep body fat relatively low.
4) Excess insulin is bad. We’ve written about it here a lot. Chronic excess insulin may be even worse than excess sugar (and we know how bad that is). All animals produce insulin, but within any species, those that produce less insulin live longer than those who produce a lot. Eat to keep insulin low.
“people who weigh a ton and exercise a ton, but eat a ton, still tend to weigh a ton.” This statement could be a net description of my life up until 2006. I exercised hard 5-6 days a week, but still was carrying too much weight. The clear answer, based on my personal results – too much food, particularly too many carbohydrates…
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Finding whole grain products
Yesterday we were in the grocery looking for burrito wraps.
We were trying to avoid white flower and came upon some wraps with this stamp.
Done. I made some home made bean burritos with a couple of the wraps yesterday, and they had a really good nutty flavor.
Read more about the Whole Grains Council
The big plan for the wraps is to make home made burritos and take them backpacking. I’d learned about taking frozen burritos backpacking from friend Bob, but the store bought ones are so scary…
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Secrets of a big loser
According to Calorie Lab News:
The August issue of Redbook includes the story of Kristy Martin, a 37-year-old from Kansas who has lost 120 pounds. She gained a lot of weight in college and wore a size 20 wedding dress.
It wasn’t until she read on her medical chart when pregnant with her second son that she was obese that she really thought about having a serious weight problem. When she had her wisdom teeth taken out ate she couldn’t eat to fill the boredom, so she started exercising and eventually dropped nearly half her weight through walking and eating better.
She says it’s critical to get over the guilt of taking time for yourself to exercise, because you’re better able to help others and less stressed if you take that time. Other slimming tips include planning meals in advance and cutting down on grazing during meal preparation, saying no to family members who try to push unhealthy foods on you and celebrating losses by getting great new clothes.
I try to imagine what’s going through the minds of people who would push unhealthy foods on a woman who is 120 lbs overweight – I just keep coming up with a blank…
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Excerpt of Introduction to “In Defense of Food”
Click here to read the whole introduction to Michael Pollan’s book. Click here to read about or buy the book.
What follows is what I find the most compelling:
…There are in fact some very good reasons
to worry. The rise of nutritionism reflects legitimate concerns
that the American diet, which is well on its way to becoming
the world’s diet, has changed in ways that are making us
increasingly sick and fat. Four of the top ten causes of death
today are chronic diseases with well- established links to diet:
coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. Yes, the rise
to prominence of these chronic diseases is partly due to the
fact that we’re not dying earlier in life of infectious diseases,
but only partly: Even after adjusting for age, many of the so-called
diseases of civilization were far less common a century
ago—and they remain rare in places where people don’t eat
the way we do.I’m speaking, of course, of the elephant in the room whenever
we discuss diet and health: “the Western diet.” This is the
subject of the second part of the book, in which I follow the
story of the most radical change to the way humans eat since
the discovery of agriculture. All of our uncertainties about nutrition
should not obscure the plain fact that the chronic diseases
that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the
industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods
and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and
animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap
calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and
the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a
tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy. These
changes have given us the Western diet that we take for granted:
lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar,
lots of everything—except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.That such a diet makes people sick and fat we have known
for a long time. Early in the twentieth century, an intrepid group
of doctors and medical workers stationed overseas observed that
wherever in the world people gave up their traditional way of
eating and adopted the Western diet, there soon followed a predictable
series of Western diseases, including obesity, diabetes,
cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. They called these the Western
diseases and, though the precise causal mechanisms were
(and remain) uncertain, these observers had little doubt these
chronic diseases shared a common etiology: the Western diet.
What’s more, the traditional diets that the new Western
foods displaced were strikingly diverse: Various populations
thrived on diets that were what we’d call high fat, low fat, or
high carb; all meat or all plant; indeed, there have been traditional
diets based on just about any kind of whole food you
can imagine. What this suggests is that the human animal is
well adapted to a great many different diets. The Western diet,
however, is not one of them.Here, then, is a simple but crucial fact about diet and
health, yet, curiously, it is a fact that nutritionism cannot see,
probably because it developed in tandem with the industrialization
of our food and so takes it for granted. Nutritionism
prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various
nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying
processed foods rather than questioning their value in the
first place. Nutritionism is, in a sense, the official ideology of
the Western diet and so cannot be expected to raise radical or
searching questions about it.
But we can…
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A personal journey
Disclaimer – The actions and results I’ve outlined below worked for me. However, I am neither a doctor nor am I your doctor; you may be in a different situation and need a different plan.
In November of 2006, some friends took me rock climbing, which I had not really done before. I quickly realized that I would not be very successful at this sport if I was trying to carry my spare tire up the cliff as said spare tire contributed nothing whatever to getting up the cliff.
I so badly wanted to succeed at climbing that it motivated me to get rid of the spare tire. Call it a magic moment – an event that gave me the motivation to make a permanent change.
I’ve outlined here the changes I made to lose weight. One thing I didn’t originally mention on that page is that I also started taking 3000 mg of fish oil and 900 mg of Omega-3 Fatty Acids every day. I also eat a lot of fatty fish (salmon) and rarely (not “never”) eat red meat.
I recently (July 2008) went to see my GP on an unrelated subject and she ordered a panel of blood tests. I recently got them back, and discovered that I also had a blood panel to compare them to from just after I made the diet and lifestyle changes. Continue reading Post ID 235
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11 ways to eat the 11 best healthy foods that you aren’t eating
Go here. Thanks to Cousin Pink!
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My favorite protein shake
- 1 C orange juice or milk (obviously you lose the orange taste) or both
- 1 frozen banana, sectioned (good use for those “overripers”, I break them in half, bag them and freeze them)
- 1 C frozen blueberries (optional, but yummy and good for you)
Blend until smooth
- 1 or 2 scoops vanilla whey powder (depends on how protein-y you want it) added with blender on low
Blend until well mixed
- Several ice cubes. Number will depend on how frozen you want it, how hot it is, temperature of other ingredients. I like stiff milkshake consistency Continue reading Post ID 235
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A counterpoint concerning the cholesterol frenzy…
I like the article and it’s summary – exercise and eat healthy foods to protect your heart – sounds like a plan…
