4 June 2019

Healthy Eating

I used to spend exorbitant amounts of time exercising to keep my body from getting too out of hand and postpone age-related health complications for as long as possible. Until a few years ago, I thought that was normal, but following an injury that kept me from working out for a long period of time, I fell too far behind to get things back in order without doing something drastic. My revelations are summarized as a guide below.

Revelations

Is Exercising Needed?

To my astonishment, exercise was not needed to begin losing weight. Granted I had built up a lot of muscle mass over the past 6 months and was at least 35lbs over weight, but it seemed that exercising wasn’t relevant to correcting this issue. I was actually a little upset about this discovery, because I’ve spent a lot of time exercising when I’d have greatly preferred to be doing something else. Every week or so, I try to lift, because honestly, I don’t even believe it can be this way (plus muscle loss wouldn’t be ideal) but when I shifted my nutritional intake around, I did not pay any mind to whether I was “getting enough exercise” and it totally didn’t matter, I was losing weight without actually expecting to.

Hunger Inducing Foods

Certain foods cause an increase in your appetite. Cereal is a good example of this. Just the other day I was experimenting with adding cereal to my diet, and foolishly chose a box with Trisodium Phosphate as one of it’s ingredients. Let me just say that that box of cereal did not live to see another day past the day it was opened. Cheese and eggs are more good examples of foods that boost your appetite. I haven’t studied it thoroughly but I have a hunch that most breads will do the same. Also, just with plain oatmeal, if you add sugar to it, suddenly when you’re finished eating, you’re hungry for another bowl. I find that I’m much happier without adding these hunger inducing agents to my daily meals because I just don’t have the time to exercise all these extra helpings of calories off by the end of the day. I limit how much seasoning I use for this reason as well; seasoning ‘low on calories’ can be dangerous because it masks how much food I’m actually hungry for.

Potato Dieting

To shift into this diet, it’s wise to keep up a store of sliced, boiled potatoes in your refrigerator. I look to potatoes as my cheat food. If you eat them cold, you actually don’t digest 100% of the potato you taste, even though you feel 100% full, which is a great hack to exploit. Google “potato diet” for more startchy details.

Fasting and Ketogenesis

Ketogenesis is the process your body uses to break down fat to use it’s energy. The TL;DR on this stuff is that your body can’t easily break down fat if you’re snacking throughout the day. Shifting to the new diet required lots of potato snacking I’m sure. But I’ve found that eating hardy, nutrient-rich meals allows me to feel full for 90% of the day, and during 5% of the day I mentally focus on continuing my fast and the other 5% of my day I absentmindedly take trips to my refrigerator, grab a hand full of carrots, and then realize I’m still fasting and put them back (or spit them in the trash, yuck, carrots!).

I was reading up on monks and how they lived, and just tried to fast from 3pm through to another day. One reason the monks did this was take make it more clear how their mind behaved when it was in need of food. I don’t usually like being late for meals, but I gave this a shot one night and found it an insightful, though unsustainable practice.

The only time I break my fast in-between meals is if I did something especially exhausting that day, and even then, I like to wait a little while because that uncomfortable feeling you get when you need more food than you’ve eaten is really just what your body feels like when it’s burning fat for energy.

Wake Up Hungry for Breakfast

I used to eat big dinners, and snacked before bed. The result was that I would wake up full, and then go eat another meal, even though I didn’t even want breakfast in the first place. I think that was an unhealthy habit. My aim now is to go to sleep exactly slightly hungry for breakfast. It’s important to pull this off perfectly because if you go to sleep too hungry, you won’t sleep for the entire night (until morning for some reason). I believe its also important to not snack too close to bed time. Your digestive system more or less shuts down during sleep, so if you have a bunch of food in your stomach, it’s just going to rot in there all night long and then when you wake up, turn your breakfast into an entire meals worth of overeating.

Avoid Wheat and Corn

The cheapest way to feed a population is through wheat and corn. It packs massive amounts of calories and does so on the cheap. I believe these foods also induce hunger in me more so than anything else that was on my old diet. For that reason, I dropped them, and also in the hopes that I would be more clear headed, I dropped them.

Nutrient Flushes with Juiced Veggies

When switching up your diet, the last thing you need is to embark on this adventure without getting all the nutrients you need to feel great. The best solution to this is not to slam down box after box of serial in the morning (this is quite certainly a hunger producing agent for me in fact). Nope, your best bet is to juice fresh vegetables.

Some Easy Meals

As it turns out, the most abused chemical in the US is sugar and so I’ve been trying to select meals that limit “blood sugar spikes.” Some of the deserts may violate this rule, but please note that I rarely indulge in these euphoric meals and would only recommend them for people interested in moving off animal products but need some sort of culinary Methadone equivalent ;)

Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner
Sides (post-meal fillers)
Deserts (only for adjusting)

Starter Juicing Ingredient List

So my take on juicing is that it’s ok to not get every ingredient every time, just as it’s ok to experiment with new things (but I stay far away from parsnip and ginger root). So below is my general goto “core” ingredient list. If you’re missing too many leafy greens or you wind up watering things down too much with stuff like cucumber or green beans, you won’t feel full. After a proper juicing meal, I like to think I’m full for at least 3 hours, so if you don’t feel full afterwords (ie you would NOT want another sip of juice) then tweak your proportions or add less flavor enhancers.

Categories: health - nutrition