Stop Dieting and try Eating with Reason

A little bit about me - as long as i could remember as a child my mom was on one diet or another, The doctor had her try 800 calorie a day diets and everything else. There were always lots of weight loss books all around the house. The results? My mother was always obese and none of the diets ever seemed to make any difference. Since I came of age in the 60's i didn't like listening to authority and following rules. And most diets are nothing more than a really long list of rules.

In the early 70's, after I had served in the Army and lived through Viet Nam and and the loss of my father. I returned to work as a manager trainee at the K-mart I was working at before being drafted and earned a whopping $2.50 an hour. My boss there weighed close to 600 pounds so anything looked skinny next to him. Working as a retail manager was not a physically demanding job, so I kept gaining weight - a lot of weight. I couldn't fit behind the wheel of my truck anymore and had ballooned up to 450 pounds of fat. I started donating blood in the Army and kept doing so on a regular basis until one day they said they couldn't take my blood because my blood pressure was too high it was 190 over 210 ! at that rate my heart was never resting and so i had to do something fast.

I borrowed the book "Calories don't count" from mom and proceeded to go on a strict Atkins diet limiting my carbs to less than 20 per day. This worked very well and I was down to 190 pounds in about 6 months. Weight loss but at what cost? The Atkins diet is very high in cholesterol and in later years i have suffered heart attacks and strokes that might be related to that diet. My primary care physician was an advocate of the Atkins diet until he needed a heart bypass due to clogged arteries . Now he is doing a Mediterranean diet which is basically like the south beach diet. Again a diet with a strict set of rules to achieve weight loss. Rules ! and more rules!

Reflecting back on my struggle I have come to a startling conclusion diets and rules don't help achieve weight loss. we need to change our thinking about what we eat, We can toss out all the diet books charts and rules and simply think and reason before we eat.

We have been taught since we were children that we need to eat three meals a day, breakfast before we start the day, lunch around noon, and a big dinner after work. Back in the time when most of us worked on farms this might have made sense, except back then the big meal was at noon. So the farmer eats a big breakfast, goes out and works hard for some time then another big meal at noon and after work a smaller meal since the work day was over. This sort of diet works well for someone like the farmer who is performing physically demanding work all day. Today most of us have sedentary occupations, we have no need for the quantity and type of food eaten by the farmer or other laborer and the result is we are getting fatter and fatter.

Now to my Eating with Reason theory. We are a machine and food is our fuel, we need to stop and think before we eat. If we eat only when hungry rather than eating because it is noon or dinner time, we may find that we don't really need to eat as many times during the day, or maybe we need to eat small meals more often. This will be different for everyone. Just as we select the proper fuel for our vehicle we also should stop and think and reason whether we are filling our bodies with the proper fuel. And also reason out the proper quantities, what I am saying here is you should not overfill your body fuel tank any more than you would overfill your gas tank in the car. If you overfill the gas tank it spills all over and if you overfill your body it spills over as fat storage .

So the bottom line is use the hundreds of healthy recipes we have here as a starting point. Eat only when hungry and think and reason out just what you are eating. Your body requires protein and vegetables, it never requires large quantities of sugar or starches. Soy protein is just as good as beef protein for your body, my favorite protein is peanuts as in peanut butter. I am diabetic so I have eliminated all refined added sugar. There are so many sweeteners on the market today that no one needs sugar to make things taste sweet. One of the best choices for sweetening is Stevia which is a natural herb sold as a food additive because the FDA has succumbed to pressure from Monsanto who owns the patent on the chemical used in nutra-sweet artificial sweetener [aspartame] so the FDA declared that Stevia could not be sold as a sweetener.

We all should toss the diet books and simply stop and think and eat with reason. America is in a crisis of obesity and there is also a food shortage in much of the world. Eating with reason could solve both of those problems at the same time.

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