Archive for Health

16 May 2013
Exercise • Health • The Mind-Body Connection • Weight Loss

Why I Failed at CrossFit…and the Paleo Diet

For years and years we have been told that if we eat a certain way and move a certain way, we will lose weight and be healthy. Period. And that usually works…for a while. Until it doesn’t. There are many theories that attempt to explain this problem.

Let me preface this discussion by stating the following: I believe that the Paleo Diet is the best method of eating out there for me. It covers all the issues: Weight loss, hormone regulation, chronic disease protection, improved sleep, etc. The food is, for the most part, very satisfying. It has a lot of really great benefits. But I have found success through this way of eating to be difficult and often temporary. This is not due to a flaw in the science of the program. It has to do with a flaw in the way that I we think about getting healthy.

This happens to the majority of people who try to “get healthy”. What do we mean when we say that we want to “get healthy”? We mean “I want to lose weight and be skinny! I want to be the size _____ that I was in high school/college/before I had the baby…” That’s what we want. But here is the secret that no one ever tells you: You will never get there if that is all you are thinking about.

You need to have a better reason than that. What reason? I can’t tell you that. It’s different for everyone. (I think that I may have found mine…more on that in future posts…)

But, it’s not your fault that you fail for this reason. Remember how I just told you that you will never get there if that is all you are thinking about? Here’s the kicker: This whole game is set up to ensure that being skinny is all you are thinking about!!! The way that diet and fitness products are marketed and sold to you is mostly responsible for your unhealthy attitude towards adopting a healthy lifestyle.

I find it glib and insulting when I am lectured on this concept by people in the diet and fitness industry, or the Dieting Industrial Complex (DIC), as I call it. I find it particularly insulting when it comes from people who run gyms – especially CrossFit gyms. I also hate it when people who have never had a significant weight problem try to pull this bullshit. “How the fuck would you know?” I want to scream at them! There is a big emotional difference between a person who is carrying 5 or 10 extra pounds, versus someone who is carrying 100 extra pounds. There is also a big difference between a person who suffers from disordered eating and a person who doesn’t.

Think about it. This is an industry whose very survival is dependent upon people never believing that they are good enough, no matter how thin they are. How the hell else would these people continue to make money selling fitness and weight loss products that are basically the same tired old information repackaged to look like it’s new and revolutionary? They wouldn’t be able to because this stuff is not ”revolutionary”. And if you think it is, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. We’ve known fruits and vegetables are better for us than crème brulee for a long time now. And we’ve known that grains contribute to weight gain and disease for a century and a half. These concepts are not new.

The people that have found their real, true and lasting motivation for getting healthy are going to be fine. They will go on the program, solve their problem over time and you will never hear from them again. Their problem has been solved. It’s the people who are always wanting…always searching…those are your real customers. Those who seem to stay fat no matter what they do. Call it a lack of motivation all you want to, but you, Mr. or Ms. Health & Fitness Professional – you don’t want to solve these people’s problem any more that Big Pharma wants us all to “get well”. You may think you do, but you really don’t. Like Big Pharma, your industry wants to manage their illness. The illness of “never believing they are good enough” and “willingness to try anything you tell them to.” Why else would they buy your next book? Or join your “new and improved” gym? Let’s call a spade a spade. It’s the people that “just want to look hot” and don’t really care about adrenal fatigue that are funding your party. This $45 Billion industry is being kept afloat with their money, not the people who adopt the program for life on the first attempt. It’s these ”frivolous” people who just want to be skinny that you constantly shake your finger at that make people like you millionaires.

The reason that I keep failing at the paleo diet…is built into the paleo diet. If one of your main selling points is that your program will help people “lose weight fast” and then they try it and they don’t lose weight fast, they are going to quit. The program is not doing what it promised.

The reason I quit CrossFit is because I was led to believe that it would get me ripped very quickly. Four weeks, chronic exhaustion, a heel injury, one post-workout vomiting session and $250 later when I was sick, in pain, poorer and NOT ripped…I quit. As any sane person would. I did not get what was promised.

When you market a product by promising – or merely implying – that it will get rid of weight fast and half (or more) of the people on your program don’t lose weight fast and quit, who’s really to blame here? Them…or you? Promising fast, insane results is how you move product. ”Eat real food, be more active, and the weight will slowly, slowly go away over time if you just relax and don’t think about it so much…” – that doesn’t sell DVDs. And you think the solution to the quitting and lack of success problem is to endlessly chastise the quitters while continuing to make the unrealistic promises?  You should feel lucky that the 68.8% of people who are overweight or obese don’t ban together and lynch your ass in the parking lot!

Listen carefully, Dieting Industrial Complex: If you want people to stop quitting after failing to experience EXTREME results, then stop promising EXTREME results in order to sell your product. It’s really that simple.

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10 May 2013
Food • Health • Life in General • The Mind-Body Connection • Weight

How Mika Brzezinski’s Confession Led to My Own

 

Mika-Brzezinski

I confess that I never had much respect for Mika Brzezinski. I had never read any of her previous books, and I fear that I based my poor opinion of her on a handful of dumb statements that she has made on the MSNBC show, Morning Joe over the years. I had her pegged as more of a Sherri Shephard-esque figure; the very thing that makes most morning television unbearable for me to watch. I am hereby stating that I stand corrected. While I do not suddenly believe that Ms. Brzezinski is a rocket scientist, I refuse to label her as a Morning Show Twit anymore based on my reading of her latest book Obsessed: America’s Food Addiction–and My Own.

I started this blog with a mission: I wanted to separate the idea of being thin from the idea of being healthy. As any thinking person knows, those things can be mutually exclusive. I wanted to provide real information on how to be healthy and avoid chronic disease. For some people, physical health is their issue plain and simple. When they have good information they clean up there diet, get more sleep and become more active. Their physical health improves, even if their weight loss is minimal or they experience no weight loss at all. But the word “healthy“ can often be used as a substitute for the word “thin“. This allows society to shame fat people for no other reason than the fact that they are fat. It gives credence to the stereotype that if you do not have a “normal” BMI, you are automatically unhealthy and people have a right to judge you or try to shame you into becoming thin (as if that ever works).

Ms. Brzezinski’s book is about food addiction. The idea for writing it was born out of an awkward conversation that she had with her best friend Diane - another journalist. Diane was about 100 pounds overweight and Mika confronted her while they were sailing off the coast of Long Island one day:

‘Diane,’ I said, ‘you can’t climb onto this boat without help. Is that how you want to live? Your whole body hurts and your joints are killing you. Why do you think that is? I am just going to say it. It’s because you are fat.’

She then made a deal with Diane. Mika would pay her to lose weight. Now I know what you’re thinking. “What a shitty friend!!” Right? But here is the catch: Both Mika and her best friend have been binge eaters for decades. The only difference is that through sheer luck, near-constant starvation and bulimic-type exercise, Mika managed to maintain a size 2 figure, while her friend experienced a significant weight gain during the course of their 15-year friendship. Mika knew that her friend’s weight was dangerously high and her own was dangerously low. The deal was that they would both deal with their food issues once and for all. The friend would lose weight and Mika would gain weight. She told her friend that day:

‘Other people don’t see the beautiful person I see when I look at you. They see a woman who looks like her life is out of control, who can’t even manage her own body.‘

This is an important point and this was why my mind was a bit blown by this book. First let’s talk a bit about perception.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where facts and reality don’t matter very much (Did they ever matter?). It’s all about people’s perception. And the truth is that when people (even other fat people) look at a fat person, particularly a fat woman…or even worse…a fat woman of color (i.e. me), they will proceed to make certain types of judgments about her. I’m lazy, undisciplined, sloppy, out of control, etc… It’s hard enough in this world to be black and female. This already may have cost me a job. Being fat just seems to be piling on. And since good jobs are becoming scare as the economy becomes more and more unstable, I think it’s time for me to face this harsh reality. It doesn’t matter how articulate I am or how great my resume is. I may not even get the chance to show a potential employer what I can do merely due to their prejudice. And it sucks. IT SUCKS. It absolutely blows large disgusting chunks that the world is like that. But it’s the world we live in. Another person’s perception of you matters a great deal when they are the person who decides whether or not you get a job. And as a person who has been unemployed or underemployed for going on 7 years now, I can tell you that this situation is now beginning to translate into dollars and cents for me. This is becoming increasingly unacceptable because I fear it may, literally, be costing me. It may be costing me a better life. A life that I really want.

Secondly, I am not healthy. Physically, I’m fine, but psychologically and emotionally, not so much. And by pretending that I am just so that I can be a good little feminist and write a fat-positive blog that doesn’t ruffle any feathers within the fat acceptance or feminist communities doesn’t change the fact that I have (gulp)…an eating disorder. I’ve had one for awhile now. I have been hesitant to discuss this subject in detail until now. Hello, my name is Therese and I am a chronic binge eater. I binge eat alone when I am bored, depressed, stressed out or anxious…and sometimes I exercise in an attempt to “burn off” the binge, which I suppose makes me a bulimic as well as exercise in this context is a form of “purging”. I admit that I’m not as obsessive about it as I used to be, but just because Mika Brzesinski was able to hide her food issues behind a size 2 body doesn’t make she and I any different. Like me, Mika struggled with binge eating and food addiction her entire life – beginning when she was a young child. Apparently, she was a World Heavyweight Champion binge eater. In the book, she describes times in her life when she inhaled 3 Big Macs and piles of French fries in one sitting, ate whole pizzas in secret in her college dorm room and polished off an entire jar of Nutella with her bare hands after taking a dose of Ambien one night. (Some people sleepwalk while on Ambien…she sleep-ate.) I used to pretend I was sick when I was a kid so that I could have the house to myself. While my family was gone, I would binge eat from a stash of candy that I had hidden in my room. Sometimes I’d make a pan of brownies or cookies, eat them all, then do the dishes and throw away the brownie mix box in the neighbors trash can to hide the evidence. I still take stress-fueled trips to the Mexican bakery for pastries every few weeks. I can polish off 3 croissants, 4 donuts, 2 large chocolate covered biscuits and 2 huge chocolate chip cookies…in a matter of minutes. Does that sound healthy to you?

Mika Brzezinski had some physical problems, too, as a result of her food issues. She visited two different nutritionists while writing this book and both confirmed she was seriously under nourished. There was not nearly enough fat or protein in her diet. She was also exhausted from her obsessive exercise regime. A therapist diagnosed her with “orthorexia nervosa” – an unhealthy obsession with healthy food.

I stated clearly in my first post:

Let me be clear: I am not against weight loss. What I am against is weight loss being required for everyone as the ultimate “cure” for the “disease” of being fat.

I am not sick because I am fat. I am sick because I have an unhealthy relationship with food. It’s this unhealthy relationship that, over a period of 25 years, has made me fat and is keeping me that way. The constant dieting that I have done has only made the problem worse. Periods of dieting-induced deprivation only end up feeding (so to speak) the fire that is the binging cycle. It just gives it more air. The fat is a symptom of a greater problem, not a problem within itself.

I always thought that I was unique in this way. I never thought I was like those other women with eating disorders. In all the ABC After School specials I watched about anorexia and bulimia, the girls were always thin. I thought an eating disorder was a thin woman’s disease, but on page 116 of Obsessed, Mika points out that there is a growing amount of research that links obesity and eating disorders. I am by no means stating that EVERY fat person has these issues. These are just mine. My blog, my experiences. I could very well fix my psychological issues and still remain fat. Who knows? But I have a sneaking suspicion that these issues are what has made me fat and have been keeping me that way. How do I know? Because when they go away, I’m thinner. Not Mika Brzezinski thin, but significantly thinner. I have had temporary bouts of normalcy in my relationship with food. There have been times when I don’t really think about food much at all. During those periods of my life when I was happy, had a job I enjoyed and experienced less stress, I lost weight. And it happened effortlessly. I didn’t even have to think about it. In 2001 while vacationing in Italy, I lost 10 pounds…in a week, while eating the most decadent Northern Italian cuisine you could possibly imagine. And by the way, Mika’s friend never had to think about how she ate when she was younger. Her issues with food only began with a traumatic life event: Her boyfriend died in a car accident when she was in her early 20s. I am still in the process of tracing my food issues back to their origin.

In an article in the New York Daily News, Mika makes the following statement:

Saying someone is fat is not a judgment—it’s a description. We need to stop  blaming and shaming people who struggle with their weight, and start figuring out how to help them, and help all of us, find a healthy way to eat.

Sounds good to me.

P.S. There were some problems I had with the book. I’m not wild about the term “healthy thin” that’s used throughout the book. I think I get what she means, but those two words really need to be separated because they are two different things. I also hated the food-shaming of pregnant women on page 184 that blamed things that happen in utero as a result of the pregnant woman’s diet for a child’s food issues later on in life. In reading this book, I did my best to separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m also still a bit uncomfortable with the whole idea of paying your friend to lose weight. To quote Dodai Stewart at Jezebel: “Let’s not make it a habit of calling our friends fat and offering them cash to lose weight, mmmkay?” However, Mika did redeem herself a bit on page 220, where she provides a chart explaining what NOT to say to your kid when talking to them about food. So, there’s that. Furthermore, she also lays a good portion of the blame where it belongs: at the feet of the food companies that have drawn on decades worth of research to figure out ways to manipulate the chemical structure of our food in order to deliberately engineer addiction. This cannot be stated enough, if you ask me.

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27 Apr 2013
Health • Nutrition

The Only “Bad” Diet is a SAD One

There is so much debate over what you are supposed to eat these days. There are people who believe that a plant-based diet (Read: Vegetarian/Vegan) free of animal products is the only diet that won’t lead to premature death. Some believe an “ancestral” or “paleolithic” diet (meat from pastured and grass-fed animals, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and NO GRAINS) is the only thing that will guard against poor health. And there are others who still buy that same old “Calories In, Calories Out” paradigm and insist that a person can eat whatever type of food they want as long as they eat no more than 2,000…1,700…or 1,200 calories per day…(and if you’re fat it’s your own damn fault, you’re eating too much, you pig!) And even others that insist on eating low fat EVERYTHING. Boring. But here’s the thing: None of those people are right. But none of them are wrong either. The only thing we know for sure is this: The only diet that has been proven to lead to premature death in the form of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, etc…is the American Diet.

The diet that most people in the U.S. subsist upon is commonly referred to by health advocates as the S.A.D. – The Standard American Diet. In generally consists of the following:

  • processed carbohydrates in the form of cereals, breads, pasta, and baked goods
  • industrially produced and processed meat products that are loaded with carcinogens due to being cooked at very high temperatures
  • processed seed oils – corn oil, soybean oil, and other partially hydrogenated vegetable oils
  • dangerous food additives and sweeteners, such as monosodium glutamate (MSG), high fructose corn syrup; various dyes and preservatives, like Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT)
  • produce covered with pesticides and herbicides grown in nutritionally deficient soil

The S.A.D., however, contains very little of the following:

  • raw, organic vegetables and fruit free of pesticides and herbicides that’s grown in nutrient-rich soil
  • meat from animals that are allowed to eat fresh grass while at pasture, rather than industrially processed corn feed and are not given antibiotics
  • natural fat sources from the above-mentioned grass-fed animal meat, avocados, coconut oil, raw nuts and organic butter from a grass-fed cow
  • healthy grains and starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes, organic wild rice, or quinoa

The basic problems with this S.A.D. way of eating is that it contains a great amount of substances that are toxic to your body and very few micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) that tend to protect you from heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. It’s the ultimate starvation diet – it starves you of the nutrients that you need in order to maintain good health.

So how do you fix this? I have found find that a great way to begin is to make sure that most of the plant food that you eat is raw. My blood work is always the best when I am eating lots of raw food. Raw produce will be the most nutritive because cooking food tends to destroy its nutrients. This is especially true if you cook food at very high temperatures. If you are not a fan of salads, try lightly steaming your veggies so that they remain bright in color and a bit crunchy. Juicing vegetables is also a good way to get lots of micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) into the body very quickly. Back in the 1930s, a man named Dr. Francis Pottenger, M.D. conducted a study on raw food. He did a decade-long controlled study where he fed one group of cats raw food and one cooked food. The cats who ate all raw food thrived, while those who ate all cooked food did not. But here is the interesting thing. What would happened if a person made sure that at least half their food intake was raw and the rest could be cooked? The same thing. Their health would thrive…at least according to a study done by Dr. Paul Kouchakoff in the 1930s (and my own experiences with raw food consumption). He conducted human feeding experiments that he presented at the First International Congress of Microbiology. He fed male and female human subjects of different ages different combinations of raw and cooked foods. He found that consuming more cooked foods resulted in higher count of white blood cells – this is an immune response. It’s your body fighting off disease; an invader of some kind. While the specifics of the immune response are unknown, it’s still an interesting experiment.

So what have we learned: As long as we include as much fresh, raw plant food as possible, eat well-sourced animal products, and avoid most processed food, we’ll be alright. There is no one way of eating that’s any better than another. You just have to experiment and see what works for you. The only “bad” diet, is a S.A.D. one.

 

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06 Mar 2013
Health

What is “Healthy”?

If we are going to talk about being healthy, I think the first step is to establish a definition of good health. So I ask the question: What is “healthy“? How do we measure it? The answer is not so simple.

Let’s be clear. I am not a doctor. Actually…I’m a lawyer. (Seriously.) But there is one very important skill that you learn in law school: You learn to ask the right questions. You learn to properly identify issues. So here are some important questions to ask when trying to determine if you are indeed healthy:

  • Do you have trouble digesting food? (Ex: Do you suffer from constipation, gas, bloating, etc?)
  • Do you experience brain fog? (Ex: Difficulty concentrating, memory problems?)
  • Is movement painful or exhausting for you? (Ex: Do you have joint pain or muscle soreness? Is it difficult for you to climb stairs or walk one mile?)
  • Do you suffer from fatigue? (Ex: Are you tired even after a full night’s sleep? Do you have trouble waking up in the morning or staying awake during the day?)
  • Do you have trouble getting to sleep and/or staying asleep at night?
  • Do you suffer from frequent headaches?
  • Do you still feel physically hungry even after you have already eaten? Do you feel hungry at odd hours, like the middle of the night?
  • Do you crave any particular types of food? Sugar? Wheat? Alcohol? Coffee?
  • Are you often sick? How many times per year do you come down with the flu? Or a head cold?
  • Do you have skin problems? (Acne, rosacea, eczema)
  • How are your numbers? (Cholesterol, blood pressure, fasting glucose, vitamin D, etc.)

If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, there might be a problem. But if you are an overweight person who has been constantly fed the nonsense that you suffer from the “disease” of obesity, you should ask yourself an additional question: Are you sick…or just fat? Has your excess body fat affected your health? Has it ever stopped you from living the life you wanted? I mean really stopped you? Have you been unable to go to college, get married, have a fulfilling sex life, travel, engage in your favorite hobbies or have children because of your weight? Be honest with your answers. Depending on what they are, you may not have a problem at all.

Here are some more questions to ask yourself: How has trying to lose weight made you feel? To what degree do you connect what is going on in your mind to what is happening in your body?

I am of the opinion that a person’s health is determined by how well they can digest food and absorb the nutrients in that food, whether or not their hormones are balanced, how well their immune system works and how their brain functions. Notice I did not mention body mass index (BMI). I just don’t think it’s relevant. I believe that if the above-mentioned systems of your body are up to snuff, you are healthy. Period.

More details to come about how these systems work and how you can fix them if they are indeed broken.

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05 Mar 2013
Health

Why You Will Love This Blog

When my husband and I moved to Chicago in December of 2009, I was in pretty poor health. I was stressed from the move, I weighed about 210 pounds (at 5 ft 6 in tall, that’s a BMI of 33.9 making me obese), hated my job, was always exhausted, and anytime I came in contact with somebody who had a cold or the flu, I got sick. What’s worse, every time I got sick, it was harder and harder to shake it. I was working remotely for a company in Northern Virginia. I felt isolated working from home, the work was not what I was interested in, the pay was low and I was constantly plagued by technology problems. I just felt like crap. Things were not going well.

We moved to Chicago because we wanted a change of scenery and a break from the pace of the East Coast. I figured I should go see a doctor for a basic check-up, so once we got settled I made an appointment in early January 2010. I searched far and wide for a really great physician. I was tired of doctors that either couldn’t or weren’t interested in helping you, or doctors who just gave you whatever prescription meds you wanted and sent you on your way. (If I wanted that, I would have gone to a drug dealer.) Eventually, I found a doctor who practices what is known as integrative medicine, which combines the best aspects of standard conventional medicine with well-tested, safe and effective alternative therapies that tend to be less expensive and less invasive. This doctor received his medical degree in Germany and had done post-graduate work at Dr. Andrew Weil’s Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. My husband jokingly said that he looked like Keith Richards (a guy who’s clearly done some “living”, but still looks pretty good), so I will hereafter refer to him as “Dr. Keith.”

So I told Dr. Keith my symptoms. I told him about my fatigue, my weak immune system, etc. I was recovering from a terrible cold at the time. He told me to go to the drug store and get some Vitamin D. What? Didn’t he mean antibiotics? Or anti-virals? He proceeded to tell me that Vitamin D has a great effect on the immune system and numerous other areas of health and that millions of Americans, particularly African-Americans and those living in cold climates with little sunlight suffer from low Vitamin D levels which can result in numerous health problems. He suspected a deficiency was the cause of my symptoms. He drew some blood and said he would send it off to the lab for the standard tests plus something called a food analysis (whatever that was), but he suspected that if I got more sunlight, took megadoses of vitamin D throughout the year and ate what he referred to as a “Stone Age” diet, I would be fine. His approach was focused on good nutrition. He indicated that if I did as he asked, I would probably drop some weight as well, but body weight was not the focal point of the conversation. This was very unusual. When you are a fat person and you go to the doctor – even for something that is totally unrelated to your weight – somehow your weight is always the focus of the discussion. He gave me a Vitamin D pill that is only available to health care practitioners that contained 100,000 IUs. The recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of Vitamin D as per the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is only 600 IUs. He suggested I start with 5000 IUs daily and adjust the dosage as needed.

The NIH recommends a Vitamin D level in the blood between 50 and 125 nmol/L. Anything below 50 is considered inadequate for good health and anything below 30 is associated with rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults (both involve a softening of the bones – not good). Dr. Keith’s recommended dosage may sound like a lot to you, but when my initial test results came back in February 2010, my Vitamin D (25-Hydroxyvitamin D) levels were at 22.6. After two years of experimenting with Vitamin D dosing, I find that my levels stay within the normal ranges when I take between 10,000 and 20,000 IUs per day during the fall and winter and 5,000 in the summer, depending on how much time I spend in the sunlight. Two years later after dosing this way, I went back to Dr. Keith for a check up, and my test results from January 2012 boasted a vitamin D level of 63.4. When we spoke about how I was feeling, I said I felt great. Cutting back on sugar and other refined carbohydrates and eating more fruits, vegetables, protein and fat seemed to have solved my problems. I explained how in the last two years, my energy was back, I was no longer addicted to caffeine (I still drink coffee, but I can take it or leave it), my sleep had improved, I never got a headache or so much as a sniffle, and on and on…the only thing that wasn’t perfect was the extra weight that I was still carrying and my digestion still wasn’t quite right. I told him that I was confident that as long as I kept doing what I was doing, my digestion would get better over time. Then he leaned towards me and asked: “Why are you here?” I responded: “Well, I’m still overweight, so I thought…” He asked again: “But, what’s your complaint? Why are you here? You say you’re feeling better. Whatever books you are reading, the information they are giving you is spot on. As for the weight, just keep active and take care of yourself in the way you have been, and your body will respond.” This was weird. This was the first time that I had not been hassled and lectured by a doctor about my weight. I began to think there may be something to this “Integrative Medicine” thing. In a nutshell, Dr. Keith’s advice was: Just take good care of yourself and don’t worry about it.

But instead of just being thrilled with the results and taking the doctor’s advice, like most Americans I wanted to be thin. Why? In part, due to vanity, but also because obese people are constantly told by doctors, neighbors, friends, coworkers, and the media how dangerous being fat is. Even carrying 20 or 30 extra pounds is considered by some to be potentially lethal. So despite the fact that it was entirely logical that I could maintain excellent health and still be overweight, for some reason I could not accept that. This idea that any fat is unhealthy is so imbedded in American health culture that it’s hard to shake–even for a well-informed person. And because of this rampant fat phobia and general hatred of fat people, many Americans are led to believe that spending huge amounts of money and risking your health (or even your life) in order to get your BMI into that sweet spot (18.5 to 24.9) is worth it. The promise is this: Not only will you have a better body, “save” yourself from a certain early death from degenerative disease, but you will have a better life. And this pervasive, distructive, and government-endorsed attitude in dealing with our “Obesity Epidemic” tells you, fat person, that you should do whatever you have to do, no matter the risk, no matter the cost, to transform yourself from a fat person to a thin person. Just eating good, healthy food that’s not processed and maintaining a moderate level of activity isn’t enough. Unless you are dropping mad weight, whatever you are doing is never good enough.

I believed this lie for so long. I have spent the last 25 years dieting, starving myself on processed “diet food” and exercising vigorously. However, in late 2011, shortly before my second visit to Dr. Keith, and after a lot of research, I began to think that dieting just might be my problem. This was the beginning of a journey that began to change the way I think about being fat and its relation to my health.

The purpose of this blog is to sort through the useless and downright harmful information you receive on a daily basis from the media, the diet and fitness industry and the medical/pharmaceutical industry about your health and your weight and to help you come up with some sane way to eat and live that will protect you from chronic disease and allow you to enjoy a long, happy and healthy life. This can be done even if you never lose a single pound. I believe that this is possible because I have been doing it for years…without even knowing it. I will also share with you the wisdom I have gleaned from some of the diets that I have been on. Amazingly enough, while most of them proved to be ineffective, unenjoyable and/or unsustainable, they all taught me a little something. For example, I will tell you about a supplement I once took because I was told it would result in crazy fat loss in 30 days. It failed to do that, but it did help me heal from an injury for a low cost and with no side effects or liver damage. I will tell you about a workout that I started doing because it was supposed to make me skinny. It didn’t exactly do that, but it did end up boosting my immune system and regulating my hormones, which helped me to avoid getting sick and sleep better. I will explain how a simple blood test can tell you which foods (that most people think are “healthy”) that you may want to think twice about eating, so that you can enjoy stellar digestion and nutrient absorption, which are both vital to your health, no matter how fat or thin you are. Let me be clear: I am not against weight loss. What I am against is weight loss being required for everyone as the ultimate “cure” for the “disease” of being fat.

This will be information that is useful, effective and won’t make you feel like a terrible human being who doesn’t deserve to live simply because you have more body fat than the people on the magazine covers.

And that is why you will love this blog.

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