The Food Lesson

I walked through the grocery store and saw an overweight woman looking at a box of cookies.  She studied the label and then put it in her basket.  I picked up a box and asked her if they were any good. She replied, “They’re okay.  They have organic sugar instead of corn syrup, so they’re healthy.”

Telling yourself you are eating right doesn't mean you are eating right.  Just looking at labels isn't the same as understanding what they mean in conjunction with everything you eat. 

Atkins, South-Beach, Low-Carb, Low-Fat, Blood Type, The Zone, Fit-For-Life...

We've been through them all and they all work—and then they fail us.

They have compelling and logical theories, but they also have caveats that make them difficult or impossible to maintain as a constant lifestyle.  In the end we all become diet-dilettantes and ultimately revert to what we like to eat—typically because we miss “our foods” so much.  So what can we do?

First, let’s go back and remember that food is fuel.  Cars and airplanes and other mechanized vehicles can't burn more fuel than they have in their tanks or they’ll stop. We are better than that… we CAN burn more fuel than we put into the tank every day.  The difference?  Motorized vehicles don’t change their sizes, but organic vehicles, like our bodies, DO change size.  It’s really magical!  We can burn more fuel than we put into our tanks and we can put more into our tanks than our bodies should hold because we have the capability to expand and contract based on our reserves.  So the goal is to figure out how to tap into those reserves and start using them in conjunction with what we put in the tank.  We want to fill the tank less and borrow from our reserves more until our size becomes tolerable and healthy.  We add weight when we put in more fuel than we use.  We become overweight when instead of going into our reserves, we overstock them.  If we were like cars and extra calories (fuel) backwashed out of our bodies from our mouths when we overfilled ourselves we’d probably never overeat.  In fact, we do have natural triggers that do tell us when we should stop fueiling—but we’ve learned to fool them and trick them into letting us do what we want.  It’s time to stop playing the games.  We feel like since we can’t see the extra calories that we’re storing they are easy to ignore… until they’re obviously not…

Sometimes the intake and output of fuel seems simply unbeatable and requires a more drastic approach then changing the calorie input/burn equation.  We now have medical techniques for cutting off the extra reserves, sucking out the reserves, or banding or stapling the fuel intakes so we can’t over-fuel.  I don’t advocate this per se, but I do understand the psychology.  Sometimes people need a fresh start.  Like warfare, sometimes you have to pull out the big guns to win the battle, or at least to gain ground.  And this is a war…

However, in this blog I’m going to focus on what can be done without cutting.  Remember that the Law of Thermodynamics states that the reserves WILL become the fuel source when the primary fuel is depleted.  Again, we’re not like cars.  Our machines, our bodies, won’t simply turn off on the highway when the fuel runs out.  The body wants to keep going for the rest of the day and it will find the fuel it needs—you’ve stored plenty over time.  We have to learn to control our fuel intake.  We'll learn to give ourselves slightly less than we need to run so our reserves get tapped.  We will never put in more than we need because our reserves are already far too full—in fact, the reserves are overflowing past our belts. 

The next few posts will go into detail about some of our fuels.