Aren’s 10 Diet Rules
I just dug up a 10 year old medical checkup form. Despite significant muscle mass gains, I am 15 pounds lighter than 10 years ago! Here are the rules that helped me lose weight and maintain the weight loss:
- Don’t eat when not hungry. We eat a lot of food because of craving, not hunger. How do you tell the difference? Think of how you feel if you have eaten nothing in 8 hours. It’s a grinding feeling. Craving is just a dull, psychological feeling. If your digestive track is normal, like virtually everyone else on the world, then it will signal true hunger when you need food. (Actually, it signals true hunger even when you don’t need food. More below.)
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6355 …or eat fresh produce. If I cannot resist the craving, I eat unprocessed fresh fruit or vegetable. That doesn’t fully satisfy my craving, gradually retraining it. Additionally, fresh produce is much better for me than junk food snacks.
- It’s OK to feel hunger. In nature, animals eat all they can find because they don’t know where the next meal comes from. That’s why my dog is constantly starving. She forages all the time. If I fed her all she wanted, she would be a blimp. Humans share that same evolutionary programming. However, I am better than my dog; I can choose not to eat and feel hunger before meals. I don’t have to quench it with a snack.
- Many “healthy” foods are really junk foods. Anything packed with calories with relatively minimal nutritional value a junk food. This includes:
- Fruit juice is junk food, even non-sweetened fruit juice. They are so packed with calories that you’re better off with sugary soft drinks. The same goes for smoothies. The average “original” size Jamba Juice smoothie is a 480 calorie bomb! That’s about three and a half soft drinks! My kid isn’t a blubber butt partly because he drinks no fruit juice. His only eats whole fruits.
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6358 Stuff with trans fats are junk foods. Trans fats’ peculiar harm is more than just weight gain. Still, most foods chock full of trans fats aren’t good for you even without the trans fats. You don’t need the Twinkies, Oreos, fries, pastries, donuts, cake frosting, etc. regardless of trans fat content.
- “Healthier” junk food is still junk food. It’s just marginally less deadly. Wendy’s removed the trans fats from its fries, but they still make you fat and clog your arteries and do other nasty things. Remember when Snackwell cookies and other low fat products first came out? People started eating them as if they are healthy. In fact, most “healthier” products, like the Snackwell cookies, make you just as fat as the originals.
- “Healthier” junk foods have a high opportunity cost. “Healthier” potato chips, popcorn, crackers, or other junk foods provide virtually no health benefit and offset better foods, ones with actual nutritional qualities. In high school, I knew kids who had a bag of potato chips with every lunch. That is a travesty; those potato chips offset something healthier like fresh fruits or vegetables.
- Exercise. Diet and exercise go hand and hand. While only one of the two is better than neither, you have to do both to get best results.
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4081 Quit blaming the dog. This is euphemistic for society’s tendency to blame others for our own failings. Two common bogus reasons weight problems are “those restaurants are feeding me too much” or “it runs in the family.” Whatever. I take personal responsibility for my dietary choices.
- Don’t gorge at restaurants or special events. The solution is simple: lay off the chips and salsa, order smaller meals, and slow down the pace. It’s OK to be be satiated without being stuffed, and you’ll save money to boot!
- Don’t buy into stupid alternative medicine crap like detoxification, coffee enemas, grapefruit diets, or whatever. They’re bunk, and even if they don’t harm you, they’re a distraction from good nutrition. You’re too valuable to be a living pseudo-science experiment.
- Stop pampering yourself. Modern “pamper yourself” marketing and mindsets make me sick. They are a flimsy excuse to do stupid, selfish stuff. Nobody ever accomplished anything great by pampering themselves.
Your skeptical side may suspect I am preaching but not practicing. You’re partly correct. I don’t follow these rules perfectly all the time.
I shared a half gallon of Blue Bell Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream with my son over the past week and a half.
I have lightly salted almonds at my desk at work, and I shovel several into my mouth each day.
But I am following enough of the rules enough of the time to go somewhere, and I am improving a little bit each month.
I didn’t stuff myself at Thanksgiving.
I didn’t clean my plate the last time I was at a Tex Mex restaurant.
I only ate one ice cream cone (instead of 2) the last time I was at Dickey’s.
I want to lose another 10-15 lbs to get rid of belly fat. (I may have ab muscles underneath them?) I’ll have to crank down these rules further. I think it’s an attainable goal, but we’ll see!
