AJLea's Logboek, 18 jun 15

Yup, I take full responsibility for my being overweight and I hold myself accountable for what I put in my mouth. 

It's hard for me to see how some people DON'T feel that way. I know usually it's an emotional issue and I've gone through that myself. At the end of the day however it's my mouth... When I kicked sugar (all refined whites actually) it became 1000% easier to deal with cravings (I don't have them any more) and my emotional eating came to a stop. The best thing I ever did! 

Same here Suzi161 and AJLea! 

Same here ! I believe refined sugars spike up the blood sugar and then when the blood sugar drops then their come the cravings . I now only get sugar from fruits, I dont drink juice and I dont have cravings ... and trust me .. I had a sweet tooth before ! 

It's a personal fault as well as a modernism/cultural fault I think. Over the past 40ish years, processed foods have really skyrocketed, and along with it, obesity. There have always been sweets and unhealthy foods, but they weren't available ALL THE TIME and EVERYWHERE. People used to cook. Baking sweets takes a lot of ingredients and time, making dinner takes the same - usually less ingredients and less prep with homecooking. More people worked more, as in laborious, on your feet work - all the time. Fatter people used to be richer lazier people behind a desk or on a throne. Now "work" is pretty much everyone at desks except poor people eating junk food because we found out that it's way cheaper to make everything processed out of a few overfarmed industrialized foods and 'flavorings' that takes 3-10 minutes to make dinner, vs homemaking healthy food using multiple types of foods that takes 10-40+ minutes. Big meals used to be a once in a while thing, like holidays, now we can basically eat as much as possible every single day. It's like when meat was scarce in china during the cultural rev. and now they have meat so they add meat to as many meals as possible. People are starting to wake up and go back to the old ways of eating, and attempting to avoid the modern processed, packaged, and premade foods. It took time to get fat, it's going to take time to reverse it. I think it's good at least people are figuring it out for the most part and are trying to turn it around and maybe someday all the crap out there will just become part of a history book like the black plague or great depression. - Something that could come back but people take precautions to avoid. 

But we have no excuse for being ignorant, and we all know the government is making money off of fat people and putting more money into keeping us fat than helping the people be healthy or putting money into schools instead of their pockets. We no longer have an excuse for making ourselves fat, and we all know better than to stuff our faces with crap.  

I feel the same as Suzi161 and Sugar Waffle! I chose to eat the food I ate that got me over weight! 

I've healed myself by changing the way I eat. Just don't look at my food diary for today! LOL 

Excellent points queenrilly1 and for the most part I agree with you. Well no, I completely agree with you but I think a lot of the problem is self made. People who are too busy too cook, but watch 2 hours of TV a night. People who can't afford healthy food but have cable TV, a smartphone, and two car payments. Of course like everything else this doesn't apply to everyone. But it certainly applies to a lot. I know what it's like two be a dual income family raising three kids and trying to make ends meet. I was lucky in that my wife always cooked. I got fat by not moving and eating too many refined whites (and got fat again doing the same thing!) - so while I am full of advice I am not very smart! LOL. Like everything else in life, if there's a will there's a way. Or as my hero Marcus Aurelius would say (paraphrase) "The obstacle IS the way" 

It's hard sometimes to let go of what we want, but that's what it is. What we WANT. Nothing bad will happen if we don't have that delicious fattening food we so desire. I've been telling myself lately this mantra. Difference between (most) people living their dream, dreamers dream, and doers get their dream.  

Tosh2015 what an excellent mantra! What you feed your brain can help control what you feed your body. That is what I am all about :) 

Sugar Waffle you are too funny! "Just don't look at my food diary for today!" - we all have those days, we just can't let them defines us... 

Its not totally your Fault,, if you have never heard of Vinnie Tortorich ,, take a listen to his Podcast 'The Angriest Trainer' , or even his book of the same name .Or even Gary Taubes " Why we are fat and what to do about it ". 

Sugar, what have you done? Anyone know where I can get inorganic food? 

Organic in scientific terms mean carbon based, if I remember my science from 100 years ago.. LOL NM Everyone has a choice in what they eat except children, dictated by their parents. I think much of the advertising and even the so called nutrition information re: say low fat substitutes or the push to use no cal or low cal substitutes has contributed to the weight gains in this country. those chemical trigger bodily reactions that actually cause people to gain weight. Just my opinion.  

Great dialog. Provokes a lot of thought. 

I watched a online video.. I wish I knew what it was called but the gist of it was American's used to eat healthy... then Processed *easy* foods came on the market during the industrial revolution and somewhat before. Less work to prepare lead easily to overindulgence as it was far cheaper too. The came the diet revolution... especially as fast food was taking off and more and more prepared foods came on the market and there was more overindulgence or ignorance about what you were indulging in... tv dinners, I mean you can even buy canned bread :O never saw it before i came to Maine. So with the Low fat diet fad prepared foods started labeling the foods as such but if they just lowered the fat often it was not as palatable so guess what they replaced the fat with... sugar. Then you have low sugar reduce that or now they make fake sugars they also add fat to make it tastier. Look on your yogurts in the dairy aisle. This is not a myth. They want people to buy and who will purchase something that tastes nasty even though it is *better* for them? NO ONE. It is marketing ploys. IMHO Read the labels of the things you buy before you buy them. Whole foods are much better for you. Take the time and prepare them yourself. And just because it is labeled a certain way does not mean you should take the word of packaging advertising as TRUTH. The terms LOW FAT, LOW SUGAR, No Cal or Low Cal and many others like it should make us all stop and think before buying. Just because it tastes good does not mean it is good for you especially if you are in OUR collective shoes. As I have said in other posts Fake sugars like sucralose kill 50% of the good bacteria in you intestines. That is why many get gas, indigestion or worse diarrhea. Imagine no sugar substitutes in your yogurt... you cannot break even. Fake sugars also trigger the same response in your pancreas as real ones - it tells your body to store any excess energy into fat. FAT is what we are trying to burn so that cannot be good either. I am no dietitian but some of this stuff just is counter intuitive and should make us look at our intake and reconsider our choices. 

I'd agree WF. Actually fat in the diet slows the insulin response so keeps you from storing the calories as fat as easily. Fat doesn't make you fat. 

I love the discussion! This is awesome... 

This problem - I feel like it's a perfect storm of combined things. (this is going to be long, and I don't comment much on FS because everyone has to find their way and there's often so much pain, and (overly) strident opinions - so you know, what I write below is just my own observations and experiences.) So - we could start with portion control, for a start - particularly in restaurants/convenience stops/kiosks, etc. We could talk about modern life and the relative loss of daily activity - being outdoors less often, being less active as a "natural" course of life. And while I do think that calories in/out play an obvious (and unavoidable!) role in weight loss, to rely SOLELY on that thinking disregards the profound role insulin/ghrelin/leptin, etc. play in fat storage and overall health when it comes to what kind of foods we rely on to get those calories - what one might call "modern malnutrition" - people who eat less but eat poorly, or eat MORE and eat poorly, either way - your body may need only "x" calories a day, but how you spend them from a nutritional standpoint does matter in the long term! I don't just mean just protein vs fat vs carbs but essential minerals, vitamin K, D, etc. Then we have that nutritionally, there is a direct correlation between the increase in the consumption of TRANS (distinction worth making) fats, highly processed starches (often in the form of "convenience" foods (which often ALSO contain said trans fats) and obesity. And it's true - nobody is forcing me, or you, to eat them - but marketing/exposure does play a role in how alluring those are to people, perhaps, (otherwise marketing would not exist). I can see where the easy access, cheap prices and immediate gratification such foods provide can be tempting to people who are stressed, depressed, sad, in a hurry - all common elements in modern Western life. Now couple that with some other factors: the broken "science" (I say "broken" because he completely disregarded any data that did not align with his objectives at the time), put forth by Ancel Keys that completely vilified saturated animal fats - the "commercialization" of the "diet" industry which eschews the science in favour of appealing "easy answers", the fact that muscle maintenance and growth as a factor in maintaining healthy weight has been undervalued (particularly for women, who have been sold a false idea that they'll turn into bodybuilders overnight if they pick up a hand weight)....there's just so, so much bad information out there, a lot of vested interests that tell you "THIS IS THE ONLY WAY!" All I can say is what helped me was to react less, and read more - decades, now, I've read - things I agreed with, things I did not, just to find a place that finally made sense "to me" and that works - "for me". But it starts with being absolutely honest with yourself, and your body - it requires patience and rational thinking and realising that weight loss is NOT linear - we are not vending machines that drop a pound every time we put a "diet coin" into the machine....ugh, so long, sorry. But the point is - it's nuanced, it is a matrix of issues, I think, that have come together to make this worse than it has to be.