It’s been one of those months again.  You know…when I go to a million different places and have a million different conversations with a million different people.  How’s that for exaggerating?  I am serious, though.  I feel like I’ve spent the whole month talking which is kind of funny because I am one serious introvert.  I know—it’s hard for you to believe–but I am.  If you leave me to my own devices, I’ll stay in my office all day long alone with the ringer off on my phone.  That is pure heaven to me.   But I didn’t stay in my office; instead I was out and about being pegged with a bunch of questions I feel are more on the review side but worth a quick mention again:

Do I need a multi vitamin?

Yes!  And get a good one, too.  Good does not mean expensive.  My favorite?  GNC Ultra Mega for Women original.  They got all crazy and started coming out with ridiculous variations such as one for dog walkers, those who use hair gel and for anyone who still watches Survivor.  Honestly, you don’t need all that.  Plus the amounts that they add for things like that are so small it’s not worth it.

Do I need to take __________?

Most likely no.  This conversation usually starts off with all the things you need to take/buy and then ends a little later on with you telling me that you don’t have a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of.  Let me say this for the record:  unless you are in a MAJOR endurance event , cutting for a MAJOR event or just won the lottery save your money.  There are only 4 things I advise people to take long term:  multi, BCAA’s, fish oil and magnesium.  Anything else is a specialty item that is being taken for a specific reason.

I hate swallowing pills.

Really?  Because I know of at least 10 people who’ve told me how much they love it and wish that their food came that way, too.  Ok, done with the sarcasm but this really is a non issue nowadays.  You can get just about anything as a tincture/liquid or a chewable online or in a vitamin store so knock yourself out finding what you need.

What’s a good brand?

Who the heck knows!  Seriously!  They change vitamin brands by the hour.  I have been in stores standing in front of a display and someone has come over and relabeled the vitamins while I stood there.  Ok, that’s a lie but I have been pumping gas before while the price was going up.  You get my point, though.  So here are some general tips that I’m sure if you try hard enough you can find the exception to the rule so please bear with me:  go national (Nature’s Way) but not commercial (One A Day).  Do not buy the 50 pound container of vitamins at Costco or BJ’s.  Go middle of the road for price.  Too expensive is usually over the top (USANA or Nutralife—the Coach brand of vitamins) and too cheap is just that (Walgreen’s version).   Don’t read the label like you know what you’re doing, you have not a clue what you’re looking at.  Admit it.  Go for sustained release if you can find it and last but not least, if you can get pregnancy vitamins do it because they are typically of great quality.

Do you recommend any fat burners?

WHAT?  Put the crack pipe down girl!  No!  Listen, I spent a very long time at a weight that I wished to holy heck I was never at and STILL didn’t take a fat burner then.  THAT alone should tell you how I feel about them!  Put the bottle down and run.

What should I take post workout?

This will be a series.  Hang tight for this.

There’s more.  Today was all the supplement questions.  I had others and I’ll post those tomorrow.  It’s been a busy month.  If you have any questions I don’t answer over the next few days, hit me up via email and I’ll see what I can do.  Woop woop!

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First, let me just say I love that saying.  There’s something about that phrase that makes me feel like I’m saying a naughty word when I am really not.  I love it—and that’s sad that something like that makes my day.  Wow…  Second, there really is something that’s sticking in my craw (mind you, craw means the stomach of an animal.  Ewww).  I am in the middle of doing research for a new series coming up (and a few other things that I am writing that you’ll know about soon enough) and it has forced me to have to have to read a bunch of studies.  If you have never done this, let me help you through wondering whether this is a good thing or a really mundane and awful thing:

• Studies are crap. Very few studies are done now as truly sanctioned studies.  Back in the day they used to segregate people from the world and force them to do maniacal acts all for the sake of science.  Ok.  Sorry.  That’s not true…but they did follow them very closely and more often than not, provide them with the food necessary for the study.  Nowadays, you’re on your own and instead they “ask” you how felt or what you ate and when and how much and etc.  That’s about as factual as me calling you up right now and asking you what you ate last Tuesday for lunch, what you wore 2 weeks ago to the gym and then drawing a conclusion from that.  What the…??
• They are all rigged. Now, truth be told, that’s an exaggeration.  But for the sake of this post and the fact that I am now annoyed from going through as many as I have, they are all rigged.  What I mean by this statement is there are very few government grants out there for studies of things that matter.  The people who are paying for studies are typically the people who will benefit from the information coming out of the study.  If they won’t benefit from the information, you won’t see the study.  Ask Monsanto.  They’re sitting on a stock pile of studies you will never see.
• They are misleading. The conclusions that come from studies are dangerous simply because they are interpreting them from shady data.  See number 1 and then think about some of the bad things that can come from that.  If I ask you if your headache medication made you feel better a week after you took it, you could say anything in response to that and I will then use that info to *rate* the headache medication.  What happens when you don’t remember all that well?  Or, if you forgot you took something else right after because it didn’t work great.  Now I go and post that info that that medicine wasn’t good or that it was great and it really wasn’t.  This is what many people are using nowadays as their litmus for decisions.  Frightening.  Think of how many butter vs. margarine studies there are and then shudder.
• They are suppressed. There are a whole bunch of studies out there you will never see.  That stresses me out the more I think about it.  Big industries like dairy and beef or megalomaniacs like Monsanto suppress so much information that would benefit the public it is awful.  They either distort it or suppress it.  Either way, it’s terrible.

I do want to say that the ones done like the good ole days are very valuable to us and those are the ones that I am trying to sift through and save.  As much as I love a good study, I love experience even more.  If I can round up some good pics for you, I have a good series coming on body types.  Y’alls need to know what your potential is.  As always, hang tight for more!  And put down that chocolate! Woop woop!:o)

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Have you ever woken up in the morning and just knew that was the day “it” was going down?  I mean everything, not just food.  So if your co-worker was going to try to throw you under the bus again, she was getting an earful; if your man wanted to voice his opinion on what you were wearing that day, he was in for a beat down; if your kids thought that they were going to sass you that morning, they were in for the longest punishment given this side of the Mississippi; and when you went out to lunch that day with the office, you were having a piece of bread AND you were splitting a dessert.  Have you ever had one of those days?  Did you ever wonder where it came from in the first place?  What made you all “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” at 6:30 in the morning before you even got dressed? Serotonin.

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that regulates our mood, increases our pain tolerance, helps us sleep and curbs our food cravings.  When this little guy is in line, all is well.  When he isn’t, you start at one end of the kitchen and don’t stop until you make it to the other side eating anything with starch, fat and salt.  I’m sure your first question is going to be, “What makes him fall out of line?”  And my answer, plain and simple, for us is dieting.  Food restriction wears him down until he is at such low levels that he demands to be raised again by any means necessary and that means carbohydrate, lots and lots of carbohydrate.   When these cravings kick in, the only thing that is keeping you from blowing through a big bag of lays potato chips by yourself is the fact that they are not yours.  You just happen to be at your girlfriend’s house and those are her kids’ chips.  You don’t want her to think you really eat that stuff so you’re going to behave, but as soon as you get home it is on.

Here are some things to think about serotonin:

Symptoms when low: insomnia, depression, strong food cravings, aggressive behavior (pushing your cart into the woman in front of you at the grocery store was not cool), and poor body temp regulation.

Three things raise the level: carbohydrates, vitamins and estrogen.

When our period comes around: estrogen begins to drop dramatically which in turn drops serotonin.  Suddenly, we have the desire to eat 4 pounds of chocolate as a midmorning snack with a tablespoon of nuts to make sure it’s healthy.

At the end of a dieting phase: we are the lowest in terms of estrogen, carbs and vitamins.  It’s no wonder we walked into the neighborhood bakery with a can of pepper spray demanding that all half moons be placed in a brown paper bag while we slipped out the back.

How do we keep in check? High protein, vitamin B6 and fish oil.

Who Are Serotonin’s Aiders and Abettors?

Dopamine

You can thank dopamine any time you want a coffee first thing in the morning or a sweet after dinner.  Dopamine drives our desire for familiar foods that seem like rewards to us.  If we did all the right things in a given day by eating all of our veggies and not nibbling on foods in between, we want to be rewarded.  This means we want something sweet or yummy that feels naughty on our palette.  Or if we had a bad day and want to be comforted, hot chocolate or warm chocolate chip cookies seem to fill the gap.  What we desire on these bad days or at the end of the week when we feel like we’ve worked hard and deserve something good, is guided primarily by dopamine.

Galanin

This dude is no joke.  He has a bad attitude and the only thing that makes him happy is fat.  High levels of galanin make us crave fatty foods and desserts.  Why is he an aider and abettor?   Galanin increases with our estrogen levels just like serotonin does.  So once a month when our inhibitions are low (i.e. high serotonin means good mood all around) due to high estrogen therefore high serotonin and galanin, we feel like we can indulge ourselves with some high fat yummy food.  When we do that, though, our levels then drop with our blood sugar and carbohydrate cravings are there to lift our spirits once again.  This is a horrible see saw ride to be on and we do it all the time!

Endorphins

Ahhh…yes, endorphins.  We love these guys because they tell us that the beat down workout we just did earlier in the day was A-Ok.  They give us a natural high or what most folks know as a runner’s high.  They also like to make tasty food seem more fun than normal.  They literally encourage us to eat junk.  This means if you accidently listen to galanin or serotonin and eat something sinful, endorphins tell you to keep on going!  This is why you can’t stop eating the box of chocolates until they are gone.  WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS?  Jeez louise!

If you have ever wondered why you cannot stop eating chocolate, why you want a sweet right after dinner or why you can be a beast every so often for no apparent reason, there you go.  These guys are out to get us and it’s not nice.

Oh there’s more self sabotage on the way!  Wait til we talk about sodium, sugar and fat.  Honestly, it’s a wonder we all don’t weigh 1000 pounds knowing all this stuff.  Hang tight!  Woop woop!

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I have seen some jacked food combos in my time that’ll make your hair stand on end, all in the name of “variety”.  I am a huge proponent of variety in one’s diet and when folks try to put this into practice, it sometimes translates into a nightmarish situation.   But there is a reason I harp on variety and it bears repeating in this post:  severe, hard core, no-joke, serious BOREDOM.  So much so, that you may find yourself chewing on grass just for a different feel and flavor on the palette.  This is where the crazy combos come in—and trust me, they are crazy.  It behooves us then to talk about what variety really is so we can avoid the pitfalls of every day eating that allow us to fall into the mundane dieting some of us are doing today.

There are three major things that come to mind when I think of variety in our diet:  different types of food, different food flavors and different textures of food.  If you have enough diversity in the types of foods that you choose, then you will do well in all three categories.  If not, you could be chewing on your blanket by the morning and that’s not a very pleasant thought.

Different Types of Food

I have this incredible talent for taking things that are simple and defined and making them confusing and complicated all in a matter of seconds.  I know this simply because when people tell me what they’re doing with their food choices all week long, they are nothing close to what I suggested.  When it’s one person, it’s them.  When it’s a bunch—it’s me.  Therefore, I own this and I get it and I am here to try to make it better by being more clear when explaining what your week should look like.

What it isn’t:

• A different food everyday that never repeats in the week. I don’t know where this came from but man am I impressed if you can get this done.  There has to be a food that repeats in a week.
• A different protein at every single meal. Again, no, you cannot have chicken at every meal but you can have it at 2 meals in a day.
• Thai food today, Mediterranean tomorrow, Italian on Thursday. You are not obligated to become Chef Boyardee.  Please avoid the temptation.

What it is:

Variety is varying the foods in your diet in such a way that your Monday does not look *exactly* like your Tuesday and that you sufficiently switch up your fruits, veggies and starches throughout the week.

• If you have chicken for lunch on Monday, have it for supper on Tuesday and have something different for lunch on Tuesday so you are not eating the same grilled chicken salad everyday for the next 2 years.
• If you have oatmeal on Wednesday, have cereal or oatbran on Thursday.  Go back to oatmeal on Friday.
• Have 3 favorite breakfasts, lunches and snacks each so you can rotate them around and keep it fresh.
• Change your fruit daily.  It’s the easiest thing to do since you do not have to cook it.

Different Types of Flavors

For some reason, this is the hardest of all the things to get folks to fool around with.  There is more to life than BBQ sauce, lemon/pepper, garlic salt/powder and grated parmesan cheese.  If you continuously eat the same 1 dimensional food flavor, you will have no defense against a meal that smells like Heaven and tastes like a motley of spices and sauces.  You’ll be dead in the water.  Most neglected flavors:

• Citrus (other than lemon)—Orange chicken is lovely.  I don’t mean the one you get at a Chinese food restaurant.  I mean one made from a reduction of orange juice.  YUM.
• Tropical—Mangoes, coconuts, passion fruit and so on can be very fun.  Get to know them.
• Polarizing—Cloves, mint, licorice (anise) and other dominating flavors

Check this site out and go crazy:  Khymos

Different Types of Textures

Protein powder is not a food, it is a supplement.  It is wonderful post workout to make sure you get in all your nutrients fast, but it is not a meal.  We are meant to chew our food and when you do not, you are not satisfied. When two or more of your meals are shakes, the odds of you being happy while having them are low.  Can you stay on it?  Sure.  We are happy to be unhappy for long periods of time so staying on it is not necessarily an issue.  Is it a good thing for you?  Nope.  Why?  Texture is more important than variety and flavor combined.  Any time I ask a woman why she ate such and such, the number 1 reason she broke her diet, she’ll say because she loved the way it crunched.  This is a major message for all of my non-starchers out there.  At some point, you could be taken down by an Ak-Mak cracker.

• Salad is great for a crunch but it rarely does the trick.  We eat it way too much.  However, croutons will light up your life alongside craisins, sunflower seeds, al dente beans and
• Mixing cold and hot foods together is another way to explore texture.  Hot rice on a cold salad or cold, crunchy veggies in a warm wheat pasta salad—yum.
• Next in line to crunch:  creaminess.  Melted cottage cheese on a potato or cold greek yogurt mixed with salsa, lime and pineapple on a piece of warm chicken come to mind.

Keep in mind you will refuse to eat a food first because of feel on the palette before taste ever becomes an issue.  This means if you are at work with your packed lunch of mushy chicken and slimy asparagus and someone shows up with warm Asian chicken covered in an orangey/citrusy sauce with crunchy wonton strips and cold green beans marinated in a hoisin sauce, you could beat her down in the office.  Please let me know so I may be there.  I need the entertainment. Woop woop!

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I started to open this series up with a ton of science on our brains that shows how we are hard wired to desire certain types of foods and how these foods affect our emotions so we desire them more and so on and so forth.  However, I kept coming back to the same place of debunking some kind of crazy myth that we all seem to buy into that has been perpetuated by the powers that be and has secretly tormented us over the years.  I finally came to the conclusion that I need to debunk the myths first.

It is no mystery to any of us that we care about how we look.  We also love the satisfaction of a good workout, the feeling of being fit and the distinction of being different than the rest of the population.  With that love comes the heavy burden of trying to stick to a challenging diet for a long period of time:  no processed food, limited starches, limited sweets and low fat choices with very little support from outside of the clean community.  This is not the haven we thought it would be when we first signed up for this lifestyle.  I don’t know about you, but I know I thought this would be easy because I would feel great all the time and wouldn’t want unhealthy food because I was now “so healthy”.  I had no idea what I was in for the first time I broke my diet.  All I know is I started in the morning with Dunkin’ Donuts and ended in the evening with Bertucci’s and everything in between was a blurr.  That was 9 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday, although, that could be because there was butter involved.  Shhh.

When I first started dieting, I did it for a very specific reason so the means justified the ends.  I was a fitness competitor and the protocol was that you needed to torture yourself with dieting in order to get on stage or else you were not getting on stage.  Or let me say, I wasn’t getting on stage.  I don’t know if everyone shared my same views back then.  But there was an obvious reason for my very bland, boring diet that lacked variety, starch and fat.  Fast forward to present day and my diet, although still clean, looks very different than it did back then.   Flavor, texture, fat, balance and quantity vary all the time and that is something that has mattered far more than anything when it comes to me sticking to this eating lifestyle.  The majority of us who can’t stick to it long term or find ourselves struggling all the time are over dieting for the results that we desire.  If you say to me that you do not want to get on stage and you are not eating sodium, still eating tuna from a can or packet or follow any bogus diet in a magazine, we really need to talk.

This industry (meaning clean eating) it what it is because of competitors and fitness models.  You can thank both men and women alike that don the cover of magazines and strut across stages for our initial desire to enter into this way of eating.  Even if you are a runner/athlete, you have been enticed to this way of living because that’s how your favorite athletes are maintaining their weight, as well.  However, we want their look without the stage or the lights and believe to get that we need to follow their diet, or their method of dieting, *all* the time.  Not so, says I.  Also, this industry is full of “diets” but then refer to them as a lifestyle.  You cannot have a lifestyle of dieting (in the noun sense)—that’s a nightmare waiting to happen.  At some point we need to learn how to *live* this life instead of hopping on a diet for 12 weeks, off a diet into a pit of sugar for 8 weeks, back on the diet to negate all that we did in the pit, back off of the diet again into sheer anger and frustration and so on.   Or better yet, live in maintenance hell where you are constantly wondering if you are doing enough to stay where you want to be so you do more, crash, do more, crash, etc.

There are many things we need to consider when eating like this:  flavor, texture, variety and balance are a great place to start.  We also need to think about serotonin, dopamine, estrogen and galanin when it comes to the brain stuff and lastly, sodium, sugar and fat are beyond important to our long term survival.  Magazines like to talk in terms of recipes and nutritional sound bites, your friends will talk in terms of suffering, the internet is going to show you how much you suck at doing this but I’m going to talk about this as a living, breathing thing that must be learned and nurtured to be accomplished.  Are you ready?  Woop woop!!

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We have some bad habits.  It’s true.  Beyond our bad habits, though, lie some disturbing and tortuous habits that have been born out of survival and strange Greek mythology.  I’m not sure where some of them came from, but we’re going to talk about these things because they affect us long term and erode our dieting process.   We’re also going to talk about how we eat our food, what kind of food we eat, what we put on it and how all of these things can sometimes set us up for:

The Big Binge

Although this sounds like a lot of food, for many of us it usually isn’t.  All we need is a jar of peanut butter, a few slices of toast and 2 bananas and we have ourselves a Big Binge.   This does not happen regularly and we’re not always sure of what brings it on so diving into this series may help.  One thing is for sure, though, we feel like crap right after and we throw out all peanut butter for at least 3 days.  Then we go shopping and somehow it miraculously ends up in the cart again.  Very strange.

The Endless Cheat Meal

This is the meal that starts on Saturday night and ends some time Monday morning when we feel it’s safe to start dieting again.  This isn’t an all out gorge, it’s more like an unstructured hodge podge of “little bit of this, little bit of that” because our oatmeal and egg whites are about as appealing as our mates worn underwear.   If left unchecked, it can easily become…

The Behind Closed Doors Scoffing

“Monday” has come and gone and we still do not have full focus but we’re not way off track either.  No, we have some restraint but it’s interrupted daily with some kind of cookie, chip, nibble or sneak that no one else sees (so we don’t have to acknowledge or own it).  Not only do we conveniently ‘forget’ that we had those nibbles, but we will vehemently deny them to our spouse/boyfriend/mate if they catch us behind the door in the act.  Shameful.

The Que Sera Sera Menu

My heart goes out to any woman who has this menu right now.  I have a tendency to run into people in various places and inevitably someone will attack me and say, “Could you please just make me a diet?  Just tell me what to eat.  Don’t make me have to choose.  PLEASE!”  You know my answer is always, “NO.”  But why are they there?  Because they are eating ‘whatever will be, will be’ every day of the week.  They’ve been eating the same menu since the last solar eclipse and they are ready to take an eyeball out for it.  I can’t say this enough, though…giving you a menu will not solve this so you’ll have to keep up with the series.  Sorry.

The Militant Madness

Here’s where we all want to be because we think this is nirvana.  Tupperware containers stacked in the fridge with just the right amount of food in each ready to go for the next few days.  No fuss, no muss.  However, we’re not eating it.  We’ll “forget” in the fridge and run out to work or we’ll bring it but someone will ask us to go to lunch and we ditch it.  We’re eating anything and everything other than our perfectly packed Tupperware.  What’s up with that?

As always, before l launch into this series I need to remind you real quick of how I use the term diet.  I am not referring to it as something that you go on for a particular amount of time that restricts food, life and all enjoyment of anything worthwhile.  Rather, I use it as a verb and it describes the act of you eating clean food but not necessarily in a restrictive, bland sort of tortuous sense.  At all times we are ‘dieting’ because, in essence, we are different than the general population that eats whatever they want whenever they want since we choose to eat only unprocessed foods in a ‘small meal all day long’ fashion.  This is important for you to remember because when I start harping on (because you know I’m good for a rant albeit mild compared to my old self) the types of foods we eat, you won’t be thinking silly thoughts like “I can’t have that while ‘dieting’” because I’ll come and give you a noogie through the computer.

Meet me here over the next few days while I talk about the crazy neurotransmitters that make us do what we do as well as our own destructive behavior that only exacerbates the issue.  We’re not talking about any of the above scenarios for the next few days; those are just manifestations of the real problem.  We’re going to focus on taste, texture, smell and so on because they’re the real culprits.  Hang tight. Woop woop!:o)

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