I know—no, really…I know!—that I can be a nag about certain things.  I’d be amazed if you did not know that I was a psycho about good fat in your diet or variety in your meal plan.  In fact, I’d think there was something wrong with you if you didn’t know that about me.  But there really are reasons for the broken record lectures that come out of my lap top every week.  This series would rank up there as one in the top 3 reasons I am the psycho I am about the way you diet.  Not just that you diet, but exactly how you do it.  Most folks focus on just your body, others focus on your body and your general health; I would say I focus on your acute symptoms first, general health second, emotional stability third and body fourth because I have seen the damage first hand when the (outside of the) body is the top priority.

Variety is my bat and your menu is my ball and I literally beat the living tar out of it every week.  Occasionally I’ll get a homerun, but for the most part I’m just swinging at it hoping for a line drive (for you to change anything).  Eating the same thing every day, day in and day out is boring, restrictive and will make you manic.  But more importantly, it sets you up for food allergies and intolerances that once they set in, you have most of them for a long time or for life for some others.  Nothing is worse than having a favorite food that you can no longer eat because you ate too much of it and now it either makes you sick or makes you sick when you eat something else with it.  Ok, well I lied.  There is something worse.  And that would be developing an autoimmune disease or condition because of the foods that you are eating such as Crohn’s disease, diverticulitis, gastritis, IBS or Ulcers.

Each one of these conditions have no real known cause as to why you have them but all of them can be triggered by food allergies/sensitivities.  Crohn’s typically runs in families but just because your parents have it does not mean you will.  What really needs to happen is that you provide it with the right environment to thrive and then it will kick in when it’s ready.   Ulcers are very much like that, as well.  They are caused by H. Pylori bacteria that flourish in our stomachs but not everyone who has H. Pylori has ulcers.  This means that we needed to get our bodies in such a rut/mess that we cultivated that condition.  I would hate to know I brought something as painful as ulcers into fruition because I insisted on eating XYZ every day.   We would like to think that because we are eating so “healthy” that we no longer have to worry about these things.  Only people who eat crap get these things.  Wrong!  Oh so wrong!

One of the requirements to work with us is to fill out a health history questionnaire.  In that questionnaire we ask if you have any medical conditions that we need to know about.  Time and time again, form after form you will see someone list a gastrointestinal condition as something they are struggling with.  Shoot down to the section on food and they will say, “Every day I have…”  and proceed to give me their food diary.  Is this their fault?  No.  No one talks about variety the way they should and most of us are happy we eat something never mind trying to mix it up.  But now that you do know, you are responsible for your health and you need to get to mixing it up!

Here are some things that you need to know when it comes to these five conditions:

Do not stack slow metabolizers

I talk about this as ‘caustic combos’.  These are foods that are not bad but should not be eaten close to each other.  Salmon, steak, sword fish, beans and pasta come to mind when I think of these.  They are foods that typically take a long time to move through the colon.  Therefore, eating them on the same day or having them day after day is not a good idea.  Slow motility (the amount of time food spends in your colon) is a major factor in diverticulitis and IBS.  The longer food sits in your colon, the more damage it can do.  And yes, we eat a lot of fiber but that means nothing.  Constipation is out of control among clean eaters (hence this series).

Binge on more than just chocolate

Chocolate is mucus forming and can really do a number on the colon.  Mucus is a primary symptom of IBS which basically says that there is major inflammation somewhere.  Say you work out and do not replenish your water adequately.  Then you come home a little later and have a salmon salad for lunch.  Now you’ve jammed up the highway during a drought season.  Then you lose your tree that night on some chocolate (I know…you’d never do that).  Now you have a chief aggravator waiting its turn for exit in your colon while sitting behind pink stucco.  Great.

Easy on the offenders

Dairy, wheat/gluten, egg whites, nuts, soy, popcorn, chemicals in food, caffeine (yoohoo diet coke lovers), chicken and fructose/sweeteners of any kind are known allergens.  Eating them in large quantities is just asking for trouble.  Back in the day, Walden farms marinades were all the rage.  Then people started cropping up with all kinds of health issues—not because there was something wrong with the marinades, but because they were going through a bottle a week.  It was crazy.  I am sure Walden Farms did not want people eating their product on that level.  But that’s what we do, we KILL foods we love.  KILL them dead!  We eat them until their pouring out of our skin.  So much of what we go through is incredibly preventive.

Listen, if you made it this far….wow.  There is more.  We need to talk symptoms of the above, supplements for everything and thyroid stuff.   This goes much deeper than you think.  Woop woop!

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Waking up every morning to a flat stomach is a great feeling.  Not just because we all want a flat belly, but because it typically means we feel good, too.  But as the day wears on, many of us begin to bloat, become gassy or our stomachs start to complain with this occurring on a near daily basis.  Since our diets tend to be free of the usual suspects (processed food, cheese and excessive sweeteners) we are left to wonder what are we doing wrong and why do we need to burn a hole through our office chair when no one is around?

Aside from the normal issues associated with diarrhea, constipation and persistent gas, I wanted to take you into the land of naturopathic medicine and give you a few more things to think about other than the normal causes and remedies.

Diarrhea

What is it? Annoying and smelly.  Great combo right there; makes you just want to have it weekly.

Normal Causes: Incomplete digestion, food poisoning, artificial sweeteners

Notable Causes: Emotional stress—I see this a lot.  We must find ways to manage our stress better.  We tend to forget that running, plyos, cardio and lifting are also a form of stress to the body so we heap on more stress on top of good stress.  From here we just become one big leaky gut.  Chron’s or ulcerative colitis—Here is another common one that you would not necessarily think about but many of us suffer from it.  If you are having chronic diarrhea and have just said ‘what the heck about it’, get this checked out!  Vitamin Deficiency—specifically A, B and zinc.  I know we think we eat healthy so we don’t need to supplement, but that’s crap (pardon the pun).  We play hard and eat lite.  Stay on top of your vitamins.

Treatment: The easiest by far is the BRAT diet.  Go here before going to Immodium.  BRAT diet (bananas, rice, apples and toast) starts out with chicken broth first.  Just plain old chicken broth with lots of sodium in it.  Do that for about 2 meals, then add rice at the next meal.  If you can hold all that in, add a piece of dry toast with that soup next meal.  If all goes well, have a banana or an apple/sauce.  Lastly, add in plain chicken for stability and you should be good to go by then.  If it’s really severe, start with  rice water first:  1 cup rice boiled in 5 cups water for 45 min.  Have it throughout the day before venturing into the BRAT diet.

Constipation

What is it? A traffic jam that when released, causes the scale to drop as much as 3 pounds.

Normal Causes: Dehydration!

Notable causes: Not going when you have to—if you have to go, then go.  Don’t hold back for long periods of time because that can have major consequences.  Magnesium deficiency—now do you see why I am psycho about it?  This is just one of the benefits of Mg.  Depression—need I say more?  Very prevalent in the clean eating community.  Hypothyroidism—if you can’t kick start your system, you can’t really kick the colon into action either.  This is a good sign as to whether they have you dialed into the right dose of thyroid med.

Treatment: Start with a fiber product.  Use laxatives only as last resort.  Teas work really well.  But here are some things you may not have thought of:  Guacamole—with or without chips, enough of this stuff can make the meal you at on prom night fall out of you.  It’s called greasin’ the groove.  As a side note…do not have this or salmon or anything high fat the day before a long run.  That’ll be an inconvenient run if ever there was one.  Do NOT have fiber—if you have gone 5 or 6 days without going, fiber at this point is like stuffing cotton into your eardrum.  It doesn’t make sense.  Instead, try a stool softener.  It will work much better.

Gas

What is it? Embarrassing and revealing all at the same time.

Here’s the deal: All of us have gas all the time.  It’s normal.  But when it starts to smell like first days of the Boston Harbor Project at low tide, something is wrong.  If you have adequate variety in your diet, this should not be a huge issue.  But if you insist on eating only 2 veggies and they are broccoli and kale, you may have the ability to clear out a commuter train at 5pm.  Also, I find that because our meals are packed for the day and we tend to either eat them cold or eat them rapidly, that our digestion is typically poor.  Slow down, heat up your food and take time to eat it.  You could be saving yourself some money in the long run with all the candles you won’t have to buy.

Treatment: Digestive enzymes, glutamine and probiotics.  Most of us run out and get the probiotics and we forget about the enzymes.  More on those later.

We have more to delve into over the next few days.  Bloating is caused by much more than what’s here.  I am finding we have stomach issues and liver problems, as well.  More than anything I really want you to reduce your stress.  That includes working out too much.  Ya hear me?  Woop woop!

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There comes a time when an issue is so worth discussing that we have to look past the embarrassment factor that it may cause.  When I first started eating clean, I never thought about anything but the outcome.  All I cared about was what I was going to look like when I reached goal and the methodology behind what I was doing to get there (remember, I started this to do what I do now for a living, not to just look good).  I had no idea that I could crave foods more than a pregnant woman in her 9 month or after a period of dieting hate chicken with a passion reserved for mean people and animal abusers.  But what was the real shocker was the gastric disturbance caused by all of the veggies and artificial sweeteners in my diet.  Even after I cleared out all the sweeteners, I could still level a 4 story building with one shot if I wasn’t careful.  You know it’s clinical, when you are burning so many candles that you change the temperature in the room that you are sitting in.  That’s serious business right there.

This is going to be a TMI series at some points and a great help at others.  What I have found in the clean eating community is an abnormal amount of gastric issues when they should be cleared up with our initial diet change.  IBS, heartburn, constipation, Crohn’s disease, gastritis and so on are rampant amongst the ranks and it seems as if it shouldn’t be.  So I want us to take a look at what we are doing right, what we’re doing wrong and what we don’t even know that we are doing that is furthering these conditions.  Whenever you read a book on these conditions, the first thing that they tell you is to clean up the diet and we have already.  So what gives?

I will be talking about these conditions and how they affect us both physically and emotionally because both play a role in our overall health.  Since we tend to be type A folks, we have to look at what that does to our stress levels and our colons alike.  Most of us at some point in our dieting careers are like wound up balls of yarn waiting to unwind at any moment.  That does a number on us long term and since adrenal fatigue is a concern nowadays, we need to be prudent in the way we relax as much as the way we diet.

I won’t be starting this series until Monday.  There will be no blog on Thursday and the Friday audio post will not be posted until Saturday afternoon.  I owe you sweet and savory so I’ll be getting that on the blog this weekend.  If you have anything you want to see covered in this next series, hit me up at Jodi@trans4mationstation.com.  Cool?  Woop woop!

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I go to the gym Monday through Friday right after I drop my kids off at school.  (For those of you who are wondering, I finally started coming to a stop for my kids to get out of the car.  No more pushing them out as I drive by.   It’s been working well for us.  Thanks for your concern.;)  It’s a basic gym, nothing extraordinary about it and I go at that odd time of the morning where it’s the end of the early morning rush but before the mommy time starts so it’s never crowded.  Every day that I am at the gym there is a woman on the Arc Trainer—her special Arc Trainer—covered in about 2 gallons of sweat and I used to always think, ‘Work it girl!’ when I saw her doing cardio.  Then one day I got on next to her and she was covered in sweat while the display of her machine said 7 minutes.  I immediately thought, “Holy crap.  What setting could you possibly have that on if you are that sweaty after 7 minutes?!  I need to get a hook up from sister-girl on how to juice the Arc Trainer for everything it has.”  Then I got on again about a week or two later when her display read about 50 min or so (I know I wrote about this before on some post but I can’t find it right now) and while I was doing my cardio it looped at 60 min and started counting from 1 again.  What the…?  What is THAT about?  Who in this day and age has that much time to do that much cardio all week long?  Holy ticking time, Batman!

So today I just happen to be there before she was and she came in and put her stuff on the machine before going to the lockers to put her stuff away.  What she used to “hold her spot” was 7 pieces of gum neatly lined up on the machine—meanwhile she was chewing away on some already before setting up shop.  Holy intestinal fortitude!  I got the runs just knowing she was going to chew all that in that short of time.  Well short time for 7 pieces of gum, long time for useless cardio.  Thankfully I was done 5 minutes after she came back so I had enough time to stock up on Cank-Aid and warm salty water.  This brings me to some more of the basics…

I am going to start running, I need to lose some weight.

Good luck with that.  Using running to lose weight is like using a spoon to empty bathwater out of your tub; you will eventually get it done.  If you insist on running as a form of weight loss, do it the right way by incorporating speed drills and sprints into your runs and you’ll really achieve what you’re hoping for.

Can I do the weight lifting class at my gym instead of lifting?  It’s so boring and I hate it.

You mean the class that does more reps in one hour than I would ever do in one week?  I would say no simply because you cannot lift heavy enough.  And I can’t say this enough:  group fitness has its place in life but not as a primary if your desire is to look good naked.

What do you think about…{insert diet concept/book/workout technique/DVD/latest fad here}?

Who cares?  You know you don’t.  I could tell you that it causes a new arm to grow out of your neck and if you are hell bent on it enough, you’ll bring an extra sleeve for your shirt just in case.  Seriously.  And honestly, if it is going to energize you, challenge you, inspire you and so on and it is safe, I say go for it.  I hope that most of us have been around long enough to know that change matters more than the actual diet or workout itself.  Not to mention, are you new to dieting or not?  If you are new, you’ll lose weight running to the shower in the morning.  If you’re a veteran, you could scale Mount Kilimanjaro eating only a bean and a half of pear and maybe, just maybe, you’ll lose a half pound by the end of the week.

I started doing bootcamp 5 days a week.  Is that ok?

Only if they mix it up.  If you are doing 5 days of jumping/plyometrics, that is not ok.  And if it is really a glorified run club, see #1.

It is cool to see people in their “stages of readiness”.   When we first start out we just want to lose some weight.  But then we lose a few pounds and realize we look the same as before, just smaller.  Then we go to a beach and put on a bathing suit and realize we’re so crinkly that we look like we wrapped ourselves in cellophane before we left the house.  That sets us on a mission to be smaller and tighter.  The rest is history but it’s wild to watch it go down in slow motion.  This wraps up all the questions asked to me in April.  May is proving to be a slow month which is nice because I need to regenerate in my hole office after all that.  Woop woop!

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This is part two of my crazy month of April where I was accosted by some insane folks with some insane questions.

I want you to know how this really happens because when you read these it can almost sound like I’m trying to say that I’m well known or something.  Umm…that is SO far from the case.  BUT, I am well known in my very small circle of influence (that’d be 8 people, 2 dogs, 2 cats and some bunnies in my yard) by what I presently do and what I used to do.  Now those folks never ask me any questions—they know better.  After I’ve told you something 5 times, I begin to put your business out there when you ask me something you know already.  This is a great deterrent for repetitive questions from family.  It looks like this:

Repeat offender: “Jodi?”

Me: “Yayesss?”  If you have ever had me say yes to you this way, you know what this sounds like.

RO: “Do I have to measure my food?”

Me: “Nope.”

RO: “Really?  You told me before that I should?”

Me: “I did?”  Knowing full well that I did and said with a massively incredulous tone.  “Well then why are you asking me again?”  Said with full sincerity.

RO: “Because I was hoping you would say no.  And you did, but I know you’re lying.”

Me: “I’m not lying.  You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.  Like progress (pronounced proe-gress).  Why do what you need to do to progress?  What you’re doing so far is working great for you.  Just keep doing more of that.”  At this point they’re done with me because they realized they’re not going to get anywhere (both in their dieting and the conversation with me) but I swear to you I am neither mean nor snide.  Those days are behind me (kinda;).

So if it’s not all my family and friends asking me these questions and I’m as famous as a homeless guy (although the dude in Boston who walks along Mass Ave, Roxbury, and washes your windows is pretty well known), who is asking me these questions?  Their friends!  Holy suffering survey, Batman!  My family’s friends and my friends’ friends can keep me busy for a long time.  Since I’ve never met most of them before, I do not mind.  It is funny to watch someone who knows me run and hide, though, when they ask me a question they know is a no-no.  But they don’t realize that I just do that to them.  Sillies.

Here’s Part 2.

Do I have to measure my food?

Yes.  Think about it this way.  You’re on a side street doing a good clip.  Not sure how much but a bit on the fast side.  A cop standing on the side of the road for a detail pulls you over.  He didn’t clock you.  He saw you.  He’s been on the force for 25 years, though.  He “knows” speeding when he sees it.  He gives you a ticket and tells you to slow down.  Is he right?  Yes.  But the ticket he gives you is dependent on *exactly* how fast you were going.  He claims 43mph.  Your speedometer said 40.  Three extra mph adds $30 to the ticket in Ma.  When you contest this by going to the judge and say, “I can’t accept this. He didn’t measure this accurately. I should not be stuck with this fine.”  The judge is going to say, “You’re right.”  Think of this when you step on the scale.  You’re using an accurate measuring tool to measure an inaccurate way of dieting.  Must be frustrating to accept those extra 3 pounds.

When can I stop measuring my food?

First time dieting:  after 5 weeks.  Veteran:  after 3 weeks and you are on a roll.

Do I have to have a cheat meal?  I’ve been doing great without one.

Yes.  Because you haven’t gone anywhere yet that has your favorite food.  You’re locked up in a cell known as your house.  As soon as you leave the compound, though, and go to a real function with real food laid out in front you, I have ten dollars that says you’ll forsake utensils and you will defy gravity with some of the eating techniques you will use when you get around that PB/chocolate/ice cream/starchy food/dessert that you’ve been missing.  No snortling please.

Sometimes the things that I get are not actually questions, but declarations.  It’s as if they want me to say to them, “You are so amazing and so on track!  What you’re doing is fabulous.  You’ll be Heidi Klum in no time.”   However, it’s usually something that will send me into a two hour rant.  See below:

• “I don’t eat salt.” Who is scarred from the salt rant?  Don’t make me go here again.  I can only say “huge” so many times.

• “I don’t eat fruit.” Now that’s just sad.  Fruit is nature’s candy and definitely not the reason you haven’t reached goal.

• “I don’t eat starch.” This is a BIG mistake.  There are a ton of Atkins/South Beach sufferers from back in the day who can tell you how much this hurts you as you get older in life.  This is cool if you never ever gain any weight back.  BUT, if you gain even just 5 pounds back, you’re done for.

• “My trainer says…” Good.  Why are you talking to me about this?  Follow what they say and stop fact checking them.  This is some sick game people like to play pitting trainer against trainer like they’ve been hanging out with Michael Vick or something.  Knock it off and go with your trainer.  You’re paying them.

You know there’s more.  I had lock jaw by the end of the month.  Hang tight.  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)

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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