My dad’s a personal trainer. He’s looked at most of the diets, and typically has the same thing to say about all of them

Here’s what I’ve grown up having drilled into my head:

• Your brain needs carbs to function. It cannot digest protein for food. This does not mean all carbs all the time. This does not mean white flour and empty carbs. Those are not proper nutrition for your brain or body. But you cannot unilaterally cut carbs out of your diet.
• All carbs are not equal.
• If you want to lose weight – burn calories more than you take in. Yes, exercise. This raises your metabolism, and becomes self-perpetuating. Brisk walking is better than nothing, but his usual response is, “how’s that working for you?” (hint, they’re talking to a personal trainer to start a program with him…) – To really burn calories and to lose weight, you must break a sweat.
• Load bearing exercise is good for your bones, and excellent for burning calories.
• Moderation. A couple of M&Ms once in a while, not a big deal. A handful or a bagful a day… not going to be helpful. The same is true with protein and carbs.
• Humans are omnivores. Part of that is carnivore. Eating meat. We wouldn’t have ripping and tearing teeth if we weren’t. We don’t need canines for a carrot. We’re built to metabolize animal protein most efficiently. If we’d evolved past that, we’d have evolved away our ripping and tearing teeth too. Vegetarianism and Veganism are a choice. If done poorly, vegetarianism and Veganism can be a dangerous choice.
• “diet” (small d) is a lifestyle. It’s not a few months where you change what you do regularly, lose the weight, then let everything go back to the way it was. That’s yo-yo dieting. Change your habits, change your life (and your weight).  diet (small d) is mostly common sense.
• “Diets” (Large D, commercial diets) – are a multi-BILLION dollar industry. They love to use buzz words that catch people’s attention – like “metabolism” because we’ve all heard that slow metabolisms cause us to be overweight.

Here’s what I learned on my own:

Flours are one of the most “Tampered with” foods out there.

• They’re fogged with cyanide gas to make them unattractive to bugs (I also find this unattractive)
• they’re bleached white with chlorine gas.
• I heard rumour from the Bosch store that they can -legally- cut the flour with sawdust. (I can’t find corroboration for this one though)
• they remove most of the things that made the wheat berry healthy and whole – vitamin E oil, wheat germ, bran, germ oil, because it goes rancid in the bag. Then they add niacin and ug,.. something else… (I don’t have what we call “dead bag flour” in the house anymore) and call it “Enriched”
• Most of the nutritional value in flour is dead within 72 hours of grinding the wheat berry. (How long do you think it sat on the shelf before you got it? In the warehouse? At the factory?) – Hence the “dead bag flour” name in our house.
• Freshly ground flour (yes, this is whole wheat) and the things you make with it – taste great. They don’t have that dusty taste that the bran you buy in the store does. Or the weird, just “wrong” flavour of store bought whole wheat. They don’t tend to … uh…. bind you up as much.
• This doesn’t even touch on what labs have done to the wheat plant to make it grow faster, taller, bigger, stand up in wind, grow in drier climates, wetter climates, etc.
• “Ancient grains” are even better, and many times don’t get the reactions that “wheat” does these days. We use Kamut in most of our cooking and baking, and it doesn’t bloat my belly like modern wheat flour does. (Fun fact: “Kamut” means wheat.)

Soy is not food.

• It’s a known goitegen. A goitegen messes with the thyroid. Makes it run more poorly. The thyroid is largely responsible for…. wait for it…. metabolism. It’s the thermostat for your entire body. An overactive thyroid revs up the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, etc and can burn them out. This is why we control thyroids that run too fast. An underactive thyroid slows the metabolism, and does other “bad” things. Many people don’t have a problem with soy or other goitegens. In moderation. With how much is in the foods we buy, it’s hard to practice moderation these days.
• Soy is in almost every prepared food you’ll find on the market today. It’s a cheap texturizer and filler. It keeps profits up for manufacturers, while making their product seem like it’s more than it is.
• Ever notice how many store bought so called “diet” foods have a lot of soy in them? (other things too, but I’m not going to get into -that- discussion) It’s not in their best interests to make you thinner, they lose a customer.

Remember the 4 food groups we learned in school? They weren’t wrong. They included: moderation, a balanced diet, and no real “junk food”. Why have we forgotten about that?

Through my youth, and teens, even into my 20s, I was very slim, and very muscular.  Then life took over, and I fell off this “Regime” for a while.  I slowed down, I got lazier, I ate out more often, more prepared foods in the house, etc.   The first time in my adult life when implemented what I have written here? I dropped 2 dress sizes. Not immediately, and not dangerously, but it was gone. My energy level increased, which made exercising easier, and then that made losing weight easier.

The only reason I’m not at my ideal weight today is because when I hurt my back, I fell off a lot of this when I became depressed. It’s hard to “give up” a lifestyle of motorcycles, skiing, and other activities, and find yourself hurting to just sit up, and not get depressed. Food became comfort food, became habit. I’m fighting my way back now, and losing weight again.

In fact, I think I’ll take the bike with me to see a client today.  🙂