Natural Health Help

Losing weight is really hard work. Especially doing it right, meaning you become actually healthier while you do it, and then you turn your success into maintaining a healthy weight lifelong. Ideally you will grab the challenge and run with it; you’ll have a great time, continuously rewarded by the fantastic fulfillment of overcoming difficulty and meeting your goal. Some of us can get excited by the idea, gather up the tools we need and then get it done, joyfully. Many of us never start; it seems overwhelming. It means change. Food, the way we think of it, even what we think it is, is so central to our lives that even when we know that the way we are using food is hurting us, change sometimes seems impossible. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve heard the statistic- 90% of people who lose weight will regain it, plus more. That’s a pretty discouraging idea. What about that 10% that keep the weight off? How do they do it?

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Last time I talked about how a lower carbohydrate ketogenic diet is the best way to lose fat. This would be a diet in which you reduce your calories by eliminating simple sugars and refined carbohydrates. The Atkins diet has been a rather extreme form of this diet; Protein Power, the South Beach Diet and many other popular versions have helped thousands of people to lose their extra fat in a safe and satisfying way.

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Fat is energy. It’s the extra stuff you ate, and haven’t used yet. To our ancestors, who lived with an unreliable food supply, fat was friendly stuff. A woman with rounded hips and a nice mound of belly looked like the best thing walking to your many-times great grandpa. She looked like a mother who could feed his babies even on the rough days when he wasn’t bringing home the mastadon. A round woman advertised her man as good at his job, admirable and desirable. A round woman also meant a man could relax a little, because his partner had the basics for the kids covered. This was such a good system for everyone, it has persisted in our bodies to this day. We are the end result of a long line of excellent fat storers.

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I said I’d be back to talk more about how permanent weight loss is accomplished. I often tell my patients this: There are three ways we eat- we eat to get fat, we eat to lose fat, and there is a third way, different from these other two ways of eating, that we use to maintain a healthy body weight life-long. How we eat to lose weight is different from a healthy life long diet.

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I have been scanning some major news services to see what people have been saying about our inevitable New Year’s Resolutions about weight loss. I was dismayed to see how much of the news has a negative spin. There are a number of experts showing up, seeming to say the news is bad. There are a number of reports saying that epidemic obesity is due not to the simple and the obvious (we eat too much, we don’t exercise enough) but rather to factors deep, mysterious and out of our control, like brain hormones and genetic programming or prenatal nutrition (And hey, nothing will drive a woman to chocolate like the idea she permanently ruined her children’s health while they were in-utero, by the way she ate!) The news just is NOT that bad!

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It is clear that carrying too much extra fat will hurt you. Fat cells are not simple sacks of nothing much. In fact they are tiny factories for making chemical trouble in your body- inflammation being the #1 cause of the trouble. Normal inflammation is an essential part of healing and health- but too much inflammation is the beginning of major illnesses. The damage to your blood vessel walls that results in hardening of your arteries, and leads to high blood pressure and heart attacks, starts as inflammation. Chronic pain like arthritis in your knees or your low back, bursitis of your shoulders or hip joint, gut ulcers and sinusitis are just some of the ways that inflammation causes disease and discomfort. The more extra fat you have, the more inflammation you create in your body every day.

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Adapted from Making Peace with Food: Freeing Yourself from the Diet/Weight Obsession by Susan Kano rev. ed. Harper and Row, Inc 1989

Learn to be good to your body- understand your body’s needs and defenses and learn to respect your physical powers and vulnerabilities.

Revise what “thin” and “fat” mean to you- reject ‘fattism”; appreciate and respect people of every size and shape, including yourself; stop idealizing slenderness and slender people; expand your appreciation of the human body in all it’s diversity.

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