Category: diet

Failure

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.

–Mark Twain

The Roommate’s latest suggestion for a post is to reflect on why people might try ditching the gov’mint approved Food Pyramid (we’re 100 certain!) and then after a while give up on this new way of eating.

And by “ditching the Food Pyramid” I don’t mean going on the cookie diet.

As “Dr.” Siegal says, “Hunger Wrecks Diets®©™,” so order all your cookies and shakes now and don’t ever stop eating. That’s the key. And also don’t forget to take all the nutritional supplements, since cookies apparently don’t provide all the nutrition you need.

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A Mess of Greens

I don’t want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

–Doug Copeland

I’m going to say some things about vegetables now. It might hurt their feelings, but I’m not going to say it to their faces. I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t repeat it to your asparagus, either. Hang on, here we go:

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Insanity

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

–Albert Einstein

I woke up this morning to see similar headlines blasted all over the web. I would love to quote it for you, but I just can’t decide which particular headline to use.

The upshot of all the headlines is that the FDA has finally approved a new obesity drug, Belviq, for sale in the USA. And there are so many things to mock here that my head is swimming. It’s like that time I got dragged to go “fishing” at a fish farm. The pond was about 3 feet deep, 20 feet widem and 10 feet long and contained approximately 1,546,453 fish.

You could just put on your apron, grab one with your bbq tongs, and stick it right on the grill.

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The Best Laid Plans

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

–J.R.R. Tolkien

Especially if dragons make good eating. I’ll have to check on that.

I’ve gotten a few requests to be more specific about what I eat and especially to discuss the proportions and “how to” of it all.

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That Is The Question

A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.

–A.A. Milne

Another big question I get in eating this way is, “what about exercise?” This is a good question. If you read at all, or are able to hear, you’d think that exercise was the magic elixir that solves all of life’s problems. You can’t open a web page anywhere without seeing it lauded in glowing terms as the key to weight loss, heart health, and even longevity.

Of course you can’t find many centenarians who exercise, but we’ll just call that a paradox and pretend it doesn’t happen. The key for you to live a long life is obviously to exercise.

Only maybe it isn’t.

Because there are enough paradoxes lying around here to build our own gym with.

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Bad News With Benefits

Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.

–Lao Tzu

Have you been waiting for the other shoe to drop? Well don’t worry: it won’t. This bad news is some of the easiest bad news you’ll ever get.

Eating this way–avoiding grains, sugars, vegetables oils, and excessive amounts of fruit, while embracing real animal fat, meat, and other fresh, real foods–has been one of the easiest things I’ve ever done.

It was certainly easier than spending half my life kneading my “healthy” whole wheat bread dough.

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Objections, 3

Nullis in Verba

–Motto of the Royal Society of London

In Objections 2 we started talking about fat and explored just a little bit of the history behind the rise and dominance of the lipid hypothesis–that fat is the cause of obesity and health problems.

Now let’s talk a bit about the science.

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Objections, 2

It is of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man’s oration; nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.

–Plutarch

In the previous post I listed a common objection I hear to eating very-low carb: your brain needs glucose! In this post I deal with another common objection:

But all that saturated fat is very bad for you.

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