Archive for 'Weight Loss'
You have to confront and acknowledge what you are now and what you don’t want to be before you can become what you want to be.
The nonphysical exercises you do at the end of each week are an imperative part of the process, an integral part of the diet.
Getting thin and staying thin take more than a diet. I cannot stress the nonphysical exercises strongly enough.
For the next five weeks, make a commitment to me and to yourself. Surrender—and just let go! One of the reasons my diet works so well is that you have nothing to think about except getting skinny. You relinquish the responsibility of making choices, eliminating the temptation to cheat. Don’t worry, nothing is leaving the planet—it will all still be here tomorrow. All the food you love, or think you love, will still be here whenever you want it.
Important: Any diet, including this one, should be supervised by a doctor. This regimen should not be followed by anyone who has diabetes, colitis, hypoglycemia, a spastic colon, ulcers, illeitis, enteritis, diverticulosis, or by anyone who is pregnant or breast feeding.
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We are the masters of setting unrealistic goals. And we are constantly frustrated, constantly wanting.
Because eating is an emotional response to an emotional situation, we get unclear messages from our bodies. Since most of us don’t even know where our stomachs are, we can’t hear our little cells yelling “Feed me. Nourish me. It’s my turn.” Instead we respond to the heart—only the heart.
As I said earlier, I’m not going to take your heart out of your stomach; I’m going to put your head and your body in. You are going to begin to think about food, really think about it.
I’m not going to ask you to give up the one thing that could make life work for you.
I’m going to teach you a way of eating that will allow you to be as compulsive as you need to be. I’m not going to make you change an aspect of your personality as inherent as the color of your eyes. I’m not going to make you stop eating, but I am going to make you start feeling.
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You may be thinking you should avoid carbohydrates at all cost since they can so easily increase insulin secretion, which packs on additional pounds of fat weight. Carbohydrates, however, are an essential part of the diet. As long as you enjoy them in balance with protein and fats, they will do just the job they were originally intended to do—provide energy to the body.
Carbohydrates, or sugars, are the fuels your body burns in each of its three trillion-plus cells to provide energy. The brain “runs” on carbohydrates (or sugars). Carbohydrates are the quickest, most readily available source of energy, and when carbohydrates are no longer available, the body burns fat, then protein. If carbohydrates are underprovided, the body is often forced to cannibalize lean body tissue to provide fuel. So it’s important to eat enough carbohydrates to satisfy the body’s energy requirement each day.
Select carbohydrates that are low on the glycemic index (see chapter 6 for this information) and avoid foods that precipitously increase blood sugar. You would do well to virtually eliminate all starchy foods, such as potatoes, yams, carrots, corn, grain products, and rice that so easily increase blood sugar. Feel free to indulge in as many “greens” as you wish. Green foods are free foods!
The problem most people have with this chart is learning what constitutes 71.5 grams of carbohydrates, or 65 grams of protein. Here are a couple of tools to put this information in a format you can use to prepare your meals.
Most animal-based proteins (seafood, poultry, veal, lamb, beef) contain about 9 grams of protein per ounce. If you require 65 grams of protein per day, plan to use about 7 1/2 ounces of seafood, poultry, or other protein per day, divided between breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
By the way, the premise of this book does not allow for a totally vegetarian lifestyle. Those who eat eggs and dairy products as part of the protein source can easily become allergic to these foods through overconsumption, and soy products will put weight on a person who is either estrogen sensitive or for whom soy pulls down the activity of the thyroid gland.
Another way to measure the amount of protein you will need at each meal is to use the palm of your hand. Plan to eat a protein portion about the size of the palm of your hand. Carbohydrates can fill up the rest of the plate, as long as you are not using any starchy vegetables, sweetened beverages, or fruit.
Remember this simple rule: You must include a protein portion with each meal if you wish to slow down the entry of sugars into your bloodstream and encourage your pancreas to secrete glucagon instead of insulin. Insulin = Fat! No more high-carb meals or snacks!
If you have indulged freely in carbohydrates (either the “good carbs” or the “bad” carbs), you are going to find this approach a little difficult to swallow, especially if you’ve been working with the vegetable/grain base type of diet. I’m going to offer you a little grace, a little leeway in starting your program, because for you this may be an enormous change in lifestyle.
When I counsel clients using this prototype, I watch their faces while I’m unrolling the plan. If they pale, if their expression goes blank, or they stand up and say, “I can’t do this! I’m outta here!” I change my approach! After all, I want them to succeed, not secede!
I encourage you to take one meal at a time (dinner, for example) and work on balancing that one meal until you are totally comfortable with the plan. This may take just a few days; it may take a few weeks. But in that one meal, make sure the proteins and carbohydrates are balanced so carefully that you begin to feel a difference. You may even start to lose a little weight!
The host of the party was serving fresh-sliced watermelon. “That’s okay. That’s okay,” I said. But after a while it just hit me. I saw those slices cut into fourths, and I said, “Just the heart.” I tried to find the biggest piece, took it, and stood there and ate the heart. I just let the juice run down my chin and over my hand, and I said, “I’m going to cherish this moment.”
J.H.
When you are totally comfortable with dinner, do lunch. Either enjoy leftovers from the evening meal or use some of the lunch suggestions in the recipe section of this book. Work with both lunch and dinner for a few weeks until this new way of eating is ingrained into your psyche. Before you know it, eating a balanced meal will seem like second nature to you.
And by the way, don’t worry if you “blow it” occasionally. We all do. Just start over again at the next meal and carry on. Your body is a wonderful organism; it has grace built into it. It can handle the occasional nutritional disaster. Just make sure you get back on track as soon as possible and make those occasional “slips” as infrequently as possible.
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With stapling, the pouch is produced by placing a line of staples down the upper part of the stomach from just below the point where the gullet joins it and placing a piece of nylon mesh or tubing around, opening at the lower end. This stops the opening (stoma) enlarging. In many cases this type of procedure has produced satisfactory weight loss. However, it is a complex and difficult procedure. In the postoperative phase, complications such as leakage from the staple line and abscess formation may occur. Later the staple line may break down or the mesh erode into the stomach allowing food to pass through as normal, since restriction is lost. The result is often that lost weight is regained. Other complications include excessive vomiting and acid reflux causing heartburn. These are often caused by the pouch stretching. The operation is difficult to reverse when complications occur, as the staples can only be bypassed and not fully removed.
Gastric banding or band gastroplasty. Gastric banding was developed to try to simplify the procedure. Instead of inserting a row of staples to create a pouch, a synthetic band is drawn around the upper stomach narrowing it at a point about 3cm below the junction of the gullet and stomach. This creates a small pouch with a narrow stoma just as with gastric stapling. There is less chance of stomach perforation, no staple line to break down and the procedure can be readily reversed by removing the band. Other problems such as erosion, excessive vomiting, pouch enlargement and reflux can still occur.
This procedure has now been further improved by the introduction of the laparascopically insertable (i.e. key hole surgery) adjustable silastic gastroplasty band Gap band). The band is clipped around the upper stomach. It has a fixed circumference of about 10cm. The size of the stoma is adjusted by means of a circular balloon running around the inner surface of the band. This is connected via a fine tube to a reservoir (injection port) which is implanted in the abdominal wall muscle. Injection of saline fluid into or removal of fluid from the port tightens or opens the stoma. This adjusts the rate at which the pouch empties and allows fine tuning of the operation. It is the only laparascopically insertable and adjustable procedure available at present.
Unfortunately, either because of lack of patient motivation or compliance or because of technical problems, gastric partitioning procedures do have a failure rate of about 25 per cent requiring revision, reversal or conversion to another procedure. In these cases a malabsorptive procedure called biliopancreatic diversion is often recommended.
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