Dieting is about REAL food

For me dieting is about learning to eat real food ... in proper portions and training myself not to binge eat in between those proper meals.

Real food for me consists of less processing and unlike a lot of women I see trying to lose weight I do NOT go in for most of the highly processed *diet* foods pushed on us from every corner of the manufacturing world. I think of processed food manufacturers like drug dealers, except THESE drug dealers are prominently featured in every grocery store, magazine or TV channel.

Ever since I started my new lifestyle I have done a LOT of research, trying to glean whatever extra bit of knowledge I can out of the masses of misinformation out there. I've made mistakes, I'm still making mistakes but the learning curve continues and as I read more and more I can slowly weed out those mistakes and that's what I'm doing. It's a learning curve and I am still on the upward curve of it.

A lot of my initial misconceptions were based on conventional wisdom. Things drummed into my head over time, put there primarily by my mother (who sadly was hoodwinked by the drug pushers in the food industry) but also by the sheer volume of articles and opinions spouted by very serious people gracing our TV screens and magazine/newspaper covers telling us the danger of this food or that. Butter is bad, Margarine is good! Canola oil is "healthy"! Try this new sweetener it's ZERO calories! Aspartame that's the ticket! Saccharin! New! NO FAT mayonnaise, Fat free sour cream! Coke zero! Skim milk! Baked not fried! Animal fat is BAD! Trans fat is bad! Eggs are BAD! ... I could go on ....

I readily admit that while some of the things on that list are bad for us, not all of them are, and yet we think they are, and some of the things we think ARE good for us, aren't ... how are we to know the difference?.

For instance, Skim milk is a good choice of milk for the dieter but it isn't necessarily BETTER for you than say a full fat whole milk and to me it tastes like water. It's an option to be sure but it is not the only healthy milk option available to us and that's what we have been led to believe ... skim milk perfectly fine, especially for folks who for various health reasons are forced to try and reduce their fat consumption, but for reasonably healthy people, whole milk or a higher fat milk like 1% or 2% might actually be a BETTER choice. Have you seen the recent studies that said that kids who drank primarily whole milk when growing up tended to have a lower BMI as adults than kids who grew up drinking non fat milk? They aren't sure why yet but I bet when they do it will be something like ... the kids who drank whole milk had better overall diets and outlooks toward food and weren't nagged to death about food by well meaning but misinformed parents who passed their own hangups about food onto their children ...or ... the fat in the milk they had with their cereal in the morning probably help keep them full longer so they were less likely to develop bad snacking habits in between meals so they ate fewer calories overall ... stuff like that.

Whatever ... I don't really care what the reason is. From what I have read we would all be better off if we stopped listening to the food industry who's main goal ISN'T to give us healthier food ... it is to MAKE MONEY and they only reason they even SELL healthy food and fake healthy food is because they are trying to balance what they can convince us is healthy (and super cheap for them to make) and what is actually healthy.

What I have found on my weight loss journey is that to lose weight you MUST eat a calorie deficit .. it doesn't have to be huge but it must be less calories than you burn on a daily basis ... all the fad diets out there do this ... some do it by cutting out an entire food group or even several, but do you REALLY think that is a healthy way to lose weight? I don't. The fact is even those diets are really just based on getting folks to eat less calories than they burn, the PROBLEM with those diets is that they are unsustainable and even if the dieter is successful, as soon as they start eating *normally* again the weight just packs back on and often worse than before they started the whole diet thing in the first place. You heard it all before, I'm sure ... I am just adding my voice to the choir.

My diet plan goes like this is eat real food, keep track of what you eat, to lose weight eat a calorie deficit, exercise more ... The best thing about it is it works, it's healthy and it's sustainable for a lifetime. No tricks, no quick fixes and no huge cash expenditures to join programs that will ultimately fail.

If you think this could work for you, then you're right ;)

IA