Perfect Weight Balance

(From the Flower Child's Garden Planet)

"I'm so rich:

I have enough:

I've never gone hungry."

"...Except on purpose"

 

(Omni reports:)

On creating the all superfood, calorie conscious, intermittent fasting, six hour solar, diversified organic veganish, diet to maintain perfect weight!

The Problem

Over the years, I slowly gain an extra few pounds. Then, last year over the holidays, I put on an extra ten pounds or so. 

Comfort food, I tell myself at the time, it is a stressful time. (In fact, later I hear of the 2016 "trump ten".)  It is just all the heavy winter food, I tell myself, expecting most of it to fall off in the spring as it always does, mostly....But this time it does not.

Now I enjoy looking good as much as anyone, but it is not about that. It is about how I feel. Ok, these are the complaints of a veganish once skinny person who never had to worry about my weight, I admit. 

 

But those extra pounds begin to weigh on me. I feel the stress on my weak spots, such as the joints involved in carrying the extra weight around all day. My metabolism feels like it is messed up. I feel tired. 

But I only eat good organic whole vegan food, I only eat when hungry, and I don't overeat. So what is the matter, I wonder. Perhaps I am supposed to get heavier, and feel worse, as I get older?   Uh,.....No.

So I look things up at the great Shared Library of Humanity, the interweb. I discover that I have a syndrome called ETMF. (Kidding!) The surprise is that I'm actually eating, too, much, food. 

Turns out I am eating a thousand or more calories a day over and above what I need, for a person my age, sex, height and so on. It is amazing I had not yet gained far more weight. 

This surprises me because I was not eating food designed to fool the senses such as artificial flavors, and tricky factory food full of empty calories. I am doing this on all nutrient dense superfoods. That density was to be the key. 

 

This is a puzzle to me. I had learned to trust my body, eating as much as I wanted, on a diet of all natural food, and now, I wonder what I'm doing wrong. Could it really be as simple as eating too much food?

The Cure for ETMF

Ultimately, I make two changes, course corrections, in my daily eating habits. The first one is to not change the "what" of what I am eating at all, just the "when." Calories we eat in the daytime are more likely to be burned right away, I learn, while calories consumed at night are more likely to be stored as fat. So I employ a technique called intermittent fasting. 

We all fast daily, when we sleep at night. That's why we call the first meal of the day 'break'-'fast'. Intermittent fasting, or IF simply extends this. So I attempt to eat all my days' food in a six hour window of time, every single day, starting as early as I can easily manage. At first I can do this only every other day, but now I do it most days.

This is an important aspect of any so called diet. How sustainable is it? Can you do it, day in, day out, forever? This is a diet, as in, the way I always eat. Not as in, what I do for a few weeks to lose weight. The WIAE diet.

There is evidence that this is a very old health practice. The Essene Gospel of Peace, book one, a spiritual health text from the first century, advises that if you can, "it is best to sit down to a meal only once a day." My friends' shaman healer advises her to not eat at night, to give the body a rest. 

I my case I eat two meals usually. All I can eat. But both within six hours. Or eight..

The other thing I change, is to learn to count calories. I do this for several days; looking everything up, adding up the numbers, learning how many are in foods that I eat a lot, acquiring a good working ability to estimate how many calories I am eating. Just tracking, not even trying to eat fewer calories. Just learning, for the first time in my life, to count calories.

(Be aware, as I give to you this sacred algorithm, knowledge is power, and the interweb gives us power; including the power to instantly look up every little thing about your food, and I have heard some people have gotten lost in the Power of the Calorie Counting Game and developed problems that look a lot like "eating disorders"! My advice is, don't try this game without help unless you already eat an all healthy nutrient dense diversified diet or you could get deficient in something eventually)

 

So. I do the math, and subtract five hundred calories from the days' total any day I want to lose weight. As I begin to deliberately eat fewer calories than I usually need, I gradually start to lose weight. Gently, slowly, I drop weight over several months, keeping my habit of only eating during the day, within a six hour window. It is easy. 

Sometimes at night I do feel hungry, so I sip probiotic rich sour kraut water. That makes my tummy happy. And oddly, by morning I am no longer hungry. I have, in my life, on occasion fasted, but other than that, I was not used to being truly hungry very often. 

It is surprising and sad, but most of us who have enough, rarely get truly hungry. Instead, we experience false hunger, the feeling of our gut microbes telegraphing their preferences to us by way of our belly brain. That is probably what I feel at night. But nowadays, I experience true hunger daily, usually after my morning walk. And I REALLY enjoy my food!

When my weight does finally drop below my perfect normal weight, I allow myself to eat longer and later in the day, and quickly catch up within a day or two, and rebalance.

The Result

I feel awesome! People say I look great. All sorts of little complaints that I had, have vanished. My energy levels have returned, my joints are happy, and I feel like I have new superpowers. 

Instead of feeling like a victim of some mysterious malady causing me to feel out of balance, helplessly growing fatter and fatter, I now realize that eating too much (even of a good thing!) made me too fat, and so was causing those symptoms. 

 

I wonder what my rekindled appetite will inspire me to try out next. Soon I might share fun new recipes. My clothes are a little loose so they me fit better as I dance around through the day with more bounce in my steps...