Upbeat Living: Tomorrow we diet? |
Many of us have a firm holiday slogan: "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may diet!" And now it’s the New Year, and the RG is over. All who feel bloated or overweight, raise your hand! All who feel tired from tight clothes, raise your other hand! For all of you, I have good news. Going on a diet isn’t the only way to get your clothes to loosen up! Try my UnDiet Plan first. Here’s the microcondensed version.
Step One: Drink a large glass of filtered water. Filtered water is better because chlorine and fluoride in the public tap water causes abdominal discomfort and swelling for some people. Sugars, salt, and alcohol can all cause dehydration, and you got a lot of those in your system the last few weeks. As you drink extra filtered water, you rehydrate, and your cells release wastes more rapidly. Some people can therefore reduce bloating or lose 5 pounds by drinking extra water for a week. Most diet programs ask their members to drink 8 glasses of water a day, because tissues actually release fat cells more easily when well hydrated. Further, in Chinese medicine, sugars, alcohol, and fats are all yin foods, which, consumed in excess, will make your abdomen swell; drinking water assists in reducing this.
Step Two: Take a 20-minute hot bath with 2 cups of Epsom salts, every day. If you have a steam room, use it regularly. This increases metabolism and speeds flushing of wastes.
Step Three: Switch what you eat without changing the amounts or counting calories. Have less alcohol, caffeine, sugar, s alt, saturated fats, and additives. Have more green veggies, especially broccoli, zucchini, dark green leafy things, and try lean protein rather than grains. Fill up! Some of you will notice your abdomen becoming less swollen within 2 days. Plus, you’ll feel better and more clear-minded. The virtues of green veggies, especially raw ones, include not only great vitamins and minerals to recharge you tired cells, but also many enzymes. Enzymes help the body to turn your meal into cell nutrition. When your cells are better nourished, they stop yelling, "feed me!" So, you literally will be less hungry when you eat more salad. Also, veggies gently scrub plaque off the intestinal walls, resulting in greater digestive efficiency. Within a few days, you’ll have more energy and be feeling more cheerful, because the cells of your body are getting interior nutrition. You are becoming relieved of depletion strain. Your liver and pancreas are now working much less hard, and your blood sugar curve is normalizing.
Try these tricks for a week, and see if you don’t drop a few pounds and feel much better. Now add Step Four: exercise. Do 20 to 30 minutes a day of brisk walking, dancing to MTV, chasing your dog along the canal, or playing catch with the kids. Exercise improves every body function, including DHEA production, endocrine function, and of course, fat-burning. Several famous doctors advocate this amount of exercise for increased longevity, as well as felling much more energetic, flexible, and happy. When you have been doing Steps One through Four for a month, you may wonder why you ever ran you life differently!
Are you having terrible trouble sticking to the Step Three foods? Do you find you inner child demands pizza, or you crave chocolate when depressed? If you have intense emotional connections to food, and they are hampering your diet goals, add Step Five: Change your self-talk. Many do not realize how much inner dialogue they have about how unworthy they are, how fat, how ugly, how stupid, how unsexy, how untalented, how unwanted, or how underachieving. Many of us say a lot of cruel things to ourselves. Some people react to their own self-talk with compensatory cravings for foods that may have been treats in childhood or other happy times. A part of one’s personality may sometimes say, "I had a bad experience, so I need a quart of ice cream to make me feel better!" Being an adult does not automatically exempt you from this kind of reaction. However, you can begin to notice the mean things you believe about yourself, and notice how you may crave certain foods when you are feeling bad about something. The best book on this subject is The Only Diet There Is, by Sondra Ray. If you recognize yourself in this paragraph, go buy a copy and set up your new self-talk program, then go back later to Step Three of the UnDiet Plan.
Do you still want to "diet" to lose weight? Next time, we’ll cover medical views of popular diet myths and realities. Now, go get your next glass of water --