Dieting round two

 So in our last article I was telling you how I got rid of forty pounds by eating raw or natural foods all day until I get home from work. Well apparently I am still getting rid of weight. Went to the doctor today for that regular physical I am apparently suppose to have every year after turning forty. I was not aware that was a mandatory event after forty. Anyway I am now the same weight as I held at age sixteen in high school. That is right; I have now managed to get rid of a total of sixty pounds. No exercise, well I work on the farm mowing, gardening and such, but I do not work out, I do not walk or run or do any exercise regime. I have gotten rid of sixty pounds now by simply changing my lifestyle. My doctor was totally amazed! He asked what I had been doing over the eighteen months since he saw me last when I had a case of flu right after starting work up here. I told him I changed my lifestyle. He said, “What you quit drinking, quit smoking what?” I said no “I stopped eating crap made by man. No chips, no cakes, no cookies, no candy, no fast food, no frozen meals, no processed crap. He said, “Come on now, you have not had any of those things”. I admitted I do still have a sip or two of my kid’s milkshakes and maybe a bite of chocolate after dinner, but for the most part I eat natural raw food all day every day until I get home and then I eat a sensible meal made at home. (He talks a lot.) He asked “so you haven’t eaten out?” Well, since he was the first person I met when came up here to work, he knew I have a penchant for eating Thai food. I cannot get enough of it. I admitted that I have been to a few Indian Buffets and a few Thai restaurants over the past year but not enough to have to use two hands to count. And even eating at those places, I ate sensible. I still eat whatever my wife fixes for dinner. My wife has become the best cook ever. She always makes everything fresh. She refuses to use anything canned, so even with my dinners we have a very low percentage of processed crap in our one enjoyable meal each day. My other meals each day are just fuel stops. I look at them that way because that is what food is meant to be. Now get this from my doctor, “but food is one of the enjoyments in life”. I looked at him with that blank stare I give my son when he says something stupid. So I said “you must rank it right up there with sex, shitting and showering huh?” He said “no but if you cannot enjoy food what can you enjoy”? I said “life, my children, swimming, being outside without a shirt, having my wife think I am sexy, having women turn their heads when I walk by (and not laughing), the beauty of the sky, the air I breathe, being able to wear clothes I have not fit in for twenty years, not having to go to the doctor from being sick”. Do not get me wrong, I do enjoy food; I enjoy my dinners every night. Tonight my wife made curry chicken, it was awesome I had seconds. I can eat that way at night because I have already fueled my body for the day and eating dinner is simply enjoyment, spending time with the family. So the point of all this is, yeah, I am still getting rid of fat. According to my doctor I am at the perfect weight now for my height of six foot. So how do I do it?

Okay, raw food! But you say raw food taste blah!!! But I cannot eat raw food!!What?? So you are telling me you cannot eat a banana? You cannot eat an orange, or a tangerine, or strawberries, or an avocado, or grapes, or raisins, or figs, or cantaloupe, or watermelon, or an apple, or pineapple? You are going to sit there and tell me you have never eaten any of those things? What about vegetables, salads or vegetable finger foods? Have you never eaten any of those? Okay so you have. But I like them with butter and cooked? Oh, so you do like vegetables? Okay now we are getting somewhere. You like them when they taste dead. Or not bursting with life and enzymes. Okay well then, now we know you can indeed eat vegetables and I would most likely assume you can eat fruit as well. Not too many people cook fruit. So the issue is not the vegetables or the fruit, it’s that you want it to taste good, or to taste more appetizing than just raw food. Your flesh suit thinks if it’s not cooked or covered it is not going to give you that filled feeling. Wrong!

Okay so you want to get rid of fat and weight? Like in part one of this article series first you have to change the way you think. The way you think about yourself, the way you think about food, the way you think about getting rid of weight. Once again, did you catch it? I am not here to tell you how to lose anything. Never try to lose weight. Losing something only makes your subconscious think something has been lost to get back. This is why people roller coaster on diet after diet. I have seen it; my favorite to watch people on was the all meat diet. Ketones stink diet, as I called it. Yeah, it works, you smell awful, and your pee smells awful, you feel disgusting from eating meat and fat from meat, your skin and hair look bad but hey you did lose some weight. Then they start eating normal again, at least they stop smelling then, but less than a few months later not only did they gain the weight back, they gained even more. Your body was not designed to eat nothing but dead food. God did not intend for us to eat nothing but meat. God did not intend on us to eat dead food. It takes a terrible toll on your health. Then your metabolism changes back to "hey thank goodness we are getting carbohydrates again, lets stock up". Okay, not a sensible way to go huh? So what do you want to do? You want to get rid of weight and fat? So here is how I suggest doing it!

Eat an eighty percent raw or natural food diet. Cooking food kills the food, kills the enzymes, and kills the nutrients. But you say, steak tastes good! I agree, steak does taste really good, especially the way I grill them. You can still have steak, you can have steak everyday if you want. As long as you are sensible about it. Eat eighty percent raw food all day then have your steak at night. But do not be stupid. Have the steak, have a potato, and have a cooked vegetable dish. Just nothing processed, don’t put a lot of crap on the food. Okay but let’s do not talk about the 20% of the food to be eaten each day that is cooked. You can do whatever you want there, just be sensible, don’t pig out on cake or cookies or ice cream or whatever. Use common sense. I am not saying to not eat ice cream, or not to eat cake or cookies, but do not be like an addict and pig out like you are jonsing for a fix. Have one. Have a bowl of ice cream but just one. Okay back to the main part of eating to live and get rid of weight. The eighty percent!

Important point to add here! Water tastes good, if you drink a lot of water you already know water from different sources taste different, I suggest drinking distilled water as much as possible. Filtered water anytime else. I am not going down the rabbit hole conversation of distilled water sucking vitamins out of you, if you ate right it would not matter. The point is you need to drink water daily. Lots of water. At least four to five glasses throughout your day. I mention this because dieters tend to drink diet sodas all day long. I do not want to tell you what that does to you. I always think its funny when people get the big piece of pie and cookies with that diet soda. Or my real peeve is people at the buffet on their third plate with that diet soda. Come on! What are you thinking? Just say no to soda! Of any kind. I work for the company that makes the high fructose corn syrup that is in every processed food you can name, and in every soda. You say but its diet. So is water. But did God make that soda? Is that soda natural? NO,NO,NO NO!!! Water is alive, water is living, and living energy keeps you alive. Get the idea?

What I eat each day! I start my day with a glass of very cold distilled water each morning. Used to take vitamins each day so it’s a habit. I do not drink coffee. (Nothing wrong with coffee, I make a pot for my wife each morning before I leave for work, I just cannot drink it.) I then wash my food for the day, usually strawberries and blueberries under cold water in a strainer. I pat them dry and bag them in sandwich baggies. I also grab a few bananas or apples if there is any. I usually take that glass of cold water with me on my twenty mile commute into work. I consume all of the water before I arrive. I then start my day in my office. I will eat my bananas while I read the news to begin my day. If I did not have bananas I eat the blueberries. A crucial part of my eating habits is having fruit at home to take with. Since we live in the country, there is no grocery store within twenty miles so, if I don’t have it I have to go without until I can go and obtain some fruit during my lunch break. On these days when I had no fruit to bring to work I would just drink lots of water until lunch. But on most days I take my fruit with me. I eat at 7am again at 9am and then go to lunch around 1130am. I eat a lot of fruit. In the afternoon I try to have another fruit around 2pm or so to get me through. This is not always the case, I often only had the berries to bring so I would save those until 1130am and consume all of them at the same time and call that lunch. You are saying, my God man how can you survive on just eating berries for lunch. Well, a year or so back, I felt the same way. Back then lunch to me was an all you can eat buffet. Now because I have accustomed my flesh suit to living food, it is satisfied with a half pint of strawberries or a couple of bananas.

I get the life energy from them so I feel full, satisfied. Okay that is pretty much what I consume each day. Sometimes I change it up a bit, with cut up cantaloupe or watermelon or a couple of fresh avocados. Luckily, where I work they encourage you to stay at the office with a very elaborate cafeteria, complete with fresh fruit, fruit cups, a very diverse salad bar and multiple stations of cooked foods. This allows me to grab fruit when I did not have any at home. You noticed I never eat any salad. I know, I recommend salad because it fills you up, but like you probably, I can’t stand the stuff. They even give credit points at my work for people to eat salads, you can use the credits at the company store, but I just can’t do it. Not without drowning it with crap to give it some flavor. What you say? Yeah, just like you I need flavor too. Or I can just get a bowl of carrots, or a bowl of broccoli..I can enjoy a single flavor without crap on it but something about a combination of salad veggies that just seem to have no taste to me. Okay this leads me to what can you do to get used to just eating fruit or vegetables. Covering up that taste!!!

Tips, tricks and condiments!!

Hiding the flavor until the flavor finds you. Yes, that is the explanation I have for you. Your taste buds will adjust back to the way God intended for them to work. You will one day find apples or strawberries sweet again, but until that day comes you can either chock it up like a man and just bear with it, or you can enhance the taste or cover rather with other things. This is where the condiments and seasonings come in handy. First, get out a pen and write this down...Cavender's Greek Seasoning...Wal-Mart, Kroger I know both carry it. It will change your life. It is all I season meat with but I also use it on many other foods to hide the blandness or cover up tastes I do not enjoy. Second, peanut butter, actually peanut butter has gotten a bad rap from diet peoples because of the fat content, whoa you say! Yes it has some 40% fat content, but what the diet people never tell you or are completely unaware of is that fat in peanuts is natural fat. Your flesh suit needs natural fat, it helps your body produce oils and other lubricants your flesh suit needs. It is why I also highly recommend cashews, pecans, pistachios and macadamia nuts but we will get to that in another article. Right now we are talking about covering the tastes of fruits and vegetables. Mustard, soy sauce( men avoid this one), Seafood sauce, ranch dressing, thousand island, French dressing, mayonnaise, cheese( real cheese not cheese food), tiger sauce, sweet and sour sauce, I think you are getting the idea here. I do not recommend covering your food for more than the first week or two, unless you just cannot seem to eat anything alive otherwise, this is just a temporary help to get used to eating living foods, to allow your taste buds time to adjust. Usually it only takes about a week before your body starts craving the living food and you will suddenly not put the condiments on. But for now as a helper, condiments can help the transition. So you are saying, you listed off a bunch of stuff I have in my pantry that I normally stay away from when trying to lose weight. This is true. But this is a temporary transition to help you go raw. If you have stamina, and have made that life decision to change, do not go this route. Go straight to raw food. I stick to the fruit myself because it is sweet and my body finds it very satisfying and I get full quickly by eating sweet fruits. So you ask, what do you put on what? Okay, these are just suggestions. I am no doctor, I am no nutritionist, and I am just a guy who went from a size 40 waist to a size 32 waist in less than eighteen months. And I am, according to my physical yesterday, incredibly healthy for a forty four year old man. So here is what I did.

I started with peanut butter, get the crunchy kind, it adds more flavor and adds that crunchy texture to otherwise mushy fruit. I would take a spoon with me to work and eat two spoonfuls of peanut butter per banana, or cut up an apple and literally dip the apple slices in the peanut butter. This works okay, I found it didn’t help the fresh peaches much but bananas, pears, apples and even strawberries were great with peanut butter. Other ideas, honey, I coated everything in honey for a few days. It got old washing my hands to get the sticky off but tasted great on berries, bananas, apples, pears and peaches. After a few days, the strawberries were sweet on their own, so were the bananas and apples and blueberries are the best!! Those are the only two things I used on fruit for my transition. Fruit is easy to adjust too. But vegetables!! Just can’t stand them!! So, for me. Carrots, broccoli, asparagus, tomatoes, green beans, celery, cucumber, zucchini, squash and cauliflower all tasted just damn nasty without something on them. Okay some of those vegetables still taste nasty to me by themselves. So back to the condiments, first always try Cavender's seasoning, it will get you a long way. I would pour out a pile of it on a plate and dip the broccoli crowns in it and eat them that way. Experiment with condiments you like the flavor of. Sweet and sour sauce will do a great job of covering as well. Salad dressings( the only way I can eat salads) will also help in this regard. Being this is our first harvest at our farm, I have been eating a lot more raw vegetables, mostly tomatoes and broccoli, and I just rinse them, slice them and season them with Cavender’s. But like I said , experiment, the point here is to eat living foods with enzymes and vitamins intact. Even if you coat them with crap, you will still notice the difference in how you feel by eating the raw food. It will change your attitude on lots of things in your life.

Next article will include my own recipes.. Or check the raw food blog..I have a list of recipes someone gave me a few years ago for different raw food entrees…until then…keep it raw!!!!