The LBDDiaries.com Blog

When we go back to planning the meal and sitting down as a couple it brings peace into our lives. We can communicate with one another and not the media.  Might even consider cleaning up a bit!

What to blog about on a beautiful Tews Day morning.  How about… hummingbirds?  And SUGAR?

Have you ever noticed how hyper hummingbirds are?  I have to wonder if it isn’t because of all that sugar they drink from feeders with homemade feeder syrup – sugar, water and food coloring!  Makes you wonder about your own body, huh!? Well, it should!

We do not have to consume white, refined sugar to be consuming sugar. It’s everywhere and it includes sucrose (as in table sugar), glucose, fructose (as in fruit sugar), lactose (as in milk), maltose or malts (as in rice malt and honey), jam (contains concentrated juice which is high in fruit sugar), palm sugar (traditionally used in macrobiotic cooking), maple syrup, corn syrup, and the very sneaky and BAD-4-you organic brown sugar, which is not all that different from white sugar. Even alcohol is a sugar… and brown rice syrup (a “hidden” sugar in some Kashi cereals).

Take a look at some of the things sugar can do to you, your body, your DNA, and your weight loss program, then think twice before eating so much of it from now on:

* Sugar is a major downfall in overweight people.  For obese individuals, consuming even a teaspoon of sugar a day would cause metabolic imbalances that contribute to obesity.

* Sugar can decrease growth hormone (the key to staying youthful and lean)

* Sugar feeds cancer

* Sugar greatly assists the uncontrolled growth of Candida Albicans (yeast infections)

* Sugar increases cholesterol

* Sugar can weaken eyesight

* Sugar can cause drowsiness and decreased activity

* Sugar can interfere with the absorption of protein

* Sugar causes food allergies

* Sugar contributes to diabetes

* Sugar can contribute to eczema

* Sugar can cause cardiovascular disease

* Sugar can impair the structure of DNA

* Sugar can cause hyperactivity, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and crankiness

* Sugar contributes to the reduction in defense against bacterial infection (infectious diseases)

* Sugar contributes to osteoporosis

Try honey (if you don’t like the strong flavor of clover, try alfalfa; it’s very mild [link on left, The Honey jar]), xylitol or stevia as alternate choices for sweeteners.  Raw honey has a long list of beneficial functions.  Honey increases calcium absorption, can increase hemoglobin count and treat or prevent anemia caused by nutritional factors, can help arthritic joints when combined with apple cider vinegar, can help fights colds and respiratory infections of all kinds, can help to boost gastrointestinal ulcer healing, provides an array of vitamins and minerals, and supplies instant energy without the insulin surge caused by white sugar.

    **http://www.naturalnews.com/021506.html

I don’t know what it is about the wind sprint type exercise but it really works.  My body got used to the routine I was doing and results stopped.  Nan experimented with me with this type of exercise (interval); although I argued with her, I tried it and began to get almost immediate results.  Of course I thought I was going to die at first even though I was in (what I thought) was pretty good shape.

Now it has become a part of my routine and I just automatically do 20 to 30 second bursts of speed and then the same slower. I have worked up to thirty minutes and am well pleased with my endurance and overall results.

The hardest thing for me to do was retrain my mind in portion sizes.  Then came not eating heavily after 6:00 p.m.  After years of training yourself the wrong way to eat, now you have to learn a new way of eating!  The reward is that it works.

You got to make the moment last!  Especially when eating.

I did a longer blog about Elegance on my sister blog, www.joy-cafe.com/joyblog.

In our fast-paced excessively clinical, contemporary world, many things have fallen by the wayside.  Elegance is word that means, “dignified richness and grace.”  Richness and grace tend to make you think of an era when people took time to have tea with one another. 

I discovered my mom’s egg cups recently.  We ate our boiled eggs in those cups when I was growing up.  I’d forgotten.  Mom taught my brother and me proper table etiquette – how to set a table and what use each utensil for.  Her theory was to teach us as children so that after we grew up we’d never be embarrassed dining out in a formal setting.

I hear your brain churning wondering, “Nan, what does this have to do with weight loss and getting back into your little black dress?”  Plenty!

So many in our society tend to rush into a fast food restaurant, shove down the food, rush back to their cars, go home, and plop down in front of the television for the rest of the evening.  I remember eating out with my brother a few years back, and we both shoveled our salads down as if the food was going to be snatched out from under our noses any minute!  My son is the same way.  I have NO idea where this came from BUT IT HAS TO STOP!

If you shovel your food down, by the time your stomach registers, “Hey, we’re full down here.  No, we’re more than full.  We’re overstuffed.  We feel awful!” you’ve eaten way too much.  I’ve heard it said that it takes about 10-20 minutes for your stomach to register fullness.  If you eat slowly, take the time to savor your food, and sit down at the table with a real plate, you just might stop eating long before you overeat!

I really think I ate so mindlessly over the past few years that I probably never registered what I was eating.  You know I didn’t gain all this weight by magic!  So Alpha Hubby and I are trying to make an effort to eat at the dining room table and use the good dishes!  We are taking time to savor the food (which tastes better now that we cut out chemicals) and eat like elegant people, not like pigs with our snouts in the trough.  He he.  Had to break up all this uppity-up stuff!

SLOW DOWN!  That’s my bit for today of what I’ve learned in the past few weeks.  I need to take my time eating and stop when I begin to feel a tiny bit full.  If any of us wait until we are really full, it’s too late.  We are overstuffed – and it will show!

  www.littleblackdressdiaries.com  and www.joy-cafe.com/joyblog

Love and marriage, love and marriage
They go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell you brother
You can’t have one without the other!

Is now officially rewritten:

Eat right and exercise
Eat right and exercise
They go together like jiggle and thighs
This I tell you brother
You can’t have one without the other…

Unless, of course, you actually do eat right and exercise then it will get rid of the jiggle and thighs – hoho!

So many times I’ve tried to just cut back on calories and drink more water in order to lose weight.  I totally ignored the fact that I needed to exercise.  It’s sort of like the song – you can’t have permanent and healthy weight loss without both – eating right and exercising.  Think of them as things that are inseparable.  Permanently fused together and not to be separated.  Think of them as being like ham and eggs, chocolate and smiles, love and marriage, Dr. Pepper and burps, babies and poopie diapers (sorry), hugs and kisses, Leland and Nan.  I really like that last one.  It just isn’t something that can be separated!

On this journey back into my first Little Black Dress, I’ve had some eye-opening revelations this past month.  I found out that food has to be such a part of my thinking that it is almost inseparable from normal lifestyle functions.  Now I don’t meant I think about food all the time to savor and stuff face with.  What I actually mean is that I have had to train myself to automatically think about food and its impact on my body and weight loss program all the time.  Doesn’t mean I haven’t blown it but that actually is becoming less and less… wow. I can’t believe I finally got to write those words.  Blowing it is less and less apt to happen.  Wow.

Since I gained all this weight because I was mindlessly eating now I have to think about what I am putting in my mouth in terms of being good for my weight loss and eventual maintenance program.  It has taken one month and 3 weeks to retrain my mind.  My mind has fought me every step of the way but it is not the boss of me.  I am no longer able to stuff my mouth with an éclair without thinking about the consequences… and taking the éclair back out of my mouth.  This is a HUGE victory for me.  It also RUINED my éclair affair.

I had to learn to think about the consequences of everything I ate.  This is not bad news.  It is very, very good news.  It is part of why my stomach is beginning to shrink – I’ve lost an overall 4 inches thankyouverymuch – and my clothes really are beginning to get loose again.

Eat right and exercise… dum de dum dum, la la de da de da de da da da da!!  

When you get as chemical free as possible then you don’t have the cravings. We have been trained by society to super size (more food). Buying into the “more food scheme” we continued to pile on the pounds. When we went to a restaurant and the food was brought to us in small portions (food didn’t touch) our minds would tell us to stop on the way home to pick up a burger and fries. We trained our bodies to eat more and more. We spoke to it by saying, “That is not enough to keep a bird alive.” Then we end up buying bigger clothes.

Well, it just goes on until you decide you don’t like what you look like and if you don’t like what you look like then guess what other people think? So what it comes down to is eating the amount it takes to fuel your body and avoiding processed foods. I used to be able to eat to triple-decker burgers but now one patty is enough because I retrained my thinking.

Eat to live not live to eat. If you don’t have a problem with what you look like then that is ok. If you are one who cares what they look like, then you can achieve it.

It is true the body will lie to you. It will agree with you to eat enough food until someone has to roll you away from the table because you ate so much you can’t move.  After years of eating anything and everything then the body turns on you and blames you for the shape it is in.  It says it is the one in charge when, in fact, you are the one in charge by the choices you made. You are the one who will make the decision follow-through on any bad thought the body has.

My son commented about the foods I eat (at the time he was still eating anything and everything he wanted).  He felt they were not tasty.  Well the truth is that when I became chemical-free, my taste buds changed and my body began to desire live (and healthy) foods.  I told him that I eat foods that I like.  If I didn’t like them I wouldn’t eat them. The key was to get my taste buds back to normal.

Chemicals mess up a lot of things in your body. Once in a while you are stuck at an office gathering (which is noted to have foods loaded with white sugar or white flour) and you will end up eating foods not on your list. The odd thing is when I get caught by it and eat something not on my list (doughnuts anyone?) they really don’t taste as good anymore and I want to get the nasty taste out of my mouth. I don’t have the same reaction to live foods. They don’t leave a nasty aftertaste.