Lean and Hard

"What diet are you on?"

I find that people who want to lose weight are generally in the market for gimmicks, easy ways to get around the inconvenient realities governing the operations of these complex mechanisms we call our bodies, and trick them into getting into fantastic shape with little or no effort.

Maybe science will find this magic pill one day. Unfortunately that day has not yet graced us with its presence. But human beings are nothing if not gullible, which is why scams work so well. We want the magic pill so badly that we buy into every unsubstantiated claim that comes our way, especially if it's got a good marketing strategy.

As evidence of this I direct your attention to this bizarre fad quickly becoming de rigueur among brides-to-be. Get into that tiny wedding dress in time for your wedding with the help of...a feeding tube! Don't look now but the groom-to-be just got scared and ran away.

The word "diet" implies something temporary, and most diets are so strange and restrictive that they absolutely should be temporary. So temporary that they end before they begin. And naturally, most diets don't work in the long term for this very reason. As soon as you get off them you start gaining back all that lost weight and more. You end up worse off than you were before you started.

Instead, we should be concerned about healthy eating.

But what is healthy eating? As the title of this post indicates, it's eating a diet (using the word in its broader meaning) that is sparse in calories but dense in nutrition.

Sadly, the foods that are marketed to us most heavily have just the opposite formulation. They are calorie dense and nutrient sparse. How about an example?

A 12-ounce can of Sprite has contained within its cool cylindrical shape 140 calories. What makes up its ingredients? Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, citric acid, natural flavors, sodium citrate, and sodium benzoate. Picture your cells getting a fresh delivery of these raw materials and thinking, What the heck are we supposed to do with crap? About the only thing they can do is trigger a huge insulin spike and stuff the calories away as globs of yellow fat in case an asteroid strike causes you to end up starving someday.

At the other end of the spectrum are so-called superfoods. These foods carry a huge nutrient payload of things your cells desperately need, but with a much more reasonably-sized caloric cargo. Here are some examples:

• Green Vegetables:kale, swiss chard, broccoli, artichokes, string beans, asparagus, spinach, cabbage, lettuce, and peas
• Yellow/Orange Vegetables: carrots, butternut squash, sweet potato, and corn
  Beans/Legumes: chick peas, red kidney beans, lentils, and adzuki beans
• Fresh Fruits: blueberries, strawberries, kiwis, apples, oranges, grapes, pears, pineapple, and bananas
• Non-Starchy Vegetables: eggplant, mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes, and onions
• Raw Nuts and Seeds: filberts, almonds, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, walnuts, cashews, pecans and flax seed

These are only a few examples, mind you. There are innumerable awesome foods out there to enjoy and experiment with!

My "diet" is simply an effort to fill my daily caloric needs with as much nutrition as I can. Taking in a limited number of calories per day with as much nutrition as possible packed therein: that's what it's all about. So why would I use up 140 of my precious daily allowed intake of calories with something as utterly useless as high-fructose corn syrup?

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In a way, this is like asking which wing of the airplane is better to keep it flying rather than plummeting to the ground, the right or the left? Stupid question, right? Similarly, both exercise and diet play an important, in fact essential, role in promoting long term weight loss. But unlike the airplane analogy, they don't necessarily have an equal effect.

Consider the math: If you spend 30 minutes on the elliptical at a moderate pace, and if you weigh 150 lbs, you will burn approximately 393 calories. If you eat a double whopper with cheese and medium fries, you will consume about 1400 calories. And they both take about the same amount of time to accomplish.

What does this mean? You have to work out like a demon to make up for eating badly, and you won't even come close.The way I look at it, exercise is crucial for building muscle and improving overall health, but it can't win the battle for fitness by itself. Controlling what enters your mouth is even more crucial when it comes to losing weight and keeping it off.

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