Dieting, Does It Really Work?
By Shawn Wilson
No they don’t! Personally I hate the word diet, for me it’s a four letter word. To describe myself, for many years I was an athlete, competitive swimming and competitive hockey was a big part of my life. Between the ages of 11 to 17 I worked out two hours before school and two hours after school, morning were always swimming and evenings was either swimming or hockey. I like many of us stopped this large amount of exercise when I turned 18. I unfortunately was never going to be a pro hockey player and swimming became too much work as my social life grew.
While for 3 years after this there was a huge decrease in the exercise I was getting I was still eating the same amount and never gained a pound. Year 4 wasn’t so kind. While I didn’t actually gain a lot of weight I lost a lot of muscle mass which all decided to locate itself around my waist. This process may sound like an excuse, it is more of an example of what happens to many of us. No we’re all not athletes but do experience two things, we exercise less and our bodies metabolism slow down as we age.
So here I am 31 and still what I would call stocky, but I am in pretty darn good shape. Instead of the crazy exercise that I used to do it’s now much more moderated. I have a dog and live in a very hilly area, so my daily walk with the dog provides great fresh air and fantastic exercise. I also try to get to the pool three times a week and swim for about an hour. Appearances are deceiving, while I am again not slim by any means I can walk or run faster than any of my “skinny” friends.
Now that we’ve addressed exercise let’s move onto the food side, the part that people often refer to as dieting. Why the word bothers me so such much is it takes the joy out of food. Next to sex, food is the most enjoyable part of life, I enjoy nothing more than eating a good meal with my family or friends and worrying about how much fat is in the food is never on my mind. Here are the only questions that should ever be on your mind when it comes to food.
Is the food real? So much of what we eat isn’t real food, proper fruits and vegetables and meat produced by local farmers is 95% of what my family consumes, year round. We are lucky in that we have a great farmers market near our house, many of the farmers now have green houses so in the winter months we have access to proper local organic produce. Next is buying meat from local producers, most of this for us is attained at the local farmers market, my grandfather used to always say “A local farmer that shakes your hand and looks you in the eye to say thank you is never going to do anything harmful to you are the animals he is producing, a big company on the other hand?”
Focus on Flavor and not fat content! If you’re eating real food and less packaged goods you’ll end up losing weight and feeling great. Our home has hardly any processed foods and we never worry about fat content, focusing on making proper food that tastes good is all we focus on.
Stop eating before 6:30pm. About 5 months ago I decided to change my eating habits. While I have been eating proper food for years now I was snacking and consuming desserts after dinner. If I have a sweet craving I will grab some dessert at lunch time. My new rule is eating only between the hours of 8-6:30, since changing this I have lost 25 pounds.
It was that simple eat great food, don’t eat late in the evening and if the sweet tooth should come to town I have something at lunch. This minor change makes sense, we need more food during the day and most of us in North America are accustomed to having large dinners and smaller lunches and breakfasts. Much of Europe does the opposite, large protein based breakfast, decent sized lunch and wine and cheese for dinner. Sounds good to me!
My point is you don’t need to make huge changes, you do need to listen to your body. Some people can handle more fat than others, that’s the key is you know your body better than any nutritionist so start listening. Most of all eating real locally grown food is not only good for you but creates less pollution as the food doesn’t travel far. A win, win for everyone!
This article was written by Shawn Wilson, a member of the customer support team at Datepad, where internet dating is always free. Datepad has a massive directory of informative dating articles along with a great list of dating site reviews on their dating blog.
