Over the years, people have come up with wacky diets and fads to lose weight. Some of the fads include: an all carb diet (the reasoning being that if you don’t eat fat, you can’t get fat. Wrong!), a purely ketogenic diet (where you eat only fats and protein. Unhealthy and dangerous!), Raw food diets (where you only eat raw foods without cooking, microwaving, “ovening”, genetically engineering, etc…it…this is all well and good but how long can you keep this up), weight watchers diet (where each food resembles points and you can eat a certain number of points a day. You can eat virtually anything as long as you stay at or below your points level. This sounds great but if you’re someone who can eat only 20 points a day, and you eat a bowl of rice, you’ve already eaten 4 points, this is assuming you only ate plain boiled rice…you didn’t add meat, sauces, or vegetables. How long can you keep this up? And what if you’re in a situation where you’re not able to count your points? Then what?) I even met a girl who said that she counts calories. She’s 160 pounds and 5’4…She basically said that she eats whatever she wants as long as she stays under 1200 kcal a day. This means that she can eat double big macs, chocolate covered donuts, etc..as long as she stays under her allotted calories (this is not healthy! Firstly, she’s not eating enough calories for her size, secondly, she’s eating unhealthy foods. Sure she will lose weight, but the health effects aren’t worth it.)
As you can see, most people focus on losing weight rather than eating healthy and properly. There’s no magic way to lose weight other than through healthy eating and exercise. Even if you get surgery, such as liposuction, if you don’t exercise and eat healthy, you’re still going to have those clogged up arteries and a heart that isn’t very strong. It’s better to be fat and healthy than to be thin and unhealthy. It is possible to be thin and unhealthy. Some people, regardless of what and how much they eat, don’t gain weight easily. I think people should focus on a healthy lifestyle. You’ll notice that when people go on diets, as soon as they lose the weight, they easily gain it back. This happens mostly because their diets are only effective in the short term. For example, if you’re eating a raw food diet and you lose all the weight, afterwards, you want to go back to your normal lifestyle of eating cooked food, you gain the weight back.
When choosing a “diet”, it’s important to choose one that you can turn into a lifestyle. When you look at different diets, always ask yourself, is this something I can maintain for the rest of my life? If the answer is no, then that diet is not for you.
I’ve tried different “diets”; although, I didn’t know they were diets at the time. In first year, when I went home for Christmas, people kept commenting on how I’d gained a weight. It was so annoying. Before I went home again in the summer, I decided to lose weight. How did I do that? By a method which I thought was healthy. In the morning, I would have one small bowl of oatmeal (about half a cup) made with just water, or a small cup (cup not bowl) of Special K cereal with milk and no sugar. For lunch, I would eat a bowl of raw fruits and vegetables. For dinner, I would always eat a small bowl (less than a cup) of plain basmati rice and 1 piece of chicken drumstick. At that time, I thought eating protein made you fat so I limited my protein intake (this is bad and wrong). I also would go to the gym every day for 2-3 hours. Sometimes, I even went to the gym twice a day. When I say 2-3 hours, I don’t mean that I got there at 10am and left at 12pm. I mean that I exercised for 2-3 hours. All the cardio machines I did had automatic timers. If I stopped to take a break (which I never did), the time would stop. After I had done 85 minutes of high intensity cardio straight, then I would do some weights.
Naturally, of course, I lost a lot of weight. I lost about 20 pounds in a month. This is because I was barely eating and always exercising. When I came home, my mom did most of the cooking so it was hard to maintain that lifestyle. I gained about 10 pounds back. In 2nd year, I tried a smoothie diet. I only drank smoothies with fruits. Just put fruits in a blender (no milk, yogurt, etc) and drink it. Sometimes, I had a salad that was made of spinach, tuna, and fruits (no dressing). I managed to maintain a normal weight but once I started getting depressed, I started ordering a lot of pizza. Oh, during this time, I didn’t go to the gym that much.
3rd year, I tried a diet that basically allowed me to eat anything except I didn’t eat: rice, bread, or pasta. It was kind of like my modified paleo diet. I’m a huge fruit lover so during this time, I ate a lot of fruits. My diet was 80% composed of just fresh fruits. I also ate a lot of chickpeas, beans, and cooked a lot of Indian recipes. I still gained weight though because my housemate started catering. She was an amazing cook, and she would make all these things like African fried rice, african meat pies, pork chops (I don’t eat pork by the way, but that time, I did)…and eventually I forgot my lifestyle and just started eating what she cooked because it was yummy and free. w
What I noticed was that none of these diets were viable in the long run. At the start of fourth year, I was eating primarily chickpeas and salmon…and once in a while eating whole wheat pasta. I cooked a lot, but as soon as I made one friend, I started eating out a lot. I compensated this by going to the gym every day but I still gained weight because…I eat a lot. Most people, when they eat out, they eat one meal. I don’t really eat out. I would just go to a restaurant, order a meal, then go to another restaurant, order another meal, and go to 7-11 to buy some snacks and candy. I would eat that at home all in one sitting while watching a movie or a show. I can eat a medium pizza from pizza hut, 6 bread sticks, and 8 chicken wings to myself all in one sitting. Of course, I’d be really full after about the 3rd slice of pizza, but because the food is right in front of me…or in my fridge or whatever, I’d keep eating. Even if my stomach was bursting, I would still keep eating because I just really like food.
So how did I try to remedy this? Firstly, I did a lot of research on my body type, eating habits, etc. I found out that I have a gluten intolerance. I never knew I had one until researching about it. In the past, any time I ate something like bread, pasta, or anything wheat based, I got a lot of digestive problems. My stomach would hurt. When I say hurt, I mean it would feel like someone was stabbing my stomach with a thousand knives. I also would get really bloated and have a lot of gas (ew, I know). I didn’t think anything of it. I thought this was normal and happened to everyone. Also, I noticed that when I ate starchy foods like rice, I would get really sleepy like 10 minutes after eating…and I would have to go sleep. After discovering this, I decided that regardless of how tasty these foods were, I wouldn’t eat it.
So I eliminated: bread, rice, pasta, and potatoes from my diet. Bread wasn’t really hard to eliminate. I only like fresh baked bread. When I used to live at home, my mom would make the best fresh baked bread (from scratch not with a bread maker), bagels, and muffins every Saturday. In school (where I basically am for almost 11 months in a year), I didn’t have this luxury. There was a bakery close to my house in my old university so I used to go there all the time…but when I moved universities, that luxury was no longer available. Rice (even though I grew up eating rice…and I love it!) also wasn’t a problem because I only really ate that at home, at a friend’s house, or when I went to eat out. Pasta and potatoes weren’t problems either because I didn’t grow up eating that.
I based my diet mostly on beans and garbanzos (romano beans, kidney beans, chickpeas, and lentils). One of the guy’s I really liked followed the Paleo (Learn about Paleo here) lifestyle and told me about it. He kept trying to convince me to follow Paleo. I noticed that I was already eating Paleo, except that I ate Legumes. After researching Paelo, I decided that this was the lifestyle that worked both with my body type (android body) and health issues (gluten intolerance…etc).
The Paleo diet basically tries to imitate how our caveman ancestors, who were mostly hunters and therefore carnivorous, used to eat. Their reasoning for this is because they assert that it takes a very long time for our bodies to evolve. Modern homo sapiens (humans) appeared about 200,000 years ago in Africa…but we didn’t start farming and cultivating until about 12,000 years ago. Paleo supporters argue that 12,000 years is not a long enough time for our bodies to evolve enough to tolerate eating wheat based products, grain, and dairy…Of course, I completely disagree with this theory. 12,000 years is more than enough…and with things like natural selection, if these grain products were so adverse to us, nature would have selected against it. Allele frequencies also change every couple of generations.
Also, eating habits vary across the world. Some populations can tolerate: wheat, grain, dairy, and even starchy foods. The Japanese, for example, eat a lot of rice. Early West Africans diets were primarily composed of pure starch (they compensated for this by always hunting, working on farms, or doing other laborious activities). I think it just depends on the person. You know what your body can tolerate. You know what you can thrive on.
Eating Paleo means that your diet comes primarily from protein and fats but it’s not a ketogenic diet. The way the human body works is that we burn: carbs first, then fats, then protein for energy. The brain’s preferred source of energy is carbs so eating carbs is extremely important. If your diet is mostly ketogenic (eating just proteins and fats), fat becomes your primary source of energy because you don’t have carbs. This is why people on a ketogenic diet tend to lose weight a lot faster and a lot more weight in a shorter period of time…but Ketogenic diets aren’t healthy either. If you eat too much protein and fats, your body will eventually start burning protein for a source of energy…and proteins are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT for every aspect of life (trust the biochemistry student).
Some people say that Paleo is very similar, if not the exact same, as the Atkins and South beach diet. This isn’t true. In Atkins and South Beach, you’re supposed to eat just meats, fats, and leafy vegetables. This means you can go to McDonalds, order a burger, and eat just the meat and cheese. This means, you can go to 7-11 and eat their deep fried “chicken wings”. You can eat any meat and any fat regardless of how it’s cooked as long as you don’t eat carbs.
Paleo, focuses on healthy eating. In Paleo, you have to cook your own meals because there are so many things you can’t eat if you go out. For example, if you go to a restaurant and order chicken, and they tell you it was fried in olive oil, you can’t eat that. You would think, oh, olive oil is healthy…but plant oils aren’t good for frying because they create reactive oxygen species at high temperatures and this leads to health problems. Plant oils are only good eaten raw, like in salad dressing and stuff. In Paleo, you’re not supposed to eat anything with additives…this means you can’t go to the grocery store and buy their box of frozen chicken wings…because 99% of them contain additives even if they’re made with “100% white meat”. You also can’t eat refined sugar (cane sugar, white sugar, brown sugar, coconut sugar…any sugar).
You’re supposed to eat fresh (organic) foods (as in go to the grocery store buy your meats and vegetables fresh…and cook them with ingredients that you know such as lemon, herbs, salt, and other spices like cumin, paprika, curry, pepper…etc) With Paleo, you’re supposed to eat organic foods as much as possible. This is too expensive for me as a student. I always eat organic eggs but with meats and vegetables, buying organic is expensive. I basically did my research and found the list of dirty 15 and clean 15 vegetables. The dirty 15 contain the most pesticides and crap on them. The clean 15 contain the least. I eat from the clean 15 as much as possible. With meats, I always buy organic when it’s on sale…if it’s not on sale, I buy grain fed and free run if it’s on sale, if that’s not on sale, I just buy normal fresh meat.
Basically, in a Paleo diet, you can eat: Virtually any meat, fats (from animals, from plants like: olive oil, vegetable oil, coconut oil, avocados…etc) non starchy vegetables (You can eat sweet potatoes), nuts including nut butters (like almond butter, cashew butter…etc), seeds, and fresh fruits. This sounds like a very limited diet but there’s actually a lot of things you can make from that list You can even bake paleo bread (which I’ve done several times before. It tastes 10x better than normal bread), cauliflower rice (tastes great and has a similar texture to rice), and paleo pizza.
You’re not supposed to eat Legumes (dried beans like: chickpeas, kidney beans, peanuts, peanut butter, romano beans, lentils…etc). You’re also not supposed to eat dairy (this wasn’t hard for me to cut out because I hate milk, I barely eat yogurt…etc…and when you think about what’s in milk (all that blood and pus, and steroids that they feed the cows to make them grow fat fast, it’s easy to skip dairy)). You’re also supposed to avoid starchy vegetables like: corn, white potatoes (again, you can eat sweet potatoes, you can eat yams, you can even eat unripe plantains). carrots…etc.
I’m not strict Paleo. Before I started Paleo, I used to eat 1/3 cup of oatmeal (made with just water, no sugar…etc) and two eggs every morning for breakfast. I also used to eat legumes (a lot of beans and lentils). Legumes didn’t really have an adverse effect on my body and neither did oatmeal. When I started paleo, I cut everything out and only ate chicken, beef, and vegetables, and fresh fruits…eventually I cut out fruits except for avocado and blackberries. I would also make paleo bread and paleo pancakes as a treat on saturday after my workout. Honey is paleo, but I never ate it. After about 10 days, I got used to this lifestyle and it became my main diet for two months.
The only problem was that I noticed that I was always hungry, regardless of how much I ate and how much water I drank (sometimes 3 liters a day). I still went to the gym every morning for two hours…but I always had low energy and my two hour workout would take about 3 hours or 3 and a half hours to complete because I had to keep stopping. I decided to bring some things from my old diet back to my new lifestyle. Now, I eat 1/2 cup of organic oatmeal and 3 organic egg whites every morning after my workout. I’ll also eat 0% fat plain organic yogurt from Liberté (it’s made with just skim organic milk and bacterial cultures. Each serving of 175g only has 100 calories and 18grams of protein). I also eat organic peanut butter from Bulk barn as a treat a couple of times a week. Once in a while, I’ll eat an unripe plantain, yam, or sweet potato (these are paleo but if you’re trying to lose weight, it’s best to limit them). I’ll even eat rice (rice is a nightshade in paleo, meaning whether or not you eat it depends on how your body reacts to it). On days when I feel like cheating, I’ll make myself a chili with beans and I enjoy it very much. My body doesn’t react to it and I feel full.
The point is to find what works for you. Find what you can change into a lifestyle. People start a diet and they fail because it’s not viable in the long run. When you’re looking at a change in your diet, think to yourself, is this something I can maintain for a year. At first, it might be hard to. If you have diabetes type II, it’s best to follow the paleo lifestyle and exercise. If you’ve got PCOS or you’re an android body type or apple body shape (you gain weight primarily in your mid section and/or upper body), Paleo lifestyle works best for you too. It might be hard to stick to your lifestyle at first, but after 21 days it will stick.
When I started Paleo, all I could think about for the first few days was eating rice (even though I don’t even eat that much rice to begin with). I was literally dreaming about non Paleo food for the 5 days…but after finding a bunch of recipes that I liked, by the 10th day, it was just a lifestyle and I stopped thinking about those foods. I could even walk down Dot (my nickname for this street in my city which is just filled with restaurants: Lebanese, Somali, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, McDonalds, Harvey’s, 7-11, Pizza shops, bars…etc) and not be tempted to buy anything.
After about 2 months, my body got used to this lifestyle and whenever I ate something that I wasn’t normally eating, I got horrible stomach aches and really bad diarrhea lol. Paleo isn’t for everyone. My point is find what works best for you. Figure out your body shape. You can use this test (Liver doctor body type quiz). Monitor your eating habits and notice how you feel after eating certain foods. Most importantly, find something you can stick to.
If anyone tries to tell you that there’s a shortcut to losing weight, they’re wrong. The best way to lose weight is to eat in a manner that’s healthy for you and exercise. Regardless of what you choose, best of luck!
Prost
Miss Inquistive.