Eating too much of the wrong foods gets all of us in trouble, but we love to indulge ourselves. In other posts, I’ve written about the genetic causes of being overweight and the addictive causes, but in this post, I’ll touch on the emotional ways we cause our own weight problems.
Bad eating habits are easy to pick up. We get some of these bad habits at home. When I was growing up in a German household, we eat plenty of good wholesome food but it’s what we add in to give the food the extra flavor that adds the pounds. As families became more prosperous we became more indulgent. Potatoes, for instance, are a good wholesome food with plenty of nutrition but when we add all that butter and maybe some sour cream and bacon bits, well now that nutritious potato is about 800 calories or half of your daily calorie allowance. We usually had broccoli on the table, but everyone liked it with cheddar cheese melted on top. There’s nothing wrong with cheese, but it does add calories. Milk was on the table for every meal. My brother and I would consume one gallon a day. Meats had to be prepared with gravy and we usually had boiled potatoes with butter and white bread.
You can see now how wholesome food can be turned into high-calorie meals served with wine or beer. Today we know better than to eat foods prepared this way, but most of us if we have the chance will eat like it’s Thanksgiving every night. Those are 3000-calorie meals and if you combine those calories with breakfast and lunch even if they’re small you can see how the calories for that day could top 5000 or even 6000. If you're watching your weight, 1500 to 1800 calories would be your daily limit.
Naturally, most of us only have time to eat like that on Sundays. Most of us and this is the normal routine for the working American, will just have coffee or tea in the morning along with a roll or biscuit. That’s not a lot of calories, but there’s no nutritional value in the food, you’ll be hungry again in a couple of hours. So between 9 and 10 in the morning, we take a coffee break. The average office worker has been taking coffee breaks since the 1920s. Today everyone from truck drivers to the Wall Street stockbroker will take a short break at mid-morning. Most of us will have about the same thing as breakfast, coffee or tea or worse yet a soft drink, a roll, or a biscuit. Unknowingly we have already consumed almost 1000 calories and no nutritional food value, which means your body will need some real food by lunch.
Usually, people meet in the lunch room for 30 minutes, they bring something or eat out of the snack machines, or where I work we have 1 hour for lunch so most of us go out to eat. Going out to eat use to be a rare occasion, but today it’s very common. People have more freedom at work and most of us can keep our own hours.
Lunches usually consist of a sandwich, french fries, and coke or other soft drink, the kind of food you can get at a fast food restaurant. That is probably another 800 calories or so and very little nutritional value. We have used up the whole day's calorie allotment and still have very little nutrition to show for it. It’s the nutrition in your food that gives your body the energy to work properly. Your brain uses your body's energy to function, and your organs use energy to work properly. Ask yourself “how often do I get sick?” “Why is that?” O.k., I’ll tell you if you don’t already know, it’s your diet. You eat the wrong foods. I believe many different types of Cancer can be from the foods we eat. Most of the problems we have with our bodies are caused by the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe.
We all have to eat but we need to look carefully at what we put in our bodies. Food manufacturers are in business to make money and as long as their product doesn’t kill you at the time you're eating it or it can’t be proven that it harms you in any way, then they are pretty much free to make any food or drink they want regardless of the long-term effects to your body. You see a person eats all thru the day and is usually eating foods that contain the same things, so it would be hard to pinpoint the cause, of say, stomach cancer or even something less serious like food poisoning to any one food. Diseases like cancer are caused by the chemicals we eat, but one single food has such a small amount it can’t really hurt you, but let's say the lettuce for instance on your hamburger is grown with pesticides and chemicals are absorbed into produce, you can’t wash off pesticides, so every time you eat lettuce on a sandwich or in a salad, your consuming pesticides, and your body can’t process chemical so it stores them and they accumulate. And after years of accumulation, you end up with some disease that maybe science has a cure for or maybe not.
So why do we get fat? We’re eating foods our bodies can’t process. If your body could process all your foods, then the foods would be processed in the small intestines, the body would use what it needed and the rest would pass thru and no fat would accumulate, as long as you didn’t eat too much. But the processed foods we buy today are loaded with things that make the food taste better but things the body can’t process so those things are stored as fat. Storing unprocessed foods as fat is the only way our bodies have to move the excess thru our system. Overindulging will also cause fat storage. The body will only process so much per hour, so if you’re overeating the body will store excess food as fat. Your body can only do so much and it has to make room for the next meal. Your brain tells your stomach that more food is coming and to make room so your body will simply store anything that hasn’t been digested and the only way the body has to store food is to turn it into fat.
Now that might be an oversimplification, but I want you to understand the cycle and there’s actually more to it. When you gain weight and add inches to your waistline, your body has to use energy to keep all your body tissue alive including the fat. This is the part you want to remember, you should remain the same size all thru adulthood which usually begins between the ages of 18 to 22. When you gain weight as an adult your organs are not going to grow any larger to accommodate the larger body. The larger body has more body tissue to keep alive and so your organs have to work much harder to accommodate the bigger size and that includes your heart.
So why do overweight people tire easily? Partly because they have to carry the extra weight, but also because they are spending too much of their energy on keeping body tissue alive. You combine that with a bad diet of mainly fast food that has very little nutrition which your body needs to create energy to keep your body working and you have the perfect storm for early death. Even an overweight person can be healthy into their 80s or even 90s if they have a good amount of nutrition in their diet. And everyone has probably seen examples of overweight seniors.
Today young adults or even those of middle age should be living over 100 years, but with the bad diet that most of us have today I have to wonder if today’s young adults will be living that old and if they are what condition they’ll be in and how many prescription drugs will they be taking.
Look for my podcast by searching “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight” on the podcast app that you use. You’ll see a piece of my book cover.
If you really want to lose your body fat look for my e-books at the websites listed below. You’ll get information on Healthy eating, exercise, and diet. Instead of spending hours on the internet reading dozens of posts, you can save time by picking up one of my e-books.
There are two e-books. “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight?” is available at all the online bookstores selling for $3.99. Go to any of the websites below and search the title to find my e-book. This book gives you all you need to lose weight without spending money on gym memberships, diet plans, or meal plans.
Look for my book. at Amazon.com, bn.com, iBooks, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, or Gardner Books in the U.K.
My new e-book is available on Smashwords.com and other online bookstores. Just type “getting to a Healthy Weight” in the search box at the top of the home page.
No comments:
Post a Comment