When it comes to weight, diet, food, and nutrition, the simple fact is, I do not have all the answers, you do not have all the answers, and neither does anyone else. If an author, a guru, your priest, rabbi, or your brother-in-law claims to know what you should eat, how you should eat, and why these answers are
the answer,
RUN! There are too many unanswered and unanswerable questions, for anyone to claim expertise about you.
On the other hand, if a person claims to know what is right for themselves, and what has worked for them, stick around and listen. If their plan resonates with you, and you do not have a better plan of your own, give theirs a shot. If it works for you, great, if it doesn't, move on.
BUT, and this is a
BIG BUT, follow their plan, wholeheartedly. Do not go at it half~assed and then claim it doesn't work. If you do, that will not only
not make you as healthy and happy as your friend, it will also make you
extremely annoying!If you try to eat all raw food, but often fail, and you do not get the results you were led to expect, do not blame the raw food diet. You were never on a raw food diet; you were unsuccessful in your attempts. Now, that may well mean that it is not a viable diet, at least not for you. But it does not mean the diet did not work. The same is true of any diet, food plan, or lifestyle change; they cannot work if you do not follow them. If you are constantly breaking or bending the rules, you have no idea what they can or cannot do for you. To find out, you must comply 100%, 100% of the time.
I am an expert at failed diets. I have failed at every diet or lifestyle plan I have ever attempted. I had lots of success, but eventually I failed, so I never realized the results promised by each plan. But I knew the problem was that I could not follow the plan, not that the plan was not a good one. These diets, however were not right for me because I could not follow them. They may have worked wonders for you, but that did me no good at all.
Why am I looking for a different way to eat? The main reason is that I am fat and I have an overweight daughter. What brought me to raw food was the fact that both of us were in the early stages of type 2 diabetes. I was desperate for an answer. I knew we had to eat differently, but I had no idea what we needed to be eating or not eating. I already ate better than anyone I knew.
I was never heavy as a child or a teen. I began gaining weight in my early twenties. After I had my first baby at 27, my weight sky rocketed. I began yo-yo dieting and had lost most of the extra weight when I became pregnant again 10 years later. I kept my weight under control while pregnant but went up again after Suzanne was born. I tried every diet under the sun, but could not keep the weight off. I just kept getting bigger unil l I weighed 220 pounds.
Suzanne was a small child. She was nursed for three years and ate little during that time. She is a lifelong vegetarian. She ate eggs and dairy products, but not excessively. She ate better and was more active than my two older children, or any child I have ever met. Her favorite food when she was 3 was kale. She started gaining weight at age 8 and has been overweight since then. When she was 10, I found she was diabetic. We have been diet shopping since then.
Suzanne was never still, didn't watch TV and had no use for computers. She swam competitively and attended dance class every day. She loved vegetable sandwiches on whole wheat bread, fruit, veggies. She did not eat sugar or white flour. As she began to have weight issues, we stopped all fat. Nothing helped. We tried high fat/low carb diets, almost impossible as a vegetarian, with no success. No matter what she ate or didn't eat, she continued to gain weight.
Tasha was a huge baby and a chubby toddler. Around 6, her weight normalized. As she got older, she became thin, but not overly so. She has never had a weight problem and can eat anything and lots of it. She has never been sick and only went to a doctor when she had Christopher. She has been through times when she ate nothing but junk food and never gains an ounce.
There is no easy answer to this. We get lots of advice. Everyone has their ideas, but the truth is no one knows why this happens. I can eat a "normal" meal and gain 5 pounds. This does not happen to most people. I have to fight to keep from gaining weight no matter what I am eating. When I came to high fat raw I had lost a lot of weight on the Atkins diet. I managed not to gain at first, but never lost. BUT I was never really a high fat raw foodist because I did not stay on it long enough to have verifiable results.
I have some ideas about what goes on in our bodies, but no way whatsoever to know if I am right. Eating fruit is the only way I have found that I can lose weight, when I stay faithful to this way of eating. When I go off, I gain weight. You may say that my thin daughter, when not eating well, is not really healthy. I don't think you are right. I think she is healthier than the rest of us.
My grandmother and grandfather ate the same very high fat southern food their whole lives. My grandmother was thin when she was young, and a large, heavy woman when she got older, just like me. My grandfather was a tiny skinny man. My grandfather was extremely active, riding a bike everywhere into his 80s. My grandmother was inactive. Neither of them ever had cancer, heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, or any other disease. My grandmother had occasional blood pressure that was a little high near the end of her life and they gave her a diuretic to take during those times. Neither was on any prescription medicine. My grandfather died at home at 90. My grandmother died in a nursing home at 88, after an 8 week illness. Before that she had her own apartment.
My grandparent's long life and relatively good health was not because of diet and exercise. What was it due to? I'm sure many people will give me an answer, but the truth is, no one knows.
What is going on with these 100 pound babies we are seeing on television? Is it their parents fault they are so big? Dr. Phil says so, so it must be. Do you think you could take most babies and do anything to get them to weigh 100 pounds at 2 or 3 years of age? I don't think you could. I think most children could never consume the calories these children are consuming. They would throw up before they could eat the thousands of calories these hungry children are eating. Half of the children in America live on junk food and most of them are not fat. Something else is going on. When it comes to nutrition, we do not have the whole picture.
I keep two babies. Until they were a year, they both had formula as their primary food. They were each tiny newborns. Gavin ate some food before he was a year. Paxton eats almost no food; he has no interest at all in eating. At 12 months, Paxton weighs almost 30 pounds; he is enormous. At 12 months, Gavin weighed 23 pounds. They were consuming the same food. They were the same age. There is more to this picture than we can see. True, genetics are involved, but why is Paxton so much bigger than other babies his age? Why is he so fat? He drinks less than Gavin at that age. I don't know and neither does anyone else. When it comes to size, weight, calories in, energy expended, etc etc etc, there is no clear pattern, no matter what anyone tells you.
My two biological children each weighed the same at one year, 18 pounds. Andrew is now 6 foot 4 and Suzanne is 5 foot 7. Suzanne was breast fed; Andrew was on soy formula. We took Christopher off of soy formula at 8 months and put him on bananas and sesame milk because he was so fat. Yet, I have seen skinny babies on the same formula. I have been searching for answers for almost 30 years now and have concluded that the only person who can help me is me. No one else can do any more than suggest something that they have seen, heard of, or tried. That is all I can do to help anyone else.
I am hoping we will be able to eat a high fruit diet, lose weight, and be thin and healthy forever. It would be a dream come true. I am losing weight and doing better at staying away from other foods. I am convinced that, for us, the fat in our diets is the problem. ( I am choosing to ignore the fact that the only diet I have lost substantial amounts of weight on is the Atkins diet. It is not an opton for me any longer, but it does throw a monkey wrench into the whole low fat thing, when considered, doesn't it?) We have to be on an almost no fat diet to lose weight. But, even if it does work for us, you will not hear me saying it is THE DIET for everyone. If it works for me, I will gladly share my story, if you are interested. I know enough to know that I do not even know everything about my body. I certainly do not know everything about yours, and neither does anyone else. It is up to each of us to do our own research and experimenting, to figure out what works for each of us. If we can share that information, we may all benefit. We may not ever know everything there is to know about any of this, but I believe we can learn enough about our own selves to get healthy and reach the level of wholeness we are all dreaming of.
Until tomorrow!
Love & Sunshine!
Connie
