Common sense. Ignore gurus. Live and eat simply.
The following is an excerpt from The Morning After I Won the Lottery, which was a follow up to What I Felt When I Won the Lottery and The Unbridled Joy of Special Needs Parenting.
Recapturing my Youth
After I awakened, I started craving higher energy foods in smaller amounts, and I lost about 20% of my bodyweight over a four-month span.
I look and feel like a young man again.
Even now, I struggle to eat enough. I don’t like feeling weighed down and slowed up.
Previously, I didn’t mind a Friday evening gut-buster with a 14-ounce rib-eye eased down by cheesecake, coffee, and ice cream (lubricate the slopes, right?)
If it weighed me down, so what? It isn’t like I had anything else to do or the Qi to do it. (See results in body photo above.)
Now, I recoil at the thought of a 2,500+ calorie blow out. That would stop me from having fun afterward.
Screw that.
The Beatles were popular when I was born. I’m old.
Home scale extremes 194 to 152
Doctor’s scale 186.6 to 158.2 (Based on times of measurement. Doesn’t capture peaks.)
Hover range, 158–160 home scale.
Diet and Nutrition
The internet is a cesspool of misinformation on health and diet.
Let me share a few simple observations the don’t require complex bullshit to understand. (I hold diet gurus in low regard.)
Calories in minus Waste (defecation) equals calories available for Consumption (burning) in metabolic processes.
If Consumption is less than calories available, the body will store some as fat and expel the rest as waste.
If Consumption exceeds calories available, the body will first try to be more efficient with what comes in, reducing waste. This is why restricted calorie diets often fail.
If the body can no longer extract useful calories out of food, it will burn fat.
The body sustains a set point range, perhaps 2–3 pounds.
When body weight rises to the top of the range, appetite diminishes.
When body weight falls to the bottom of the range, appetite increases.
Slow weight loss diets nearly always fail because the ravenous hunger at the low end of a set point range is overwhelming. Every time I’ve succeeded at losing weight, I plunged through the set point lower barrier by fasting. Every single time.
If I eat carbohydrates, my body produces a host of different digestive enzymes than if I consume fat and protein. Changing gears from carbohydrate digestion to fat digestion is very uncomfortable, which causes most people to abandon their diet, me included. Staying in fat burning mode all the time is preferred even if all the fat comes from food.
Once I start burning fat, I don’t want to eat much food, particularly if fat burning is what I’m attempting. Every calorie I consume is a calorie not taken out of your fat.
Fasting is good for the body. It burns fat and allows the body to remove toxins, generally through urine if I drink a lot of water.
Excessive fasting causes muscular degeneration, but that is way, way down the road. I won’t lose much muscle on a 5-day fast. I’ve done several.
I can’t drink too much water. I simply pee it out. I am not unusual in that regard.
Electrolyte depletion is a thing. I Add salts to my water occasionally. It’s not as big of a thing as diet gurus make it out to be.
Hunger is a signal from the body that the stomach has finished digesting the last meal. How that signal is interpreted is completely up to me. Appetite is a phantom of the imagination.
A Hunger signal can be safely ignored.
Fear of Death shouldn’t be part of it.
How and What I eat now
When I was started college, the four food groups were candy, chips, alcohol, and caffeine. I consume none of those today.
I east mostly eggs, lean proteins, fruits, vegetables, and greens, olives of all kinds, and yogurt. That’s it.
I love foods with natural water. Eighty Percent of my foods are found in the produce section of the supermarket.
Hat Tip Tony Robbins.
Fruits and vegetables provide more energy than proteins. I’m biased toward energy since my heart races much faster than before.
Bread and grains always make me drowsy. I refuse to eat them. Plus, the chemicals my body releases to digest them cause discomfort after their job is done.
Basmati rice is okay, but starchy rices or raw starches of any kind put me to sleep.
Sugar, or foods loaded with processed sugars and fats cause flushing and sometimes nausea. Often they make a very quick trip through my digestive tract, no further details needed. I avoid those like the plague.
I eat 6 or more times per day, often in 100–500 calorie bursts. Rarely do I eat more than 500 calories at one time.
I only schedule eating if it’s with my family.
I never eat out of habit.
I never eat when I’m not hungry.
I never struggle with portion control.
Sorry, I think I will pass….
Feel the Body
My body improved because I was strongly motivated to improve it.
I maintained a disciplined habit of exercise most of my adult life, but I needed to rely on reminders of health or vanity to motivate myself to continue — at least I knew that much about self-direction.
But when motivation is weak, the results are similarly weak, but it was better than nothing at all.
When this change came, I suddenly found a thousand reasons to go to the gym and work out.
The workouts became painless and energizing.
I had to be weary of pushing myself beyond my aging body’s limits.
The mind was willing.
It was fun again!
I remembered those intense sessions doing heavy squats with my workout partner from 30 years ago.
I craved that feeling of complete physical exhaustion and deep personal satisfaction caused by pushing my physical limits.
Qi Cleanse
When the intense Qi burst hit me, I lost my appetite. I attribute it to the extreme activation of the chakra in my solar plexus, pointing right at my stomach.
Over a few weeks, I had episodes of nausea and night sweats as my body expelled every flesh toxin I had accumulated over the years.
I changed sheets a lot.
I scheduled a checkup, but the symptoms, which weren’t in any way painful, had subsided. My GI doctor gave me a clean bill of health.
Prior to this experience, I had no idea that powerful Qi flow can, in and of itself, be cleansing to the body.
Good to know.
Give yourself a reason to live, and you will live a longer, healthier life.
Another valuable fact.
Simple.
Cool!
I am thankful for the years of heart meditations to prepare my body for the new flow, or it might have killed me.
My heart-rate is higher, a necessity to fuel the body to execute on the Go energy coming from the Qi flow.
My blood pressure is low. The moment-to-moment experience of my body is stronger, like the pumped-up feeling after a workout, but all the time.
I feel young again.
I won’t be having a gut-buster on Thanksgiving.
~~wink~~
Anatta
About Anatta. How to Quote Anatta. Contact: selflessanatta@gmail.com
Anatta only responds to requests from the Heart.
