Here are a few ideas that I’ve tried to follow in order to maintain a good and healthy weight. To be honest, what has helped a lot on top of increasing my raw food intake, has been the amount of walking that I do every day instead of driving or even using public transport – if you need something from the shop and it’s a 20min walk from you, walk! It may sound like a long way, but after a couple of times you’ll soon wonder what you were so worried about.
Anyway, here are a few ideas:
WHAT TO AVOID AND WHAT TO DO
1. A way of Life – The most important part of losing weight is realizing that you’re not going on a quick-fix diet, but rather that you’ve recognized that your current way of life and the food you ingest are doing you more harm than good. When you acknowledge this, you will be able to change for the better because you will be improving your lifestyle rather than punishing yourself by not eating the foods you love. Don’t forget, at least 1/3 of our current medical ailments are directly related to our bad diets.
2. ‘Fabulous’ Fat – We are genetically programmed to eat a lot of fat when we see it, because when our ancestors came across meat and similar fatty foods they had usually been without it for a while and their bodies knew that it would be another long time before they’d be able to eat it again. This is why we are so attracted to fatty foods and find it hard to stop once we start eating a packet of chips or cake, etc. The secret: arm yourself with energy-giving foods such as nuts and dried fruit. These fill you up and give you the energy that the sugar in sweets, etc., was going to give you for a brief moment, before making you want to eat more.
3. A Treat – The second secret in this regard is to make it a rule that you never, ever buy sweets, chocolates, cakes, bread, etc., when you’re alone. Designate one person with whom you can eat these things, like your partner or a specific friend, and make sure that you only eat junk food when you see them (if it’s your partner, have a specific time when you can eat junk food, otherwise you’ll eat it all day at the weekend) – this diminishes the number of hours in which you could be filling up on the wrong types of food and makes junk food a ‘treat’ again rather than a normal part of your daily diet.
4. Corrupt Coffee – Minimise your coffee intake (1 cup a day, at most!) – this will not only reduce cellulite, but coffee is destructive for your intestines which means that you aren’t able to absorb all of the nutrients in your food. You need the nutrients in order to lose weight! Lots of nutrients doesn’t mean lots of food. You can eat less food and ingest more nutrients if you just make sure that you eat more fruit and veg, and diminish the foods that make nutrient-absorption more difficult.
5. Brown is Beautiful – Change from white to wholewheat in everything you eat – for example, when rice is white it means that the outer layer has been removed. This outer layer contains all of the rice’s nutrients and fibre – and fibre is very important for keeping your cholesterol down, your blood sugar stable, your heart healthy, and your stomach working (the more you go to the toilet the more weight you lose). If you eat white rice you’re just eating starch without the good part. Starch turns to sugar which turns to fat if you don’t do enough exercise to use the sugar!
6. Bad Bread – Stop eating white bread! And try to avoid bread whenever possible! Bread (and all products made from wheat, like pasta and cakes) contains gluten, to which a large number of women are intolerant. Not only has gluten been related to many common diseases, including cancer, auto-immune disorders, neurological and psychiatric conditions and liver disease, but it also sticks in your stomach for a really long time, makes your stomach bloated and painful, and again hinders proper nutrient absorption. Not only is it unhealthy for you and makes you put on weight, your bloated stomach makes you look fatter than you really are.
7. Rue the Red Meat – Stop eating so much red meat. It is a LIE that you have to eat red meat in order to get enough protein and vitamin B12. Most vegetables contain protein and it’s the dirt on your veg that gives you the invaluable B12. In fact, sprouted lentils have 7% more protein than a piece of meat, as well as loads of fibre and other super essential vitamins that meat doesn’t contain. Meat is linked to severe medical problems such as: heart disease, colon cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, kidney disease, hypertension, obesity, to name but a few. One piece of meat takes 2 weeks to leave your body. In the meantime, it causes the appearance of numerous bacteria in your stomach and damages your intestines, once again making it difficult to absorb essential nutrients. Bits of meat get caught in the folds of your intestines, which means that you have pieces of rotting meat inside of you for months and months at a time!! Uggg! If you have to eat red meat, keep it down to once or twice a week, have fish twice, chicken once or twice, and the rest of the time eat vegetables – there is no need to eat more meat than that!
8. Disastrous Dairy – Minimise your dairy intake. Dairy products such as milk and cheese are high in fat, and we don’t actually have the enzymes (the things in our bodies that digest our food and give us energy) to digest them. Most people around the world are intolerant of dairy products, which is why so many of us are constantly suffering from sore, bloated stomachs, headaches, sinusitis, and general feelings of unhappiness. Milk also causes excess mucus formation, which cancer loves!
9. Sodding Soft Drinks – Stop drinking soft drinks! Not only is there masses of sugar in each can, but a substance that can strip paint and clean engines (like Coca Cola) should not be in your body! Switch to water, or juice if you must. Women need to drink 2.5l of water a day – that’s 5 bottles of water. It’s actually not much over the whole day, but it cleans out your system and helps against cellulite, amongst many other things.
10. The Light Lie – Don’t go for the ‘light’/’zero sugar’ options. As a way of maintaining the sweet taste and filling feeling of the original version, other forms of fat and artificial chemicals are added. Rather eat the real thing and just minimize how much you eat, e.g. if you’re a coke addict, have a set day like a Saturday in the afternoon, to treat yourself to one real coke rather than drinking the ‘light’ versions all week. You will put on more weight if you do this!! (and by ‘one real coke’ I don’t mean an entire 2l bottle to yourself!)
And it applies to everything, from low-fat yoghurt and ice-cream to artificial sweeteners (basically chemicals in a bottle).
11. Stairs to Weight-loss Heaven – Climb the stairs more. Do not stand on the escalators waiting to get out of / into a mall or station, etc. Walk up and down escalators or stairs as a first means of getting in some extra exercise.
12. Raw is Rad – Eat more raw food. When we cook food we lose up to 80% of the nutrients, all of the Vitamin C and B-vitamins, and we expose ourselves to dangerous carcinogens and fats like trans fat. Try to make each meal at least 70% raw (like a big salad) and 30% cooked (some cooked veg and brown rice). You actually get a lot more energy out of eating raw food because your body does less work digesting it and the result is more nutrients being absorbed than would happen with a cooked food & meat meal.
13. Fabulous Fresh – Buy a liquidizer and start making more soup and fresh fruit juices. Don’t use chicken / beef stock in your soups – rather use fresh herbs to add taste to the soup. As for fresh juices, these are much more delicious, healthy and cost a lot less than buying juice in a container.
14. To Drink or Not to Drink – Try not to drink when you eat. You know when you usually eat lunch and dinner, so you can judge when you should stop drinking (30 minutes before eating) and can then time how long to wait until you can drink again (various accounts range from 30 minutes to 2 hours – try at least an hour to be safe). This is because drinking dilutes your stomach acid, which means that it’s more difficult for your stomach to digest your food so you get less out of the food you’re eating.
15. Super Soya – Eat more soya products – substitute milk for soya milk, mince meat with soya ‘meat’, etc.
16. Salty Sensation – Change your salt to less-refined, low-sodium salt. The 50% less sodium version is often more expensive but it lasts a long time as we shouldn’t eat too much salt in our diets. Among other things, salt is water-retentive, which means that it makes you look bloated and fat. If you can, change to sea salt and look in heath shops for various herb and spice combinations to substitute salt on salads and veg.
Hope that helps! Obviously there are millions of other tips including not drinking and smoking and types of exercise to do, etc., but I think I’ve written enough for now.
Here’s a raw soup recipe that would be a great step towards being nice and healthy:
RAW TOMATO SOUP
Raw soup uses water that isn’t warmer than 47⁰C – if you can put your finger in the water it’s fine, but it must’ve get hotter than that.
Ingredients:
• 5 tomatoes
• 2 red peppers
• 1 stick of celery
• ¼ red onion
• Some fresh basil
• 1 handful cashew nuts
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• Enough warm water for desired thickness
Method:
1. Cut up all of the ingredients very finely
2. Add to a liquidizer along with the warm water and blend until smooth.
3. Add salt and herbs to taste
4. If you heat it up later to eat, stir continuously and stop heating before it gets too hot for your finger.
Variation:
1. To thicken it up a bit and make more of it for the family, add cooked lentils when blending.
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GAGGING ON GELATIN
I’ve been a vegetarian for a really long time, more than half my life (I haven’t lived that long yet, so it’s quite an achievement), and loving it more and more every day as the world is ravaged by diseases caused by the consumption of antibiotic + hormone-filled meat or the various viruses caused by its production – yeah, I’m sure to catch the H1N1 living in a huge city as I do (or commuting here every day - hold thumbs for good news soon!), but at least I wasn’t part of its cause.
Anyway, that aside, let me tell you what happened to me a few years into my vege life. I had for a long time naively assumed that beloved jelly would have been made from something synthetic by now (much like one would like to naively assume that archaic barbaric practices like whaling are a thing of the past). Sadly, both assumptions are hugely incorrect L (and after checking this up on the web, it seems that a lot of vegetarians have found themselves in the same pickle).
One day I quietly had a squizz at the ingredients on the side of the jelly box as my housemates and I (this was in the uni days before I became Ms. Vigilant about food ingredients) were in the throws of preparing shots of vodka jelly. To my absolute horror, there it stood: BOVINE GELATIN. As you can imagine, I almost fainted, and was briefly consumed with the illogical urge to throw up the past few years’ total consumption of the stuff. My housemates got to drunkenly finish off the jelly on their own, and I have never again been able to eat a chewy sweet and various desserts that insist on containing this rather odd type of food.
I now live in a country that (apart from eating red meat 2-3 times a day!) seems to have a similar obsession with eating gelatin. Every restaurant sports bowls and bowls of the stuff – I’m guessing because of the belief that it’s good for us.
Let’s set the record straight, and then give it up for good – it may look and taste yummy but so does a McDonald's burger, and we all know where that should be thrown!
WHAT IT IS:
A tasteless gelling agent derived from the collagen found in animals’ skins and bones (not from their hooves, as I’d believed for a long time). Its E number is E441, so if the word gelatin isn’t listed in the ingredients, have a look at the various E and INS numbers to see if the manufacturers have snuck it in with that name (as they tend to do, trying to con conscious consumers into continuing to eat the additives they’re trying to avoid!!!).
I read one response to a thread that said that eating gelatin is just eating the molecules that were once part of an animal! Hmmm, a very sweet and sneaky way of covering up the fact that food / chemical industries boil down parts of animals and put them into a massive number of products, often without our even knowing it.
WHERE IT’S FOUND:
It seems like it’s everywhere! Sigh… yes, like MSG, gelatin seems to have found its way into most of our common day products. Here’s a list – there are usually vege-friendly versions (depending on which country you live in), you’ll just have to start checking every single ingredients list to make sure:
EDIBLE PRODUCTS
- Jelly
- Many cold desserts
- Meat pies
- Marshmallows
- Some low-fat yoghurts, cream cheeses, and margarines
- Many ‘light / lite’ food products
- Jams
- Those chewy sweets
- Some brands of gum
- Frosted foods, even some frosted cereals
- Biscuits
- Cream
- Custard
- Soft drinks that contain beta-carontene
- Packet soups
- Vitamin and medication capsules
SOME INDUSTRIAL USES
- Glue (remind me again why we eat a substance that we use in industrial glues?)
- Photographic films and papers (go digital!)
- Cosmetics (under the name hydrolyzed collagen)
- Crepe paper, glossy playing cards and glossy paper
- Paintball shells
NUTRITIONAL VALUES
Ok, so the Gelatin Manufacturers Institute of America, Inc., says that gelatin is great because it “can complete and increase the amino acid composition of other protein sources" when eaten with other protein-rich foods, and cites the fact that it serves as a good replacement for fat, cream, eggs and starch because it binds water well and makes that full feeling that we usually get from all the ‘tasty’ fat that’s put in our food stuffs – then again, I’ve lost all faith in these American ‘Institutes’ posing as informative sites when in fact they’re simply lobby groups out to dupe us – the website states that gelatin has no E number whereas further research indicates that it in fact does…hmmm, I see an obvious trust issue when it comes to US food groups– let’s not even get started on my beloved FDA!!!
IN CONCLUSION
Anyway, yes, fair enough, for non-vegetarians, I guess gelatin serves a purpose. But it’s not thatnutritional (although it’s 84 – 90% protein, it’s an incomplete protein, high in non-essential amino acids, and lacking some of the essential amino acids we need), so it’s definitely not enough for me to jump back on the reduced animal-part bandwagon. Let’s face it, it’s made of pig and cow skin and cow bones, from the same animals that had to go through a torturous existence and hideous death so as to feed the world’s insatiable meat-eating population.
My advice: read the labels and stay away. Although (and I say this with a tear in my eye) it’s probably impossible to avoid it completely, we can definitely try. Check the ingredients and opt for the vege version of gelatin, like pectin, carrageenan, or agar, and support cosmetics companies that are animal friendly – would you really want to put animal skin all over your face, after eating a nice big bowl of what could effectively also be used to glue your furniture together? No thanks!
