CONGRATULATIONS, YOU RETIRED, MEET YOUR NEW JOB
After you retire, your only job is to take care of yourself. Sadly, when you look around the majority of people you see are VERY overweight. According to government agencies almost half of the US population is OBESE and a sizable number (no pun intended) are Morbidly Obese (100 or more pounds over ideal suggested healthy body weight).
JUDGE YOURSELF
If you feel good, have all your mobility and are disease-free then you're doing great.
If you're 50-75 (or more) pounds overweight and sporting a chronic auto-immune related illness then it might be time to consider a different path forward.
Do you have a full length body mirror? If not consider getting one, there are inexpensive models for under $10. Take off your clothes and look at yourself, how's your shape? Attractive or swollen?
BEFORE YOU LAUNCH ON A DIET
Learning what to eat and when to eat are important to your diet. I'm in my 7th year working the Plant Paradox diet. It took a lot of reading and a healthy amount of luck to find this diet. Before 2006 my adult weight was typically between 220 and 250 pounds. In 2008 I read over 200 books about diet and exercise. By experimenting with what I ate and drank I was able to get my weight down under 200 pounds but it was a continuous struggle to keep it down and IT was always trying to go back up. No sooner would I get down around 190 and then in the blink of an eye I'd be back at 211.
In those days of dieting I was always hungry. It was because I was not eating nutrient dense foods when I did eat.
METABOLIC FLEXIBILITY IS KEY TO DIET WEIGHT LOSS
If you are sporting a girth of blubber around the middle it's probably been slowly swelling for years. Your body has become accustomed to storing triglycerides in your body-fat cells and it's pretty much been a one-way trip, UP in weight.
When we were young they taught that you could just reduce what you eat to loose weight but when you've spent a lifetime training your body to store fat it's going to take some work to change the direction.
Dr Gundry has a great video about Metabolic Inflexibility.
TIMED EATING AND INTERMITTENT FASTING
For me, Intermittent Fasting (also called "Timed Eating") has been a key ingredient to get weight off and keep it off.
Here's the short version, you do all your eating in an eight hour period and then you don't eat any more. Here in our home we've moved breakfast to 10am which means we have (ideally) until 6pm to eat other food.
10am - Breakfast, usually three scrambled eggs (fresh from our hens)
2-3pm - Main meal, Plant Paradox foods only
6pm - fresh fruit snack
STOP - Before you jump in you need to develop Metabolic Flexibility, that is, train your body to use calories from fat cells stored on your body.
If you just drop your daily calorie intake down to 1000 you'll feel awful and you'll literally starving yourself, yet for all the anguish you're going through you won't lose much fat.
Training your body to use fat takes time and a plan.
THE BEST PART
Once you train your body to a schedule of "Timed Eating" you won't feel hungry and it's easier to say NO to all those snacks that put the weight back on. You don't feel hungry because your body is actually using calories stored in fat.
Getting up and down out of bed, even out of chairs becomes so much easier when you ditch excess weight. Exercising becomes MUCH easier when you're lighter in weight, and that helps you burn a few more calories.
Watch Dr Gundry videos on YouTube to learn about the Plant Paradox and Timed Eating.
Internet Search on:
Timed Eating
Intermittent Fasting
Metabolic Inflexibility
Wishing you good mobility and health!
©2023 by Mark King, thanks for reading My Diet
It's not ok to copy or quote without written permission. Thanks!
