Thinking for myself

Yesterday's blog post taught me something.

This diet and exercise thing is a touchy subject.  It's like politics and religion and Michael Jackson--best left alone if you're not prepared to handle the emotional responses that are inevitably evoked.

It's OK.  I'm prepared.

Yesterday, I used words like "hogwash" and "bunk" and "nonsense" when referring to the grossly misunderstood and over-exaggerated notion of starvation mode.  I got some feedback from some people who felt I was attacking their chosen way of eating.


To those people, I say first that I'm sorry.  Sort of.  Sorry that I presented it in such a way that it came across as an attack on your way of life.  Secondly I say, please read it again if you still feel that way.  I dissed an idea, not a practice.  I dissed the weight loss community for insisting for so long that we are putting our bodies into starvation mode (bunk) if we don't eat every few hours, making many of us feel that the ONLY way to succeed at weight loss is to eat tiny amounts of food throughout the day and never enjoy a guilt-free meal again.  This is really misleading and completely overblown and it makes me mad.


THAT is the idea at which I am thumbing my nose.  

I have some great links that cite solid research which shows what it takes for our bodies to go into TRUE starvation mode, and I was going to post them, but I learned something else yesterday:  It doesn't matter what I post.  It doesn't matter if I get Richard Simmons and Jillian Michaels and that Tony Little guy with the awesome ponytail to shout it from the rooftops.  People know what works for them and they're going to take it personally if someone comes along and says "Hey, you might have been misled about the science behind what you're doing."   


I'm no different. 


My "diet" is the right one. 
My religion is the right one.
My presidential candidate is the right one.
And Michael Jackson was a pedophile.

So there.

This weight loss thing is a huge learning process for me.  This blog is a way for me to share what I'm doing and what I'm learning.  What's working and what's not. When I share some of my "a-ha!" discoveries, it's absolutely up to you to decide whether or not you give a crap.  It's up to you to decide if you want to lend it credibility and read more or just blow it off as one more piece of information you have to sift through or one more thing that Jacey's going to try and fail at.  I can live with either.  Just understand that much of what I write is for entertainment purposes and because I think I'm mildly amusing, not because I believe myself to be a foremost expert on losing weight.

I understand that the only way I will ever have a toned leg to stand on is to have measurable success and to finally be able to say, "HEY, EVERYBODY!  LOOK AT ME! THIS WORKS!"   Only then will anyone truly listen to what I have to say, and it's only then that anyone SHOULD listen to me.  After all, who am I?  Someone who's been trying and failing at weight loss for a lifetime?  Umm, yep.  That's me.  I've had a couple of big successes with it in the past, but here I am again.

I will repeat once more for the record that I believe that anything you do where you are restricting your calories will bring weight loss results.

Cutting out bread
Cutting out sugar
The grapefruit diet
The hot dog diet
The Ding Dong diet
The swallow-a-tapeworm-on-purpose diet

They might suck, nutritionally speaking, but they all create a calorie deficit (or massive amounts of diarrhea), so they all work for losing weight.

Of course there are things we can eat that are better for us and more beneficial to our bodies, but when it comes to losing fat, cutting calories will do the trick, no matter how you do that.

Two of my all-time favorite weight loss blogs are written by people who lost weight counting calories, plain and simple.  344 pounds is written by my virtual buddy Tyler W. who has made quite the name for himself in the weight loss world.  He's lost around 135 pounds eating food that wouldn't likely be considered healthy, just eating less of it.  The other fave, Can You Stay For Dinner?, is written by an amazing young woman who has also lost 135 pounds.  She is a food writer/critic/author.  Food is literally her life.  She loves a good meal and eats three meals per day.  Neither of these people is an advocate of the fasting lifestyle, to my knowledge, but that doesn't mean I don't have enormous amounts of respect for them and their successes.   They've done what works for them.  That makes it their "right thing."

I'm searching for my "right thing" and sharing what I'm learning along the way.

I'm straightforward. Some people don't like that.  OK. If you want to print out and shred my blog posts and let your pet bunny poop on them, I say go for it.  But when I say I've read studies that tell my common sense side that certain claims are hogwash, give me some credit for having half a brain and understand that I'm sharing information, not reading some anorexic goth teenager's blog and trying to pass it off as gospel.  And then go Googling stuff for yourself if you don't want to take my word for it.  But for Pete's sake, please don't argue with me about it if you're not willing to do what I've done, which is to explore ALL of the options and learn about them.

We all know what works.  We just don't all understand WHY our "right thing" works because there is so much conflicting "knowledge" out there. Everyone is an expert.  I try to take in as much credible information as I can and then think for myself using that information and my own common sense (I believe God gave us reasoning abilities and brains for a reason). And then I write about it and give my non-sugar-coated assessment and let you do with it what you will. 


In the meantime, I really love this post from fellow IF'er Jenna about fielding others' opinions on fasting vs. eating more frequently.  http://19hours-freedom.blogspot.ca/2010/04/achilles-heel-of-fasting.html

Now, time for some Billie Jean on Pandora ...