What did

one skeleton

say to

the other?

Congratulations!

You

reached

the

Finish

Line.

When it comes to the issue

of Weight Loss & Maintenance

of that Weight-Loss,

As Long as Llife Exists...

There

is

NO Finish Line.

Saying it Again....

There is NO

Finish Line.

Those who would like to understand more should read the article: Running DOWN the UP Escalator - Weight Loss & Maintenance. 
Also, review the articles contained here at DietHobby, under:  Blog Category:  Research - Science. 

Good food,
Bad food,
and
Subversive
Food Combining.

By Michelle
May 9, 2016 @  fatnutritionist.com 

The idea that there are universally “good” foods and “bad” foods is an old one, ancient even. There are traces of it in Leviticus, though the way the concept was used then is perhaps different from how we use it now.

Given what we know about clinical nutrition, that sometimes a startling mix of foods can be used to help people in certain disease states — more ice cream and gravy for someone undergoing cancer treatment, less protein and fewer vegetables for someone with kidney disease — and since dividing your risk among a wide variety of different foods can help hedge your health bets, the idea that there are universally good or bad foods doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny.

I take it more as evidence of black-or-white thinking — a hallmark of diet culture — which is almost always false.

The words themselves, good and bad, imply a moral dynamic to food that I just don’t think belongs there. Sure, food can be literally bad if it’s spoiled or contaminated with botulism. But even if you eat this kind of bad food and get sick from it, we don’t generally assume that you now have become a bad and contaminated person.

We just think you’re sick, send soup, and wait for you to get better.

Getting food poisoning doesn’t stain your character or reputation, even if you are literally contaminated by a bacteria that a food has transmitted to you. There’s an implicit understanding that the body is self-cleansing and will get the pollution, the infection, out of its system over time. And though you might be averse to eating a food that made you sick in the future, due to stomach-churning associations, you probably won’t assume it is a universally bad food eaten only by bad people.

We do, however, make this assumption about moral contamination, that (morally) bad foods
(which are coincidentally usually high-calorie, presumably “fattening” foods) are eaten
by bad, gluttonous, ignorant, irresponsible, and usually low-class (and coincidentally fat) people.

And we try to avoid those foods, we claim, out of concern for our health.
But, in practice, it appears to be much more about avoiding that moral stain.

Even if there are foods that, in isolation, don’t produce ideal health outcomes for most people, does the idea that these foods are uniquely bad while other foods are uniquely good actually help us to be well-fed?

I’ve asked dozens of people this question, “Does believing in ‘bad food’ help you to eat better?” It’s an honest question. After looking at the ceiling for a second, then looking down and letting out a bitter little laugh, they always tell me no.

No, thinking of the foods they want to avoid as morally bad does not help them to eat a more nourishing diet in the long run. It doesn’t even help them to avoid those foods, most of the time. For a lot of us, it only succeeds in producing guilt for eating a perfectly human mix of foods.

If a belief in good foods and bad foods helped people, on balance, to eat better, I could grudgingly get behind the idea, though being a fat hedonist, I would always advocate for pleasure. But it fails even in its stated objective, to say nothing of the side-effects that come with it.

I do believe there are foods that are generally more nutritious than others (in certain ways, keeping in mind that macronutrients and the calories that represent them are still technically nutrients, after all), and which usually leave a person generally feeling better, and generally in better health, than others. But there’s also something to be said for eating and including foods that are designed primarily for pleasure, not for the cessation of physical hunger or the promotion of long-term health.

Learning to break down the categories of “good” food and “bad” food is a little tricky, but it can be done.

One of my favorite techniques for doing this, aside from giving yourself explicit permission and acknowledging that all food is food, is to do what I called “subversive food combining.” This means, simply, putting together foods that you would usually classify as good and bad, and that you would usually keep apart (that “healthy” meal of fish, rice, and vegetables you eat when you’re being “good,” vs. the pint of ice cream you eat when you’re being “bad”) by including them in the same meal, or even on the same plate.

Maybe I’m a jerk, but it gives me a cheap thrill. Some combinations I’ve tried:

•     Potato chips and salad
•     Sauteed kale and pizza
  
•     Peanut m&ms and an apple
  
•     Boxed macaroni and cheese with pork tenderloin and greens
  
•     Carrots with bean and cheese burritos
  
•     Cookies and almond
  

Telling yourself that there are no good foods and bad foods is one thing. It is necessary, but not sufficient to produce an actual change in how you view food. Backing it up with action is crucial.

Try it. Break a few rules. Crush the false dichotomy.

So, if thinking of foods as either good or bad doesn’t actually help people to eat better, what does? In my experience, it’s eating observantly, but non-judgmentally, and taking note of your pleasure both during and after eating. Noticing how food both tastes during eating, and how it makes you feel, physically, after.

Over a series of hundreds of personal experiments, you can start to shape your eating in a way that makes the most sense to you, that leaves you both happy and feeling healthy, and that improves measurable indices of health, like cholesterol or blood sugar. But in order to conduct these experiments, .......

You have to give yourself permission to eat anything.

You have to acknowledge that food is neither universally good or bad, real or not-real, pure or polluted.

And you have to believe that it cannot, by association, make you good or bad either.

There are many online female body-positive, life-coaches, who claim to have a great deal of previous personal experience with diets and dieting.

The majority of them appear to be aged around the mid-thirties; with bodies that never became morbidly obese, but instead generally maintained at or near a normal body weight. 

Most of these online gurus of normal weight claim that they once bought into our advertisement culture which demands excessive thinness; that they dieted, restricted and binged in attempts to achieve an "ideal" body, but eventually decided to accept their normal bodies. They then began some type of intuitive eating, which caused them to continue maintaining their body at a normal weight.  Now they put themselves forward as experts who accept money to “coach” others along the path that they have discovered for themselves.

The concept of being able to trust one’s body to tell one what and when to eat (Intuitive Eating) is an appealing one.

I like the content of much of what proponents of IE have to say, and think that their message might hold true for people who have bodies that have always been near a normal weight (within 20-50 pounds). 

Unfortunately, people who have bodies that are well into obesity, or are “reduced obese”, have increased their number of fat cells, and have ratcheted their Set Point up to the place where trusting their body NOW,...  and following its eating instructions, ... will simply take them, and keep them, at or near the point of their highest bodyweight.

My own opinion is … IF you can accept having a body that stays at-or-near your highest weight, then trusting your body to tell you what to eat could bring a great deal of relief and peace of mind.  At this point, I’m not there.  However I cannot help but find what they SAY appealing.  Below is one of the articles written by one of these  “Life-Coaches”.

Organic Food and The Fuck It Diet
                by Caroline Donner

My prescription for obsessive eating or orthorexia is : eat. Let go of any and all food rules and restriction and acceptable eating amounts. Eat more than you ever thought you should. Neutralize all foods. Allow binges (and by doing that, it becomes not a binge.)

Eat and eat and eat, and eat the things you are scared of, until eating is just eating and food is just food.

It works. Especially when you are supporting your emotions and fears, and helping create a new expansive identity beyond food and body obsession.

It heals your metabolism and fixation on food.

It is the way to get to true intuitive eating. Attuned eating. Eating where you are able to simply listen to your hunger and cravings and not judge them for not being healthy enough, or not being what you expected or heard was acceptable.

“Healthy Food”

Lots of people think Yea well, I’ll eat, but I’ll only eat good healthy foods.

I want to share my view on “healthy” and organic foods.

Besides the fact that “healthy” is subjective, and the healthiest thing for you is what you crave in this very moment. And therefore healthy changes from day to day depending on what you need….

I LOVE healthy and organic foods. Maybe selfishly, I truly wish we lived in a world where access to healthy, sustainably and humanely raised, organic, non GMO, real delicious buttery food was the norm. I wish we could get back there. I wish it was accessible to everyone. I wish that was the food we ate. At least I wish that was the food I found everywhere I go.

In general, I like that food better. It tastes better to me. It feels better to me. And, perk, it helps our planet too.

And I’m not talking about low cal BS. I’m talking the real stuff.

But… it still doesn’t help to fear the other stuff. The” shit food”, as I call it, it IS all neutral. It is important to eat that food when you want it. In whatever quantity you want it. Forevermore. It is important to enjoy it, release all fear of it, and enjoy it.

Remember this: Perfect health does not exist by eating perfect foods.

Sorry about it. Eating pure perfect foods isn’t the be all end all. If it was, I would have cured myself doing the paleo diet and I never would have started The Fuck It Diet. Perfect food (whatever that is) does not cure all our earthly woes and health problems. And some “shit food”, as I sometimes call it, will not ruin our health.

It just won’t.

As Linda Bacon says in Body Respect, what has more impact on our health than anything else is how much power, autonomy, and agency we have in our lives. Feeling stressed, marginalized, financial burdens, prejudice, and fear of the very things we are using to sustain our life force cause more health problems than any health habit.

Fearing food is not good for us.

Part of orthorexic or food obsession recovery is about  truly neutralizing food and weight. And that includes eating any and all food you want. Especially foods that scare you. Rancid fried oils in your nachos? Bring it on. It can not will not ruin your life or your health. It just doesn’t hold that much power.

Realizing that no one food has the power to heal or destroy you (unless you are legit allergic to it, in which case, more power to you! Become aware of that stuff. Thank your body for communicating so amazingly to you.)

Are rancid fried restaurant oils the best? Surely not. Does it matter in the big picture. NO.

Pop tarts might be just the thing for you. It will help you heal your fear of foods, it’ll let your whole being know you are feeding and taking care of yourself physically and emotionally, and it’ll do just as much work to speed up and repair your metabolism as a “healthier” food.

Intuitive Health Food

It is so essential to eat foods because you want and crave them. The best bet to getting to a place where you are really eating what you want and crave, is to get through all fear and food fixation. If you are eating wild salmon because you are forcing yourself to, as opposed to when you really really really want it, your health will flourish so much more from eating it when you crave and want it.

Organic, whole foods are great. I think you are great for your health, happiness, taste buds, and the planet, but trust your body when it wants other things. Trust this process.

Do not force health foods on yourself. Be open to eating and exploring them when you want them. Until then, realize that your nachos and pop tarts are exactly where you need to be. You can trust your body to lead you right. Give it time.

While I love the sentiments expressed in the above article, I have to take what seems workable for me, but leave the rest  .... BECAUSE.....

the advice does NOT come from a “reduced obese” person, who has lost weight from high obesity, and thereafter maintained a normal weight for decades. 

Very few such people exist, and all of them who can be found, indicate that ongoing vigilance with food and/or calorie restriction is necessary for their personal weight-maintenance. 

This has also been my own personal maintenance experience during the past 10+ years.

The author, Caroline Dooner seems to be in her mid-30s and appears to naturally be a normal weight. She puts herself forth as a body positive Life-Coach, with emphasis on “Life Recovery, finding food and body ease”.   

She has written a couple of eating disorder “recovery” books, and recommends Health at Every Size,  Body Respect, Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere, as well as books by Byron Katie, Elizabeth Gilbert.

REMEMBER:
STARVING WORKS.