Healthy Lifestyle / Nutrition

[blixa]

I'm glad you brought up how some people become vegetarians to lose weight. It's a healthier diet, but you can still eat very badly while following an animal friendly diet. I gained 30 lbs by eating out on a daily basis. I think becoming a vegetarian should be more than just losing weight--there definitely needs to be more of a purpose. The only way you're going to stick to a vegetarian diet is if you truly want to be a vegetarian. Whether it's the taste of meat or your beliefs on animal rights, the purpose needs to be substantial otherwise you'll never stick to it.

I know a buttload of vegans that are extremely overweight because all they eat is bread and all the drink is beer. It's unbelievable. If you're going to make a statement about what you believe in, at least try not to kill yourself in the process.

people make two mistakes about vegans that the vegan is supposed to be really healthy or that the vegan is lacking in vitamins and is deficient. there are fat and skinny vegans. carbs are carbs no matter what diet you follow.

i get a blood test every once in a while and my doctor always says the same thing, that i'm the healthiest patient he has. i've gotten to the point where i haven't eaten meat in eight and a half years and i have so much variety in my diet that i don't really get worried about anything anymore.

[chick de la lynch]

I get really annoyed when meat eaters tell me they're going to out live me because I don't eat meat. Then again these meat eaters don't make a valid argument, which is just even more annoying.

[oldgentlovecraft]

I enjoy eating whatever I feel like eating, within reason, but without worrying about how it's going to shorten my lifespan. People that are worried about staying healthy to the point of restricting their diets are scared of death (and life for that matter), and the only true vegetarians that I'll tip my hat to, ever, are those that eat that way because they enjoy it.  Simple as that. If you don't like meats because you really don't like meats then enjoy your diet.  Vegetarians are the emos of the culinary world. 

[wheresmysnare]

I enjoy eating whatever I feel like eating, within reason, but without worrying about how it's going to shorten my lifespan. People that are worried about staying healthy to the point of restricting their diets are scared of death (and life for that matter), and the only true vegetarians that I'll tip my hat to, ever, are those that eat that way because they enjoy it.  Simple as that. If you don't like meats because you really don't like meats then enjoy your diet.  Vegetarians are the emos of the culinary world.  

+100000000000000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_foodism

...lol

[lostpilot]

I cannot eat meat anymore. I find it repulsive. It sickens me now..

[black coffee]

When I was younger, I didn't eat meat and I was made fun of as "the vegetarian" in my family. Over the years, I began to appreciate the taste of a good fillet steak or Carpaccio. I'm also sure eating meat helped me gain the weight that I now have, and I wouldn't wanna go back to being that skinny.

[alvarezbassist17]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128849908

Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter
by Christopher Joyce

August 2, 2010

Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.

It wasn't a very high-calorie diet, so to get the energy you needed, you had to eat a lot and have a big gut to digest it all. But having a big gut has its drawbacks.

"You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.

Until, that is, we discovered meat.

"What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says.

That period is when cut marks on animal bones appeared — not a predator's tooth marks, but incisions that could have been made only by a sharp tool. That's one sign of our carnivorous conversion. But Aiello's favorite clue is somewhat ickier — it's a tapeworm. "The closest relative of human tapeworms are tapeworms that affect African hyenas and wild dogs," she says.

So sometime in our evolutionary history, she explains, "we actually shared saliva with wild dogs and hyenas." That would have happened if, say, we were scavenging on the same carcass that hyenas were.

But dining with dogs was worth it. Meat is packed with lots of calories and fat. Our brain — which uses about 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle — piped up and said, "Please, sir, I want some more."

Carving Up The Diet

As we got more, our guts shrank because we didn't need a giant vegetable processor any more. Our bodies could spend more energy on other things like building a bigger brain. Sorry, vegetarians, but eating meat apparently made our ancestors smarter — smart enough to make better tools, which in turn led to other changes, says Aiello.

"If you look in your dog's mouth and cat's mouth, and open up your own mouth, our teeth are quite different," she says. "What allows us to do what a cat or dog can do are tools."

Tools meant we didn't need big sharp teeth like other predators. Tools even made vegetable matter easier to deal with. As anthropologist Shara Bailey at New York University says, they were like "external" teeth.

"Your teeth are really for processing food, of course, but if you do all the food processing out here," she says, gesturing with her hands, "if you are grinding things, then there is less pressure for your teeth to pick up the slack."

Our teeth, jaws and mouth changed as well as our gut.

A Tough Bite To Swallow

But adding raw meat to our diet doesn't tell the whole food story, according to anthropologist Richard Wrangham. Wrangham invited me to his apartment at Harvard University to explain what he believes is the real secret to being human. All I had to do was bring the groceries, which meant a steak — which I thought could fill in for wildebeest or antelope — and a turnip, a mango, some peanuts and potatoes.

As we slice up the turnip and put the potatoes in a pot, Wrangham explains that even after we started eating meat, raw food just didn't pack the energy to build the big-brained, small-toothed modern human. He cites research that showed that people on a raw food diet, including meat and oil, lost a lot of weight. Many said they felt better, but also experienced chronic energy deficiency. And half the women in the experiment stopped menstruating.

It's not as if raw food isn't nutritious; it's just harder for the body to get at the nutrition.

Wrangham urges me to try some raw turnip. Not too bad, but hardly enough to get the juices flowing. "They've got a tremendous amount of caloric energy in them," he says. "The problem is that it's in the form of starch, which unless you cook it, does not give you very much."

Then there's all the chewing that raw food requires. Chimps, for example, sometimes chew for six hours a day. That actually consumes a lot of energy.

"Plato said if we were regular animals, you know, we wouldn't have time to write poetry," Wrangham jokes. "You know, he was right."

Tartare No More

One solution might have been to pound food, especially meat — like the steak I brought. "If our ancestors had used stones to mash the meat like this," Wrangham says as he demonstrates with a wooden mallet, "then it would have reduced the difficulty they would have had in digesting it."

But pounding isn't as good as cooking that steak, says Wrangham. And cooking is what he thinks really changed our modern body. Someone discovered fire — no one knows exactly when — and then someone got around to putting steak and veggies on the barbeque. And people said, "Hey, let's do that again."

Besides better taste, cooked food had other benefits — cooking killed some pathogens on food.

But cooking also altered the meat itself. It breaks up the long protein chains, and that makes them easier for stomach enzymes to digest. "The second thing is very clear," Wrangham adds, "and that is the muscle, which is made of protein, is wrapped up like a sausage in a skin, and the skin is collagen, connective tissue. And that collagen is very hard to digest. But if you heat it, it turns to jelly."

As for starchy foods like turnips, cooking gelatinizes the tough starch granules and makes them easier to digest too. Even just softening food — which cooking does — makes it more digestible. In the end, you get more energy out of the food.

Yes, cooking can damage some good things in raw food, like vitamins. But Wrangham argues that what's gained by cooking far outweighs the losses.

As I cut into my steak (Wrangham is a vegetarian; he settles for the mango and potatoes), Wrangham explains that cooking also led to some of the finer elements of human behavior: it encourages people to share labor; it brings families and communities together at the end of the day and encourages conversation and story-telling — all very human activities.

"Ultimately, of course, what makes us intellectually human is our brain," he says. "And I think that comes from having the highest quality of food in the animal kingdom, and that's because we cook."

So, as the Neanderthals liked to say around the campfire: bon appetit.

[RoyalDeftonicBoy]

Just going to the gym 4 days a week, avoiding Coke, eating salads but not starving of good food.

[Jizzlobber]

well basically my health and wellbeing routine involves the following..

Green tea...2 cups before breakfast...eat a breakfast of eggs, toast, or pehaps oats porridge.

after my breakfast i take a multi vitamin, followed by a vit C,A, and E supplement...

i dont eat a LOT of meat...and only white, i;e chicken ,fish..so lunch would be either chicken or tuna fish sandwhich, and maybe a bag a chips...


i folow lunch with another 2-3 cups of green tea, and lots of water or juice...

i have the odd few beers too..but my prefered alcohol of choice is red wine..

i dont smoke cigarrettes, BUT, i do smoke weed pretty much daily..so thats pretty unhealthy.

but im generally quite set on maintaining an  "anti-aging" approach to life..

[Jizzlobber]

The key to weight (fat) loss is gaining weight in muscle, specifically your larger muscles such as your legs, glutes, abs and back so both while they're healing and while they're just sitting there, they burn calories as opposed to store them like fat cells.

yeah this is true...for the past 6 months ive been working out my legs and i find as my legs grow stronger and fitter..my waistline has less of a tendancy to expand...even with the beer binge-ing

[charissa]

Here's what I try to embrace:
-don't drink your calories; drink water
-lean proteins (good to eat a substantial amount of protein within an hour or two of working out to build muscles)
-whole grains
-organic foods
-lots of fruits and veggies (if you can't buy all organic, at least buy organic for the "dirty dozen"
-avoid processed, pre-packaged foods, corn-syrup, preservatives, sugar, white carbs
-extremely rarely eat out
-milk: raw cows milk from grass fed cows is best, but lately I just get the best quality organic milk my store carries. I haven't been able to give it up altogether though. It does strike me as odd that humans drink bovine milk that's meant for calves and the poor things are taken away from their mothers and bottle fed so they can make more milk for humans.

I try to buy all organic: if my grocery store offers it in organic, I'll get that. If they don't have organic, I'll get the best quality option.

here's where I stray:
-been drinkin' a 6-pack of woodchuck each week now that I've weaned my 2-year old
-I have 1-2 small iced-coffees each week
-occasionally bake choc chip cookies
-sometimes I have a donut w/ my coffee= BAD!!!

Exercise:
-I like to go hiking with my dog and my daughter--there's LOTS of beautiful trails around here
-just picking up my 36-lb 2 year old all day long, my arms and legs are toned like they never were before, and I was never mushy to begin w/
-if the weather's not good for getting out, I'll play Just Dance on the Wii. I do have Wii fit, but it SUCKS and is not challenging at all
-if I could afford it I'd go back to the local personal trainer my mom got me gift certificates for a year ago--that was awesome!

Health:
-I try to stay away from man-made chemicals
-I make sure the vitamins I do take are organic
-Vitamin D3 + probiotics will keep you healthy, hubby used to have a bad stomach and I encouraged him to take probiotics and now his stomach is much stronger. Take about 15,000 iu of D3 (or go outside in the mid-day sun for 20 minutes) and take up to 3 probiotics (acidophilus, etc) daily
-Oregano Oil--helps keep you healthy--known for curing sinus infections
-Neti-pot works wonders, but I'm pretty lazy at using it frequently
-Buddhist mediation works wonders.
-sometimes have donuts and other bad food

That's just me. I'm a member of the Holistic Mom's Network, so I get a lot of great tips there!!

Oh and I also use organic house cleaners and toiletries. Cheapest most effective cleaner is 50% distilled white vinegar 50% water in a spray bottle. I use it to clean everything in the house.

[bright lights, big city]

-don't drink your calories; drink water
-whole grains

switching to whole grains was crucial for me. I used to eat so much cheap pasta, now it's all whole grain (as well as not eating half a pound during dinner).
I still have the occasional beer and hard drink, but absolutely no more energy drinks or soda anymore.

[lostpilot]

drinking water ONLY rocks.

I think I'm going to quit smoking while I am in Turkey. it seems like a good chance, because I won't have any spare money to buy cigarettes, lol!

[black coffee]

Cigarettes are pretty cheap in Turkey, though. I definitely wouldn't stop smoking while being there. With weed it's a different story, because it'll be hard to get anyways.

[lostpilot]

Cigarettes are pretty cheap in Turkey, though. I definitely wouldn't stop smoking while being there. With weed it's a different story, because it'll be hard to get anyways.

yeah, so I've heard that getting weed is difficult there, BUT, getting weed is very difficult to get where I am at now too, so I think I'll survive.

cheap cigarettes you say.. still, my finances will be limited.

[black coffee]

Obviously it depends on how much you usually smoke, how much money you're used to etc., but in comparison to prices where I live, it's freakin cheap there. Food, drinks, cigarettes. it's great.

btw anyone else working on a sixpack? It's still a way till I am 100% rhere, but it looks pretty good already. If I wouldn't drink so much alcohol like in the past few months, visible improvements would be MUCH better though. But it's ok like this.

[lostpilot]

I remember the days I had the sixpack.. an eight pack actually
now it's just a flat stomach. still looks good though.. I'm happy with my metabolism completely.

[bright lights, big city]

shut up

[blixa]

basil tea. put a few basil leaves in a cup and pour hot water in. it's nice. good for fatigue, insomnia, and period pain. it doesn't taste bad either.

[wheresmysnare]

I have been doing weights and running now for over 4 months, about 3 runs a week 3 miles each time and half hour weights 3 times a week.

I started off being able to run/walk 2 miles and lift half of what im on now. I have lost the belly almost completely and have some pretty sweet definition.

I still dread working out but i guess its payback for treating my body like a 24/7 shithouse for 3 years.