Saturday, June 27, 2015

Attitude

Our attitude toward how we approach eating is critical our success at weight loss. When I approach notable breakfast and lunch with the idea of only eating enough to relieve hunger, I do better than any other concept of satiation. The evening meal then becomes somewhat larger, but with the same attitude, it can be handled. Eating just enough to remove active critical hunger is far less than comfortable for me but doable.

With the proper attitude we can stay in our happy place. What I refer to as our happy place is that daydream like state of mind where we are distracted from the physical hunger situation, and in one of the early mind state of per-mediation, not monkey mind, but not in concentration either. This is accompanied with the loss of time consciousness, sort of like a nap while being fully awake but not fully present in the reality of the present.

We have the natives that have the poor mes attitudes, here in Canada. They lost the war and surrendered, rather than starve. Many live on reserves, where the leaders look after themselves, and there people live as they can. They do not have the will to become part of the modern culture, but long for a simpler time, but also want all the modern convinces, at someone elses expense. Oh, poor me. Truth and Reconciliation. They need someone to reconcile with. It is a native cultural problem. Over 1000 missing and dead aboriginal missing? It is a cultural thing, since they are 4 times as likely to go missing. Predators exist, Predators harvest those who can be cut from the heard. Oh well, it is their culture. Attitude is critical for our survival. If they do not care, why should I?

But back to only eating enough to relieve active hunger. Some days the hunger will just not go away. Now what? It cannot be hunger, but it feels like hunger, not cravings. now what?

Yes, "a man in the grip of his daimon".
 

   

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Four Hormones



Anyone who has struggled and recovered relatively long term will tell you that there is no recovery, only an ongoing effort to not gain, separated with periods of more effort to lose. Some say that there are periods of remission. I believe that the difficulty with recovery is that obesity is not understood; it is a complex and chaotic issue with many channels and processes, and there is so much misdirection that few have the endurance to find a solution and to stick to the solution. Eating is not a logic driven process; therefore we cannot reason ourselves out with useless concepts like “eat less, move more.” We need to understand that obesity is a disease of excess fat accumulation, driven by hormones, and that some can be addressed by food, but not all. Some is emotional, some is knowledge based. We need to understand our specific causes of our overeating, provide ourselves with an alternate coping skill or philosophy, remove the cause and correct the damage. We need to understand the desires, cravings, hunger and the motivations for eating and overeating. To this end we will explore this problem and offer a number of partial solutions that have worked to some degree. 


Copied from about the net in blue.

Causes of obesity

1. Not Enough Adiponectin
Adiponectin tells your body to burn fat for fuel, but the more fat on your body, the lower your adiponectin levels. Untrue. There is a correlation between adiponectin level and obesity, not causation.  To break the cycle and kick start your adiponectin, take a high-quality magnesium supplement or eat lots of seeds and green, leafy vegetables.
Fill up on fiber, not calories.



2. Insulin Imbalance

We have all heard how insulin overdose and insulin resistance cause overeating. We also know that high glucose and high insulin combined yields a pleasant relaxant with short term effect. This provides relief from anxiety, stress, emotional discomfort etc.


3. Too Much Ghrelin (excessive hunger, could it be irrational hunger, aka false hunger))
Ghrelin is the hunger hormone. The more you have in your system, the hungrier you are and the more fat your body stores. New research indicates that lack of sleep increases ghrelin levels, so get 7-8 hours of shuteye. But skip the caffeine and energy drinks, because the resulting crash slows your metabolism and makes you feel hungry, even when you're not.

4. Cortisol Overload
Cortisol is necessary for a fight or flight situation (what about freeze), but too much increases your cravings for sweets, stores body fat, breaks down muscle tissue, and can cause depression. Reducing stress is the best solution — if you can find the time to do it in your busy schedule.

We all understand how stress and tired contribute to overeating. So what is the solution. No TV, go to bed instead. Learn to cause others stress rather than yourself.  But there are many more hormones involved.

One of the areas that provided me remission is looking at individual philosophy, the way we individuals think. This has provided relief a number of ways, one concept at a time, in a iterative process. The prerequisites must be learned before the core material. Often, I believe, my problems stem from some missed concept that other people have, which I just missed, ignored, did not grasp, or have forgotten. I expect most people are the same. So what we must do is to go through our understanding, our beliefs, values, our belief system, one line at a time, and compare that to others. When we find a discrepancy, we can then examine the problem concepts and figure out which is better, right, wrong, troubling. 

The purpose of this to understand enough to recover; to push this issue, disease, problem, behavior, whatever handle we choose into remission. One of the helping concept is a sense of purpose in life, urgent, pressing, and unrelenting. This sense of purpose, at the level of the individual, is what drives us, why we get out of bed in the morning, why we struggle throughout the day, until we fall back in bed at night. If we have that driving urgent burning desire to do something, then we are ready for remission. Without that I could not recover in a lasting way. It is that urgent purpose that drives me out of the kitchen and to my office. At a society level, our purpose is to flourish and reproduce, improve the conditions for people to live in, up to some comfortable but not decant style. Minimalist, yes. Frugal, yes. Anything more, they will need to do for themselves. 




 


Monday, June 8, 2015

the Concept of False Hunger


 http://diabetesupdate.blogspot.ca/2015/03/study-discovers-how-avandia-and-actos.html

"Remember, most of the time, hunger is a symptom. When you feel hungry, you need to do detective work to find out what is causing that hunger. If it is irrational, consider the medications you are taking."

 So does this mean that any hunger other than four to six hours after eating is irrational, or not logical, therefor false hunger?

http://www.chuckrowtaichi.com/ch.html

In order not to be ruled by false hunger (hunger for unnecessary or harmful substances), it is necessary to do two things: (1) learn to recognize the basis of your sensation of hunger and (2) educate your body not to send the wrong messages. False hunger falls into nine basic categories: (1) low blood sugar; (2) an irritation of the lining of the stomach; (3) addictions; (4) the discomfort of the body in utilizing reserves; (5) a desire for stimulation; (6) a genuine need for essential nutrients, expressed by a craving for food dilute in those nutrients; (7) tiredness experienced as a need for food; (8) thinking about, seeing, or smelling food; and (9) habituation to regularity. 

+(10) distraction from boredom, stress, life, anxiety 

These are someone else words for the 4/5 of my groups: Physical, maladaptive, environmental, food addiction, but more specific.

Is false hunger a better handle for the problem? It leaves use with a do not eat concept, but do something else. The exact cause is not known yet, all we need to do is not eat.  

The concept of take responsibility, identify the actual problem, address the actual problem, may be useful. The problem is _____________________. Like I just do not want to be here, doing this. What are the choices? ____________________ go away, and do ____________. find a new life without paper? Doing something we do not enjoy is different that doing something we do not like. That " like " is a continuum: enjoy, ambivalent, dislike, will not do. Now what about the costs of not doing something? Can I afford to not do it, or afford to do what I want to do?

Do I even know what I want to do, or what would satisfy me?

So now there is potentially 3 issues, real hunger, false hunger and cravings. Ok, so what? Well just perhaps taking the problem apart even further will allow more insight. So then I suffer, not from hunger, but false hunger. So the causes of false hunger are physical, not mental. Either way, they still must be resisted or displaced. Other things I want to do can displace them, but only up to exaustion. Sleep can displace them, but there are distraction from that. So now it is stay up, fight false hunger, and do X or fore go what I want to stay up for and sleep. Choice eat or sleep.   

Picture because I can


  

Saturday, June 6, 2015

insulin sensetivity, playing the hand we are dealt

Insulin sensitivity is the critical body function that we must achieve to lose weight. We do this by not eating carbohydrates, not overeating proteins, and eating some fats. The amount of fat we eat will control our weight. It does not take much fat to prevent weight loss, a few hundred calories. That is as little as 22 grams of butter each day. Other people claim not to get fat consuming fat to satiation, but will not provide numbers, so how much fat are they actually eating?

There are those who say fat will not make you fat. Bullshit, for some of us at least. Some of us just gain weight so easily, that any extra food is stored; our fat cells are more insulin sensitive than our muscles cells. It is that simple. The fat is locked away, where we cannot get to it, we get hungry, we want to eat, now we have a choice or not; do what the body wants, or struggle against it.

Not eating any added fat forces the fat out of the fat cells, but it is a miserable existence during the fat loss cycles. Maintenance of weight is near impossible for many of us; we need to cycle through some range. When we get to the top, cut the fat, and lose. Always keep carbs low and protein at some reasonable level, say 1 gram per Kg of lean body mass.

Both glucose and insulin are toxic at more than normal concentrations. Keeping both low is the answer to longer life, even if the government does not think that is so, as may be implied off their Canada good food guide (spit). Perhaps it is their attempt at limiting there pension liability, and creating employment through the medical industry. It is all about keeping the people busy, to keep the dollars turning, and on each turn, the government gets a taste, or more like a big lunch. Government always does what is good for government, not the people.  

The only way to get the fat out of the body is to stop eating fats, after fixing the carbs and proteins for those of us who have the obese gene concept. Concept because no obese gene has been found, but we behave like it is a physical imperative direction. Perhaps we are in a continual state of agitation, or have some natural chemical driving our eating.

Anyway, if we are not normal weight, with little excess, or losing weight, we are not insulin sensitive. HAES are just shorting there life's with there opinions, but that is their choice. It has no impact on the stoic self, to separate the various concepts of self.

What do I know?

picture because I can



Thursday, June 4, 2015

More Bitching

http://michaelprager.com/Susan-Roberts-iDiet-HAES-food-addiction-dieting-health-fat-obesity-overeating-weight


"We need to show people how to retrain their brains so that what they enjoy eating is good for their weight."

 If I listens to HAES, I would be massive or dead.

Ya sure, but that may not be enough. Most of the time remission is all about not eating, and retraining ourselves to not eat. We do not have stoic absolute control of all of what drives our appetites only influence. It it is beyond our stoic control, we can only influence, some times our desires happen, sometimes not. We may be able to place physical and mental obstacles to prevent eating; some times we just go around. 

The way I see it there are at least five stages or groups of problems to overcome in obesity recovery or obesity remission. We have only quality, quantity, and frequency to work with at the observed behavioral level. The cause must be understood and removed to obtain lasting remission from overeating and this is at the psychological or philosophical levels.

  1. Physical food knowledge, knowing what is less-obeseogenic food, like Paleo template, LCHF, or similar food knowledge. That is not enough, for one can get fat on good food, but not as quick as on carbage foods, - sugar, ground grains, processed carbohydrates, processed foods in general. Cleaning up our eating choices helps a great deal, but there is still the quantity issues and frequency of eating.
  2. We may have physical issues driving appetite, physical high appetite or false hunger. These may be bacterial, fungus, yeasts in the gut. These are a group of hunger like symptoms that are relived by eating, even good food can be overeaten.
  3. Environment has an impact. If we work and live in the food system, temptation, low impulse control, food pushing people, who just push as a mater of principal, who see their function as food pushers, and if we are dependent on them .... We may find that the only way is to walk away from the "family business."
  4. Maladaptive behaviors covers a group of issues, binge eating disorder, emotional eating of comfort foods, stress and anxiety snacking (high blood glucose and high insulin is a natural relaxant) and similar problems. Binge eating disorder does not cover frequency eating problems, which are more common.
  5. Food addiction issues, where a chemical is driving appetite. Identification and abstinence is the solution.
So there you have it one more time. 

Now naturally we want to remove discomforts, so it we have either physical or mental things driving us to eat, we will tend to overeat.  24/7 365/life of resistance is difficult.

Picture just because