Welcome, Collards

Ok, I lost another whole pound this morning. So collard greens, move on over to the ‘friendly’ column.


Just to be clear, I chopped them and sauteed them in a vegetable soup. Preparing them the traditional way, boiling them with a hamhock, would certainly require a separate test. Not only have I not tested pork yet, but I know that there is more likelihood of reactivity from slow-cooked, high-sodium meats. The truth is, I almost never cook them that way anyway, so this test was quite appropriate for my lifestyle.

Since I enjoyed a weight-loss day, I’m free to test another food today. 



This morning, I had a bowl of quinoa for breakfast. I had made it last night, so it was already cooked this morning. I dropped a tablespoon of butter in a sauce pan and heated up the quinoa in it. Then I cut up half of an apple, sprinkled that with cinnamon and put that at the bottom of a bowl. I spooned the hot quinoa over that and then drizzled coconut milk on the top. It was delicious!

The rest of the day I will only eat known friendly foods. If I have gained weight in the morning, I’ll know that quinoa makes me react and I’ll avoid eating it. I’m hoping this one is a pass. I really like quinoa’s nutty flavor and how quick and easy it is to prepare. I’ve already passed brown rice, but I hate taking the time to make it, so I hardly ever eat it.

One of the surprising joys of this program is how many different, creative and delicious ways I can eat the same small selection of foods. And now that my friendly arsenal is growing, it’s getting so much easier to rotate the foods so that I’m still choosing from my friendly list, but I’m not forced to be monotonous about it. For example, I now have a choice of four things I can have for breakfast. (After today, possibly five)

And I also know that at any time I can have pancakes or cookies or whatever I want. But I have not fully embraced this reality yet because I’m so fascinated by the testing concept. I intellectually know that I could have lasagna tonight without gaining weight, as long as I quickly went back to this central diet. After a party, or if I had gone to a restaurant and indulged, is the most important day to return to the central friendly diet. 

I’m theoretically envisioning a lifestyle that allows for weight loss while enjoying any sinful indulgence every other day. The key to that lifestyle, of course, would be in following the structure of the friendly eating plan and testing preparedness protocol and having those sinful indulgences be just that, occasional indulgences no more than once every two days. A lifestyle that allows daily sinful indulgence is what leads to weight gain. If the lifestyle is more balanced toward the friendly plan, the indulgences are the minority and don’t have the same detrimental effect.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nude Stretching

Image
I never thought I’d do something like this. But over the years many people have suggested that I make a Nude Stretching Video.  I guess the fact that I’m comfortable with nudity and with my body and that I’m a fitness pro with a passion for helping people made it seem like a no-brainer that I create something like this.  But I’ve been resistant to doing it for a long time; for fear (I guess) of what the more conservative people might think.  Now, finally, I’ve succumbed to the requests and put something together.  You conservative people will just have to look the other way. :) Now, I haven’t made an X-rated video here; I'm just nude and I'm stretching.  It's completely natural. This video blends a smart, educational stretching session with  “Warhol-like” video interludes accentuating an eroticized appreciation of the male form.  My intention was that it could be enjoyed on two levels. The free-style, hand-held segments demonstrate the positi...
Read more

Routines From the Vault

Image
I’ve been teaching Nia for 16 years now. And most of those years, I’ve gotten four new routines from Nia. That comes out to over 60 routines over the years. I’ve also created quite a few of my own routines. And along the way, certain routines have fallen out of favor for one reason or another.  For example, a great routine called Commitments, which uses the music from the soundtrack to the movie of the same name, is one of my first ones. I learned that routine so long ago that I have the music on cassette tape and I watched the routine on VHS. It has been retired “To the Vault” for many years. Ditto for routines called Genesis, Roots and Adagio. Some routines have been taken apart and used to build other routines. For example I took all of the Angelique Kidjo songs from the classic, Agolo, and put together a routine using only songs from her album, Aye (which means "LIFE" and is the name of the routine as well.)  I split up the songs from the repetitive routine Fi...
Read more

Food Purist

Image
I tell people I’m a food purist. And I say I’m gastronomically conservative.  Sometimes these terms are misunderstood. These terms that, as far as I know, I’ve made up; I don’t see them commonly used this way, but I could easily have picked them up subconsciously and adopted them. When something is so universally true, as I think food purism is, you often see the same or similar permutations of the concept showing up in different places. Anyway, being a food purist doesn’t mean that I only eat the foods that offer the best nutrition per calorie, or the foods with the highest antioxidant levels or the most enzymes or the least fat or the lowest glycemic index, etc. etc. That’s all popular science and I don’t get bogged down in it. All of that is changing constantly, anyway: One day eggs are good for you, the next day, you can only have whites, then they’re good for you again, then you find out they’re bad for you. Not that I’m saying anything about eggs right now, but this...
Read more