It’s not just me, they’re everywhere, right? What a time to be alive! Now I can just take a pill and eat whatever I want! Wait… it’s not a pill? You have to inject yourself? Oh, but it’s like an insulin injection where a plastic gizmo does it for you with a little snap. Well, that’s still pretty easy, isn’t it?

So how do these drugs work? What’s it actually doing in my body? What even is a ‘GLP-1’?

Effectively, these drugs work by curbing your hunger, and / or slowing your digestion. What does that mean? In the case of drugs like semaglutide, it mimics the effects of hormones that signal your brain that you’re full. GLP-1 stands for glucagon-like peptide-1, and is an intestinal hormone that helps your body regulate blood sugar levels. The GLP-1 drugs, then, are classes of drugs that mimic natural GLP-1 in your system and stimulate the pancreas to release insulin, which slows digestion and reduces appetite.

Some of these drugs take it one step further and release chemicals that block the intestines from absorbing dietary fat. The fine print says something like, “a portion of the fat consumed is not absorbed and will be eliminated through bowel movement.” I don’t know about you, but ‘fat in my poop’ does not sound like a pleasant evening.

What is all of this really saying? Basically, these drugs are either tricking your brain into feeling full, or messing with your digestive processes, or a combination thereof.

Do we know the long-term results of taking these drugs? These drugs are all brand-new, and are an off-shoot from diabetes medications. In fact, the weight loss is a side-effect of the diabetes medication. And that’s the thing with drugs, they always have side-effects.

Don’t get me wrong. For some people these weight loss drugs are a Godsend.

For the first time, these weight loss drugs are allowing people who were looking at a future of insulin injections and diabetic amputation to instead lead a relatively ‘normal’ life. I recently stepped on a nail that impaled my foot. It got infected and I needed surgery. My Podiatrist told me had I been diabetic, I would have lost the foot and possibly my whole leg from the knee down!

Facing the possibility of losing limbs simply from poor circulation is not how anyone wants to live. If I was pre-diabetic I would absolutely jump on these weight loss drugs RIGHT NOW. But does that mean I’d have to be on them forever? What happens when someone is on one of these drugs for 5 years? What about 10 years later? We just don’t know yet.

Will you see advertisements in the 2040’s with the voiceover saying, “IF YOU TOOK GLP-1 MEDICATIONS IN THE 2020’s YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO COMPENSATION”?

That remains to be seen. My gut feeling is that you probably don’t want to be on these drugs for the rest of your life.
Of course, I am not pre-diabetic so I’m not considering these weight loss drugs at the moment. I am not pre-diabetic because following the initial ‘panic eating’ phase of the covid lockdown, I decided to get serious about my health. Within around 6 months, I went from weighing about 230 to 168. Without weight loss drugs.

That’s how I know it’s possible. You see, during the pandemic, I learned the 9 Core Competencies that everyone needs to know in order to effectively manage their health. Portion control is one of those Core Competencies.

Unfortunately, it’s also the only one the weight loss drugs are helping you with. If you stop and think about it, that’s the bottom-line with these drugs: They help you to eat less.

Eating less is important. That’s why it’s one of the nine. But if all you’re ever doing is controlling your portion sizes, you could still be missing out in the other eight areas.

What are those other Core Competencies?

Learning to take care of yourself by setting goals and moving toward them. Getting in touch with your body and learning to recognize your hunger, fullness and thirst cues. Ensuring that you’re matching energy intake with energy output. Learning the difference between higher-quality foods and lesser-quality foods and choosing the former more often. Giving your body the nutrients it needs. Moving often and well. Resting and recovering. And learning to manage emotions without food.

And that’s where I come in. As a Health Coach, I help people to learn those 9 Core Competencies and engrain them into their lives. I help people who are on these weight loss drugs to master the other aspects of their health so that they won’t need to be on the drugs long-term. I help people to take charge of their health so they get the results they want.

Would you like me to help you? Get started by getting your Personal Comprehensive Eating guide delivered to your inbox by answering a few simple questions here: https://www.eclecticwellbeing.com/myeatingguidequestionaire

To your health,

Mark

The post Should I try Weight Loss Drugs? appeared first on Eclectic Well-Being.

It’s like as soon as we learn something health-related about food, something new comes along to contradict the thing we just learned. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? What gives?

Like most things, there’s usually a grain of truth to something, but then it gets taken to extreme absurdity.

Let’s take butter, for example. Is butter bad for you? No. Would it be bad for you to eat only butter, and nothing else? Absolutely, but who’s doing that?

The truth hides in the middle.

A little butter isn’t going to hurt you. Eating it a stick at a time? Probably not the best idea.

Now it is true that in my personal health journey from 240 pounds down to 168 pounds, I made a lot of changes to my eating and exercise choices. But when I tell people that most of that difference resulted from cutting out processed foods, it starts to sound like a Conspiracy Theory.

Look, it’s not that “Big Food” is trying to kill us. There’s no evil plan where all of the food manufacturers got together and said, “Mwha-ha-ha-ha! If we add these specific ingredients to our products, it will make our customers sick and fat so our friends, Big Pharma, can profit from them! [Maniacal Laughter ensues]”

The reality is more like, “hmm, these less-expensive ingredients and fillers make the product cheaper while still tasting good so I can sell more product and make more money!” (If you don’t know what “fillers” are, check out grated cheese: https://www.golomblegal.com/blog/2016/march/what-is-the-real-problem-with-having-wood-pulp-i/ )

And the problem there is that those less-expensive ingredients and fillers also have less or zero nutritive value to them: they’re empty calories.

You see, those “artificial flavors and fragrances” are chemicals that mimic the chemicals naturally present in our foods that give that food its taste and smell. But that’s all it is: the chemical that causes the flavor or scent. The rest of the food that has the nutritive value isn’t there, only the flavor molecules.

That’s what we mean when we say, “empty calories.”

There’s nothing there your body can use for fuel. Your body runs on glucose, not chemical flavor molecules (or wood pulp for that matter).

What’s the problem with empty calories? You think you’re eating food, but you’re not. You’re eating a food-like substance, which fills your stomach and makes you feel “full.”

But when your body breaks down that substance into molecular form that it can use to repair your body and make new tissues, there’s nothing there for it to actually use. There’s no building material amid the filler. It’s just junk. So, your body removes the moisture content and passes the rest on to the colon for elimination.

Now your body is exhausted. It’s performed an entire digestive cycle, and it hasn’t gotten what it needs. Resources are becoming depleted. What does it do?

“Release the Ghrelin!” decrees the brain.

Ghrelin, of course, is the “hunger hormone.” Once released, you start to feel hungry again.

If you’re like I was, munching away on empty calories all day long because you’re hungry all day long, you might now be starting to understand why that is.

Yes, you are going to continue to feel hunger until your body is satisfied, nutritionally. You need to give your body what it wants. And it doesn’t want those empty calories.

What does your body want? I’ll be happy to tell you, but first I need to ask you a few questions. Click the link below to register for a free Comprehensive Eating Guide.

Answer a few questions on the form, and when you’re done, I’ll email you a personalized guide telling you how and what you want to eat to meet your specific health goals.

It’s free! Click now 😊 https://www.eclecticwellbeing.com/myeatingguidequestionaire

Why would you want a personalized eating guide? It’s your roadmap to success! The guide takes all the guesswork out of eating. You will know that what you’re eating is what your body wants and needs, AND in the proper portion sizes for you!

Once you start giving your body what it’s looking for, wonderful things start to happen. You start to realize that those decades you’ve spent trying to get your health under control are over. You’ve done it!

Take control of your life, now.

Click to get your Free Comprehensive Eating Guide and start seeing that scale swing in your favor.

https://www.eclecticwellbeing.com/myeatingguidequestionaire

The post What am I Supposed to Eat?! appeared first on Eclectic Well-Being.

For some of us, the Halloween season might as well be called Candy Season. At least, that’s how I used to look at it. Candy Season led up to Gluttony Season, otherwise known as Thanksgiving. Which then, of course, leads right to Charitable Season, or maybe, “Tons of Homemade Pies, Breads, & Cookies Season.” Our family called that Christmas Time, but families of all different traditions tend to be doing the same types of things right around the Winter Solstice.

Now I know, for me, candy snacking started before Halloween actually arrived. At first it was days before. Then half a month. Then it crept up to the point that October was official Candy Month, with a steady crescendo of candy consumption climaxing on Consume Mass Candy Day.

After Halloween there seem to be more and more backed goods showing up as we approach Thanksgiving. It’s almost like we just need pie in November. And then on the Big Day, OMG there’s SO MUCH FOOD! If you’re leaving Thanksgiving Dinner and you haven’t had to loosen your pants, you did it wrong.

I don’t know about your family, but it seems like in mine, once we got used to eating sugar, more sugar-containing foods started to hang around. Like between Halloween and Thanksgiving, if we weren’t baking pies or cookies, we were buying Oreos and Chips Ahoy.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we went through a lot of ice cream, pies, cakes, Entenmann’s-style coffee cakes and such.

And puddings! I can’t believe I almost forgot about pudding. My favorite was the stove-top kind where you had to cook it in a pot, then pour it into the “pudding glasses” then pop those into the fridge without spilling them.

I loved the chocolate flavor and that skin that would develop on top. 🤤Mmm… I might have to make some pudding now… Do you have pudding glasses? I honestly don’t know what the proper use for those glasses was. They were just perfect little single-serving size glasses that Mom always got out for pudding. 🤔Do I have pudding glasses?

After Christmas the sugar fest tended to continue through February, with Lesser Candy Day in the middle. Somehow the sugar train slowed itself down. By March, St Patrick’s Day was more about corned beef and cabbage and less about the sweets. From there sugary snacks started to wane.

But during that brief period of darkness, I would put on 10 to 15 pounds. And I know I’m not alone. That cycle, from late October through mid-March is when most of us tend to put on weight. It’s also, quite literally, the darkest part of the year.

It’s also the part of the year where nothing grows. We are biologically wired to want to put on some extra fat to get us through the darkness, so we’ll survive to see the next spring. The only problem with that is, we no longer live in a world that is season dependent.

Refrigeration is pretty new!

We can go to the supermarket and get fruit year-round. That’s a relatively new thing. Frigidaire released the first residential refrigerator in 1923! Before that, if you wanted to keep something cool, you needed ice.

Why do we have so many different traditions that all involve making fruit pies? Because our ancestors needed to do something with the harvest. Without refrigeration, fruits and vegetables don’t last very long. So, they canned what they could and cooked off the rest.

Perhaps uncoincidentally, we are also hard-wired to crave sugar. This is because in nature, sugary fruits tend to ripen in Fall, conveniently right before winter sets in. We crave the sugar because it’s a fleeting resource. We need to eat it to fatten ourselves up to prepare for the lean winter to come.

But again, we don’t live in a world where that cycle really matters any more. We have just as much access to food in winter as we do any other time of the year. Why then, do we continue to live as if we do?

More importantly, what can we do about it?

Are we destined to pack on 10-15 pounds each year just because we’re predisposed to it? No, of course not. Must we succumb to sugar’s siren call and eat it from Halloween through Valentines? No, but we absolutely will if we allow it.

Sugar is absolutely the hardest addiction to break. One reason being, it’s in everything.

Manufacturers can be sneaky!

Product makers know that people want to avoid sugar, so they often list it as other things. If you see dextrose, fructose, glucose, lactose, maltose, sucrose, or galactose, in the ingredients list, those are all different types of sugar.

Sometimes they try to give it the Health Halo of friendly-sounding names like: beet sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, cane juice, (I love this next one) cane juice crystals (sugar!), coconut sugar, confectioner’s or powdered sugar, castor sugar, date sugar, grape sugar, golden sugar, demerara sugar, muscovado sugar, panela sugar, raw sugar, turbinado sugar, or yellow sugar. They might sound healthier, but they’re still sugar.

They might try to confuse you with names like: corn syrup solids, crystalline fructose, dextrin, ethyl maltol, diastatic malt, glucose syrup solids, icing sugar, Florida crystals, maltodextrin, or sucanat.

Or they might be using liquid sugars with names like: agave nectar or syrup, barley malt, blackstrap molasses, brown rice syrup, buttered sugar or buttercream, caramel, carob syrup, corn syrup, evaporated cane juice, fruit juice concentrate, golden syrup, high-fructose corn syrup or HFCS, invert sugar, malt syrup, maple syrup, molasses, rice syrup, refiner’s syrup, sorghum syrup, or treacle.

To your brain, all 54 of the things I just listed count as sugar and will make your brain prefer that product, because remember, we are hard-wired to seek sugar. As much as possible, avoid products with added sugar.

So how do you cut out sugar completely? You don’t. But, you do limit your intake of it.

For example, I love chocolate, but if I eat candy bars like I used to, I know what the result will be. I’ve seen that. I have evidence to support that. Instead then, I buy bags of little individually-wrapped dark chocolate pieces. Or, I buy a big dark chocolate bar. Not a candy bar, like a Mounds or Almond Joy Dark. I mean a solid bar of 60 – 92% cocoa. Dark and a bit bitter.

Dark chocolate is the way to go for two reasons. One, it’s actually a beneficial saturated fat is small quantities. And two, since it is a bit on the bitter side, we’re much less likely to mindlessly much away on it.

My other really big one was ice cream. I used to eat a huge bowl with at least four scoops of chocolate chip cookie dough or chocolate chip mint (sometimes two scoops of each), chocolate syrup, AND butterscotch syrup, topped with cool whip or Redi-whip spray.

Again, I know from experience what happens when I allow myself to do that regularly. I still have size 40 fat pants that I now use for yardwork with a belt cinched up so much it looks absurd. I keep them to remind me that at one point these were tight on me and I was contemplating moving up to 42’s.

So now my ice cream consumption is still daily. But I eat one or two little mini ice cream cones. Just enough to satisfy my sweet tooth. I do that so that on the rare occasion that we’re hanging out on the Bluff, I can have that Sundae at the Chocolate Café without worrying about it.

What about Thanksgiving, I know you’re wondering?

We did a whole Thanksgiving-themed blog post here: https://eclecticwell-being.com/tips-and-tricks-for-a-deliciously-healthy-thanksgiving/

The short story with Turkey Day is go ahead and indulge; but maybe don’t take a weeks’ worth of leftovers home (or give yours away if you host!) I’m still going to bake my cheese bread this year. And I’m going to really enjoy eating it. Once it’s gone though, I’m not baking anything else until Christmas rolls around.

For Christmas, we’ll probably bake some chocolate chip cookies and some kifli. Or kolaczki for the Polish side of the family. Whatever you call it, they’re those little powdered sugar covered white cookies and are typically filled with fruit preserves or nut butter. They’re good, but not something I could eat year-round.

Which works out well for our plan of only indulging a little bit around the holidays. Yes, I have been known to eat one slice of all four pies in one sitting before and I’ll happily do it again. (My stomach might not be so happy with me afterwards, and that is something else you’ll want to learn to listen to, but not in this article today.)

And that’s the key, right there.

We need to understand that as humans, we are wired to seek sugar and consume it, but we can control how much we ingest. We must be aware that we’re prone to packing on the pounds in winter and take active steps to avoid it.

One of those active steps should be getting in some exercise. We’re much more active in the bright, warmer months than we are in the cold, dark months. There’s simply more to do outside in the nice weather. Once things cool off, we don’t want to take our activity level down to: couch potato.

So there’s something you can do: Join a local gym. Go there and do something. Literally anything is better than laying on the couch in front of the tv. If you don’t know what to do, find a gym that offers instructor-led classes.

Getting healthy starts in your mind. You need to make a decision that this is something you want to do, and then start taking action on that decision. Life will never change otherwise.

Are you ready?

The post Transitioning Smoothly into Autumn appeared first on Eclectic Well-Being.

I’ve been thinking about programming lately and realized that computer programming is a lot like baking. With regular cooking, there’s a pretty wide margin of error. There are a lot of mistakes you can make and still have your meal come out fairly decently. With baking, not so much.

Baking is more of applied chemistry. There are reactions that need to happen. For those reactions to happen in the way you want, you have to be very specific with your measurements. In order for your baked goods to come out consistently the same, you need to follow a recipe.

We could call that recipe an algorithm; a logical series of steps that must be performed exactly as laid out to get reproducible results every time. Well that sure sounds a lot like a computer program.

You could even compare a computer programmer to the chef who develops the recipe for others to follow. In both cases, a recipe or algorithm is being created that future people will use to replicate the results of the original. Pretty cool!

Ok, so how does that relate to health?

We’re almost there, I need to give you some more background information.

When developing a program, the first thing you encounter before you can run it is the debugging process. There are two kinds of errors you might find: syntax, and logical.

A syntax error means the computer can’t understand what you want it to do. These are usually spelling errors. Looking at it from a baking perspective, let’s say you’ve misread 4 Tbs for 4 C of water. You might immediately notice that your batter is entirely too loose.

Just like a computer syntax error, you will need to fix your batter before you can attempt to bake it. Of course with baking, that might mean you need to start over, whereas with a computer program, it means looking for the misspelling and correcting it.

A logic error might be harder to find. Logic errors mean that all of your code was spelled correctly, but what you told the computer to do was not actually what you wanted it to do. The way you know you have a logic error is to look at the output and realize it’s wrong.

With baking, maybe you used 2/3 cup of salt instead of sugar. Your muffins might come out looking ok, but they’ll probably be too salty to eat. Or, maybe you forgot to add the butter and now they’re super dry. We know we made a mistake, but we won’t know what mistake until we’ve tried the muffins.

Have we made the crossover to health yet?

That’s where we’re going now. The thing is, every single day, we’re programming our bodies, whether we realize it or not. We give ourselves input, in the form of food and drink, and we get the energy to power ourselves through the day as output, with a couple of waste products that we’re not going to discuss in this article.

With programming our bodies, the syntax errors are pretty obvious. If you’ve ever tried to siphon gasoline from one container to another with a hose that you primed with your mouth, you know that spitting out the gasoline is pretty intuitive.

As soon as you taste it, your body screams at you not to swallow it. Likewise, if you put hard objects like rocks in your mouth and try to chew them, you’ll experience quite a bit of pain from your teeth. These are analogous to syntax errors. You’re trying to get your body to do something and it’s rejecting your efforts.

Logic errors, though, are much more difficult to find. Most people deal with logic errors for decades before realizing that they are the cause of their own issues.

Your body is giving you feedback all the time.

The problem is, we ignore that feedback, or start taking a pill to make it go away. Case in point, my Uncle Bill. Here we have a man who suffered from chronic heart burn for years. The solution? Over-the-counter heartburn relief drugs. The result? He died of esophageal cancer.

That heartburn was feedback! But rather than listen to his body, he took a drug to numb the pain. That’s the thing with logic errors in health programming: they’re subtle. An odd pain here, stiff back there, trouble taking a full and deep breath, these are all little things that your body is telling you, something’s wrong.

But what would happen if we took a different approach? Instead of providing random input and stimulus, what if we got specific? What if we followed a recipe? What if someone else created an algorithm for us that we could follow to reproduce desired results?

Do you think getting healthy could be as easy as baking a cake?

Well you’re in luck because that’s just what we’ve combined with Cultivus Fitness to bring to you. Eight weeks of programming, in fact, including the nine core competencies that everyone must master to achieve great health, along with personal-trainer led classes that show you how to move in your workouts to get fit without injury. All without breaking the bank.

Is this the right program for you? Absolutely! Click here for more info: https://www.cultivusfitness.com/

The post Can we Program our Health? appeared first on Eclectic Well-Being.

With the same results each time: Lose a little bit of weight on the diet. Get tired of the diet because it’s impossible to maintain for whatever reason. Go back to “normal food” and slowly gain back the weight lost, plus a little bit to add more motivation next year.

It doesn’t really add motivation though, does it? It’s more like adjusting to the new normal and seeing how long it takes before new clothing becomes mandatory because the old clothes are too tight now.

And that’s the whole cycle. Get tired of being too heavy, go on a diet, lose a bit of weight, gain it all back, and try again next year. So many people experience this that there’s even a term for it.

Yo-yo dieting.

So-named because that’s what happens to the weight. It bobs up and down, slowly but steadily climbing a bit higher over the course of the year, until we decide to do something about it, then it drops, and begins to climb all over again.

I suppose we could also have called it “itsy-bitsy spider dieting,” as the spider seems as persistent as that yo-yo.

Regardless of what we call it though, living through it feels demoralizing.

Year after year, sometimes more than once per year, we put ourselves through this. Consistently trying to get onto the other side of the scale, where the numbers go down and stay down.

But they don’t. We watch the mirror in horror as our face swells to the point that we no longer see any family resemblance. We are now the generic “fat person” background character in someone else’s movie.

Why is getting healthy so hard? Why do we have to struggle like this?

Some people can’t take it any longer and resort to drastic medical measures, like having their stomachs stapled so they physically can’t eat as much food. And sometimes that doesn’t work either!

Can you imagine undergoing surgery in an effort to lose weight, and still have it fail?

Now the medical community is even armed with shots to help lose weight. These products are brand-new. Has there been a long-term study on their effects on the body? Will we be watching TV in 2036 and seeing ads for, “If you used MiracleDrug and are now experiencing symptoms of disintegrating liver [or some long list of other possible horrible ailments] YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO COMPENSATION!” Time will tell.

Why does getting healthy have to be so darned hard?

What if it wasn’t? What if all you needed to do to become the healthy version of yourself is eat and move a bit?

That sounds like fantasy, doesn’t it? Yet for millions of people, it’s reality.

No, there’s no accompanying magic pill to take that makes all of your consumed calories disappear. Likewise, there’s no special food, instant meals, or shake packages. You can literally eat the foods you enjoy, move your body in whatever way you can, and watch the scale go in reverse.

Yes, you do need to move your body. Does that mean hours upon hours of standing-in-place cardio sessions? Nope.

I was skeptical too when I came across this method.

I thought the only way to lose weight and get into shape was to spend a lifetime at the gym, drinking kale smoothies, and eating bland, flavorless “health” food.

Yet I made pork tacos with Spanish Rice for dinner last night, and every Friday night is Pizza Night.

I’m also a chocoholic. I eat chocolate every single day, and I typically end each day with ice cream.

Yet I dropped from 240 down to 168 eating just like this.

Mind you, I didn’t stay at 168 for more than a month or so. People started telling me I was looking “too thin,” so I tweaked my plan a bit and popped up to 183, where I’ve been holding steady since 2020.

So, what do you need to do to make this work for yourself? To answer that, I created a whole year-long immersion program.

During that program, I go over the nine core competencies that everyone must master to live a full and healthy life. None of them are hard, but it’s likely that you’re not doing all nine in the right way at the moment.

I know I sure wasn’t! That’s why, even though I was working out like a madman at the gym, I wasn’t seeing the results I wanted on the scale, or on my body for that matter.

After making these small tweaks, though, everything changed. It really does feel like magic! It took me several decades to pack on all that weight, but once I really got into it, that fat just melted right off in months.

While learning the nine core competencies, I also help my clients to incorporate them into their lives, so that they really start living them and embodying them. After that, I celebrate with them each month as the scale begins to drop, they buy a new outfit in a smaller size, their clothes start to fit how they want them to fit, and they start to admire their own reflection again.

Will it work for you?

Let’s find out! Schedule a call with me to discuss your situation, and if you think it makes sense for us to work together, we will 😊 If not, no worries. I want to work with clients who want my help. Is that you? Click the link below:

Visit: https://www.eclecticwellbeing.com/Mark1-2-1

The post Why is Getting Healthy so Hard? appeared first on Eclectic Well-Being.

One of the biggest gripes I hear from clients who haven’t yet become clients is, “I tried eating healthy, but health food is so boring!” So, why are you making it taste boring?

Ah, you’re not – you’re buying the pre-packed items from the “health food” section of the grocery store. There’s your first problem. Most of that is fine sitting right there on the shelf. Just because someone labeled it as “healthy,” doesn’t mean you need to eat it.

In fact, there are loads of products on the shelves that are using healthy sounding “buzz words” to try to convince you that this particular bag of corn chips is good for you. We call this the “Health Halo Effect.”

It’s like when the manufacturer puts “Gluten Free!” on a box of snacks that have never been made using any gluten-based ingredients. Or maybe “Fat Free!” on a bottle of salad dressing that’s had the sugar content cranked up to eleven to compensate for the loss in taste due to the removal of fat.

Sometimes you’ll see “Zero Trans Fats!” on the label. This means there are trans fats in the product, but they fall below the level required by law to list them on the ingredients panel.

Now I’m not saying that all food companies are trying to deceive you. But there are so many playing this game that you do need to take a look at the back of the package to make sure it’s what you want to be eating.

Or, you could steer away from those processed foods and start making your own meals from whole food ingredients.

If you’re now asking, “what are Whole Foods? Do you mean the supermarket chain Whole Foods?” No, I do not. I mean, foods that are whole.

To be a whole food is to recognize what that food item used to be. For example, say a chicken thigh, as opposed to a chicken nugget.

By looking at a chicken thigh, you can see the fibers in the muscle tissue. There may be a bone inside. There may still be skin attached.

When we look at a chicken nugget, on the other hand, it’s basically a homogonous blend of things, pressed into a nugget shape, breaded and deep fried. What’s inside of that blend isn’t so clear. It might be meat. It could also be ground skin and byproducts. Certainly, this nugget did not come to be by natural means.

Or maybe we could look at an orange, vs an orange creamsicle. The wrapper on the outside of the orange is its own natural skin. Peeling it open, we can see that this was a fruit that had grown on a tree. It looks quite natural.

Then there’s the orange creamsicle. The wrapper on the outside here is a waxy paper product. We can see the seam and we can tell where it was mechanically pressed together. Peeling it open, we see a frozen slurry of light-orange colored goo on a stick. Clearly, the creamsicle was produced in a factory.

And that’s pretty much the difference. The more processed a food is, the more difficult it is to tell what it used to be.

Also, generally speaking, the more processed a food is, the less nutritive value it contains.

Meaning, if you want to be healthy, cooking your own food is going to get you there a lot faster and for less money than buying pre-packaged “health foods.”

Especially if you’re growing your own fruits and vegetables!

Here on our Eclectic Sanctuary Homestead, we’re growing fruits, veggies, squashes, tomatoes, peppers, and a bunch of culinary herbs. We even have a set of laying hens that provide us with the freshest eggs you’ll ever eat.

Don’t have your own garden yet? Do you have a friendly neighbor with a garden? How about a nearby farm stand?

Are you willing to get a little dirty? Even if you have a compact property, or live in a townhome or apartment with no yard at all, you can get a container garden going.

Container gardens won’t be as productive as plants sown directly into the Earth, but you can still get a decent yield. (Container chickens, not so much…)

Herbs are a great choice for container gardens!

If you don’t want your food to be boring, you need to season it. Seasoning with fresh herbs is the best taste you’re going to get.

Speaking of seasoning, there are a lot of spices to choose from, and it’s not likely you’ll be able to grow all of them in your yard. Which means you’ll want to have some ground, granulated, or powdered (or any combination thereof) spices on-hand.

When it comes to cooking, I like using as much fresh stuff as I can. Typically that means I’m chopping up at least a fresh onion and a handful of garlic cloves when making dinner.

You can, of course, use powdered or desiccated flakes instead of the fresh; however, you do get more benefit from adding the whole foods into the meal. Some of the nutritive value is lost when these foods are dried and turned into powdered spices. The flavor is still there, but when the goal is health, the whole foods have the most nutrients.

When I was unhealthy, I still cooked dinner. At that point in time, I used to use dried onion flakes and granulated garlic for everything. I hadn’t switched to olive oil yet, so I would add canola oil to the pan, dump in the onion flakes, add heat, and “reconstitute the onion flakes.”

At least, that’s what I told myself I was doing back then. The reality is that once those flakes had been dehydrated, allowing them to soak up oil was only making them more fattening.

It is totally possible to make a meat chili and not add any vegetables to it. I know, I’ve done it. Ground beef, onion flakes, granulated garlic, chili powder, cumin, paprika, salt and pepper. That was the very first chili that I ever made.

It was as awful as you’re imagining.

I was still in my 20’s and didn’t know to add pureed tomatoes to give it that smooth consistency. I was working at my Uncle John’s commercial bakery in New Brunswick, NJ at the time. He had owned Van’s Deli for over a decade before opening the bakery and had worked as a chef in various restaurants.

Naturally, I told him about my chili-making escapade, and the first thing he said was, you forgot the tomatoes, and you really should throw some bell peppers in there.

Now, I really like chili, so I’ve since learned to make it a bunch of different ways. All of them, though, are loaded with fresh veggies. In addition to being healthier, the fresh veggies also taste better. Your tongue knows the difference.

I am not a Master Chef, and in fact, I have no formal training in cooking, but my food tastes good, and it’s healthy. If you want to learn how to cook, let me know. We periodically run Deliciously Healthy classes right here at the Homestead. If you’re interested, join the waitlist by clicking on the link below and we’ll let you know when the next class will be 😊

https://www.eclecticwellbeing.com/DeliciouslyHealthyInterest

Until then, I encourage you to experiment in the kitchen! The worst thing that can happen is you’ll discover what you don’t like.

The post Healthy Food Doesn’t Have to Taste Like Health Food appeared first on Eclectic Well-Being.

Kathi and I love hosting Thanksgiving! But it can be stressful since there’s so much food to cook.

One way to take the stress out of it is to think about what you’re going to make, what needs to be cooked in the oven and for how long, what needs to be prepared ahead of time, and in what order you’ll do everything.

Now this blog isn’t going to focus on everything, but it is a bit of a recap of what our Deliciously Healthy Thanksgiving, focusing on a few Deliciously Healthy side dishes:Savory Maple Roasted Butternut Squash and Brussels’ Sprouts, Baked Green Bean Casserole, and Healthy Mashed Potatoes, in that order.

Why that order? Because the Squash and Sprouts take the longest, then the Green Beans, and the Potatoes are relatively quick. Doing it this way, we should be able to plan it so everything is all done at the same time.

START WITH PREPPING

Before we start prepping, the most important thing you can have when making your own food is a very sharp knife. And you want that knife to be a “Chef’s Knife,” with a long, thin blade that’s taller towards the handle and curves down towards the tip. You can cook just about anything with a sharp one of these.

So we start earlier in the day with trimming the ends from the Brussels’ Sprouts and sliced them in halves; peeingl the Butternut Squash trimming the top and bottom and cutting into cubes; trimming the ends from the Green Beans and cutting them into roughly 2-inch segments; clean, trimming, and slicing the Mushrooms to roughly ¼ inch thickness; peeling and trimming our Garlic cloves; cutting our Cauliflower into florets; and peeling our Potatoes, cut them into chunks and placed them in a pot of salted water to keep them from turning purple.

Butternut Squash Tips

This is one veggie that I want to go into detail because so many make it harder than it is and so they buy the pre cubed version at the market. It’s fine, but what do you do when you get it fresh from your farmer? Here’s how to easily prep your butternut squash.

First off, I see a lot of people trying to cut these in half by placing the whole thing sideways down on the cutting board, then trying to sort-of saw it with the knife lengthwise. If you’re having to force the knife through, your knife isn’t sharp enough. This is how people cut themselves, trying to leverage their entire bodyweight down through the knife. Then the knife slips and all of the downward force is redirected laterally, usually into the hand that was holding the food you were trying to cut.

What I like to do instead is chop the ends nice and flat so that I can stand it up on its bottom without it falling over. Now, I place the knife dead-center across the top, perpendicular to the cutting board, angle the blade a bit, then simply slice the whole thing right into two equally sized halves.

Deseeding with ease 

Before we can cut it into cubes, we need to deseed it. I used to joke that you wanted to use the sharpest spoon in your drawer, but Kathi hit upon a brilliant alternative to make this job so easy! Use an Ice Cream Scooper!

Easy to grip handle, angled for digging, perfectly adapted for gouging the seeds from a Butternut Squash.

You can separate the seeds from the stringy mass, roast them and eat them like you would Pumpkin Seeds, set them aside for local wildlife to eat, or add them to your compost. Ours will most likely be consumed by our Chickens.

Cubing

When cubing something like this, I used to cut it into strips, then cut down each fat strip to size, then cut cubes out of each thin strip.

The easy way is to first cut lengthwise making one long strip, then rotate the Squash half so the side you just cut is flat down against the cutting board, then make lengthwise slices in this direction to the size you ultimately want your Cubes. Here we’re going somewhere between half an inch and one inch.

Rotate the Squash back so the original half line cut is back against the board, and reposition the slices you just made back into the Squash shape. Now, make lengthwise cuts again, then rotate 90° and make even side-to-side cuts. When you’re done, you’ll have a Squash half in cubes, but still in the shape of a Squash half. Take your knife and slide the whole thing into a bowl, and repeat with the other side.

COOKING MULTIPLE ITEMS

So looking at all our recipes here, the Green Beans need to cook at 375°F for about 25 minutes, the Squash for 25 minutes at 450°F, and the Sprouts at 450°F for 18 minutes.

We happen to be graced with multiple ovens. Trying to cook things that need different oven temps and times means you’d have to cook the Beans first, then the Squash and Sprouts, then reheat the Beans right before eating.

But since I have two ovens, I’m pre-heating the upper oven to 450 and the lower oven to 375.

Now that all of our Squash is cubed, we need to get it seasoned and, in the oven, to start cooking.

Savory Maple Roasted Butternut Squash and Brussels’ Sprouts

Into this bowl with our Squash, we drizzle some Olive Oil. Probably about a tablespoon or so. I don’t really measure. I use a big bottle and go by “glugs.” One glug is about a tablespoon. Then we shake some salt in there. And crack some fresh pepper. By the way if you’re looking for something simple to spice up your cooking, a Pepper Mill and some Rainbow Peppercorns. It’s still pepper, but you’ll taste a wider range than black pepper alone will give you.

I like to use a skinny spoon when stirring things up like this. I find that the wider, serving-spoon-size utensils make more of a mess. You want to ensure that all of that Olive Oil is absolutely covering each and every Squash Cube, and you should see pepper flecks evenly distributed throughout the bowl.

Here’s another trick: Wet the pan first.

We want to get some foil on this pan to make cleanup easier later, but we don’t want the foil to stick to the food. Just run some water over the pan, then let it mostly drip off. You don’t want to dry it completely. Take your foil and tear off enough to cover the pan while tucking the ends under the sides. Place it on the pan with the shiny side touching the pan, dull side toward the food. Press the foil down in the center and wipe to the outsides. The water on the pan helps it stick a bit so it won’t bunch up.

Give it one blast of cooking spray, then spread that spray everywhere with a cloth to create a non-stick surface. Add the Squash Cubes and spread them out into a single layer with none touching each other.

We’ll pop this tray into the oven and set the timer to 7 minutes.

The Brussels’ Sprouts

Now we’ll prep another tray the same as we did the first one because our Squash was on the larger side and we’re not going to fit the Sprouts on the same tray.

Take the bowl of Sprouts and dump them into the bowl in which you mixed the Squash Cubes. That bowl is already covered in the same seasonings we’re using, so why dirty two bowls with oil?

Repeat the same Olive Oil, Salt, and Peppering, and dump the Sprouts onto the prepared sheet.

Take the time to place each Sprout half cut-side-down on the sheet. This little step will add loads of flavor that you won’t get otherwise as that flat side browns in the oven.

When that timer goes off, we leave the Cubes in, and add the Sprouts on another rack, then set the timer to 18 minutes (giving the Cubes a full 25 minutes.)

A BIT OF MULTI TASKING

At this point we want to get some heat under the pot of potatoes. I’m setting it to max with the lid on, then I’ll lower it a bit and remove the lid when they start to boil.

We also want to get these beans pre-cooked a bit. The recipe calls for blanching them in boiling water, then transferring to an ice bath. I find it much easier to steam them on the stovetop, so that’s what we’re doing here. They’re done when they turn a Bright Green color; you’ll definitely notice the difference. Once they hit that point, remove from heat and set aside.

I’ve tried multiple methods to cook cauliflower when sneaking it into other things or pretending it’s rice. The trick here is to prevent it from getting watery. The fastest way I’ve found to do that is to microwave it on a plate with a little bit of water, under one of those plastic spatter guard domes. It makes the cauliflower come out cooked, but on the drier side. Super wet cauliflower makes soggy mashed potatoes. So we’re going to pop this in for 5 minutes and then check it.

Mushroom Sauce for the Green Beans

Now, let’s get started on the Mushroom Sauce for the Beans. The recipe we’re using calls for making your own crispy onion topping, but we’re not looking to rock tradition too much, and Kathi and Hana really like French-Fried Onions from a little red and white tub, so we’ll be using those.

For this sauce, melt the butter, then add those Mushrooms and spread them around, rolling them around to get them covered in butter. Let them sit and soak up that butter, stirring occasionally so they don’t burn or stick. After 5 minutes those Shrooms should be ready for the Garlic that I forgot to talk about having copped finely earlier. Again, stirring to get that garlic everywhere and all over those Mushrooms.

Dust the flour over the Shrooms so it’s not all in one big clump, then stir that all up so the flour is everywhere. The flour should cover the Mushrooms and get gummy and drier-looking. If it’s still powdery, you need more butter. If it’s still runny, you need more flour. Stir for about another minute to cook the flour taste out of the flour. Then add your stock.

This recipe calls for ½ cup of Veggie Stock. I made Chicken Stock instead, and I made a bit more, just in case. I’m going to add the stock slowly, stirring as I go, until it starts to look “saucy.” It should be bubbly, wet, and thick looking with no noticeable flour lumps.

Once you’ve hit the right consistency, stir in the Parmesan, then stir in the milk to loosen it back up. Once you’re happy with it, season with salt and pepper, remove from heat and set aside.

Place your beans in your casserole dish, pour the Mushroom Sauce over top, stir it all up, and cover with the Fried Onion Topping of your choice. This one goes into the preheated lower oven at 375 for 25 minutes.

Back to Multi Tasking

When the Potatoes are done we’ll drain off the water and keep the chunks in the same hot pot. I use real butter in my Potatoes. Margarine is a man-made concoction that does not form in the natural world. Butter is the healthier option, and I use about a stick of butter for every 5 pounds of potatoes, which I will now add to these hot potatoes so it melts and soaks in.

While that’s melting we’ll take a look at this cauliflower. Pretty close. We’ll give it another 3 minutes.

The timer is going off on the Squash and Sprouts. The recipe calls for drizzling 4 oz of Maple Syrup over the tray. What I’m doing instead, is dumping both of these trays into an extra-large aluminum bowl, drizzling the Maple Syrup into that, stirring it all up, then spreading it all onto one tray and popping back on the top rack of the oven for another 5 minutes or so to glaze up the Syrup.

Cauliflower Potatoes

Once the Cauliflower is ready, dump it right into the pot with the now melted butter and potatoes, and hand-mash with this hand-masher. You can use electric beaters if you want. I like having some lumps in my potatoes, which the hand-masher gives me nicely.

Mash it up until you can’t tell what’s potato and what’s cauliflower. Add some Greek Yogurt instead of Milk or Sour Cream and mash it until it’s the right consistency. Add salt and pepper to taste and you’re done.

The Big Finish

Now each side dish should be done at almost the same time. The Brussel Sprouts and Butternut Squash get put in a bowl, where we will toss in some craisins and sunflower seeds. The Green Bean Casserole is served right in the baking dish on a hot pad.  Serve the mashed potatoes and the turkey, and we have our Deliciously Healthy Thanksgiving.

For the real Thanksgiving, don’t forget the gravy, stuffing and cranberries! And we forgot to mention that making home-made cranberries is quick and easy!  Kathi uses the recipe found right on the bag, but instead of processed sugar, she uses honey!  Mmm! It tastes delicious!

If after reading this, you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out! Cooking and healthy eating are two topics I love to talk about! mark@eclecticwellbeing.com

The post Tips and Tricks For A Deliciously Healthy Thanksgiving! appeared first on Eclectic Well-Being.

Kathi and I have been on a quest to find the Eclectic Inn and Sanctuary. We’ve been looking at properties as south as Virginia and as north as upstate NY. At the start of this journey, we knew we wanted a wooded lot on as many acres as we could afford with a home containing at least three bedrooms and two baths. We’ve narrowed it down to the river towns from Lambertville and north.

Along the way we started to think about what we could do with actual, farmable land. Kathi has always loved lavender and dreams of an open field of it. There’s already the Mad Lavender farm up there, and we don’t want to look like copycats, so we thought, “what about herbs?”

Herbs make a lot of sense for us, being Eclectic Well-Being. We’re big on healthy eating, but also that healthy food should taste good, too. I can definitely picture a future me having hand-grown herbs for sale, regaling customers with recipes, and which herbs mix well in what dishes after sampling the spoils of my craft. So now in addition to the Eclectic Inn and Sanctuary, the property upon which it sits will contain the Eclectic Happy Herb Farm.

The Quest

We’ve found a couple of places that would be great for this. One went under contract already, contingent upon the buyer selling their home. The other one we’re starting to think about pretty seriously. One of the things I really like about this property is the street view. You see three big, red barns, and it kind of makes you want to smile a little.

The picture here really doesn’t do it justice, because you can’t grasp how tall these buildings appear from street level. When you’re pulling up the drive, it gives you that feeling you get when you’re witnessing something that was built pre-1900s and is still standing in good condition. You want to see it closer. There’s just a little bit of awe to it. It draws you in. That’s what I like about it.

It’s not a lot of acreage though. The one that went under contract already was sixteen acres, with a rather smooth grade down towards the wood line. Most of the land was covered in forest, with a good five acres left to farm. All of it is much more level than the property with the barns pictured above.

This one looks cool from the road but is only six acres in total. On the plus side though, the trees behind it are connected to a landlocked area of county-preserved land. We haven’t tried to calculate it, but it seems like a hundred acres thereabouts of woods. Of those six acres, there’s a workable field in the rear that runs the width of the lot. It would be perfect to get our farm set up and running one little section at a time.

What will we farm?

We need something farm-related to sell to keep the farm status for taxes, so we’re thinking we’ll start with chickens. We did some quick math and calculated that twenty-five chickens can lay enough eggs over the course of a year to more than cover the minimum threshold in farm sales required to maintain farm use status. My first reaction to hearing that was, “that’s a lot of chickens!” But hey, it’s a farm. It should have animals, right?

I’m not sure about livestock though. Kathi asked me about sheep and goats, and although there are livestock pens in the barn already, I told her she’s on her own. Maybe once I get used to the chickens, I’ll be willing to take on larger beasts. For now, I’m sold on the idea of farming herbs.

We’ll probably need greenhouses as opposed to open fields. We’ll sell herbs already in pots that people can grow at home rather than cut herbs that go bad a week later when you forget to use them. I can also see us offering some pre-made pesto and other herb-based sauces and spreads. Probably dried herb blends too.

And since we’ll have greenhouses, we might as well sell flowers too. We won’t have the land to do pick-your-own, but we can certainly have potted flowers too. I’d also want to sell things that are local to the area. Maybe not exclusively, but I like planting local flora. I’m sure there are other people around here that feel the same.

We may not get this property either, but one way or another, the Eclectic Happy Herb Farm sitting on the lot of the Eclectic Inn and Sanctuary is coming soon to a rural area near you! I look forward to the adventure.

The post The Eclectic Happy Herb Farm appeared first on Eclectic Well-Being.

Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve managed to do since the start of the pandemic.

In the beginning – panic eating

Don’t get me wrong – in the very beginning I was panic-eating just like the rest of us. Kathi and I were eating ice cream sundaes every night! Hot Fudge and Carmel Sauce were our go to favorites! Comfort food like mashed potatoes sounded awesome! Just like many of you, we used food to satisfy our need for certainty and comfort during those first few weeks of complete uncertainty.

After the first month I had ballooned up to around 225! Kathi didn’t want to step on the scale, but when her leggings felt tight, we both knew our panic-eating had to stop.

In April the textbooks for the nutrition certification course in which I had recently enrolled in had arrived.

Now, I don’t know about you, but the lockdown gave me a lot more free-time and it was the perfect opportunity to begin studying something I have always been interested in, nutrition and eating healthy.

I had tried numerous programs or “diets” in the past.

I’d done Atkins before, then Keto for a while. Tried Paleo, South Beach, and Mediterranean. I tried a packaged food program that I now can’t believe I ate those processed foods. They had no taste! Kathi hated it since it left her fending for herself since she wanted no part of pre-made meals!

Heck, one April I decided to try eating vegan. This was a number of years ago when Kathi still worked in the city. I was the chef in the house and I didn’t bother to tell her what I was doing. (See, whatever new diet regimen I decide to try, she was stuck having to try too 😉) However, she noticed after about a week of tofu and imitation meat products. She wasn’t thrilled with the vegan plan – mostly it was the cheese she missed.  Lucky for her, that attempt did not even last a whole month.

Looking for Health in all the wrong places.

So after all those different diets or eating plans I was still looking to be healthier. And this time was different. There was a realization of getting older and I didn’t want any short term fixes. I wanted lasting change.  For my food to fuel my body. To continue living an active life. I also wanted to change my family history. My dad died at only 62 years of age, and a few months later his older brother, my Uncle Bill, died at just 64. I don’t want that to be me. I see myself living to well over 100, and I want to live that long life being able to do the things I love, like hiking, scuba diving, exploring.

Finally, I also want Kathi to join me in this long healthy active life.  We share most of our meals together.  It’s important to me for us to share in this health journey! I want our meals to be tasty as well as providing the nutrition our bodies need as we age.

So after talking with a number of health coaches I know, I settled on the science and behavior based certification from Precision Nutrition. The program was supposed to take about a year to complete; I did it in roughly 3 months.

And then I put it all into practice,

and the pounds started falling off. Before I knew it, I was under 200! I stepped on the scale one morning and it read 199.4. I hadn’t been under 200 since the last millennium. Boy was I ecstatic!

But it didn’t stop there. Each week I was lighter and lighter. I’ve been consistently in the low 170’s for several months now. As of this morning I’m 172.6, and the lowest I’ve seen was 170.3, last week. I don’t know if I’ll see the 160’s. I’m not really even trying to shed any more weight.

Of course, I haven’t really been “trying” this whole time, either.

I’m not on any weird, restrictive diet. In fact, I’ve literally been eating Chocolate, Ice Cream, Pizza, Tacos, Burgers, and Pasta all along, and there have been a couple of occasions where I’ve gorged on a plate of desserts, or a really sweet and gooey Yogurtland bowl.

And still I was able to get down to my ideal body weight. The scale tells me I’m between 7.3 and 10.1% bodyfat. I think it’s being a bit generous, and I’d estimate I’m between 12 and 15%, which is right in the healthy range for a man on the cusp of his 50’s.

Although I studied this nutrition program because I wanted to get healthy and live a long life, I also did it because I want to help people. Besides teaching yoga and mindfulness, I wanted to teach people how to be healthy. To shed the pounds and negativity that’s holding them back from being their true Self. Living a full and abundant life!

Afterall that’s why Kathi and I started Eclectic Well-Being!

So, do you want to know the secret?

Join me for Well-Being 101 on Saturday, September 25^th from 10:30 – Noon, Eastern time, where I will spill it all!

✔ Learn to let go of what is truly holding you back from having the body you want, or anything else in your life that you desire by using this one simple technique.

✔ I’ll share one core principle which is the most proven effective way to make lasting change in your mindset and your body… It improves your chances of success by 95%… in anything.

✔ Discover how you can have more health, more joy, and get out of your own way without changing the core of who you are or doing things you don’t want to do.

This is a hybrid event, so you can attend in-person or via Zoom. Spots are filling up quickly, so register today 😊

https://eclectic.kartra.com/calendar/WB101Calendar

The post Eat Chocolate and Ice Cream Every Day, Pizza Weekly, Tacos, Burgers, Pasta, and Still Drop 50 Pounds? appeared first on Eclectic Well-Being.

Being married to not just a health coach, but someone who is focused on finding ways to promote living longer has its perks!

Coaching on what would be a better choice to help me lose weight.

Healthy meals cooked for me (that’s a bonus because he also loves to cook!).

And I have a partner to get outside with, take walks, hike, raft, and garden.

But a few weeks ago, I got some much-needed education.

Like many of you, I initially gained the Covid 10 (maybe 15 – but does it really matter?). Last summer I stopped eating ice cream sundaes and other comfort foods that like everyone else, I was using to get through lockdown. Instead of giving up ice cream all together, I switched to mini Dove bites. Delicious bite-size ice cream bars. Just enough to satisfy my sweet tooth.

I lost my Covid 10 by fall, but then winter set in. Winter, the season our bodies naturally begin to hibernate. Where there are fewer activities to burn through the fuel we put into our bodies. And why many gain the pounds we just lost over the summer. By February I was pretty much back to my Covid 10 weight and I was not happy.

Except for missing out on my morning walks, I was eating very similarly to what got me down to my pre-lockdown weight over the summer. But there I was gaining again.

After a week of simply trying to reduce my caloric intake and seeing nothing, I decided to approach my husband as a client, not his wife. I wanted to get the full treatment of what I needed to do in order to get down to my ideal body weight and stay there!

He began with asking questions.

What was my ideal body weight? He didn’t go to some chart and tell me what my ideal weight should be, he asked me. Then he ask when I wanted to achieve it by. My initial though was tomorrow! But I knew enough about weight loss and nutrition to know that was not realistic or possible.

I thought about it.

My ideal weight is the weight I was at several years ago. Like many women my age, I have slowly added 2 to 5 pounds each year. If I wanted to achieve my ideal weight, it was going to take a while. So, I told him my true ideal weight and giving it several months to get there and he put it into his Precision Nutrition Calculator that produced my personal…

Calorie, Macro and Portion Guide.

This guide didn’t just tell me the calories I could eat, but also broke it down into Proteins, Veggies, Fats, and Carbs.

Now the calorie advice was right where I had been eating. It was right where I thought I needed to be. What was completely crazy to me, is how much more protein I needed.

I was eating maybe half of the recommendation – but I was making up for it in carbs and veggies! Not drastically, but yes, I was eating a serving more of carbs, but I needed 2-3 more servings of protein!

This didn’t make sense to me. Why was it that I could eat more, and still lose weight?

That’s when my husband became the teacher.

He began to explain to me how the body needs protein for just about everything it does. And when it doesn’t get enough protein, it finds it in your muscles.

“Muscle tissue makes up part of our lean body mass and is metabolically active. Meaning, it burns calories 24/7, even at rest. If you’re constantly losing a small amount of muscle every day, it means your also burning fewer calories every day. This is one of the reasons some people seem to get fatter as they lose weight,” he explained.
Uh? So all the extra “flab” I was trying to lose, I was unintentionally creating more of it!

He went on to explain why many people tend to gain fat back faster when they stop dieting. Their bodies no longer need the same amount of calories, because they have less muscle. So when they go back to eating as they did pre-diet, they begin to gain weight. It’s also another reason diets don’t work.

I knew I didn’t want to diet.

Dieting never gave me lasting results. It’s why I’ve simply made new decisions about what to eat when I felt my clothes getting tight or feeling heavy.

BUT what I was doing was no longer working. I was choosing healthy food options, but not tracking the protein. Some days my only protein was one egg for breakfast (that’s a half serving of protein) and maybe half a serving of chicken at dinner. I thought by eating healthy carbs like potatoes, wheat bread and rice, and fresh veggies, with a little bit of protein, keeping to an appropriate calorie intake, all was good.

But I was literally sabotaging myself!

A small but important shift was needed. I had to reduce my carbs and instead increase my protein!

It hasn’t been hard, but it has been a shift in thinking. I’ve had to consciously make new decisions. To be more mindful of WHAT I’m eating, making sure I am eating enough protein.

It’s working.

My clothes are fitting better. The last time I looked at the scale, my weight was not only down a few pounds, but it was all in fat. My muscle weight actually increased! That’s a good thing! Gaining muscle weight while losing a few total pounds will make my body more metabolically active! This will help me continue to lose weight. Not like before though where I was losing muscle. As my body fat percentage increased, even with a pound lost, it was becoming harder to lose the next pound.

I now track WHAT I eat, not my caloric intake. I still eat the same things, just in a slightly different ratio. It’s been slow, but I want these changes to last, so I intentionally made it a slow process. I’ll keep you posted as we get closer to summer and bathing suit weather.

You may not be married to this health-conscious, mission-driven, human being, but you can benefit from his expertise and passion for people to live indefinitely.

Yes, indefinitely – but that’s for another Eclectic Thoughts Post though!

The post The Perks of Being Married to a Health Coach appeared first on Eclectic Well-Being.