Rudy

Rudy
My Homemade Mother's Day Gift

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Learning the Style of Healthy Living

I'm putting my next diet session together on FitClick.com and an add pops up for the new healthy choices at McDonald's.  The Wildberry Smoothie catches my eye.  Curious, I check out the calorie count, ingredients.  Can McDonald's make anything that's actually healthy?

I know I sound wildly skeptical.  But even with my picture above, are those foods as healthy as they look?  Our wheat is genetically altered... to have more gluten.  Our fruits and vegetables are grown in poor soil, inundated with chemical fertilizers and radiated for bugs and durability.  Our chickens are fed a diet of GMO grains tainted with cannibalistic fillers.  Milk contains formaldehyde, and the whole process of pasteurization and homogenization, antibiotics and Monsanto's rBGH, no longer required to be listed even in ORGANIC products. So, yeah, I'm a little skeptical... maybe wildly so.  However, my diligence to maintaining a reasonably organic diet did save me from things like High Blood Pressure, and High Cholesterol even with my serious weight issues.  I ate too much, exercised too little and ate way too rich, but my diet was still filled with things that you could pronounce, low in designer sugars and things I couldn't pronounce.  I always skimmed the fats off beef and didn't eat any pork or seafood, i.e. shellfish, or Crustaceans-adhering to a biblical based diet. Despite my gastronomical shortcomings, I avoided a lot of the more common bullets of obesity.

Okay so my 12 oz Berry Yogurt Smoothie is 161 Calories, 5 grams of fiber, 9 grams of protein, 0 fats and 23 grams of sugar, from the fruit because I use berry stevia to sweeten it with instead of sugar or juice concentrates--although, a little frozen concentrated Orange Juice makes for a great smoothie.

McDonald's 12 oz Wild Berry Smoothie is 200 calories, 3 grams of fiber, 3 grams of protein, .5 grams fat, 44 grams sugar.

Now I use a plain Greek nonfat yogurt, which is high in protein, and instead of ice and wild berry fruit base, I add frozen fruit and and the end result is that I have just as much flavor, less calories and more protein, less sugar & more fiber.  Its real fruit instead of "fruit base" more yogurt, less water.

I remember a very wise saying from my earlier days, eat foods that will spoil, and eat them before they do.

It's still a much better choice than their milk shake... and I'm not against McDonald's.  It just concerns  me that the public seems so pathetically unaware of what constitutes nutrition and are inundated with high calorie, low nutrition alternatives.  If the sign says healthy, well, isn't there truth in advertising laws?  I guess the question is, what constitutes health?

We are what we eat.

I Stumbled on a website that was a real eye-opener to me.  It talked about calorie condensed foods.  I'd never really considered that before.  It showed several examples of comparisons of fruits and vegetables to commonly consumed foods, like apples to a fast food meal.

It was disturbing.  I see the kids where I work eat this meal every day.
He went on to show he ate about 4 lbs of food a day and that:


  • 4 pounds of raw veggies will provide 400 calories
  • 4 pounds of raw fruits will provide 1000 calories
  • 4 pounds of cooked whole grains/legumes provides 1600 calories
  • 4 pounds of nuts/seeds provides about 10,000 calories
  • 4 pounds of Lucky Charms, Pop Tarts, Cheese provides about 10,000 calories

  • When I first started trying to change my eating habits, it took me a couple of hours to consume an apple.

    As I ate it, I swear, it kept getting bigger.  But determined to make some changes, I forced myself to eat 2 pieces of raw fruits every day.  It was punishing. But 2 years later, I can really pound it down pretty quick and wish it was a little bigger.

    I had a bad weekend and suddenly my weight was up by about 10 lbs.  I almost fell off the scale.  I was panicked and backed out of the bathroom like it was a murder scene I'd stumbled upon.  I'm  not kidding.  It was traumatic.  What was I going to do?  It was like a little voice in my head that said, you're gonna get fat as soon as you stop this diet, just like very other time... all you're doing is delaying the inevitable.  But, I went back to my website, changed my targets to a higher protein, lower carb ration and in less than a week I was back to the last end of session weight.  It was beautiful.  I can maintain what I've lost.

    I've figured it all out.  Stepping on that scale and seeing it back where it was supposed to be was a real moment for me.

    So I was going to start again this weekend but I'm sick as a dog... my gut is all messed up.  Everything I eat makes me sick.  The upside is, I'm losing weight anyway... but I feel pretty rough.  Actually I haven't been sick in a while.  I really think its the lack of sugar.  I've been using Stevia instead and pretty well redefined my idea of dessert.  Its a work in  progress.  14 lbs from now, I'll have lost half of me... and I'll go from obese to just simply overweight.  20 something more lbs after that, I'll be within the high end weight range of normal weight for my height and age.

    I'm coming along.  I'm not there yet.   But I'm starting to see a faint light at the end of the tunnel.

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