How I managed to lose 66 lbs is the big question. I won’t say it was easy or happens with a magic wand, because it will be a lie. The truth is – it’s very difficult but as you can see not impossible.
The basic and most important thing is that I changed my way of living and eating. Allow me to give a brief description of my previous life. I promise this won’t turn up in an autobiography of the difficult life of an MP.
My routine a year back was reckless running from task to task, from meeting to meeting and constant mobile conversations at the same time. Consequently, my eating habits were chaotic. My choleric life reflected on my weight and appearance. The main priorities were to do as much as I could do in as little time as possible, to be at as many places as possible, and to meet as many people as possible. Spending quality time with my family wasn’t on the agenda and when I was there I was constantly on my mobile. If I was home, cooking for my son it was like Christmas.
Analyzing my way of life, one week after Election Day in 2009, I gave myself a postelection promise. This was something like the New Year’s resolutions that one makes every year and as result of an internal struggle one doesn’t keep them. My resolutions were:
•Priority # 1 – spend more quality time with the family
•To cut down on the mobile usage
•Not to eat randomly
•To see more friends
•To read more literature
•To start home cooking
•To be more engaged in sports
•To avoid having meals with unpleasant people
•Not to eat when I am angry or sad
Essentially, I got back to basics and it was pretty much straight forward. Of course, I’m not mentioning my work due to the fact that it equals with Priority # 1. I have to say that sticking to the above mentioned list it wasn’t easy. I reorganized my daily routine, even my life, in order to get it together. For this purpose I had to bring some of my work home, mainly reading and writing documents. As it happens, the most difficult thing was cutting down on mobile conversations and eliminating snacking on unhealthy, high in calorie sugar products that you have with tea, coffee, between conversations or for just because you feel like it. I have to admit that I didn’t manage the active sport part well but I do hope that I will before the next elections.
Consequently, I can safely say that your life rotates around your meals. Every second person on the Planet has weight issues, no matter if it’s a man, woman, or child. We are constantly on a diet, trying one thing or another in order to lose weight, losing a few pounds at first and one month after that discovering with horrid that we gained more weight that we have lost. Another diet follows and another disappointment and depression and so on and so forth. We are constantly thinking about food – what we must or mustn’t eat what we want to eat and with whom we want to eat. I was one of those people on a constant diet, under constant stress by the hunger and the kilograms on the scale. I was very annoyed with my mom when she gave me a scale for a Birthday present. Horrible. I thought she was having a laugh. This is a personal item and if you need one, you get it for yourself. She didn’t catch my drift and got angry with me insisting that it was such a useful gift.
After I started implementing my resolutions I bought some books on the subject, like: “Superfoods” by David Wolfe, “The Complete Book of Food Combining” by Cathryn Marsden, “The French Diet” by Michel Montignac, “Dr. Well’s Optimum health Plan” by Dr Andrew Well, M.D. I have read plenty on the subject on the Internet. Of course, I have read and applied Dukan’s elixir and got a reasonable result, but I gained the lost weight immediately after stopping the diet. The materials on the topic were useful to me and laid the foundations for my own personal nutrition system.
I’ve been applying my system for more than a year now and as a result I have lost 66 lbs. My system isn’t a classical diet but a nutrition system combined with eating habits.
Following my system took the stress of being on diet away, made the yo-yo effect disappear and I wasn’t constantly hungry anymore. On the contrary, I have adopted the principle that you can eat anything, just in the right order, combination and preparation and most importantly with pleasure.
For more than a year, I feel joy before, during and after having a meal and absolute satisfaction with the numbers on the scale.
I have named this guide The Joy of Eating due to the fact that my eating habits developed into a lifestyle and I’m not permanently hungry and upset. The rudimental principle of my system is food combining. I’m not sticking my meal philosophy in your face, but I’ll be pleased if you consider my long term experience with diets useful.
Brief Historical Remarks On Food Combining
Love and greed justify everything
Oscar Wilde
Dr. William Howard is well known for developing a nutritional method based on food separation into 3 groups. He was born in 1861 in Harston, Pennsylvania, USA. He loved his food and that lead to weight issues and hence to health deterioration. He started regular active sport but nevertheless with no result. In the meantime he developed and followed a nutrition method based on food combination. As a result he lost 22 kg and managed his health issues. He founded his diet on food separation by types and eating order so digestion and the metabolism don’t get upset.
The American Herbert Sheldon is the procreator of food separation and an advocate of alternative medicine. All and all, food separation is deemed to be in contradiction with your contemporary life style.
The system I have developed is based on the above mentioned method, but is pretty much straight forward and easy to follow. And what is most important – IT WORKS.
An interesting fact is that in the remote past people did eat their food separately; they hadn’t had the ability to combine the food in the way that we do today. For example, the Indians had meat only if there was a drought as they usually had seeds, roots and fruits, etc. They were unable to store the food for a long period of time – preserving, deep freezing and storing food in refrigerators was unknown to them.
My Basic Rules and Principles
Eat not for the pleasure which you can find in food, but eat to increase your strength; eat to save the life which you have received from heaven.
Confucius
To help you shed your excess pounds and to maintain a good figure, I have created four basic principles in my nutrition system based on food separation. This system helped me to get rid of the 66 lbs I needed to get to my healthy weight.
Principle One: Do not mix proteins and carbohydrates in a meal together
Principle Two: Eat your fruits separately, before or between meals
Principle Three: Drink liquids when you are hungry, but not during a meal
Principle Four: Keep an interval of at least four hours between every meal
In practice, food separation means not to have carbohydrates (potatoes, rice, pasta, bread products, etc) with proteins (meat, cheese, fish, eggs, soya, etc.) in the same meal. Vegetables are compatible with protein as well as with carbohydrates.
Nevertheless, all nutrition contains certain quantities of carbohydrates and proteins and to determine which food goes into one of those groups the highest quantity of either one is of importance. For example, lamb contains 20gr of protein and no carbohydrates so that’s why we consider it a protein. Multigrain bread contains around 40gr carbohydrates and only 8gr protein so logically it is a carbohydrate.
My nutritional style is close to the Mediterranean diet. This is the healthiest system; it has several varieties - French Greek and Italian. I like the style of the typical meal from the island of Crete, which includes