Gluten — It makes your dick explode like a rocket launcher... supposedly.

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Relax, I’ll keep this one brief. There isn’t much history involved, just a quick before and after snapshot of when “food” was just food, to the modern day of vegans, “carnivores”, and a growing fear of gluten among the upper middle class of the first world. I suppose I’ll also incorporate my own “diet plan” into this study, and get two birds stoned at once. If you’re wondering what my qualifications as a medical doctor are, I got about 86% in my high school biology courses, and that was more than enough to educate me on the matter of nutrition and dieting. I’ll also clarify that I’m not a health nut, I smoke, I drink (I’m drunk right now), and I eat meat, dairy, refined sugar, and gluten, and.. I’m about 160 pounds, which is technically underweight for a 6 foot adult male, but I still feel healthy. I don’t feel weak or slow, even if I plan to cut back on smoking, my point is that hypochondria (paranoia related to personal health) is very common here, and quite contagious, it would seem. It’s also a business, so.. let’s just dive in, shall we?

First, I’ll acknowledge that everyone is different. Some people just gain weight faster, absorb sugar faster, or have allergies, etcetera, so this study will be based on our current “standard” of what our doctors consider to be healthy, keeping in mind that even I fall outside of their recommended guidelines. I happen to be gifted with favourable genetics, I’m one of those people who can eat anything they want and not get fat, but there’s a lot more to it than just metabolism or diet, or even.. God forbid, exercising, which I barely do myself. I walk a reasonable distance each day, and work a moderately physical job, that’s my normal workout, which seems to burn enough calories to keep me underweight with my current age (27), diet and metabolism. If I had to say what my secret is, it’s that I probably don’t eat as much as I’m supposed to. I also happen to have a mild eating disorder, my appetite is finicky, and I don’t get hungry that often. I usually don’t eat a full breakfast, and so I eat about 1–2 meals per day, with some snacks replacing what would be the rest of a normal regiment here. Keep in mind that your 3 square meals a day may also include additional snacks and or desert items, plus any sugar infused drinks, even coffee, which is arguably the most common chemical addiction in the world, even more so than smoking. That’s a lot of energy that your body has to process into.. something. Energy can’t just be deleted from the universe, it transfers from one state to another. In this case, either kinetic, physical energy, or.. belly rolls.

My point here is something that I’ve touched on before when I was looking at our food markets, and it’s the simple fact that our culture here encourages people to eat too much, even our parents tended to force us to eat more than we wanted to, or.. not enough, depending on their financial situation. Food here isn’t just in abundance, it’s also a social crutch, it accompanies almost every social occasion, along with it’s good buddy booze. The predicament of whether to eat when you’re not hungry, simply to avoid being rude in a social situation like a date or something, is something that almost everyone here has experienced, some more frequently than others, and in many cases, people will keep eating when they’re not hungry, just because.. the food is there, and other people are also eating it, so you do too. My “diet plan” can be boiled down to eating when you’re hungry, and stopping when you’re full, presuming of course that you don’t already have some sort of eating disorder that affects your appetite.

The flipside to this logic is that your body is also programmed with built in survival mechanisms, some of which dictate how your body manages it’s food supply, and resulting energy output. If you suddenly stop eating, your body might actually gain weight and slow it’s metabolism in an attempt to store it’s current energy for the long term. I’m sure you’ve heard a survival story of some guy who survived for months without food or something, it is possible, but if you go more than a few days without food, you’ll probably end up in a hospital before the end of that fast, unless you’re already used to that diet. Here in lies the term “crash dieting”, sudden, drastic changes to your food intake, which come in many different levels of severity, whether otherwise beneficial or not in milder doses. You might get sick, or you might not even notice, but the effect is still present. You quite literally are what you eat, and humans in particular have an exceptionally resilient cardiovascular system, almost identical to that of a pig. We’re among a select few complex animals on the planet that can eat almost anything, which allows us to survive in various conditions.

Compared to something like an endangered Panda bear, which can only eat bamboo and nothing else, our omnivorous nature gives us a huge advantage in survival, some would argue more so than early tool development in terms of how our caveman ancestors made it far enough to produce us. For those who might be confused about whether a monkey is more or less similar to a human than a pig is, we do seem to have more in common with pigs than monkeys. We have the musculoskeletal system of an ape, but our other organs are more like a pig’s. Apes have quite strict diets, they can only eat certain things, so in terms of our stomach, and what we eat, the pig is still a better reference point for our closest neighbours on the food web here. For the sake of reference in this study, we can just think of ourselves as “Pig Monkeys”, for all intents and purposes. If that term offends you, then oink oink, you fucking pig. I don’t care if it’s against your religion, or you just prefer some other animal, but one way or another, our internal organs are so similar to a pig’s that we can successfully transplant them between species. Not to say that it’s a good idea in general, but that alone should be a clear enough indication of the genetic similarities, regardless of how or why this is so.

Now.. what happens when a human only eats vegetables, and nothing else? Well.. ironically enough, they may very well become a vegetable themselves before too long. Likewise, if you ate nothing but meat, you would quickly suffer from a loss of blood sugar, and pass out, then wake up in a state of delirium, and craving sugar, without which, you might not wake up again the next time you black out. You still need carbohydrates to burn, it’s the fuel in the engine that is our muscles, almost exactly like putting gasoline in a car. Fat is more like motor oil, and protein would be the metal that the engine and chassis are made of, with vitamins and minerals making up all the smaller, but still necessary components of the vehicle, but without fuel, that car isn’t going anywhere. Remember, your heart is also a muscle, part of that same engine, it’s core piston really, and if the engine stalls.. that’s a heart attack.

Every mammal burns fuel in a similar way, we just.. refine it differently, from species to species. Again, similar to how a diesel or petrol engine operate quite differently, with different fuel, but perform a very similar function in the end. Even so, if you put gasoline in a diesel engine.. the truck will have a heart attack when you try to start it, if not shortly after, depending on how much diesel was already in there to begin with. Luckily, our bodies are much better designed than a Ford, and not just because you have a fuel refinery build into your chassis. We can run for nearly 100 years with minimal maintenance beyond basic hygiene, and you’re still the one driving the vehicle that’s going to break down in 5 more years and likely require another engine transplant. We consider that normal with almost any vehicle, but if that happens to our bodies, it’s a medical emergency, and even people who have no existing medical conditions can quickly push themselves into having real symptoms if they try hard enough, which is what hypochondria tends to do. Crash dieting is only one example, but a good one to use, since it covers 2 distinctly different control groups. 1, people desperate to lose weight at any cost, even death, and 2, health nuts who act like Hybrid cars. Apart from these more defined groups, we also have people who are simply paranoid of what they eat, perhaps more so than is necessary for the average Pig Monkey. They’re not necessarily “trying to be healthy” or lose weight, they just.. hear a lot about GMO’s, and pesticides, and chemicals, and even gluten, and so they try to find alternative diets that offer healthier choices, almost in a neutral way, but their bodies still tend to suffer from it if they’re not careful.

A good example here might be the simple transition from “carnivore” to vegetarian, which is more common, and in my opinion, less extreme than many other crash diets. I use quotations on carnivore because.. no living human is a carnivore, you’d die fairly quickly if you ate nothing but meat. As for an omnivore, ideally, you’d slowly wean yourself off of meat, eating it once a day, rather than three, then every other day, and so on, but of course, if your body is accustomed to getting it’s fat and protein supply from meat, then.. it might have a hard time refining a new fuel source of beans and rice in large quantities. An important distinction here is that most meat, and certain vegetables contain a rich supply of both protein and carbohydrates, offering you both needed ingredients in your own internal blood fuel, but the process of breaking down that fuel is.. quite different, once again, like refining gasoline or diesel from crude oil. Diesel can also be made from plant oils, the same one’s that we eat ourselves, but oddly enough, our muscles work more like a petrol engine, using sparks of electricity, rather than air pressure to ignite the fuel. To top it off, “fossil fuels” are made of.. fossils, of animals that were once alive like us. Hypothetically, we could start building oil derricks over graveyards and harvest our own corpses in crude oil after a long waiting period. The graveyard would just become the oil refinery, it already is, really. Burning corpses is already our primary fuel source in our industries, even with modern nuclear engines, and our bodies do the same thing as refineries when refining oils, just.. differently, of course.

You could say that the downside to being an omnivore is that deviating too far from your normal diet can be just as dangerous as not eating at all. If your body can’t digest what you eat, then.. you’re just doing more harm than good. The idea of “fasting”, which simply means not eating (“breakfast” literally means to break your fast, from when you were sleeping), does have some merit in that there certainly are worse fuels than nothing which could be put into your engine. Even so.. you do need to put something in there eventually, and as an omnivore, with a complex vehicle that is our bodies.. we also need a lot of different nutrients in order to be healthy. Healthy enough to work and breed, at least. Overall, we still have the upper hand against the diet of a Panda bear, they don’t need to think about what they eat, they only need one food, but if there’s no bamboo.. that’s it, immediate starvation. We have a lot more options, more freedom to choose what we eat before suffering from malnourishment, but of course, this tends to overwhelm people who just need to eat something, and aren’t “foodies” like every other person who buys a new kitchen, but still eats out every other day, or even more.

This Panda diet is also a good example because we can clearly see that the bamboo plant alone has.. essentially everything inside of it that we need to survive. Pandas still produce the same fuel that we do in the end, what every mammal needs, blood sugar, glucose, but they do so with bamboo, which.. go ahead, try eating some bamboo and see what happens. Your internal refinery can’t process those materials, they’d just damage your organs from the inside out, but the Panda refinery is designed specifically to turn bamboo into.. everything that it needs to survive. Fat, protein, sugar, even vitamins and minerals, all inside of one plant, and processed in one, very specialized refinery of the Panda bear. If it sounds miraculous, well.. that’s life. Every plant is made of the same materials, and each animal that eats that plant has a refinery built to process it. Termites eat wood and turn it into fuel, and wood is just another carbohydrate. A very, VERY complex one, a tree is like a giant, very strong strand of spaghetti. Look at what we eat. Under natural conditions, a cow eats.. grass. Go ahead, go eat some grass, and tell me what colour your vomit and or feces are afterword. Eat a steak, and you’ll be bragging about what you found in your toilet.

Of course, humans eat certain plants as well, what we call “fruits and vegetables”, and “grains, beans and nuts”. Without them, we quickly succumb to vitamin and mineral deficiencies, things like scurvy, which can kill you as quickly as starvation once it gets bad. To use the car metaphor again, imagine everything that isn’t made of metal being taken away from your car. This includes the insulation around the wires, which you need for a proper electrical connection. Otherwise.. no spark where and when you need it, and our petrol engine stalls. The thing to remember here is that pretty much everything you eat is made of the same things, just in different proportions and compositions. The same things that you put into your car to make it run, but.. no, don’t drink gasoline, or diesel, even if it’s bio-diesel from a deep frier, it’ll still kill you. The reason that you can’t just drink gasoline or eat trees or bamboo is because your internal refinery, your stomach, isn’t designed to process fuels like that. We have a very diverse, quite advanced and resilient refinery, but still limited in it’s own capacity.

We seem to do best eating “nutrient rich foods”, things that are abundant in a particular vitamin or mineral, such as citrus fruits for vitamin C. Your body only absorbs a small amount of what you consume, so.. you consume much more than you’d otherwise need to compensate for it. Another good example here is calcium, which people end up drinking way too much milk to meet their “daily %” of on the milk carton. You’ll absorb more calcium from a single spinach salad than from an entire quart of milk, simply because your body isn’t designed to suck a cows tit. Of course “diary products” are a somewhat vague category, essentially any milk based food, and people even try to make “milk” out of titless plants like almonds and coconuts, but most dairy products, things like yogurt, or cheese in particular, isn’t really milk anymore. Of course it’s made of the same things, but.. it’s a different organism, it’s something that ate the milk, like we did as larva, and much like the cow ate the grass, Simba. It’s been refined into a different type of fuel, one that we can refine more easily ourselves as adults. In my opinion, cheese is probably one of the best ways for a vegetarian to get protein if they’re weaning off of meat, and there are places that do “humane milking”, which.. as far as I’ve heard, most of the cows seem to enjoy a little too much, it’s.. awkward.

Which brings us to the star of our show here.. the “carbohydrate”, and it’s shady cousin gluten. Essentially, gluten is a by product of certain plants, which are made of carbohydrates. A carbohydrate is.. hydrogenated carbon. Carbon and hydrogen in a single molecule, which when combined with oxygen, makes for a volatile fuel that provides that familiar “burn” we’re told to feel when exercising, and in turn produces two by products of it’s own. Water, and carbon dioxide, which we release as our own “exhaust system”. Your shit is just the leftover materials that didn’t get digested along the way, it’s.. the garbage disposal from your refinery. Your piss is the actual exhaust from the engine, combined with water coolant from other parts of your body. The rest of the exhaust is.. your breath, you exhale the CO2, and water vapour, and plants absorb it for their own internal refineries, turning it back into oxygen, but.. they still need more water, and so do we. Water is a rich source of hydrogen and oxygen in our biosphere, two primary building blocks of life here on Earth, but it’s carbon that makes us all “carbon based life forms”, and carbohydrates are essential to this process, it’s where we get most of our carbon from. Without it… Atkins.

There’s carbon in protein and fat as well, in every cell in your body really, but as for your fuel supply, this combination of carbon and hydrogen, with oxygen as the catalyst is what you need to keep your engine burning. There isn’t enough carbon in raw protein to sustain our cardiovascular system and relatively fast metabolisms compared to most mammals, at least those of our size. Even if you absorb a few molecules from your steak, you’ve got 6 litres of blood that still need sugar 24/7, otherwise you’ll notice immediately. The somewhat common disease known as “diabetes” prevents a person’s blood from absorbing sugar, and if they don’t keep up with their medication, they can die within minutes of missing a dose, because the engine will stall without fuel. Drinking blood is actually one way to get the most out of an animal if you’re in a desperate survival situation, it contains most of the nutrients that the animal had in it’s raw form, but even that won’t keep you alive forever, it’ll just buy you more time until you can get some edible plants as well, otherwise you’ll just be shitting blood back out the other end soon enough.

To contrast with mammals that are carnivores, even your friendly dog or cat, keep in mind that a wild carnivore eats fresh, raw meat, which has a lot more nutrients than a cooked steak or burger, or processed dog or cat food. All of the vegetables and other stuff in cheap dog food is basically just filler to add weight to the product for sale, cats don’t eat rice and gravy, they eat.. meat. The thing is, since most domestic cats or dogs don’t have access to healthy raw meat, they actually do need nutritional support from packaged foods, just to get those few vitamins and minerals that they otherwise wouldn’t get. While it’s likely that ancient humans/cavemen likely ate raw meat, they were also eating.. anything they could find, and they didn’t often live past the age of 30. Cooking food sterilizes it, for the most part, but also destroys some of the nutrients, or.. makes them unrefineable in our system. A “blue rare” steak is essentially trying to cook a steak a minimal amount, literally only a few seconds on each side, just to kill any surface bacteria that would likely cause a horrible bowel infection. Also keep in mind that a real steak is an unprocessed piece of meat, it’s a raw cut directly from the carcass, and so everything inside of it is still sealed under the surface. As soon as you process meat into a ground beef, or a sausage, or a burger, or anything that isn’t a raw cut, the inside becomes contaminated with all those same bacteria, and you then need to cook it all the way through, since that surface area is now on the inside of the burger. In short.. stop ordering rare burgers, I’m not trying to be a dick, I’d just rather not kill my customers at work.

Anyway.. back to omnivores like us, you’ve probably already heard of an “all raw” diet, only eating raw food, but that’s another major transition from what you’re probably eating right now. I won’t say that it can’t be a benefit for some people, but for many, it would be a crash diet that would leave them in a worse position than when they started, possibly even something severe. The logic is sound, technically you will absorb more nutrients from raw fruits and vegetables. Hell, you could even make a salad if you really wanted to break some new ground here. Really, this “all raw” diet is like another extremist sub-sect of vegetarianism. Normal vegetarians just don’t eat burgers and chicken and steaks and hot dogs. They still eat pizza and pasta and burritos and rice and chili and other sources of protein, but if you’re “all raw”, then.. scrap all those ideas. No bread, that’s baked. Really, all you can eat is salad and fruit. Just.. snack on carrots all day like Bugs Bunny. I know, it sounds great, but it’s fucking dangerous, you’d be better off developing a cocaine addiction than sticking to a crash diet like this out of nowhere. I’m not encouraging people to start looking for a cocaine dealer, it’s just another example on the sliding scale of stupid, a drug addiction is just a worse type of crash diet.

As for gluten, it just happens to be part of several of our more abundant sources of plant foods. Grains in particular, wheat starch has gluten in it, and so does soy, which is a bean, people actually ask for “gluten free soy”, I didn’t even know it existed until recently, but I already knew that there’s wheat and soy in many different things. We’ve all heard of a gluten allergy by now, and here, we see a collision between actual allergies and medical conditions, and fad crash dieting, many of which follow various medical breakthroughs. All it takes is for one person to realize that they also lost 40 pounds during their recovery, and.. viola, you have another diet fad. The Atkins diet is a good example that most of us might remember, it was only about ten years ago that people stopped using it. From what I know, it was designed for diabetics, people who specifically can’t eat any refined sugar products, or.. anything that could spike their blood sugar, even certain fruits that are rich in those same sugars. If you hear someone talk about how it’s “fruit sugar”, ask them where sugar comes from, and if they want to see your carrot tree.

Today, we get most of our cheap, refined glucose and table sugar from “sugar beets”, a particularly sweet vegetable that we process into sugar. “Cane sugar” or “Demerara” is often from a sugar cane, another plant that used to be our main source of sugar. “Brown sugar” is refined white sugar that’s been died brown to fool people. Sugar in general is one of the biggest businesses in the world, and.. guess why. Blood sugar, it’s our universal addiction, we all need it, and now they’ve even digested it for us. In some cases, it’s a valuable tool, such as keeping someone alive during a coma, you can just inject glucose directly into their blood to keep their engine running, but for the rest of us, it’s.. a primary cause of sugar related health problems, much, MUCH more so than gluten, or more complex carbohydrates. Even a piece of fruit like an apple contains a simpler sugar than bread or pasta does, eating refined sugar just causes your body to absorb it much faster, and in a much greater ratio, leaving less of it behind. For something like white table sugar, or the glucose in syrups and sodas, this of course means that your body has even less time to do something with the energy, and so more of it becomes fat, and consuming too much refined sugar can even give you diabetes, “type 2”.

There’s an old saying that “fruit is nature’s candy”, and.. well, it is. It contains the most refined sugar that we see occur naturally in our food pallet, even honey is a more complex molecule that takes longer to digest. So.. splurge on nature’s candy, unless you’re a diabetic, and obviously, stop when you’re full, but you still need a rich source of fuel. Or.. a staple food item(s) that are rich in complex carbohydrates. Something that your body can comfortably digest in large, “meal” sized portions, and still provide you with enough energy to not be a walking zombie, if you manage to leave your couch. Believe me, I’ve been there, and it really is worth just eating some fucking spaghetti once in a while.

I’m sure that you’ve heard of “the 4 food groups” by now, and the mountain of criticism that it already faces, from vegetarians, vegans, gluten free crash dieters, etcetera. If you follow these points of logic, you end up back with the “all raw” crowd, where the only thing you can eat is fruit, vegetables, and maybe some nuts or something. The 4 food groups diet may be somewhat outdated and generalized by this point, but much like any study or regiment, it’s.. not exactly a “rule”, people tend to take these sorts of guidelines a little more personally than was originally intended. Much like if I was offended that a doctor would consider me to be underweight, that’s just a general guideline that fits into an average majority, it’s not a black and white rule for every single person. All it means is that people who fall into their guidelines tend to end up in hospitals less frequently than people who don’t, obviously there’s going to be a few exceptions from time to time. If those exceptions were the majority, then that would be the guideline instead.

The gluten free diet is an interesting addition to this growing diet craze, because it essentially cuts grains completely out of the quartet of a recommended diet, even more so than Atkins did. If you’re also a vegetarian, then meat’s out as well, and a vegan would also cut diary, leaving.. fruits and vegetables, and nuts, and maybe fungi like mushrooms. Grains are just plants like any fruit or vegetable, but each type of plant food is a bit different, even in how we digest them. Wheat is more similar to grass than something like lettuce or spinach, and we know that we don’t have the stomach to digest grass like a cow or deer can. Naturally, eating raw wheat or barley would be a bad idea, you wouldn’t be able to digest it. It needs to be processed, or.. partially digested first, into a simpler ingredient, like flour. Something that our stomach can digest once it’s been baked with moisture, it’s just.. much smaller pieces of the original material, ground into a powder that we can use for baking. Like blasting a mountain with dynamite before you go mining for it’s gold underneath. To clarify, if you just ate raw flour, you wouldn’t be able to digest it, but.. the process of baking or cooking is very much a chemical reaction, just like digestion is, you’re changing it into a different.. thing. When you bake a loaf of bread, it’s not “wheat” anymore, it’s.. bread, which is made of the same basic elements, it still has carbon and hydrogen in it, even gluten, but.. in different proportions and concentrations, the way that the molecules are connected to each other changes, like using the same Lego pieces to make a different structure (with the key addition of water of course), which does change it’s chemistry, and how we process it in our refineries. Go ahead, just.. eat some raw flour and tell me what happens.

And so, we arrive at the meat and potatoes of our study.. sorry, I had to do that. Before we analyse what a “gluten allergy” is, why it’s not really an “allergy”, and why you more than likely don’t have one, I’ll just add that wheat is only one of many other plants that are ground into a powder for further processing. Not just cocaine, but things like corn, rice, and other carb rich plants that grow abundantly are used for different baking applications, some of which are gluten free, you can still get corn bread and rice noodles, there’s usually a similar substitution for anything, since.. again, it’s all made of carbon and hydrogen Lego pieces, just put together differently. Wheat just happens to be the most abundant one that we grow here, since it’s so versatile and rich in complex carbs. It’s.. the most efficient crop to grow in this climate, compared to corn or rice. We still grow a lot of corn, but mostly down south where it’s warmer. Rice needs a lot of moisture compared to it’s size, and is a fairly labour intensive harvest, but wheat grows almost anywhere, even in cold, dry areas, it grows like grass because it is one, and it’s much easier to harvest and process than rice would be on a mass scale here. So, there are still other options for people who actually can’t digest gluten, but as for the crash diet crowd.. let’s take a closer look at the inside of your colon right now.

Basically, your intestines are full of bacteria, and without them, you’d die fairly quickly. E-coli is the primary resident in our bowels, and forms an important symbiotic relationship with mammals around the world. They digest our food for us, and we provide food and a home for them. They’re.. the working class labourers of the refinery in your gut. They do the dirty work, quite literally, even when you’re “taking out the trash” at the end of the line. In addition to E-coli, several other microscopic organisms also reside in your bowels, and elsewhere, providing something of a “maintenance crew” for your body, but sometimes.. this interferes with your internal “law enforcement”, or immune system. Even an organ can stimulate your immune system under unusual circumstances, and this is what an “allergy” essentially is, or.. does. It’s when your body overreacts to something that would otherwise be non lethal, or even unnoticeable. In the case of an actual disease or toxic overdose, it’s quite common for the immune system to essentially work your body to death trying to fight it off, but if it’s not something that would be considered dangerous to a human, then that exception is noted as an “allergy”. Remember, everyone is a bit different, and each of us has small flaws in our genetic codes, like my eating disorder. I’ve got a Homer Simpson managing safety down there, and he never tells me when I “should” be hungry, so I need to keep on top of it myself.

As for the gluten allergy, this is where we see something of a distinction. It’s actually sort of the opposite of an allergy. If you’re a celiac, your body doesn’t overreact to gluten, it.. under reacts, or.. basically just can’t digest that one material. The cause can be traced to a flaw in your maintenance crew, one of the resident organisms in your bowel refinery is either non existent, or.. just not doing it’s job well enough, they’re on “gluten strike”, and the gluten starts to build up fairly quickly when no one’s processing it, which prevents other food from being digested, or in severe cases, from even passing through. If left unchecked, you could easily starve to death on a full stomach, or even rupture your bowels and leak those same bacteria into your bloodstream, making your entire body septic, whichever came first. Even in less severe cases, eating gluten would cause bad indigestion, stomach pain, and so on, and still slowly cause malnourishment by preventing the other bacteria in your intestines from doing their job as the clutter builds up.

This condition is quite rare, and if you did have it, your doctor would know, it’s not difficult to detect. All they need is a stool sample to see what’s living in your shit, and or what might be absent, it’s not brain surgery. In the case of a celiac, it’s a persistent ailment, it doesn’t just come and go, or give you a stomach ache once in a while, it would get progressively worse and worse each time you ate gluten. If you had a bad stomach ache for more than a day or two, you’d probably go to a doctor, and they’d know if you had it or not. There’s many different things that cause a stomach ache, it’s a symptom of many different things that could be wrong, but usually not all of them at once, and an inability to digest something is just one of them.

As for people with healthier, or.. more optimally functional bowels, gluten is no more harmful than any food in moderate doses. I hate to preach “moderation”, but it’s a cliche for a reason, too much of anything is bad for you, even water can kill you if you drink too much, or.. not enough. That’s not a “water allergy”, it’s just.. how your body works, take it or leave it. If you eat too much sugar, weight gain and diabetes. Too much fat, gallstones and hypertension / heart attack/stroke. Too much gluten? Even if you do have a full maintenance crew in your refinery working at 110%, they still have a limit of how much material they can process at any given time. If you overload their warehouse, they won’t be able to process everything before the next load arrives, and so on. The garbage will still build up, even things that don’t become fat, or shit, just.. garbage in your intestines. There are things you can do to “flush it out”, everything from eating fibre, to chemical drugs, to literally pumping it out with a hose, but it takes time, and most people eat several times a day. The show must go on, right?

Fibre is a good contrast to gluten in this example, since.. we can’t digest it. “Fibre” in food terminology is basically just any carbohydrate that’s too complex for a normal human digestive tract, even grass would fall into this category, your refinery can’t process it, even if it’s still a carb. Since it’s too big to break down, you don’t turn it into fuel, it just passes right through, but some of them do so very easily, while other’s don’t. You can imagine this quite literally, just like pumping different materials through a hose. Something that’s sticky, or highly viscous will clog up the hose, while a solvent like water will flow through easily, and even clean some of it out along the way. Water in general already does most of the cleaning inside of your bowels, but certain plant fibres help clean things out much more efficiently. Basically, eating a certain amount of these digestive fibres as part of your diet is highly recommended, just to keep you “regular”, which is more important than it might sound. Of course, the easiest way to get this fibre is from.. take a guess, grains, which also have gluten in them. By striking gluten out of your diet, you’re also cutting out a major source of digestive fibre, and so if you don’t replace it, then.. you’re basically causing a problem quite similar to what you think you’re trying to avoid, presuming that you’re not actually a celiac. If you don’t get enough fibre, you’ll accumulate garbage in your bowels much faster, and eventually prevent normal digestion, just like a “gluten allergy” would, only less severe. That just means it would be a slower process, you’d approach the same point eventually, which means that it wouldn’t help prevent indigestion, if that’s why you’re cutting it out.

Of course, there are other ways to get digestive fibres, but a loaf of whole grain bread will provide the same amount as a box of vegetables, same with carbohydrates, or.. fuel. Those plants also have fibre and carbs in them, but you’d need to eat quite a lot of them to get the same amount, and.. face it, most people don’t eat enough greens as it is. 5 salads, or.. some brown toast? If you’re not getting your fibre from a lot of vegetables, or a reasonable amount of grains, then.. you’re probably already familiar with the current market of constipation remedies. This is also a good time to bring up how grains are refined, much like sugar, where white flour is simply more refined, and contains much less nutrients than normal whole wheat flour. White bread still gives you energy, but nothing else, it’s a raw fuel product just like refined sugar. The sugar is just more refined than the bread, it all gets broken down into a single glucose molecule eventually.

I know a lot of people who “don’t like brown bread”, but your options here are.. well, it’s a snooty art market, let’s put it that way. The art of baking bread, there’s more different kinds than you have time to spend taste testing. Just try a different loaf from your local bakery each time, and see which one is better. If you just ate a stale old piece of Dumpsters bread a few years ago, and got a seed caught in your teeth, and thought “I like white bread better”, then.. well, just try something else, you might be surprised. They do make whole grain bread without seeds in it for one, and if you can manage to find one that you like, it’s the easiest way to get fibre and carbs on a day to day basis. This might sound cynical, but I’m just being realistic, most of us don’t have the luxury of time or cash to go shopping for exotic groceries every day or stick to a full time meal regiment, so instead of creating an impossible fantasy crash diet goal like cutting out an entire food group without considering everything that it offers, start with simple upgrades like replacing white flour with whole wheat, use less refined sweeteners like honey instead of sugar in your coffee, replace processed meats with fresh one’s, whole steaks and fish fillets that still have most of their nutrients intact, eat cheese or yogourt instead of drinking milk, each small step makes a much bigger difference in the end than trying to leap across the entire course like Neo. Very much “tortoise and the hare” logic.

Before I finish, I’ll offer some final tips for the weight loss crowd, but first, I’ll send my final warning to the health nuts and say that while you certainly can benefit from a drastic change in your diet, crashing into it is almost never beneficial, unless it’s already an emergency, like having diabetes or a celiac condition. Presuming that you don’t already have a list of medical dietary conditions, be careful cutting out such large portions of your diet so quickly. When you research these things on Google, don’t just look for someone else’s report or opinion of what diet might be best, people make a living selling diet books, and while some of them might be good, people still tend to rush into them without realizing how many different nutrients need to be replaced, and how your body needs time to adjust to refining a different fuel source. Research what a “bowel” is, and start from there.

This crosses over into the weight loss area, since your fuel source is a primary factor. Since many people already get most of their complex carbs from grains, replacing that fuel demand can be tricky, especially if you’re limiting yourself to nothing but vegetables. Potatoes, rice, and lentils are probably your best bet in that case, just eat mashed potatoes instead of french fries. Of course, the real culprit here is an obvious one, something that we all acknowledge, but.. desperately try to avoid. Sugar, since it’s basically like a cocaine addiction, but even more addictive, and in this case, necessary for survival, so you don’t just want to get rid of it, you just need to manage it. Easier said than done I’m sure, but identifying the target before making a decision will save you a lot of pointless struggle. Crash dieting can be bad for many reasons, but one of them is that they tend to lead to a relapse shortly after, where you just end up overindulging, or overcompensating with some other food source. A common one might be that “fat free cookies still have sugar in them”, and it’s a good enough example of how marketing takes advantage of your fear of getting fat. Really, it’s just the word, and it’s as logical as putting toast in a toaster. That.. does sound logical, right?

A toaster processes bread into toast, it bakes/cooks it, and the final product is different that what you put into it, much like the bread after it’s been baked. Each step changes it’s chemical makeup, and some of these changes are permanent, at least within our refinery system. You can’t unboil an egg after it’s cooked, but you can eat it, shit it out, and feed it to worms that make dirt to grow grass for chickens to eat so they can lay more eggs. Nature will recycle it eventually in some way, but when it comes to eating fat, it.. doesn’t make you fat, that’s backward logic in terms of how a refinery works, like.. bringing the wrong oil to an oil refinery, when that refinery turns crude oil into gasoline, or in our case.. the opposite, simpler energies into more complex one’s for storage, such as body fat. So.. more like bringing gasoline to an oil refinery, but.. the opposite. This is probably one of the strongest brainwashing regiments that got shoved into our heads growing up, the idea that eating fat will make you fat, and like most, it was for advertising. Sex sells, blame whoever you want, but it always gets someone to look, and that’s all that matters in advertising. Like fishing, you just catch them with a hook, then reel them in. Naturally, a doctor will acknowledge that too much fat is a bad thing, and most diets will agree, but that ambiguous fact is easily muddled into a fallacy that when you eat fat, it literally makes you fatter. The fact here is that it doesn’t, eating carbohydrates does, and refined sugar does it much faster.

I can’t stress this enough, and I know that even people who realise this and acknowledge it will still avoid eating fat for fear of gaining weight, but I’ll say it again if I have to. It’s just traditional to assume this, everyone thinks that eating bacon or ham will make you fatter, but it won’t, it’ll just give you a heart attack eventually. Skinny people have heart attacks too, and it’s usually from cholesterol. That’s where the fat goes, into your blood, and it stays there until it can slowly burn off. Eat too much, and you’ll either clog an artery, or damage your pancreas as it attempts to break down all the fat, again, whichever comes first. Managing your fat intake is important for your overall health, especially as you get old, and the type of fat that you eat makes a huge difference. You’ve probably heard of “good or bad” cholesterol, and really, you can break this down to “liquid or solid” cholesterol, again, with respect to pumping it through a hose like your arteries. A liquid will flow through a hose very easily, but a solid won’t, which in our bodies means.. heart attack, or something similar. It can happen to any organ, that’s just the most fundamental one.

What this means for the pig monkey, is that when selecting from the wide range of fats available in the supermarket jungle, just keep in mind what it’s.. state of matter is. Is it a solid, or a liquid at room temperature? Even after you melt or cook it, and your body breaks down those molecules, well.. you’ve seen what bacon grease does after it cools, right? Those molecules will just slowly clump together again, inside of your blood vessels, NOT your waistline. DON’T forget this distinction. Excessive fat intake might still effect your digestion and metabolism, and of course your blood pressure, but it doesn’t add the same type of fuel energy to your refinery that sugar, and other carbohydrates do, which are the one’s that will make your bathroom scale read a larger number.

As for choosing which fats are good, or.. more liquid than solid, vegetable oil is a liquid even at low temperature, and while some cheap cooking oils may be hard to digest, you can get better one’s like olive oil, which can be used for almost any cooking application in place of additional fat, even deep frying. Also remember that when oil burns, it also changes, and that charred oil is no longer a liquid. Animal fat is semi solid, and since you have that same fat in your own body, you know exactly how solid it will be when you eat it. It’ll just be in your blood instead of your waistline. Too much animal fat can cause circulation problems, even heart attacks, but your body is quite accustomed to breaking it down. So long as you’re eating reasonably fresh, unprocessed meats, then it’s definitely not the worst thing you could be eating, even inside of an extremist diet.

Butter is in a similar category as a semi solid at room temperature, since.. it is animal fat, along with a few other things that came with it. Butter is something that I would consider “okay” as a dairy product, simply because you normally don’t eat that much of it, at least compared to how much milk some people drink. Eating a pound of butter every week is much more reasonable than a gallon of milk every few days. However.. butter substitutes, things like margarine or Crisco, are arguably worse than animal fats, simply because they’re even more solid at room temperature, and they don’t get much softer in the bloodstream. Margarine is just vegetable oil that’s been “hydrogenated”. It just means “hydrogen”, they add hydrogen to it until it’s “saturated”, which just means that you can’t add any more to it, like filling up a bucket to the rim, or getting a towel as wet as it can get before it won’t carry any more water. Animal fats are partially hydrogenated, each animal has it’s own consistency of fat molecules, and vegetable oils have much less hydrogen attached to their carbon atoms. This tends to make for a more liquid fat, and so saturating it makes it more solid, and more difficult to break down. Anything that has saturated or “trans fats” in it is your real nemesis in terms of preventing a heart attack, then of course moderation with everything else.

As for sugar.. this is what makes you fat. It’s the only thing that you really need to control if you want to control your weight. I only stress this because when you do crash diet, each thing you eliminate makes it that much worse, and that much more difficult to cope with, or maintain. You’re putting yourself through undue stress and hardship by avoiding both sugar and fat at the same time, your body is craving at least one of them, so.. you relapse back into both, and feel that it’s helpless. Presuming that you’re still reasonably young and not at great risk of a heart attack, IGNORE THE FAT!!! Make a grilled cheese sandwich with bacon and start thinking about what kind of bread you used, because when it comes down to the refinery in your bowels.. the “carbs” become fat, not the “fat”. Fat becomes cholesterol, in your veins, period, so if all you care about it weight.. then eating fat is quite literally nothing to fret about until you get older. ONLY sugar, THAT.. is your nemesis here, and it hides behind “fat” because it make cashola.

This may very well be the single most frustrating attempt at communication that I’ve ever experienced in my entire life, even before I could speak. Many times I’ve attempted to explain this to people, and several times, they would “acknowledge” this fact, but.. hypnosis and brainwashing are exceptionally powerful tools, the closest thing to “magic” that truly exists in our world, at least as far as can be tangibly measured. Even if you know this, you may still feel that it’s “not worth risking it”, you might still avoid fat just to play it safe, then.. either relapse into a mix of fat and sugar, or run into some sort of health problem from malnourishment. On the flip side, you might even spitefully eat fat, and declare that no one should care if it’s making you fat, but even that is a flawed way of thinking, since.. it’s still not making you fatter, regardless of how you feel about it. Food doesn’t have feelings after you kill it, it doesn’t care if you’re hungry or fat, it’s just chemistry. I’ll acknowledge that your own attitude and stress level will also impact this result, there is a “mind over matter” element to this as well, but in terms of the machine and components that you’re working with in your body, being aware of this may very well allow you to easily avoid fattening foods, by.. eating foods that are high in fat. I know, you’re already scratching your head, and trying to find out who’s crazier, me, you, Atkins, or the last diet book you read, so just decide for yourself. Think about it, really fucking hard. Do you put toast in a toaster? Do you??! It sounds… so logical that you might even do it, but you know better, so.. apply that same logic to putting fat into a body that already has it’s own fat refinery inside of it. Your body makes it’s own fat, every single fat cell on your thighs and belly rolls were created by your own internal refinery, your body didn’t just pump the fat that you ate into the most convenient location and leave it there unprocessed, otherwise each section of fat would be a completely different consistency than the others, from complete liquid to solid. Instead.. it’s all a fairly uniform semi solid animal fat, specifically tailored for your body, by your own refinery, and made from the sugar that you ate. The fat that you ate is.. more like the motor oil in your veins. Still necessary, but only in limited amounts of oil pressure.

Now.. if you’re willing to do anything to lose weight.. then listen closely. Alcohol is another important factor. I know, “liver”, liver, liver, and more liver, “my liver, blah blah blah”, well fuck you too, and your liver. Your stomach.. is the first line of defence, the Marine Corp in the ongoing assault of booze. You’ve heard of a “beer gut”, right? How ‘bout a keg, or a 6 pack? Beer is made of refined carbohydrates, a 6 pack is equivalent to about a loaf of bread. Just think of them as “loafs of beer” for easy reference. Getting hammered off of beer is roughly equivalent to eating several loafs of bread in a few hours. There goes any diet attempt that you might have thought you were doing. STOP!! … and think. Wine? Cider? Hard liquor? Mixed drinks? Beer??? Don’t get me wrong, I like beer, but.. it’s a treat. It’s a luxury, like dessert. A cold beer on a hot day is great, but it’s not a source of being drunk, not unless you’re an ancient Egyptian with nothing else to drink, or maybe celebrating Oktoberfest. It’s once a year for a reason. Of course, many mixed drinks are also heavy in refined sugar content, almost anything but a Cesar will add as much raw carbs as a beer would, if not more, and so.. presuming that you fall into the vast majority of light alcoholics that make up our population here, or perhaps even heavier.. just find a source of booze that offers more complex carbohydrate levels. You still get drunk, your taste options are still varied, and.. you lose weight, alakazaam! In terms of booze, wine is generally a better choice than beer or cider. Hard liquor is also relatively low in carbs, but of course, that depends on what you’re mixing with. Drinking a whole mickey or 26 without any mix is still unnecessarily hard on your circulatory system, but finding the right mix can make all the difference. Something like tonic water or tomato juice instead of pop or a sweeter fruit juice. Yes, welcome to bartender boot camp, so shut the fuck up, and begin and end every sentence with the word “sir”.

This also crosses back over into health nut territory, since.. alcohol abuse tends to impact your stomach, and therefor your digestive system, usually long before the Prima Donna liver has to even bat an eye at the issue, let alone face it in the trenches of your waistline. Of course some people still develop liver problems from alcohol abuse, but if you’re part of the weight loss crowd, and you do drink, then avoid any drinks that are primarily sugar or carbohydrate based. Remember, “sugar” is just a refined, or.. simplified form of carbohydrate, meaning that you’ll digest it faster, and therefor have less time to burn that energy. They just took the Lego pieces apart, then built a simpler structure out of them that’s sweeter, and easier to digest. As your body gets used to this, it becomes more and more difficult to switch back to a more natural diet of complex carbs from things like wheat, which would make you prone to weight gain as your body struggles to store energy for the future, since.. it’s not sure what to expect. In terms of survival, it’s just storing energy to assure that it doesn’t die, getting fat is the side effect. If you can assure that most of your carbohydrate intake comes from complex, more natural sources like potatoes, rice, or whole wheat pasta and bread, rather than candy or beer, then you’ll lose a lot more weight than any crash diet or exercise program, and still have the luxury of indulging in certain sweet or fatty foods, in addition to being drunk as often as usual if necessary.

Excessive drinking also damages your digestive track, causing the same problems that would result from a fibre deficiency, or even a gluten intolerance. Again, preventing normal food from being digested, in this case, because too many of your E-coli, and other refinery workers were killed by the amount of booze flowing through your intestines as it gets soaked up. Not to mention the likelihood of developing ulcers, or even stomach cancer. Any of these things will dramatically impact the way that your body digests food and processes energy, making any attempts at health or weight control that much more difficult as your diet becomes more and more restricted from these conditions. In short.. alcohol passes through the same refinery in your gut that food does, the liver and kidneys and pancreas and other adjacent organs are the support team, they handle damage control beyond the stomach and intestines, in addition to some other functions, but that refinery still has to deal with.. everything, all the time, and all at once, it’s in a constant state of operation, not just when you eat something like gluten or fat. Just think about it when you’re drinking, if you’re also concerned about health and or weight loss, your choice of booze will make a bigger difference than your normal dietary choices under most conditions.

Moving on.. calorie counting, and why you only need to do this for specific medical reasons. This is another medical dietary plan that also happened to cause some patients to lose weight, so.. it was soon followed by an army of fanatical crash dieters who insist that you must count the calories of each meal that you eat. I’ve gotten into.. quite hostile debates with people online over this, as I attempt to suggest that cutting refined sugars and beer out of your diet is a good place to start, they adapt the usual extremist suicide bomber tactic and try to assault my argument in an aggressive way, so.. I’m just trying to offer it here, where the common troll might not think to look. I’ll admit that counting calories might help you lose weight, but.. again, it’s unnecessary, and prone to failure, relapse, depression, weight gain, you get the idea.

To clarify, there are many diets that are tailored to specific medical conditions, such as diabetes, or a gluten intolerance. Many of them happen to contain less refined sugars or alcoholic beverages than most diets would, and so as a result, yes, many of these people lose weight. By majority, most medical dietary plans are designed for the elderly, people who need to control their intake of fat, sugar, salt, and.. pretty much everything to assure that their aging organs aren’t being overworked, and.. to stay regular, which becomes more difficult with age. Of course, abusing your body at a young age can still cause medical problems, even accelerate the normal aging process, but a young human body is quite resilient under normal circumstances, presuming that you’re also free of any of these types of medical conditions. It’s common enough knowledge that kids are still growing, and experience what some might call “growth spurts”, where their apparent size and weight can shift dramatically over the course of only a few months. If this happened to you at the age of 50, it would put you in a hospital, but as a kid, your organs are much more.. elastic, for lack of a better term. They can handle a lot more stress, and are operating at peak efficiency, specifically the refinery that provides the necessary fuel both for constant activity, and growing physical body mass.

At the age of about 14, your body experiences it’s first real shift from a childhood metabolism. It’s essentially when puberty might normally hit, but of course, this comes sooner or later for different people. Once this happens, your size and weight will still be in a state of growth and change, but your “spurts” become less extreme, your body structure begins to level out more, and your skeleton is essentially fully grown by about the age of 20. We all know that “big boned” is just another buzz term, your bones don’t make you fat, but your height is an important factor when measuring weight. Naturally.. a 6 or 7 foot person is going to be heavier than a 4 or 5 foot person, by as much as 100 pounds in some cases. If all you’re looking at is weight, then.. it can seem helpless when trying to compete with.. you know, little people. A person with a larger stature, a “big boned” skeleton, will naturally accumulate more body mass, since their body is essentially built for it, their genetics are likely trying to build a muscle system to match the skeleton, which of course means some fat to balance out that muscle tissue as well. In total, a person over 6 feet can still be in near perfect health up to about 200 pounds, but if that same person was 4 feet tall, they’d be obese. Much like how I’m technically underweight, simply due to my height. If I was shorter, then I’d be an ideal weight for say.. 5 feet, I suppose. That extra foot is just another 2 feet that my blood has to travel to make a full trip. Another example of how a simple weight chart or your bathroom scale isn’t always enough information to go by, even if it’s still an important piece of the puzzle.

Another important factor is gender. Yes, I’m sorry if I’m offending your “neutral” status, but in terms of human pathology, your internal organs play a big part in how.. your internal organs function, including sex organs, since reproduction is a key element of our body structures. To oversimplify, most of what your body does is designed specifically to allow you to procreate, then die, on either end of the spectrum. If you have ovaries, regardless of your “gender” in social terms, then your body will naturally accumulate mass in an attempt to foster a child in your womb, even if you have no conscious intention of doing so. People don’t plan on getting fat either, but their bodies still do things without their direct consent. It may be a stereotype that women gain weight faster than men, but their is some partial truth to this, especially in terms of age difference. Men don’t go through menopause, so it’s easier for us to maintain our health into old age, assuming that we take steps to do so. The statistic that “women live longer than men” can more than likely be attributed to lifestyles from the previous generations. Just.. think about life back in the 1950’s, where most women stayed home cleaning, and most men drank a quart of hard liquor every day and smoked 2–3 packs of cigarettes. Do the math. Today, drug and alcohol abuse is more evenly distributed between genders, so that statistic is starting to level out as the social barrier between the two dissolves.

If you want to do another animal comparison, most species have larger, stronger females than males, simply to assure that they survive to carry children. Men can procreate in about 5 seconds, but it takes women longer to develop the child into birth, so naturally, they need an evolutionary advantage to even the numbers out. Pigs and monkeys are both fairly even in stature between genders, the differences are more social and behavioural. Men tend to mob on instinct, very much like an ant colony where a large group of men can coordinate together efficiently, under the command of a smaller amount of females. Since humans are more mentally independent, more “intelligent”, our mob instinct likely caused us to “dominate society” until the more recent age of global communication. With that barrier gone, gender barriers are dissolving quickly, but in medical terms… your doctor still needs to know how many ovaries and or testicles you have, it’s just a matter of science, which shouldn’t influence your social status.. as far as I know, anyway.

Having said that, individual genetics still seems to play a stronger role here, or.. the differences between a male or female metabolism among humans are still fairly small before old age sets in. For anyone between the age of about 20–40 who’s still reasonably healthy, your ability to manage your weight is even enough in terms of diet and exercise. We’ll cover that part last, but let’s finish up with diet first. I’ve already said as much as I can about how crash dieting is dangerous, and that adjusting your diet so extremely requires a gradual process of slowly replacing each and every nutrient with a viable substitute, so let’s finish the “weight loss” program portion of things. A side note before moving on is the magic of vitamin supplements. Technically, if you just pop a multi-vitamin every day, you can eat nothing but garbage for decades, and be reasonably healthy, but.. it is too good to be true, there are strings attached, and no marketing team in the world would just throw this into an advertisement without a court order.

Again, vitamin supplements are intended for medical reasons. Either you have a vitamin deficiency, or some other problem that prevents your from digesting a certain vitamin, so.. you take a supplement until the problem can be solved, or at least ruled out as “currently unsolvable”. Of course, you don’t need a medical condition to use vitamin supplements, they’re harmless enough in recommended doses, but they do make your refinery crew.. lazy, to put it simply. This can be very literally translated into a workplace environment, let’s say.. a kitchen, to stick with the topic of food. Take Chef Ramses, drop him in McDonalds for 10 years, then throw him back in Hell’s Kitchen and see how long it takes for him to readjust to making food from scratch again. He’d probably pick it back up in a few days or less, but not all of us have Ramses managing things in our refinery. In the case of a Homer Simpson like what I’ve got, you’ll need to take some steps to manage things yourself like Mr. Burns. I’ll play Smithers here and try to give you some direction.

My point here is simple enough, I think. There’s a lot of organic chemistry at work, but the metaphor is valid enough for a snapshot in this case. If you eat vitamin supplements every day, then your body will naturally adapt to this as your primary source of vitamins and minerals. The crew in your refinery will stop processing vitamins from the food that you eat, since.. it won’t need to, it’s getting steady packaged deliveries every day. As far as your stomach is concerned, that little pill is just another nut or berry that you found in nature somewhere, and it treats it like any other food item. In this case, an exceptionally nutrient rich tablet, full of.. every vitamin that you need, already processed into it’s base form. Your refinery becomes dependant on this resource injection, and if you ever stop taking them, you’ll struggle to digest any amount of vitamins or minerals from normal food.

Having said that, vitamin deficiencies are actually quite common. Just take a look at the side of a bottle of multivitamins, and try to calculate how much you’re probably already missing. Before you panic, keep in mind that a “daily %” is a very wide, generalized average. It doesn’t account for size, weight, age, gender, or any sort of environmental factors, it’s basically just an approximation between all of these averages, primarily for healthy adults. A kid or a senior will generally have much different nutritional needs, like the difference between cat food and kitten food. Kids need a lot more calories compared to their size than an adult would, simply because they’re burning twice as much energy, physically, and in terms of growth. Same with vitamins and minerals, a growing body needs to physically construct bones and organs, which.. requires raw materials like vitamins and minerals. A vitamin deficiency during youth can have long term side effects, but even as an adult, falling behind in maintenance of those organs will catch up to you eventually, causing any number of health problems, even psychological ones, since your brain also needs these materials to function optimally.

Another thing to keep in mind is that your body can store and distribute nutrients quite efficiently at a reasonably young age, especially vitamins and minerals. This means that eating “too many vitamins” isn’t usually a problem (some things like niacin can cause unpleasant side effects, but you’d need to take quite the overdose to reach that point). Still, your body can only store so much cargo at any given time, which is also part of your liver function, meaning that if you do drink or abuse drugs, then your ability to retain nutrients is also that much lower than it otherwise would be, in addition to your stomach having a harder time absorbing those nutrients, compound the two. A vitamin deficiency will hit you sooner, and it’s a common enough stereotype that alcoholics have bad diets, not just counting the booze. If you don’t drink or use drugs, or at least not that frequently, then you could potentially go for years without getting your “daily 100%” of every vitamin on that bottle, but soon enough, something will begin to suffer from a lack of maintenance, from a crew lacking supplies in your body. Within reason, that daily % could be considered an average divided over the course of a year. If you took 365 of them at once (which you obviously shouldn’t), it would constitute about a year’s worth of nutrients that your body would normally need within that time period, but of course, some of the food that you eat also contributes to those numbers, with some nutrients being much more abundant than others, and some depleting faster than others within your body.

In general, vitamins deplete faster than minerals. Your body uses vitamin C quickly, and so it’s the most abundant vitamin added to many drinks. You’ll get scurvy before anything else if all you’re eating is bread or meat. Minerals are more durable, less.. reactive. Your liver can store a healthy supply of iron from a single meal and slowly distribute it over the course of many days, and if you maintain a consistent diet, then it’ll get used to this. Feed it iron supplements, and you’ll get much less iron from any meat or green vegetables that you eat. Iron is another common element, many foods are rich in iron, but there’s also a list of other, less abundant minerals that you need, so.. use supplements sparingly, and as needed. Realistically, you could take one of those multivitamins once every week, or even once a month, and that alone would prevent almost any case of vitamin deficiency, so long as you still had a reasonably healthy diet. If you were truly lacking in one or two vitamins, which is likely, then your refinery would quickly snatch those up from the cocktail, and store them for as long as possible. Perhaps not the ideal solution, but considering that quality food can be expensive in some cases, this can be a viable alternative for the lower class, at least until food markets can improve. Again, keep in mind that kids have different nutritional requirements than adults, including vitamin intake, and this shifts again once you become a senior, so just.. consult your doctor if you’re a vitamin junkie. They don’t get paid much for pushing vitamins, they should be able to give you an unbiased answer based on your current conditions.

Of course, you can get all of your vitamins and minerals from the “four food groups”, that’s.. sort of the point. Obviously it’s not written in stone, it’s a general guideline that can be adjusted for each individual, which.. is also the point, I would imagine. It offers choice to our omnivorous nature, we can adjust our diets as individuals, but as soon as you cut out an entire food group, as many diets do, then you need to account for what it provided, including all of the vitamins and minerals. Many people do briefly consider this when becoming vegetarians or something, they’ll eat more vegetables and beans and rice, but it can be difficult to replace certain minerals without eating meat. Some of them are added to certain foods, such as Iodized Salt, they add iodine to it because it’s so uncommon in natural food items, and many people would have an iodine deficiency otherwise. If you cut meat, and also decide to get Kosher salt, just for good measure, then you need to replace that iodine quota one way or another, and that’s just one of MANY examples to consider here.

There’s a fine balance, a very thin red line here between “natural and artificial”, and so I’ll try to offer some points on this before we move on to the dreaded exercise portion of my boot camp here. First, everything is “natural”, because it’s still occurring.. within nature. We’re still part of nature, and us processing food is no less natural than us digesting food in our stomachs, it’s just.. dangerous, because we’re running before we learn how to walk. The practice of refining agriculture is an ancient science, there are countless “natural” ways to improve the efficiency of a farm. I agree that modern GMO production is extremely careless and dangerous in many ways, it definitely needs to be managed more professionally, and not as our primary food market, but unfortunately, we’re already there, so we just need to do what we can to keep getting food while trying to deal with that. To clarify, the GMO food itself doesn’t seem to be directly hazardous, it’s not quite “poison”, and we haven’t seen any long term side effects yet. Don’t feel guilty for eating it, they’ve left you little choice, “organic food” is still too expensive for many people who can barely afford GMO food, if even that, so my point about GMO food production being careless is meant on a wider scale, in the sense that if their production failed due to some unforeseen microscopic error, it would leave many people starving. The quality of the food itself is still under study, so I won’t speculate on that right now.

As for determining which food products are too refined or processed or.. even unnatural for your liking, just.. slow down and think about what these things really mean. Remember, everything is a chemical as well, your body is made of chemicals, so vague terminology like “chemicals”, and “organic”, have very little meaning without the proper context. A “chemical” is pretty much any molecule that reacts to other molecules, water is a chemical, oxygen is a chemical when it forms a pair. “Organic”, like we discussed, is just a chemical that contains carbon, which.. is in everything that we eat. “Carbon based life forms”, “organisms”. So.. technically, all food is organic, even GMO food, but we’ve created a new classification for that word, which is meant to imply that “organic food” doesn’t just need to contain carbon, but it also needs to be free of certain chemicals. Of course it still has natural chemicals, so.. you get the idea. You can still “modify” something and call it “organic”, ask their team of lawyers if you’re really curious.

Those terms are just that, terms, categories, each category has a wide range of pieces that all do very different things in terms of chemistry. The main chemicals that are banned for “organic food” now are pesticides and steroids, which.. is good, really. Those two chemicals certainly are prone to damage your body, so if you can, it is worth buying organic food for that reason alone, but.. keep in mind that most people can endure consuming these things in small doses over time without suffering any adverse side effects, at least not until old age. I would argue that many age related illnesses may be linked to the consumption of these same chemicals during their earlier, and current life, but by majority, you can still live well through adulthood if you simply wash your fruits and vegetables, and buy unprocessed meats.

This is a good time to clarify what processing and refining is, and.. does. Remember, even cooking a meal is a form of processing and refining, you’re taking raw ingredients, and processing them into a “meal”, refining them into something that’s easier to digest. The “all raw” philosophy does have a sound argument, but it’s only a partial one in the end, very few people have the body for it to begin with. On the other hand, many cooking methods still retain most of the nutrients present, and are natural enough for most people. “Cooking” as we know it is the process of refining food with fire, or heat. Of course, we often use refined ingredients when cooking, and each step breaks it down further and further, into a simpler and simpler molecule that’s easier to digest, all the way down to baby food, or even raw blood sugar in a bottle. So.. to find a comfortable balance here, you could try only cooking with raw ingredients, so that it only gets processed once, and therefor retains most of it’s nutrients, without any added preservatives or other chemicals. Of course some preservatives are “natural”, things like salt, or vinegar, or even smoke, but.. as we know, too much of anything can still be bad, some things are just worse than others. You can still limit most of your harmful chemical intake if you shop carefully, and in most cases, it won’t cost that much more.

First, any fast food restaurant will be using the cheapest products available, so as you likely already know, cut that one out too. Unfortunately, even with the healthier options at some of them, it’s still the cheapest food with the least amount of nutrients still intact by the time you eat it, it’s been processed more than what you’d buy in a grocery store here. Really, the food itself comes from the same farms, but again, processing is the key here. Technically, when you chop a vegetable, that’s a form of processing, a blender is even called a “food processor” in many cases, and again, you’re just turning one ingredient into another. Each step from the original, raw food item subtracts from it’s final nutrient yield (cooking much more so than chopping), which tends to make more of a difference than eating a bigger salad. My favourite example here is cooking spinach. I fucking hate cooked spinach, it’s disgusting, and I refused to eat it as a kid. Of course, no one ever thought to.. not cook the spinach, simply because it’s how they were used to eating it, but if you don’t cook spinach, it tastes almost exactly like normal lettuce, and.. it has a lot more nutrients intact. I know that a spinach salad sounds disgusting, but you can use the spinach for anything, you can make a bacon chicken ceasar wrap with raw spinach leaves instead of romaine leaves, and.. you won’t notice the difference. Think about it, make some steamed romaine, and tell me how good it is.

My point here is just that “processing” is a vague term, and in most cases, it’s simply a matter of packaging. Not to say that it’s not still a detriment to the product, but that’s the idea behind most of it, just finding the most efficient way to deliver the product to the customer, even at the expense of quality. With food, expiration of the product is of course an important factor, time plays an even more crucial role than it usually does, and the practice of preserving food is another age old science that’s been in practice for thousands of years, we just found more desperate, careless ways to do it now. You can still get smoked salmon, or meat that’s been preserved with salt and or vinegar, that’s a fairly harmless stage of processing, but of course, any cheaper packaged product will be using other ingredients as well, one’s used for mass production, where they don’t have time to slowly cure meats like your local butcher would. A more expensive packaged meat may have more “natural” preservatives, but.. an even better choice is to simply buy the entire smoked ham or beef roast. A small one, I mean, one of the cuts from the deli. If you cut it yourself at home, you can save about 1000%, seriously. They charge a LOT just to cut it for you, since they have the fancy meat slicing machine, and buying packaged slices is even more expensive, if you want the good ones.

If you want to be a “conscientious carnivore” (sure, I’ll make up a bandwagon just for fun here), then become your own butcher. It’ll save you money, and provide you with a much better product. You don’t necessarily need to butcher live animals yourself, just find a good professional butcher, even if it’s at your local grocery store, and get a less refined product to work with, whatever fresh cuts they have available. You don’t even need a meat slicer, just a good kitchen knife, and a little practice not cutting your fingers off. Compared to eating hot dogs, which are quite literally made of all the garbage pieces of the animal that aren’t used for anything else, eating less refined meat products, cooking raw meat yourself, is the most sensible way to include meat in your diet without causing adverse health problems because of it. Since meat spoils so quickly, it requires the most preservation, and so refined meat products tend to be more dangerous than a packaged dairy or vegetable product, which is “natural” enough, apart from maybe some pesticides. Just.. rinse it off first, don’t forget. Think about how many hands touched it before you bought it, and act accordingly. If you want to preserve a large amount of fresh meat, just… freeze it. The magic of Sub Zero’s Lin Kuei clan, much more “natural” than a chemical packaging ingredient. The meat won’t be quite as fresh once you thaw it, that freezing process does destroy some nutrients, but if that’s the only step in it’s refinement beyond the initial butchering process, then it’s still much more nutritious, and less dangerous than eating cheap hot dogs or SPAM, or premade frozen burgers. Just make your own burgers, it’s cheaper and much better, and as easy as making pancakes.

Fruits and vegetables are simple enough, just buy fresh produce instead of canned or frozen goods. Sure, hoard a bomb shelter on the side if you want, but in the meantime, take advantage of the fresh plants that are available, because you’ll last longer in the apocalypse if you do. Juice will give you some vitamins, but even “real juice” doesn’t give you everything that the original fruit did, the juicing process is quite a significant stage of processing, and often more useful for people with sensitive digestive systems. If you can handle solids, then just eat the raw fruit. I’d still recommend juice before many other drinks, it’s better than drinking pop, just don’t forget that it still contains a lot of sugar. “Natural sugar” yes, but it does the same thing in your refinery, it still becomes glucose, which your body turns into fat.

As for dairy, this one’s simple enough too. Most dairy products beyond the milk stage are “fresh”, they package it the second it’s ready, otherwise it loses quality. Remember, cheese and yogourt and other “probiotics” are their own individual organisms, they’re technically more fresh than the milk that they ate before we packaged them. It’s basically a form of agriculture, you’re farming these tiny organisms by feeding them milk, then we eat those organisms, and in most cases, the simple act of sealing and refrigerating the product is all that’s required for preservation. Many dairy products also contain salt, which greatly add to their longevity/shelf life. With something solid like cheese, you can literally cut the surface off if it begins to mold, and the portion underneath will still be edible, since it’s a different cluster of organisms. The same species, but not the same one’s that were eaten by mold. People eat “blue cheese”, so the cheddar in your fridge will last a while before you’re whittling it down to a sliver. Investing in some good Tupperware and or saleable glass jars is a great way to naturally extend the life of your food, all of it really. That alone, combined with a reasonably functional fridge/freezer will allow you to eat one or two steps away from fresh all the time, rather than trying to crash through and over it like Neo, and most likely failing in a spectacular fashion.

Having said that, raw milk, or any milk drink, like chocolate milk, is.. well, “not good for you”, I’ll say. Not necessarily bad either, but since cow milk is designed for an 800 pound mammal, the molecules are about 4 times larger in structure than the molecules found in human breast milk. Sure, bacteria and protists can eat it too, they’ll eat almost anything, but as for us, our refinery can’t quite process this workload. All that calcium goes to waste, you barely absorb any of it before pissing and shitting it out in a somewhat random proportion. However.. wait for a “probiotic” to eat it first, and that cheese or yogourt is suddenly much easier for us to digest. That difference is huge, and in opinion, should distinguish the two, at least within the category of “dairy” products. For your own reference, just put raw milk on one side, and everything else that ate the milk before it was packaged on the other, and stick with the probiotics. They know how to process dairy better than Sanse Name does. Drinking raw milk is one step away from eating raw flour, it’s an ingredient, not a standalone food item. The milk itself still has a high fat content, and while we know now that eating or drinking fat will NOT make you fat.. it’s still hard on your circulatory system, and your pancreas, the unsung hero of your refinery. This one little organ with a weird sounding name is what really takes a beating when you eat too much fat, this is what you should think about, not your weight. The sugar impacts your bathroom scale, but drinking a bunch of milk will just put an unnecessary strain on your pancreas and gallbladder, which attempt to refine any fat products that you consume, for storage in the bloodstream. Abuse your pancreas, and you’ll get gallstones before gaining weight from it.

Of course, fat and sugar go together in many, many food items, so this can be difficult to distinguish at times. Luckily judging sugar content is very easy, a simple taste test for sweetness. Sweeter almost always means a more refined, simpler sugar content, although it could also be a matter of dosage. More or less of one product or another. I’ll also clarify that sugar supplements like Splenda/Aspartame are much worse for you than sugar, not to mention that.. they still make you fat. They can still put “sugar free” on the package, but your refinery will still extract glucose from that aspartame, as well as some toxins that are worse than almost any preservative or pesticide. Realistically, drinking a normal soda is much better for you than a diet version, but you’re still better off drinking juice if you really need a sugar fix.

And so, before we move on to exercise, I’ll just clarify that if you’re part of the weight loss crowd, and find yourself struggling with diets, with or without exercise, the most effective change you can make to start, without any extreme changes to your diet, is to simply avoid any refined sugars, or heavy doses of carbs like drinking beer. Don’t let this scare you away from eating bread, you don’t normally drink 2 or 3 loafs of beer in a day. You can comfortably include some whole grains in almost every meal, and as long as you maintain some level of activity, you might even have some room for dessert. If you can successfully cut out things like soda, candy, flavoured chips and crackers, fast foods, and pastries, then you can still enjoy one of these things on a regular basis as your “dessert”, depending on your level of activity. Your body can handle some sugar, but because of it’s addictive nature, controlling this can be difficult. I only stress this because I think that it’ll provide a much higher rate of success to most people. The idea of never eating sugar again is quite literally worth dieing over, since.. you need sugar to live, so.. replace the Neo philosophy with something more realistic. You can look forward to eating a fair portion of real iced cream every day, if.. you maintain other parts of your diet and exercise.

This is basically what I got into a fight with that calorie counter online over, they thought I was being “discouraging”, and that you just need to either believe, or.. do it. Something Neoish like that. Again, I agree that your mentality is a part of this, but your brain is about 10% mentality, and 90% instinct, controlling that other 90% is a lot of work, and it’s not an exact science, it’s not something that most people can rely on immediately, and all the time. Feeding the beast in controlled doses is much easier than trying to starve it, even for someone like me who already has a weak appetite in most cases. If it were the opposite, then I’d need to put a shock collar on my ankle or something just to remind me when I’m approaching my fridge.

My final warning for food is another repetition, but worth noting. The habit of eating out of boredom, or for any reason other than hunger is another factor that can be difficult for some people. Realistically, if you’re not Neo, you need to find something else to do to satisfy this habitual behaviour. It’s natural to want to do something, so.. try to find something to occupy your time. You don’t necessarily need to start knitting like you’re quitting smoking, but it’s similar enough on a mental level, something that’ll take time to adjust, assuming that it’s not a persistent condition. The other side of this coin would be trying to plan ahead, and get snacks that are low in calories that you can munch on when you are hungry. You don’t need to count them, just.. pick the less sugary one’s. Remember.. grilled cheese with bacon, it does have a lot of calories, but.. most of them will end up in your blood, not your waist. If you’ve got a healthy heart, and enough energy to exercise, then make two for a snack and eat it reasonably slowly.

This is my crossover point for the exercise program, we need to clarify what a “calorie” is. The term can refer to either sugar or fat, or both combined, and here, we can see exactly why counting calories alone is a very inefficient, if not dangerous method of managing your weight. Unless you have a specific medical calorie requirement, of course. Assuming that you don’t, then understanding how your body processes this will do more than counting box labels will, even if you don’t cheat or fuck up the math, you might still be counting in the wrong direction. A “calorie” is actually more of a physics term, it’s a unit of energy, like measuring wattage or voltage with electricity. Calories measure chemical energy, and not just in food, but any chemical fuel, really. Gasoline has a calorie content, but.. you know the drill, you wouldn’t still be reading this if you were stupid enough to drink it. In most cases, a calorie refers to organic chemistry, how much energy a living cell or cells might have stored in them, but the numbers can still be compared to something like rocket fuel, or even just gasoline, since many chemical fuels still contain carbon as a primary building block. To understand this principle, you’ll need to learn a physics equation. I’m sorry, I know it sounds bad, but.. it might help in your efforts to do.. many things, really, not just losing weight.

[W = F x D]

Okay, now you can panic. Once you finish, sit the fuck down and listen up. Work is equal to Force multiplied by the Distance across which that force was applied. Of course, many other factors can interfere with this, things like gravy and wind, but this is where you begin a calculation of how much energy was applied to something, or needs to be applied to something in order to move it a certain distance. Then you can account for the wind and other factors on top of that. You’re likely familiar with Distance already, we measure it in units like feet or meters. When calculating speed, we use miles or kilometres per second, distance over time. In the case of “Work”, the (W) indicates the overall energy input or output, in.. calories, or “Jules”. Jules would be the technical term for measuring the amount of energy itself, and the “caloric content” of a fuel would be a certain number of Jules that you would get from that quantity of fuel when burning it. Force is measured in Newtons, which we derive from Earth’s gravity, since.. it’s also where you’re working out, among other things. A “Newton” is measured the same way that you measure your weight on your bathroom scale, again, derived from Earth’s gravity. You’d be much lighter on the moon, but.. no less fat.

If you push down on your scale with your hand, rather than stand on it, you’re still applying force to the pad, and that application of force is what a Newton measures. A pound or kilogram is just a designated amount of Newtons on your scale, but of course, we also use those terms to define mass. Mass and weight are different, your “weight” is how much energy is being exerted on you because of your mass, and of course, under the influence of gravity, like what we have here on Earth. A “gram” is only equal to a gram on Earth, going to the moon won’t reduce your mass, but.. your mass will create less weight there, you’ll exert fewer Newtons against your scale there, even with the same amount of particles in your body.

Anyway.. now that you know what Work, Force, and Distance are, let’s put them together. If you exert a certain amount of force, Newtons, pounds, whatever, against an object, and push it a certain distance, then.. you’ve done some work, haven’t you? Maybe not a lot, but it still required energy, and this simple equation can nail down to the Newton almost exactly how much energy was used, or would need to be used in order to do that. This could also be applied to moving your own body, even just running. The result wouldn’t be quite as precise, but still close enough for an estimate when keeping track without actually needing a calculator or a calendar. Keep in mind, your body is also burning calories on other organs, not just your muscles, so you can add whatever the average idle for your body type is, and if you’re carrying extra weight, add that as well, even more calories burned, but don’t injure yourself.

I hate to nag here, but this is another crash diet warning. Crash into an extreme exercise program and you’ll just injure yourself. It sounds bad enough, but keep in mind that this will also end your exercise program, possibly for a long time, even after you recover. There is such a thing as trying too hard, if you just try to burn off a thousand calories in one work out without any practice beforehand, then you’ll not only hurt yourself, you won’t lose any weight, because you won’t even be able to walk afterword, if you’re lucky, and your body will plan accordingly. Again, the turtle approach seems to offer a higher success rate than the Neo, rabbit hole method. Start small, then gradually work your way up to a more vigorous workout, you will see results after a few months, rather than hoping to see instant results after a week, and being disappointing every time.

On the topic of Jules and calories, it’s important to reiterate that the total calorie content of a food product includes both it’s sugar and fat energy content. Yes, fat has a high caloric content, there’s a lot of energy in oil, as.. we know all to well. However.. we also know that this oil isn’t what you burn in an engine, it’s the carb calories that are used to make your own body’s oil supply. The fat that you eat is part of your circulatory system, and a necessary part, not only in reasonable doses. Again, if you’re young and reasonably healthy, and can maintain even a basic exercise program, then you can afford to indulge in some fat without risking a heart attack, and it won’t add a pound to your waist, unless of course that item also has a lot of sugar, or aspartame in it. Those carb calories will add to your waist, and as we also know, it’s level of complexity/refinement plays a key role in how you metabolize this fuel. More complex is often the better choice, your body will digest a piece of whole wheat bread or pasta much more slowly, and casually than a chocolate bar or bottle of soda. With the pasta or bread, you have lots of time to go for a walk and burn it off before the next day or so, but with the refined sugar, you’ve already burned half of it before you even finish eating, and by the time you go for a walk, you’re already fighting to burn fat, rather than just.. calories, soon to become fat if not used.

This is the last point I’ll stress before moving on, not to let “carbs” scare you, because.. you do need them. I’m sure you’ve already heard of “complex carbs”, and everything else, but this really does make a world of difference, it’s the difference between hundreds of calories at a time ending up being stored as fat, or almost none, depending on your level of activity. Avoiding all carbs is pointless, because everything has carbs in it, vegetables are just even more complex carbs. So complex that you don’t actually get much energy out of it, even if it’s rich in vitamins and minerals. There is such a thing as “too complex”, you can’t just eat grass or hay, but.. you can actually eat some gluten without your dick exploding. Just stop getting cheap white bread and get the whole wheat kind, it’ll do a lot more good than not eating any bread at all, unless you already have a very specific diet that you’re sticking to, and it can replace both the energy quota, and the need for digestive fibres so that you can actually refine that energy.

Now… as for exercise.. don’t pay for a gym unless you’re either an athlete, or you actually have extra money to burn and it’s no sweat off your bank account. Don’t blow money that you could be spending on better food, it’s not necessary to run on a treadmill or lift weights, you can run on the ground and lift yourself instead. Of course, this might depend on where you live, but even if you’re in a city, making use of a park during the day might still be less of an ordeal than going to a crowded gym. If you live in a less populated area, you might still want to avoid jogging at night, even just to avoid being hit by a car, so again, try to make use of whatever space you have available. Instead of a gym pass, get some quality running shoes and use them. Or cycling, if you have a bicycle. Take up a sport, even if it’s not a team one, hit a tennis ball against a brick wall, or shoot hoops like a G with some hip hop music. Swimming, anything that gets your body moving, you don’t need to pay for a bunch of gym clothes and equipment that you’ll never use, those are designed for athletes and health nuts. The shoes are all you might need just to avoid foot and back pain from running, everything else is a gimmick.

Basically, if you’re not an athlete or a body builder, you don’t really need to work out that much to manage your weight, just.. consistently. You’ve probably also heard of “cardio workouts” and “strength” and that, and while the terms are valid enough, you’ll still burn energy doing.. any physical activity. A cardio workout is just designed to burn more calories than lifting weights. If you’re relying on sex as a form of exercise, remember that that only counts if you’re still doing some work, laying down isn’t an supersize, and you might still want to consider some other activities for good measure. Even just walking a few miles per day makes a much bigger difference than doing nothing, once you start getting your blood moving on a consistent basis, your body will get used to having that energy ready each day, which.. will consistently subtract from your energy reserves. Your body will slowly burn off fat along with the carbs you eat, both the fat in your veins, and what you store in your body from your own production, so even this small amount of exercise will have an impact, so long as you can also manage a reasonable diet. Do both, and you can still get drunk and eat iced cream almost every day, I guarantee it.

I suppose I should explore this too while we’re here, the elitist culture of health nuts, and the “all or nothing” attitude of many opinions. You’re either healthy or not.. right? Well, no, but you are either an asshole or not. Don’t let people scare you into thinking that you need to go “all raw” just to avoid getting fat, or that it’s absolutely necessary to be in peak athletic condition at all times, I’m sure it works for some people, but it’s not necessary, you can live just as long and be just as comfortable by working smart rather than hard, you just might not win a gold medal at the Olympics, but you can still manage your weight without killing yourself too. Don’t let coincidences like this control your reasoning, just because some guy happened to lose weight on his crazy diet, or just be skinny already, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’ll work for you, or that it’s a good idea in the first place. You know your own body better than anyone apart from maybe your family doctor, and really, your own body is quite responsive to it’s own needs in either case. For someone who’s reasonably young and healthy, even if you’re overweight, if you’re hungry, then.. your body does need fuel to mix with your fat supply, if not now, then soon. Instead of not eating, make that bacon grilled cheese sandwich (on whole wheat), then go for a long walk, and make another one when you get back. You’ll lose more weight than sitting still and not eating for a few days, because you will eat eventually, and you won’t be thinking clearly when you do, you’ll just be desperate to survive, and any sense of logic will be secondary. You can break this pattern, it just takes some time, and planning ahead, which you can start doing right now by.. constructing your own personal diet, rather than just using a template that worked for some guy that you don’t know.

I’ll end this study by trying to help you construct your own diet template, based on what you already enjoy eating. First, make a normal grocery list, and don’t think about price or health, or what anyone else would tell you to eat. Within reason of course, this isn’t a game to spite the teacher, it’s your life at stake, so take it seriously. Imagine that it’s still real life, you just have a lot of money, and you happen to not be battling weight, it’s just.. what you feel like buying for the week. The meals that you might make that night, or the following days. What drinks or deserts or other snacks that you’d prefer to buy, everything. Don’t worry, we’re not counting Newtons here, you already know the equation. Now you can use it yourself, even if you’re still doubting that you understand it. It still works either way.

Now that you have a list of preferred food items, begin with the most difficult part, cutting out the refined sugar products. I know, it hurts, but.. we will be compensating for it. Fuck Neo, just pick one or two things (depending on how rich one or the other item might be) and have that as your current dessert item. You can always change this slot later, the point is that you have a limited dessert slot to fill on your template at any given time. So long as the quantity is limited, then the sugar content will be small enough to manage with regular exercise (remember, that doesn’t mean hard exercise, just on a regular basis, even if it’s light).

To clarify, “refined sugar” in this case would be anything simpler / more refined than white table sugar. That’s a good benchmark to use, since even a more complex cane sugar is quite a leap in terms of energy storage and how your body would metabolize it. You can still buy cane sugar or demerara for your coffee, just use a bit less of it, or.. again, honey, to substitute a need for sweetener. Another option to cut a corner here might be a sweet breakfast, something like pancakes or waffles, so if you do this, just avoid the cheap syrups. Aunt Jemima makes a good batter, but her syrup is mostly just refined glucose, it’s worse than white table sugar. Replace that with a real maple or berry syrup, or even just a higher quality jam. Yes, there’s sugar in it, but.. more complex than corn syrup, your body won’t send it to your thighs before you even finish eating, you’ll still have time to go for a walk. Don’t forget.. if you get real butter instead of margarine, you can use a fair amount on your waffles without gaining weight, just blood pressure, so.. manage that as necessary.

3 meals a day is still fine, but this will limit your snack slots. If you happen to not eat breakfast, or usually only eat 1–2 meals per day, then you can comfortably fit a few extra snacks into there, depending on their size. Snacking is also a habitual behaviour, so you can satisfy that habit by picking snacks that are low in refined sugars, and your options should still be quite varied. Instead of seasoned chips, get plain corn chips and make nachos in your oven, it’s… much better than “nacho cheese”, trust me, and it’s not loaded with refined sugar like a bag of seasoned chips is. Or if you’re feeling lazy, just do chips and salsa, or get some of those Kettle potato chips with a light seasoning like salt and pepper or something. The heavier the seasoning, and cheaper the product label, the more refined sugar it’s likely to contain. When looking at labels, look for [Glucose], [Fructose], [Aspartame], [Corn Syrup], almost any [Syrup], or just plain [Sugar], but realistically, “Sugar” is still the better choice among that list of things to avoid. A label that says “Sugar” should be referring to white table sugar, so that’s borderline on our diet plan here. Break it down one more molecule and you’ve essentially crossed the line, but even that shouldn’t discourage you. Remember, this will be a gradual process, your body may already be changing into a hummingbird that feeds on nectar, and so we need to ween you off of the syrups if you hope to conquer the next molecule.

For now, we’ll be reasonably generous with sweet foods for the first stage of the diet plan. If you can live with a sweet breakfast, using a more complex sweetener than cheap corn syrup, and honey in your coffee, and a dessert item after dinner, then you could even add something like granola bars or a lightly seasoned snack on top of that around lunch, and still be able to manage that energy intake, since most of your carb calories will be coming from complex carbs, not syrups and nectars. Another good way to curb this transition might be to.. take up baking. I know, it’s quite literally like playing with fire, in several ways, but if you bake your own cookies, you can make sure that only less refined sweeteners are used, you can pick the cane sugar yourself, and not just hope that a company isn’t lieing to you behind a wall of lawyers and crackpot scientists like me.

Even if you decide not to do this, you can still manage a small amount of sweet foods, and if you also eat something more nutritious, then you won’t be as hungry for more sweeteners. At least not as much as if you still need energy. Don’t worry, you won’t need to eat a bunch of salads every day, but.. one might be a good idea. If you can stomach one full salad per day, this will greatly aid in both your nutrition and digestion, your organs will function more optimally, and deliver fuel and fat less sluggishly. Even if you do gain weight, it can make the difference between wearing it well or not, and it’ll be much easier to lose if it’s stored and distributed more efficiently. Chances are, you might actually like salad enough that this isn’t a huge deal, so long as you still have some dessert after dinner, and maybe some jam on your toast or waffles.

However, if you think that you hate salad, then you need to get creative. Find a dressing that you like, there’s thousands of islands to pick from. Don’t get pushed into not using dressing, that’s another unnecessary measure that you can safely avoid, more so depending on what you pick. If it’s a sweeter dressing, that’s more sugar, but even a fattier ranch might have less sugar in it. It’ll have fat, but we know better now, just keep watching your blood pressure for that one. There’s also many vinegar based dressings, some low in fat and sugar, so between that selection, you should be able to find one, if not more that you like through sampling. While you do this.. buy some vegetables, and don’t even bother making salad yet. Just pour the dressings into bowls and dip things into them until you find something you like, I’m sure that most people have at least one preferred vegetable if they haven’t found it yet. You don’t even necessarily need to put lettuce in a salad, there are other options in the produce aisle, and of course, you can safely add some bacon or chicken or cheese into it to make it a heartier meal without adding any sugar to it. The more different vegetables that you can put into this salad the better, since this will account for most of the “raw” portion of the diet. Of course the meat should be cooked, just add it right before you eat it. Some raw food is a good idea, and some raw fruit is also a perfect choice when you’re craving something sweet. It might sound less appetizing than what you’re used to, but you might also be surprised at how good a fresh watermelon is on a hot day, even more than a bottle of juice or soda.

Now, you’ll need some staple protein and fuel sources. You need fat too, but that one’s hard to miss, we’re probably already close to a recommended max as is, but.. depending on how desperate you might be to lose weight, don’t forget about the latitude of your options here, it’s not quite as linear as a company selling diet products would want you to think, and that includes private companies run by hippies as well. Assuming that your diet provides enough fat, leave yourself some leeway there, and decide what type of food will supply your need for carbs and protein. If you eat meat, then protein is an easy one, even a single steak or fish can give you more than enough for one day. Really, I’d almost recommend not eating meat with every meal. If you’re doing the waffle breakfast, that’s already vegetarian unless you’re putting chicken on them too. If you’re not, and you also manage to keep lunch meat free, then you can eat a large portion of meat at dinner, and avoid too much animal fat in your veins at the same time. You should get enough protein that way, but if you happen to also be building muscle, you can add on an extra serving of meat, such as the chicken and waffles, or just meat on your sandwich at lunch. Eating a little extra meat is much more flexible in this case than with the sugar, just keep in mind how much you eat at once, it can still be hard on your system to overindulge.

If you’re a vegetarian, then you’re probably already familiar with the best sources of protein, beans, rice, lentils, even potatoes to some extent, which also provides a reasonable amount of carbs and fibre, but you might still need some extra carbs, depending on your level of activity. Even just working or doing house chores would likely demand an extra energy boost, so we’ll cover the carb portion in a moment here. If you’re willing to approach the dairy quadrant, cheese, like I mentioned before, is an excellent protein supplement, and much more natural than anything labelled as such. If you’re vegan, or anything more extreme, then.. you’ll need to do some research and plan a much more complicated diet plan than this. Just don’t crash into it, regardless of what it is, make it a gradual transition, and your chances of success will be much greater than trying to go cold turkey overnight.

For carbs, this one is hard to miss too, since you’ll likely be getting a lot of sugar energy already. The key here isn’t so much getting a lot of complex cards, just.. more than simple carbs. As long as most of your fuel comes from a complex source of carbs, then these small sugar injections will be almost unnoticeable. If refined sugar is your primary fuel source, then each injection is absorbed much faster, and likely not used before being stored as body fat. So.. your options here are also quite varied, and I doubt that you’d be opposed to most of them. Potatoes, noodles, bread, just to name the obvious choices. All you need to do is avoid excessive refinement in what you purchase. Potatoes come fresh in the produce section, mash them yourself for dinner and that should cover most of it. If you use a tiny bit of milk for your potatoes, that’s fine, it’s what milk is for. An ingredient in food like butter, not a beverage, you can handle a shot in your potatoes. If you’re also eating the waffles for breakfast, that’s some more bread, and if you have a sandwich or two with whole wheat bread at lunch, that should be enough carbs right there. Sandwiches can also provide more raw vegetables, which make them a good choice for people who might not like salads as much. You could also wrap a salad in a burrito shell and make a bacon ceasar wrap with spinach, just don’t cook the spinach. If you maintain a light exercise program, then you should be able to burn off a few thousand carb calories per day soon enough, without starving yourself, or compromising your health, it just takes some time and planning. The numbers might sound overwhelming, but if you understand how calories are measured, it’s not really that much, it just requires that you actually do it consistently. Even an hour of exercise each day is more than enough, you can start with less than half of that and slowly work your way up to it, and reward yourself with more carbs as you start burning more fat. It might seem like backtracking, but your body will get very good at doing this, processing fuel more efficiently, and it’ll.. make you athletic, if you stick to it.

Your last obstacle here will be vitamins and minerals, since.. I wouldn’t recommend relying on a supplement for all of them. Use one if you need it, but as a safety net to catch one’s that you’re not getting. Don’t take it every day, span it out so that your body just grabs the one’s that it needs on a semi weekly or monthly basis. If you have a reasonably healthy liver, then it should be able to manage monthly shipments without any problems. If you’re eating a salad and some sort of sandwich or wrap at lunch, that might even be enough raw vitamins and minerals as is, with the meat content if you have it, but otherwise, you might need some more fruits or vegetables. If you have a sweet tooth, get some raw fruit to help fill this gap, and that can also offer some extra vitamins. If not, make another ceasar wrap, and try to add some more different veggies into it, and don’t skimp on the sauce or cheese or bacon if you like either one. At least not yet, you can start managing fat after you control sugar, because you won’t be able to hunt down both at once.

Once you’ve adapted to this diet, if you’re not already losing weight, you can start trimming some of the sweeter items out of your diet, or.. depending on how you feel, a portion of the more complex carbs instead. Either one will reduce your fuel intake by a safe enough portion, and as long as you still eat more complex carbs than simple ones, you should still be burning more than you store, assuming that you’re still using it, that is. Then, once you finally have your weight under control, you can start to manage your fat intake more carefully. Maybe just take the chicken or bacon off of either the wrap, sandwich, or waffles, and start there. Just don’t do both at once, or sugar will jump in before fat does, your body will demand the energy, and refined sugar will provide it faster, which.. will just become more fat.

I should also clarify to not be alarmed by propaganda related to how bad something is. Here’s a common example. Did you know that Subway uses an ingredient in their bread that’s also used in gym mats? Well.. we use bio-diesel in trucks, so.. chicken or the egg, which came first? Bread, or gym mats? Is eating plants as bad as drinking diesel? It’s the same thing, right? The same.. materials? Carbon? Energy? Well.. in the case of a gym mat, it’s not so much that you can make bread out of gym mats, so much as.. gym mats out of bread. The squishy dough, things like corn starch, baking ingredients that also happen to make good cushioning for gymnastics, and other activities. So.. when you hear something like this, just stop and think about what information is really there, and which direction the train of logic might be going. Technically, water has the same things in it that you’ll find in a nuclear reactor. They use.. water for the reactor. The nuclear engine might need an upgrade, but water and bread don’t, there is a difference, even if there’s hydrogen in almost everything on Earth.

That’s about all I can think of for now, apart from the obvious reminder of moderation. Of course, too much of any of these things will cause problems, but depending on what your goals are, short or long term, just think before doing something as extreme as cutting out an entire food group, there are comfortable middle grounds that offer almost the same result, and are much less difficult to manage and maintain. If you want to study nutrition more thoroughly, study human biology as well. Yes, it will take some time, but it’s free now with the internet, and you’ll learn more in the long run. If you understand how your refinery works, then.. managing it becomes much simpler. Of course your own instincts will still play a factor here, you’ll never be completely free of impulses, and that’s sort of the idea here. You don’t need to make religious life changes just to lose weight or improve your health, that’s just a side effect of certain lifestyles. If you’re just looking for a healthy change of diet, try to think more practically, your body is a lot stronger than you might give it credit for.

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