This page starts in early 2010 & below this set of post is my 2011 story so far as at 8th April, which is not as positive as 2010 for various reasons.
I am into healthy eating but by no means am I crazy about it all! I grow most of my own vegies (except it was so wet recently a lot died). I prefer organic & I try to have some heirloom varieties. See the Veggie Garden page to read all about it.
This time last year (2009) I finally discovered why I was putting on weight & not able to get it off! I had got to over 100kg which is crazy horrible for me & my horses. All the exercise & dieting had no effect. I set out to learn about how our bodies use the food we eat & learned so much from old books.
I designed my own eating plan. I discovered that the body often thinks it is starving because the liver is not being fed correctly. We have become so fanatical about removing oil, fat, carbs, etc from our diets that we are starving our livers. When the liver is starving it will not allow the stored fat to go which means we never loose the weight. We just get really tired.
Our liver eats seed oil & also needs a lot of parsley to help detox it & the blood. When I included those 2 items in the right proportions & at the right times of the day, the weight just fell off me!!! I did no more exercise than ususal & I didn't restrict my diet to just those few food items. I even ate some chocolate & ice cream!
I SAY AGAIN THE WEIGHT JUST FELL OFF ME!!
I could not believe what was happening. Not only that, but various health issues I had began to repair themselves.
Here are 2 photos of me, the first is in Nov 08 before I got to my heaviest (I think I was about 95kgs in this one & I got to about 105kgs by Mar09). The second smaller photo is taken from a video of me working with my horses so it is small & not that good quality but I will get a better photo soon. The video was shot in Mar 2010. But I lost most of my weight within about the first 4-5mths & since then it has been quite slow to move.
In the second photo above I have got down to 79kgs & I move up & down between about 82 to 79kgs. Recently I have been able to break out of that range & loose another kg. I think the body has a weight it would prefer to be at & for me 80kg is it. Of course I would like to loose another 10kg so it will be interesting to see what this year brings. I did break my eating plan a LOT over xmas etc so that is one reason for not loosing anymore ;)
I will make my eating plan available to anyone who would like to try it. So far some have & the results have been mixed. It does seem that if they don't stick to it really well that it doesn't work as well.
But that's natural I think because if you don't change your ways nothing better will happen! I have a saying about "the definition of madness"....... doing the same thing but expecting a different result.........!!
So if you would like to try my eating plan, email me at clissat@gmail.com & I'll send you the links. It would be good to have some other people's photos here showing that others can loose weight too.
20Apr2010 It's amazing just how it happens!
I'm adding this note because it really shows what happens (to my body anyway) when I get back onto my eating plan.
Since loosing so much weight I realized my body had to become comfortable with living at the new lower weight. Then I plateau'd, then about a month ago I broke through the 79kg barrier & lost some more. So I have not been too concerned that I have stopped loosing weight. I have been eating many more 'normal' foods & a few take away's & more desserts, etc, blah,blah....you know what I mean!! lol
Well I realised day before yesterday that I was doing a LOT of 'browsing' or 'hunting & gathering' ! When I looked at what I had eaten for the previous 3 days I was shocked to see how much salt & sugar was in that food, even though my pantry & fridge doesn't have much of that sort of thing. But I managed to find it or I was out shopping & bought it!
What I had stopped doing was eating the oil & parsley in the right amounts at the right times of day so my eating had regressed to old habits. It's amazing how difficult those old habits are to get rid of. After 12 mths they are still there, right under the surface just waiting to break out again. lol
So I had to make a concious effort to make 2 successive meals using the right ingredients & eaten at the right times of day.
That's all it took to get my MIND back on track! I didn't have to think about it anymore because MY SUBCONCIOUSNESS WAS MAKING THE RIGHT DECISIONS FOR ME AGAIN !!
It's just amazing! I am a very strong willed person usually. It is hard to change my mind. It is hard for ME to change my mind! It is virtually impossible for me to follow a concious decision (for any length of time) that hasn't started in my subconcious mind. But eating those 2 foods causes my subconcious mind to just make the right decisions for me so I automatically choose the right foods for the meal.
I immediately stopped hunting for sweet or salty foods & instead I made the right food & was happy to leave it at that.
I don't know why it happens (well I do but I won't bore you unless you really want to know!) but I am so glad that it does. lol
24Feb 2011 update about my weight situation.
Well it’s been up & down since I last posted. I was doing really well then had visitors staying for several weeks & having to cook for them, I started eating normally again. I tried to add my tabouli in with my meals as much as possible but after a while it got left behind. I thought I could keep things under control but as late winter came on with no need to mow lawns or prune trees & much shorter days, I stopped doing so much work in the garden therefore in general doing much less exercise.
The weight started creeping back up & before I realized, it was out of control. Not badly out of control & I was still being reasonably careful with what I ate but I developed a dislike for tabouli so stopped eating the very thing that was my main weight loss aid. Also that was the time when the visitors were here.
As summer 2010 rolled around there was massive unseasonal rains which destroyed my garden killing all my parsley plants & it was impossible to buy also. So for a few months I tried many other things to eat instead but the weight slowly crept up to 92.5kgs. At that point I was able to buy it again & got back onto my basic diet.
It still took almost 3mths to turn the weight gain around into weight loss. That’s how much control the ormentum has over our bodies. Ask Dr Oz! His favorite subject is how much this organ destroys people’s lives by producing hormones that rule our digestion & thoughts. I have had to virtually starve myself to start getting that organ to let go of it’s fat.
8th April 2011
As of today I have lost 2kg!!! I am eating my basic diet fairly comfortably. I mean it’s not too much of a struggle to stick to it. When the ormentum has control it is virtually impossible to stick to my diet. I craved all manner of foods that I knew full well were going to add weight but still I ate them. I still struggle if I am stressed about something & there has been plenty to be stressed about just lately unfortunately.
One thing I discovered was that if I ate 170gr packet of potato crisps I would put on .5kg weight!! I wondered how the hell that could happen. Then I realized I was much more thirsty when I ate fatty foods & I also knew that the blood needs more water to keep it at the right consistency when there is too much cholesterol/fat in it. So I deduced that the amount of fat in those chips needed 450gr water to keep the fat in suspension in the blood until the liver could deal with it. That would be what’s called retaining fluid. I certainly felt stuffed, puffed up, bloated, had a huge stomach, no energy, depressed thoughts, etc.
Once I started eating parsley again it took 2 wks to turn that dysfunctional state around. No other food seems to be able to change my mind like parsley can. All I have to do is eat enough parsley each day & it does the rest! I just had to give it time. That parsley costs almost as much a gold! A small resturan sized bunch costs me $6.90 up $4 on last year!! >:[
Hopefully I will get back down to 80kgs by end of winter. Struggling a lot to stay under 90kgs though. This time I will try to do things differently during winter to avoid the stagnation. Not sure yet what it will be but I’m sure the right thing will come along in time! Also I will try not to have long term live-in visitors who don’t want to eat my type of food! So in future if I have visitors & they don’t like what I want to eat it is too bad they will have to bring their own! ;-)
The other thing to note is that I also started staying up until 2 or 3am again & therefore not getting enough sleep. I always wake about the same time regardless of when I went to bed so I often only get a few hours sleep a night. It has taken me 3mths to get back to going to bed about midnight. It is a real effort but with dedication I usually achieve it & these days I am tired by 10.30pm although I don't go to bed until 11.30pm or I will wake after a few hours & not be able to get back to sleep. Getting enough sleep is such a big thing & so important for weight loss.
The good things continued to happen once things started to flow. Like last winter my mulching machine broke. I used it to munch up the large volume of prunings from my flower & shrub garden to make compost for the vegie garden. With that machine broken I stopped working in the garden & even when summer came I didn’t prune my huge garden because I didn’t want to waste all those prunings by throwing them on the general dead tree heap. Then I found a similar secondhand machine for sale but had to wait 4wks to be able to pick it up…the longest 4weeks for a long time I can say! As soon as I had it set up in place of the broken one, I started doing 3 hrs daily in the garden again & within 3 days I had made almost 1 cubic meter of compost. The other bulk ingredient is horse manure with is plentiful at my place. Making the compost is reasonably strenuous exercise for me these days.
Another good thing that happened was I was able to fix my mower that had broken near the end of last summer’s mowing season. I couldn’t afford to fix it & had to sleep on it for some months to work out how to do it for free. Now, if the rain holds off, I am mowing again a few days each week for between 1&3hrs each time. So all in all I am getting a fair bit of exercise each day again. That itself is a big help but would not have happened without the parsley that works to change my mood & create positive thought patterns.
Rain is the big exercise stopper right now. It rains every day just enough to make the grass too wet to mow & the trees to wet to prune without getting totally wet doing it. However there has been plenty to do in the vegie garden soI spend 2hrs each morning & another 2hrs in the afternoon doing something around the place.
Just recently, (last few weeks of March & first 2wks so far of April) I have been very deflated, de-energized, almost weak. I'm craving all sorts of crap food even though I have perfectly good fruit in the fridge, I'm sleeping at least 7hrs a night, having several granny naps during the day & really struggling to get outside more than 2hrs daily. My whole body aches, my broken body parts are playing up something chronic, my mind just doesn't want to play ball. My thinking is my body is fighting some sort of infection but nothing has shown up so far. I'm trying really hard to eat a cupfull of tabouli daily but generally also eat something I shouldn't which undoes the good of the whole foods.
Anyway so long as I stay under 90kg, that in itself is a good thing.
20JULY 2011
My last comment above was about staying below 90kgs. mmmm
Well all I can say is I have managed to just stay at 90kgs with the few odd days below that threshold. Well I guess that's a start. lol I've had a few health (physical) issues that have stopped me from being as energetic as I would normally be. Then winter came along & well as everyone knows the days are 4hrs shorter meaning 4hrs less to work in.
I'm still doing a good bit of gardening & the horses need attention every day & I try to walk as far each day as I can during all my chores. So thinking about my physical constraints I think I'm getting as much exercise as I can without overdoing it. There are days when I come inside at day's end, plonk myself on the couch & promptly go to sleep for 40mins! lol
However I think while I have worries about things I will stay around the 90kg mark. That leads me to the next phase of weight loss which is to attempt to unload the 'worries' I currently have. I'm sure everyone has 'worries' & we each deal with them differently. My aim now is to deal with mine in a way that leaves me free to loose that extra weight again.
The other thing I am still trying very hard to do is get a solid 8hrs sleep every night. A good night's sleep is vital to weight loss. Getting to bed by midnight is something I always find difficult due to being involved in various online activities such as horse forums which is an important part of my life.
A work in progress that's for sure. ;-)
