In the last two segments, I have talked about dietary factors from my own hard experience. You can't learn everything the first half a dozen diets around, but you can learn where you screw up and take the learned lessons into the next diet.
This time around, I have brought with me into battle the acute awareness of cholesterol and hidden salt traps. Most women know about water retention and the bloated feeling, but cholesterol isn't something we normally “feel”. Now I know what the RDA of cholesterol is, I know I need to measure it. The lower my “bad” cholesterol, the shorter my journey becomes to the finish line.
Last diet around, I learned about the value of lemon in your water . It seems bitter or sour foods stimulate the liver to produce bile, and that helps to remove bad cholesterol and fats from your body. The process is a bit scientific, but worth reading up on. Water can also be dangerous if you're not careful!
Two diets before, I brought in the knowledge of vitamins and essential fats that do a whole host of wonderful things for your body. They reduce inflammation (I discovered this with my carpal tunnel/overuse syndrome by accident), pick up your mood by feeding it “good” fats it needs, and naturally curbs your appetite. They also help lower triglycerides and bad cholesterol as well as lowering your blood pressure. They also help to prevent blood clots. There is a whole laundry list of positive effects omega-3 can do for our bodies.
There are diet fads I've decided they are worse off than they claim to be. For instance, if you're to believe the information about red wine, well then there are some caveats you need to think about.
By now, every woman has heard of what's called the “French diet”, which claims French women are not fat and nor do they get fat. That's a lie and I bet it's a creation of the wine manufacturers to boost sales figures. French women aren't fat because they eat fresh, healthy foods, they do drink wine, but they also move! France has a good transportation system and many take advantage of it, plus if you've ever noticed, they have a lot of bicycles and they rollerblade in a special section of the city on Friday nights. They move, and that's why they're not fat. We jump in our cars, drive to Burger King, and we drink four ounces of wine and wonder why we're not getting skinny!
Another major flaw in the win drinking solving all problems has to do with the amount of red wine a person actually must consume to gain the supposed benefits. Should your intake be high enough to match the effects on mice then you're bound to suffer from cirrhosis of the liver. Not my idea of a good trade off!
I read (and followed) one diet that required you to drink one ounce of water per pound of body weight you carry. At the time, I was two hundred pounds, so that meant I needed to drink 200 ounces of water, amounting to over six liters of water per day. That advice turned out to be near fatal for me, and what I want to warn you about. I'd much rather have you learn from my dumb mistakes than make your own that could result in tragedy.
Reading this weekend an article from a doctor saying you can't drink too much water pushed me into writing this article. I also emailed the site and informed him the advice he had given was wrong and dangerous and why it was bad.
"Can we get too much water? Not easily; your body is naturally mostly water. Your blood is mostly water. Your food is mostly water. Your bowels and kidneys require water for excretion of wastes. Why, you were conceived in an aquatic environment. Too little water is associated with kidney stones, urinary tract infections, febrile illness, dehydration, and worse.
So drink yourself slim."
This is the dumbest advice on the planet. We are all trained to think of water as our friend, and it is, but there is truth in the old axiom of, “you can get too much of a good thing”.
I was consuming six liters of water a day, trying to flush out as much fat as I could. I was eating, taking vitamins, and watching my fat and salt intake. One day, I felt physically weird, but I figured it was nothing more than the process of flushing fat and toxins out of your body. Every woman has been through this stage where you feel so lousy and sick you want to stop the diet just so you can feel better. Emotionally, you know you have to ride the detoxification wave until it's finished, but most of us stop after a few weeks because we're tired of being sick, tired, mentally foggy and generally lethargic. I kept drinking water, knowing I had to be near the end of the wave since it had been two weeks.
