Junior Ganymede
Servants to folly, creation, and the Lord JESUS CHRIST. We endeavor to give satisfaction

What I Know About Health

January 22nd, 2021 by G.

So I guess we are gearing up for the long haul by getting healthy and happy.

Every doctor in the land has their own brand of health advice.  Much of it, I am convinced, bad. The studies are mostly bad and all contradict each other.

I have my own views on health.  But in this post, I am just going to tell you what I know from my own experience.  It may not apply to you.  I am not going to tell you everything I do or believe, because some of it I believe works but the effects are not obvious enough to be sure.

I will say that feeling healthy is  much better than not.

 

I get congested if I drink a lot of milk.

If you clear sugar out of your diet for awhile, normal foods taste much sweeter and high-sugar foods taste bad.

Saturated fats make me feel full and taste wonderful.  Butter and tallow and coconut oil.  Tallow is actually pretty easy to make your own.

I get depressed easily if I haven’t worked out in a few days and haven’t been eating well.

If you clear vegetable oils and processed foods out of your diet for awhile, you don’t crave them, they seem unappetizing when you do think about them, and you feel a bit ill when you do.

It is a lot easier to keep eating and eating starchy foods than it is meat.  It is also easy to gorge on cheese for some reason.   I personally also find it easy to gorge on fruit.

The more variety of food you have on hand or at a meal, the more you will eat.

Beef and lamb are delicious.

You can eat so many tomatoes from your garden that you will give yourself diarrhea and indigestion that takes several weeks to clear up.  This shouldn’t concern you, we are talking literally a dozen of tomatoes a day and sometimes much more for several weeks.  A huge salad every day that consists of a huge bowl of tomato slices with a little olive oil and tuna sprinkled on, that kind of thing.

Fasting is easy once you adapt to it.  I started out skipping breakfasts, then just one meal a day for a week.  That week was hard, I felt like I had a mild flu.  Now I can go two or three days without much problem.  It’s a flexible and easy weight loss plan.  Once you get adapted to fasting, if you really eat too much you feel really full for a long time and its easy to just skip your next planned meal or two until you don’t feel stuffed.  For me its easy to maintain weight doing fasting without paying any attention to what I am eating.  But if I want to lose weight I have to regularly do 36-48 hour fasts or I have to do something to limit how much I eat at my one meal a day–only certain types of food, or counting calories.  If you love salt like me, drink some salty water while you are fasting–otherwise you might get faint.  If you are having difficulty adjusting, have some butter or some other kind of saturated fat.  An herbal tea with some cream or something.

Chewing gum helps your appearance for both men and women.  (Except for the part where you are actually doing the chewing, you look like a cow then).

 

If you are really eating a lot at a meal and still feel hungry, it helps to pause 30 minutes.  Most of the time, after 30 minutes you feel stuffed, the signal just hadn’t caught up to your brain.

An X3-style heavy resistance band program works about as well for me as weightlifting does and it takes less time, is portable, and doesn’t require a gym membership.  However, don’t buy the actual X3 product unless you are well off and willing to pay for convenience.  You can make your own without too much trouble.  The X3-style program has also given major improvements in a hurt shoulder and a lower back pain, whereas actual physical therapy hadn’t worked as well, and neither had the bro-science Diesel Crew Shoulder Rehab protocol.

Sunlight is amazing.  Consistent with modesty, try to occasionally get out with plenty of bared skin, the more the better.  I more or less sunbathe now.  I can feel myself cheering up as I do it.  For men–I am going to try to be delicate–ah, full-body exposure has noticeable results with respect to vigor.  I have had a couple of colds where I laid out in the sun for awhile and they cleared right up.  Anecdotally some people report drastically moderating their Corona symptoms this way and one of  my colds may in fact have been Corona.

Since I cut out processed foods and vegetable oils and most sugar and started getting sun, my frequent coughs, bronchitises, long lingering bronchitises, and yearly walking pneumonia have disappeared.

A King Athletic stability disk is high quality.  Planks using it and sitting on it sometimes during the day if you happen to have a desk job really help your posture throughout the day and seem to have also helped with the lower back pain.

Diet sodas don’t seem to trigger my appetite, but they can give you gas.

You can find yourself craving homemade sauerkraut.

Mackerel and sardines are a bit of an acquired taste.  But if you mash them up with a tablespoon or two of apple cider vinegar, they neither taste fishy nor vinegary–they taste delicious.  If you get the kind that is in brine, the oily brine tastes wonderful when you are fasting and doesn’t seem to interrupt the fast.  Whether or not mackerel and sardines seem appealing to you is a good gauge if you are really hungry or not.

Nasal strips at night can really help.

If you are overweight, have another go at it with the right attitude.  The body is the temple.  Glorify him.

Comments (7)
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January 22nd, 2021 07:57:33
7 comments

Rozy
January 22, 2021

All good advice!


E.C.
January 22, 2021

Frequent fasting does wonders in making food taste great again. It also helps to fast before anticipated feasts (and after).

Growing our own food, then teaching us how to cook it properly has been one of the best gifts my parents ever gave. I’ve earned the trust of a certain friend, who will eat even the veggies she thought she didn’t like when I cook them. I love experimenting with new veggies and new recipes. I have not yet rid myself of a love for home-baked sweets, but I prefer my sweet stuff more flavorful and less sugary anyway.

I didn’t like being overweight. It’s exhausting to carry flab everywhere you go; also, it just doesn’t feel right. Still working on it, but I’m right at the threshold of ‘normal weight’ according to the BMI (and much of that is muscle, since I’m a martial artist). It’s fun to be able to accomplish feats of strength and grace that I couldn’t a decade ago, as a weak and unhealthy teen, and to anticipate continued improvement.


G.
January 23, 2021

Was the martial arts part of what you did to change your state?


IAW
January 23, 2021

Long comment coming! Somewhat in parallel to your list, but based on my own personal experience:

1. It’s amazing how little you crave something once you eat less of it. Except chocolate. I can barely stand the idea of eating candy, most processed foods, or drinking soft drinks now, but I apparently will always crave chocolate.

2. Smoothies make great meals, but they are very easy to add too many calories if you aren’t careful. Have proteins powder or some other high protein add-in (hemp hearts are great) to balance out the carbs. Broccoli and cauliflower, if you add some cacao and chocolate protein powder, are great add-ins you can barely taste. I tend to have a cup of mixed vegetables in every smoothie I make.

3. Calories in – calories out is the baseline. The macros (type of calories -carbs/protein/fats) is important, but not as important as total calories. Once you have CI-CO under control, you can mess around with the macro ratios. I tend to do well with higher protein and less carbs (though not low enough for Keto), but everyone is different. Figure out what works for you. If you lift weights, you likely are not taking in enough protein.

4. It’s very easy to overeat if you aren’t paying attention. Never stop weighing and measuring (almost) all your food. If you have no idea how much you actually ate, you will likely gain fat weight.

5. Merely weighing and measuring all your food is a great wake-up call, and you will initially lose fat just by doing that, even if you don’t specifically restrict calories. Just paying attention is amazing (I found I had days where I would eat 5000+ calories and have no idea, because I was not really paying attention). This is why nearly all diets work initially. Some diets are better than others, but nearly all will work for a little while, merely because you are paying attention.

6. I only truly fast once a month for Fast Sunday (I do drink water, since in the Bible, they drank water while fasting). However, once a week I take a day (usually Sundays) where I restrict calories to under 1000 and mostly just drink amino acids. This was quite hard for about two months, but once I was used to it, it became quite easy.

7. Add a Tablespoon of inulin a day to food (smoothies, oatmeal, whatever). Drink 2 Tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (diluted, of course) every night before bed. Doing this will result in a small amount of long-term, permanent fat loss.

8. Occasionally (and only occasionally, like once every 3 months), allow yourself to just go crazy and eat whatever. Mostly, this is to remind you how crappy you feel after gorging yourself.

9. For fitness (and fitness is requisite for a truly healthy lifestyle) you need a goal, and not a vague goal of “being more healthy.” If you want to get really strong and lift half a ton off the ground (which, frankly, is a lot cooler than six-pack abs), you need to lift heavy weights. If you want to live longer and lose weight, just going for a long walk or light jog every day is all you need. If you want six pack abs, you have to also lift heavy weights (lifting light weights for lots of reps is not “cutting” and actually can destroy muscle) AND cut calories (“abs are made in the kitchen” is more true than not, but if you have no real muscle, your abs won’t really show all that well). Without a goal, too many people wander aimlessly around the gym for a few weeks and then give up. Figure out the goal, then research on what it takes to reach that goal.

10. “Skinny fat” is a thing. You can be skinny and still be very unhealthy (and I’m not talking about anorexia).

11. It’s amazing how losing 50 lbs. makes everything better. Yes, I lost some strength at the top end, but my pull-ups doubled, and I’m happier with lessened joint pain. Plus, it makes the spouse happy.

12. Yoga is amazing, but the yoga community is super-duper woke, and tends toward paganism if you’re not careful. I suggest videos at home rather than a yoga studio, unless you can find a studio that specifically advertises “no woo-woo” or “non-spiritual.” Yoga has made me stronger in the weight room, eliminated most joint and muscle pain, and makes me feel 10-15 years younger.

13. Working out is not enough. I have basically worked out non-stop (except for my mission), yet I had 50 pounds of excess flab, due to high calorie and carb consumption.

14. Gas is actually a sign of healthy gut bacteria. Sorry about that, but it’s true.

15. The body is a temple, but temples are to glorify God, not yourself. Make sure you have the right motivations.


Evenstar
January 23, 2021

Hey, G, can you expand on the seed oils thing?


E.C.
January 23, 2021

@ G,
Yes. I got very sick with a flu that had remarkably covid-like symptoms about a decade ago and had a long haul back to health. I realized I’d lost the ability to run half a block to catch a bus, because I was too weak (though I was actually not overweight at that point, having lost almost 50 lbs in the first three weeks of being sick). So I decided to do something about it. My younger brother had been taking traditional karate for years, and since I was extremely shy, I needed moral support, so I signed up for the class.

The first evening was an experience – the class is traditional, which means half the instructions are in Japanese; I had no idea what was happening.

At first, I couldn’t do a single push-up. I ached fiercely for about the first six months. Thinking back, I’m not sure why I persisted so long, but after about a year, I started to catch on, and then it became fun to move; I’d always been clumsy, and suddenly I wasn’t. I actually gained weight (and flab) because I’d never been so active before, and didn’t know how to eat to keep weight down, so that’s been a process.

For about five years, I was quite fit but edging on obese – though I didn’t look it. Once I realized why my joints were hurting, I knew it was time to do something about it before it became a bigger problem.

@ IAW,
Yes – to #15 especially. I did some soul-searching before I started losing weight, and concluded that, with a history of diabetes in the family, I’d rather not deal with preventable health challenges, especially since I already struggle with migraines.


bruce charlton
January 24, 2021

It seems to me that feeling healthy and happy will be an uphill struggle in a world micro-controlled by evil authorities – who have already made illegal or deleteriously changed much of what was (just a year ago) regarded as pretty essential to human well-being (including religious well-being – like almost everything social, ritual, sacramental to do with churches).

My impression is that this is strategic and deliberate. To enjoy oneself in the short term already entails fitting-into the mainstream media/ socio/ political framework – designed to corrupt and demoralize.

The real challenge will probably be living well while/ despite feeling chronically ill and tired, and unable to do most of the things that would make you healthy and cheerful.

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