Galina just inspired me with a comment.... :-)
She observed that diet/lifestyle tweaks often work for awhile and then cease to do so -- i'm sure most of us can agree with that! We are sailing along losing weight, or feeling better, or getting stronger, then wham, we stall -- or worse, we lose ground. And WHY (i said to myself) does this happen?
Operating your "vehicle" is very much like driving a stick-shift. In the mountains. When the wind is blowing. You can't just put it in one gear and feed it the same amount of fuel and expect things to be constant -- you have to push in that clutch while simultaneously letting up on the gas pedal, move the lever to a different position, then feed gas again while disengaging the clutch pedal. You have to speed up and slow down to deal with curves. You have to be on top of things, paying attention to what's around you and making suitable adjustments.
Our bodies are smarter than we give them credit for, and they have a very good memory. Some people can operate their properly-functioning bodies like an automatic-transmission vehicle on flat ground, using cruise control. They're constantly making little adjustments of which we're completely unaware. Have a micronutrient shortage -- they give us a craving which SHOULD take care of the problem. When illness or midlife changes up the terrain, we have to consciously manage things more -- our vehicles require us to swap over to standard-transmission, take it out of "cruise" and DRIVE.
So we have to deal with it. We have to "learn to drive a stick" unless we want to be stalled at the side of the road, because that is NO FUN. If we have to call the tow-truck because we've overheated or fouled our fuel-pump or burnt up the engine trying to get up that gradient in the wrong gear, it can get really expensive and the car might never run right again.
Jeez, I am amazed, I thought only racing drivers in the US had stick shifts in their cars.
ReplyDeleteGetting me coat.
Eddie
Really? :-). My husband taught me to drive a standard back in about 1972.... He had a Camaro, which resisted my attempts, so he borrowed his brother's '59 Rambler with a 3-on-the-column, and i was off and running! I easily transferred my mastery to the 4-on-the-floor, and the rest is history. Sitting out beside my stodgy old Volvo Crosscountry is my previous car (which he commandeered), a twenty-year-old Mazda MX6 -- it's STILL fun to drive.
DeleteO, Tess, you made me feel like I am a muse of a poet! Well, we do have to change gears in order to see changes. I suspect for a while, that the most effective way to get more benefits from an exercise intervention is being very sedentary all your previous life, the more sedentary the better, and preferably being fat could also help. Then you have a chance to see dramatic results from walking around you block while saving on buying weights and using your body instead. Unfortunately, it will not work for the folks who don't tolerate carbs. In US many metabolically healthy people found ways to balloon into obesity and they need really small shifting of their gears. We, LCarbers, are hidden among such crowd.
ReplyDeleteI roll my eyes when some naive recent SAD consumer shouts all over the internet "Just eat real the food, guys!". As I have not being eating anything else all my life, that road of health improvement is closed forever for me.
precisely! a LOT depends on a person's "starting point." that helps define where an individual's problem may lie! after all, not everybody ate a lot of junk-food while sitting on the couch....
Delete"They're constantly making little adjustments of which we're completely unaware. Have a micronutrient shortage -- they give us a craving which SHOULD take care of the problem."
ReplyDeleteWell said! I get a lot of bug bites where I live and I have come to discover on the days the bites become inflamed, I get this craving for fish. Usually when I'm starving I crave a good chunk of beef with butter, but when the mosquitoe bites don't go away I get hungry for fish instead.
Omega-3 to the rescue? I think so. ;)
sure sounds like it to me, too. ... or maybe phosphorus, or some other micronutrient that your body knows is in fish...
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