10

Transformation of the Eating Plan

Copyright 2002, Terry Duschinski.

Make your eating plan a nourishment strategy. The concept of a nourishment strategy defines precisely what we mean. Recognizing the subtle effect of terminology, I hope we can transform the idea of merely an eating plan into one of a nourishment strategy.

Sensible eating needs an image makeover, and I’m hoping nourishment strategy rings!

What we consume contains an energy value to sustain and support our lives. This nourishment comes from the chemical breakdown of recently digested foods and liquids, or from previously unused foods and liquids that were stored as body fat. Though we may interchange the terms for simplicity purposes, to differentiate our eating plan from a diet, remember that its purpose is to nourish. The strategy consists of a slight shortfall in daily food intake so as to recruit a small portion of body fat, depleting this storehouse methodically.

Aficionados of a nourishment strategy, I presume, will be less likely to resort to drastic, ill-advised “dieting” that may crash weight off at a price much too high to pay.

This is the “don’t do anything stupid” sermon.

Fad diets fail, ultimately, and when they do you are much worse off for the experience. Ask Oprah. About a decade ago, she did what a lot of us have done, resorted to an appealing gimmick. Of course, she did it in front of millions of TV viewers, becoming the pied piper of a liquid diet.

The pounds dripped off Oprah’s body – for a while. Then they came roaring back, and now I’m sure they’re harder to shed because fad diets decelerate the body's calorie-burning engine (metabolism) in order to conserve its famine-fighting fat. With poor nourishment, the body burns a portion of muscle and other lean tissue for energy, decreasing basal metabolic rate. Oprah today recognizes that diets don’t work; they make you fat. She’s learned the hard way, and probably with some embarrassment.

It’s understandable that the anguish of excess body weight and poor body image create susceptibility to believing anything that sounds too good to be true. The Cambridge Diet, the Grapefruit diet, the Scarsdale Diet, the Beverly Hills Diet, the Stewardess Diet, these fasting fiascos and an assortment of other gimmicks perpetrated in quest of profit have all provided short-term weight loss and long-term fatness.

Fad diets provide an external temporary solution to something that is primarily a deep, internal problem. We’re not overfat because we're hungry, at least not physiologically. The problem is that we like to eat. We enjoy the taste of food, both in our mouths and in our bellies. We are prompted to consume calories for a great many emotional and social reasons, regardless of whether or not we feel full. Fad diets fail to help us come to terms with these issues.

The elements of a healthy, fit lifestyle are good nourishment matched with effective exercise day after day after day, month after month, year after year after decade and beyond.

Learn about the basic food groups, the essential vitamins and minerals, and the triggers that set off our individual desires to eat. Don't think that after you lose all the weight you want using some fad diet that you'll then become a student of good eating -- you won't. You'll start enjoying what you've long envied about slim people, which is guilt-free consumption. You will not exert meaningful discipline, and you will not master any worthwhile habits.

   My concept of a nourishment strategy is important for another reason, even if fat loss is not your goal. I’m hoping it’s a term that places an importance on sound nutrition.

I want to read from a 1990 newspaper clipping I found recently in my files. This is a statement from a Chicago writer who observes social trends:

“We’re growing a generation of eaters, not cooks; our children are growing up as food illiterates. They have no idea food comes from the earth or that eggs come in a shell. When I was growing up there was a cornfield in my backyard and a small dairy herd grazed a few hundred yards from my bedroom window. A neighbor lady would bring us fresh eggs every week and occasionally a fresh chicken which my mother and I would later pluck.

“Few people today were born on a farm or live on one and so to most children food is something that comes from a restaurant or a supermarket or a frozen box that goes into a microwave oven.

“Most of them see food as one big frozen entrée. They don’t know what real food tastes like.”

Cooking from scratch is a great way to conserve calories. It’s also a means of elevating your appreciation of food, enabling you to enjoy eating more while consuming fewer calories. But most of us are convenience eaters, not gourmet chefs. Impulsive eating is instantly gratified with the greatest of ease.

There is a reason diabetes, hypertension, and other lifestyle diseases have sharply increased the past two decades. While overfed, we’re under nourished.

A nourishment strategy, I hope, resonates an image in your mind that brings respect for the instrument that carries you through earthly life, that being your body.

Don’t look upon your daily list of snacks and meals as merely an eating plan. Understand that if you want the best for your body it deserves a nourishment strategy.