Losing Weight Without A Diet

I joined the Air Force after graduating high school in 1989. When I went in, I was five feet 11 inches tall and weighed 119 pounds. I was a skinny sucker. My Mom really knew portion control well. She had three children in the house, Dad, and her. She never cooked enough for us to overeat. We rarely went out to eat. We ate like kings though. She is a great cook.

I know what you are thinking. All boys love their Moms and you are just prejudiced. I can't deny that but in my opinion she is the best (clears throat... her and my wife Amy are the best cooks ever!) I joke there, but Amy truly is a great cook as well.

I get to basic training and you eat a lot differently. Let's just say the food is a lot different from Mom's. It was tasty but certainly was missing the love :) We would go through the chow hall line to get served whatever they cooked that day. You didn't think you got to choose what you ate did you? Then you would go sit down and hope the drill sergeant was not around while you ate (usually wasn't). If you ate too long, he would definitely show up. Yeah, I started eating real fast, and until a couple of months ago I never stopped. Eating fast is the first step to the dark side. Luckily the exercise routine of basic training counteracted the dark side; that and I had a really high metabolism at that time. When I got out of basic training my weight was around 120. No, I didn't gain much.

As the years went by my weight increased normally. I guess by 1994, when my term was up, I weighed around 140 pounds but still had a slim figure. After the Air Force and while I was in college, I didn't eat very well at all. Always eating out, either fast food or nice restaurants. My metabolism was still pretty high, so I didn't gain a lot. After college, I was nearly 30 years old. I want it to be known that by age 30 your body starts to break down. Its still strong but is more prone to accidents. One day on the basketball court, exercising to counteract the pot belly I had acquired over the years of fast food, I was guarding this guy and cut back sharply to keep him from going around me. My knee gave way and I ended up on the floor. I got back up and walked around on it but after visiting the doctor, I found out I had a torn ACL. From that point on, my weight went up from lack of exercise. I guess I was up to about 175. A couple of years passed and I was up to 185. I decided I better do something and began riding my bike, fighting through the pain of the knee since I didn't get it operated on. (If you ever have an accident at a young age like that, get it fixed immediately.)

About six months ago, my wife was selected to pilot in a program offered by Baylor (her employer)to get healthy. You might have heard of it. Its called Naturally Slim and we highly advise looking into the program if you are currently on a diet.

12 Primary Principles of Naturally Slim

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1. Eat only at Level #3
2. Eat what you want the most first
3. Eat only one food at a time
4. Chew slowly
5. Take a 5 minute break
6. Stop eating when comfortable
7. Eat protein with each meal
8. Drink 60+ oz. of H2Orange
9. Avoid sugar
10. Eat complex carbohydrates & protein with each meal
11. Use Hunger Savers
12. Eat what you truly want to eat

Diets do not work and this is the first thing you learn on the Naturally Slim program. If diets worked then 65% of the American population would not be categorized as over-weight or obese. This program teaches you how you are supposed to eat. Basically its how my Mom used to cook for our family. Smaller portions, fresh foods, less sugar. I am going to hit the highlights of this program but I highly advise joining it. There is so much more knowledge there than you will get here.

You only eat when you are truly hungry. You will find that your "truly hungry" time will not always match up with normal lunch/dinner times. This is normal and a bit of a challenge. If you get to a truly hungry stage and don't have time to eat, then eat a small hunger saver - note that you should take no less than 10 minutes to do so. A small hunger saver can include 14 peanuts (if you are not allergic) or 2 peanut butter crackers. There are others you can have but you will have to check the Naturally Slim website for more ideas. This will tide you over until lunch/dinner time. Do not eat cereal in the morning and stay away from milk. Milk has a lot of sugar in it.

Four grams of sugar is equal to one teaspoon. A can of pop typically has 40 grams of sugar. That's 10 teaspoons of sugar! Can you imagine piling that much sugar in a glass, adding water, and drinking it? You already do and then some. You know you don't drink the can of pop, its not enough! You want more, so you get the 16oz bottle or larger. This gives you a good idea why diabetes is so prevalent in our society. Its not just soda though. Everything you eat has sugar. When you go to the store next time, look at the labels of the foods you buy and you will be shocked at how much sugar you take in a day. The first step of this program is to remove your addiction to sugar. You must stay away from obvious sugars for three weeks. To help you stop, you should eat high quality (100% whole grain) breads such as pumpernickel, sour dough, rye, etc. It is a hard three weeks but you can do it as many people on this way of life have.

You can eat anything you want! That's right, anything at all excluding the first three weeks of sugar. After the three weeks, you don't go hog wild. You should only have four grams of candy sugar every three days and only at a meal time when you have eaten at least 4-6 ounces of lean protein. What we do is buy dark chocolate and split it up based on how much sugar is in a serving so that we only get four grams. Remember this is only after the first three weeks are over! And did I mention you can eat anything you want?! It sounds crazy but you will soon learn why.

We all eat too fast. We don't give our brains time to catch up and tell us we are full. You should take 30 minutes to eat a meal. Set a timer - eat for 10 minutes, break for 5 to assess how hungry you still are, and then eat for at least 10 more minutes. Trust me that's a long time and it will be hard to adjust to. To take 30 minutes, you must chew your food extremely slow until it is mush. To learn portion control, you should eat your favorite food first. Then move to your next favorite food. Eventually this will teach you portion control because you will find yourself full before you get to the rest of your meal. There is no going back to a food once you stop eating it and you must eat only one food at a time. Our brains are primitive where this is concerned. Again - remember you will eat for ten minutes, then take a five minute break, and then continue eating until you are comfortably full. For our five minute break, we play hangman passing the turn to someone else each night. You must get a good amount of protein so make sure you save room for it.

To keep your blood sugar normal during the day, you will drink a mixture of orange juice and water called H2Orange. The orange juice must be the not from concentrate kind such as Tropicana or Florida's Natural. The mixture is one part orange juice to seven parts of water. You should drink close to 64 oz. a day. We mix it in water bottles that we take with us everywhere we go. We also add Crystal Light to it to make it flavorful. You should drink 20 ounces of this when you first get up so you can determine if you are truly hungry or just thirsty. Many people mistake thirst for hunger. Some people only eat once a day but most eat twice a day. I myself, eat two times a day. I drink the H2Orange mixture in the morning because you are really just thirsty in the morning. You are not hungry. I get truly hungry around 11:30 am. I usually take a lunch prepared by my wife of real yummy food and leave the office to eat. At night, we usually eat when everyone is truly hungry, eating a hunger saver (snack) if you get hungry before everyone is hungry.

That's really all there is to it. Its very easy and you can eat anything you want. Now the results of following this way of life. I went from 185 lbs to 150 lbs in 20 weeks where I maintain that. I will not divulge my wife's weight - as we all know, you NEVER ask a woman what she weighs.....but I will say this, in the same 20 week period she lost 50 pounds and has lost a total of 60 pounds now at week 26. Eventually you will reach a point that you will just maintain your weight. That's the beauty of this way of life. You eat like this for the rest of your life and you never get fat again. So as you lose weight, throw out your large clothes (give away or garage sell them). You will never get back in them. If you notice your clothes getting tight, just cut back on how much you are eating. That's how true thins do it!

Again, go to Naturally Slim to learn a lot more than you will get here. It is a great program and Marcia Upson is a great teacher! I have no stock in her company. I am just a very pleased customer!