Give up every food you've ever liked and you'll lose weight, right?

Well, maybe. Some of us have mad willpower and could totally be like 'I WILL NEVER EAT ANOTHER FRENCH FRY OR REESE PEANUT BUTTER CUP EVER AGAIN. EVER.'

The vast majority of us, though? Yeah right. The most I've personally ever been able to do is give up chocolate for Lent (I'm not religious, but some of my friends were. I thought I'd keep them company and give myself a challenge. I did it, too!), and to occasionally have a couple of sugar-free days when I've noticed my intakes have been amping up to the point where I have dessert after breakfast. Bit over the top, if you know what I mean.

The best way for me to break the habit is the cut it out for the couple of days. Key word: habit.

I do think breaking the habit is a massive part of the whole weight-loss, starting-healthy-eating thing. If you're used to drinking a Coke with each meal and fast food for lunch every day, sometimes...ya gotta start small. It's pretty overwhelming to stop doing everything you do all at once; why do so many people wait until next week? To mentally freaking prepare themselves for doing a complete dietary overhaul! I say, give yourself a freaking break. Is that what you'd recommend to your friends and family? Actually, maybe that's a bad question  to ask; a lot of women especially are pretty hardcore when it comes to dieting and the like.

The funny thing? Look at France. Naturally, obesity rates are rising, but generally a slimmer population. Are they cutting out all saturated fat and sugar? NON, merci beaucoup. They've just figured out portion control. And looking at Quebec (what's with all the skinny francophones?). According to this article Desserts - Why Quebec is Skinny, the reason they manage to stay skinny is because they don't restrict foods.

An example: You haven't had chocolate for 2 weeks and go to a party where you're offered a plate of chocolate mousse (I'm actually not a fan of mousse, but I know it's a popular one.) Odds are, um YEAH you're going to have some - and it'll be a lot harder to stop because you've been aching for it. Same if you go to a grocery store when you're hungry, right? You buy all kinds of things that you don't need because you're hungry! (This may include a box of crappy store-bought cookies which don't even taste that great but are down the hatch in 3.4 seconds.) We have much better control if we allow ourselves to take foods off the forbidden list and let ourselves have them once in a while. I'm not saying eat a pain au chocolat daily (although I've done it), but you know what? There's nothing wrong with really enjoying a treat. On a regular basis, even! *cue fainting*

A really good post from one of my favourite blogs, Weighty Matters, is What's Your Best Worse Choice? This guy is a doc with a really interesting take on weight loss, which is very reasonable. In this post, he touches on the idea that just because you had a Blizzard, doesn't mean you 'fell off the wagon'. Was it delicious? Was it satisfying? Is that really such a bad thing, then? Sometimes making healthy choices just means getting a small fries instead of a large, or maybe getting the large fries less often. Healthy eating doesn't have to be all or nothing - we all need a little wiggle room.

So if we're not cutting out all delicious things, we're trying some ridiculous fad diet. Don't even get me started. I absolutely LOVED this article How I Lost 40 lbs Doing Everything Wrong. This guy talks about some of the current fads with dieting, and how he didn't follow any of them?

'What?' you gasp. 'He ate CARBS. And not just any carbs, he ate WHEAT.'

I know, right?

This carb thing makes me crazy. You know, in some parts of Africa, their diet is 80% carbohydrate. And yet, we're not fundraising for the millions of obese African children? Our brain RUNS off of carbs. 'But it raises blood sugar!' Um, yeah, it's supposed to. That's how the human body rolls. Carbs are awesome. We just tend to emphasize the wrong ones (refined grains as opposed to whole grains, and simple sugars in sweets as compared to fruit, etc. ) And if anyone, ANYONE, tries to tell me they haven't eaten carbs since 1999, I will probably wallop them. And then attempt to educate them; carbs are in grains, dairy products, fruits and vegetables, any flavoured drink, everything. So what you're saying is, you only eat meat? And rocks?

And wheat - wheat is just awesome. I really don't buy into the Wheat Belly thing. We've been eating wheat for thousands of years. If you're celiac, or intolerant to wheat, then yeah, wheat is not for you. Maybe even if for some reason wheat makes you feel yucky. But for the rest of us - since when did bread become toxic?

'He didn't eat pomegranate or acai every day for breakfast!' you shriek in dismay. 'And what about supplements? SUPPLEMENTS, I say!'

Just a word about superfoods. Don't get me wrong, I love pomegranate and acai, but I love them because they're delicious and pretty nutritious, not because they're 'super'. I wrote an article on wheatgrass once. You know, the 1 oz green shots of juice that are supposedly equal to 2 lbs of veggies? So not true. 1 oz equals 1 oz of veggies. And all these supposed magical health benefits? These, my friend, are based on a scientist in the 1930s giving wheatgrass to his sick chickens. They lived, and the crazy started. I did some pretty extensive research into any scholarly article I could find on wheatgrass. There's no proof of this magic, dear ones. I emailed all the wheatgrass producers in Canada and got VERY few replies, but the ones I did get said 'Yeah...there's no proof. But people want it, and at least it's a vegetable.' True dat, I say, if it takes a bit of crazy to get people to get 1 oz of vegetables, and Booster Juice (delicious!) and the like profit, awesome. That said, I have been known to have a fit when I see the wheatgrass posters saying the 1 oz=2 lbs thing. I have irritated a store into taking them down in past. False advertising is bad, yo.

I won't go into the sugar sub thing here; that's a personal choice, as far as I'm concerned. That said, do they make you GAIN weight? Erm, no. I mean, Splenda does technically have some calories, but less than plain sugar and it's something like 60x as sweet, so if you manage to eat enough Splenda to put on weight, you maybe have some other issues that need talking about. I'm a real sugar person myself, I'd rather just eat less, but it's easy for me to say that when I'm 25 and work out every day and am not concerned about overindulging in sugar for the sake of, say, diabetes.

Ugh, I'm a bad blogger for making you read all this without any pictures. And I still haven't really taken any from around PG. It's for the same reason I'm blogging a lot less - it's amazing how much less time you have when someone isn't doing the cooking and grocery shopping for you. Not that I don't love doing that, I really do, but now I'm a bit more scatterbrained so I forget my camera and have a lot less time to tramp around and find something to take pictures of.  SOON. Maybe. Hopefully.