Posted by Georgianne Holland on Jun 11, 2020 in Holistic Health, Nourishment
If you’re frustrated about your health even though you’ve tried everything to be healthy, trim, and energetic…you may need a reset button.
And maybe someone told you I’m a health coach who recommends big meals instead of tiny meals. And here you are. My name is Georgianne Holland, but you can just call me the Lunch Lady. I coach my clients to have a large, hot, relaxing lunch in the middle of the day to balance blood sugar and manage their weight.
If the body is not satisfied at lunch, it will strain through the afternoon and crave an emotional meal or drink at night. Many of us have been there. Strict self-control during the day followed by a hard-wired pull toward food satisfaction in the evening.
Let’s talk for a minute about the strict self-control diet plans in American life and see where you fit in.
Each on-trend weight-loss diet since 1944 has been popular from two to five years before it was replaced with something new. Often disproven as effective, these same diets resurface for new generations who seek weight management. They fail for the new followers just as they did for the original generation. These plans fail not because people stop trying to make them work. They fail because they are miserable and unsustainable.
The two most tried yet unsuccessful diets in the US have been the Low-Calorie and then the Low-Fat diets.
Here’s what I think; when sedentary people want to lose weight, and our American lifestyle is filled with an abundance of food—especially food that is highly processed and indigestible—we are told we need to Change Our Habits. It’s suggested that we should strictly reduce our calories.
To help people do that, ultra-low-calorie foods were mass-produced with little nutritional value in the 1950s and 60s. Americans became obsessed with counting calories. Our bodies need calories to function, so when we are undernourished, the body naturally clings to fat stores and the cravings begin. We’ve all experienced that craving for quick, grab-and-go simple sugars.
The Low-Calorie diet craze intensified when science and the food industry joined forces to create Fake Fat for foods. They wanted people to buy products that tasted like foods with real fat but had fewer calories. Margarine with yellow food dye was allowed to be sold to unsuspecting Americans in the 1950s. In the 2020s, we now know how dangerous to the body are foods that contain fake fats and trans fats.
Whatever it takes to make another sale…
If the fake fat experience didn’t frustrate you, another food manufacturer trick that has frustrated almost every American is the unnecessary addition of sugar to foods to make them more popular with young people. An example of this is the sugar that McDonald’s adds to their fries for that irresistible sugar/salt combination that sells more fries.
Diet sugar or calorie-free sugar was the next craze that has hurt our bodies. Saccharin has been around since the late 1800s, but it becomes a frequent ingredient in processed foods over the past 45 years. In 1969, bans on toxic, calorie-free sweeteners began.
About this time, the diet-crazed yet still overweight public began being diagnosed with hypoglycemia. This is a serious circumstance where chronic low blood sugar causes people to “bonk,” or feel faint, and even die. They seek out quick calories to get through the day.
Frustration finally has its say…
What happened next? After months or years of eating as few calories as possible, fake sugar and fat, and feeling weak and hungry, frustration finally had its say. Many Americans began eating in the other extreme—seeking out all of the full fat, high carbohydrate foods they could find. They regained any lost weight and felt like failures.
My Lunch Lady reputation began about 10 years ago when I first invested in my education as a Holistic Health Coach.
One of my instructors, and later my personal doctor, John Douillard, has a private practice in Boulder, Colorado, near where I live. I sought him out after hearing his lectures in my education and was introduced to the health benefits of the Ayurvedic tradition. This was also my introduction to the 51 Percent Rule, which he taught me. It helps me and my clients practice self-care for vibrant health at least 50% of the time.
In his popular book The 3-Season Diet, Dr. John Douillard writes about more of the diet plans that have been in vogue since the 1940s. He calls it the “Diet Go-Round.” Here’s his list of weight-loss plans that many Americans keep trying and then discarding:
- Low-Calorie Diets
- Low-Fat Diets
- Fake Fat Diets
- Grapefruit Diets
- The Sugar Blues Plan
- Sugar-Free Diets
- High Protein Diets
- High Carb Diets
- Low Cholesterol Plans
- Heavy Exercise Plans
- Vegetarian Eating
- Grazing
- Food Combining Plans
- The Zone Diet
- Caffeine Morning/Noon/Night
Perhaps you’ve tried more than one of these popular diet plans, and perhaps you’ve dreamed of finding an expert resource for eating a hearty lunch and stopping this diet go-round for good?
And because you’re reading about these ideas on my We Are Women At Wellness blog online, you may also know that hypoglycemia, prediabetes, or type 2 diabetes are already serious situations in your life or in the lives of people you love. Let’s begin there, where your frustration is most painful, and talk about the epidemic of unstable blood sugar, insulin resistance, chronic overweight, and more.
In part two of this blog post, we’ll unpack the worldwide Diabetes and Prediabetes epidemic and embrace a self-care lifestyle, at least 51% of the time. It’s time to say “Good Bye!” to frustration and “Hello!” to sustainable better health.