The Perfect Diet: Lose weight and Reduce stress

Usually diets leave us feeling tired and stressed... a perfect diet would do the opposite: reduce our stress levels and help us lose weight, without making us feel tired and run down. When we are stressed, we tend to eat more and less healthily.

Is it possible to relieve stress with the proper diet? If you spell desserts backward you get stressed.

Very funny...

Long term persistent stress can lead to obesity. Comfort eating is often stress induced. It can be an attempt to self-medicate, an effort to escape, even temporarily, from the stress of day-to-day living. Nuisance is, over eating, and the resultant obesity, has its own devastating consequences. As a coping strategy it is sadly disappointing.

The opposite is equally true. Obesity or even being just a few pounds overweight can be stressful.

Our society is very outspoken in its disapproval of weight gain. Judging others by their size is cowardly. Judge them by their hearts, if you judge at all. Invite them first to a very good meal, share some wine and wit, before you criticize. This approach will not only de-stress us, but will also ensure that while enjoying each other’s company we eat all the things our bodies need, and no more.

We continuously stress about our weight, always searching for THE perfect diet. It undermines our self confidence; we are constantly on some or other guru’s diet, depriving ourselves of what our bodies really need. Our bodies can only cope with so much.

But what does the perfect diet look like...a diet that is both stress and weight reducing?

Better to be slightly overweight, but healthy and stress-free.

If you need to lose weight, do not succumb to the siren song of "perfect" diets that promise 10-20kg of weight loss in as many days. Respect your body! Starvation diets are auto-abuse. You CAN lose weight, of course, but life is too short to spend three quarters of your waking hours obsessing about your weight and eating. The idea is to relieve stress. Going on a very strict diet puts your body under tremendous stress.

When we lose twenty pounds... we may be losing the twenty best pounds we have! We may be losing the pounds that contain our genius, our humanity, our love and honesty. ~Woody Allen

For the maximum health benefit, you only need to lose 10 % of your weight anyway.

Plot your height and weight on a BMI chart before you start the perfect diet ...or any other diet, to determine if and how much weight you need to lose.

Once you have confirmed with the BMI chart that you really do need to lose weight, keeping a food diary for a week is the next, logical step. Write down everything you put into your mouth, even if it is just a few crumbs. Note when you ate, what, and how you felt at the time.

There is a mood/food diary included in the e-course. Also note any exercise you did. Your diary will give you valuable information about your eating habits, good or bad.

The French Paradox: the perfect diet?

They also spend hours and hours at table, drink large quantities of wine and should all be diabetic because of the amount of sugar that goes into their coffee.

Yet most French people seem to have little trouble maintaining a healthy weight.

"French women refuse to accept being overweight," says David Benchetrit, director of the Clinique du Poids weight loss clinic in Paris.

"It is no secret that they want to be beautiful, and in love, and so they take care of themselves to look good." Indeed, Benchetrit says that two-thirds of the women he sees at his clinic have a body mass index (BMI) of less than 23, which is in the normal range of 18.5-24.9. Admittedly, they are not ALL thin.

"We sit down and eat for pleasure, using all of our senses," Mireille Guiliano, author of the best-selling book French Women Don't Get Fat, has said.

"You need to eat a very large volume of bread or pasta for the calories to add up, and most of the time, French meals are quite light and portions are small," says David Benchetrit. There is a bit more to this perfect diet than smaller portions, but none of it is very complicated, or involves any self-deprivation.

Deprivation is just not a popular French habit. I will explain it all to you in my 15-day e-course...in detail.

Changing your eating habits permanently

But old habits die hard. One of the most significant is that French children are bought up with the belief that it is seriously unhealthy to eat between meals. They never do. And so it is, very unhealthy, unless one has a medical condition that dictates small, frequent meals. This is a VERY rare condition, nearly non-existent in France. Fancy that.

The French incidence of cardiovascular disease is low, especially around the Mediterranean. And they are not really known as a nation with very high stress levels (except some of the Parisians who seem to suffer from incurable, terminal road rage, even when they are not in their cars).

Here in the Pays de la Loire we treat Time with respect. The French DO enjoy their food, their wine, the company and conversation around the table. They eat and enjoy with all five their senses. Their approach to food and eating is relaxed and reverent.

Could this way of eating be a way of relieving stress? Is it the perfect diet?

How can we change our eating habits? Are we just not trying hard enough?

A table, les enfants!

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne