Eat Less Meat

If you’ve ever looked at Gymnasium’s Philosophy page, you’ll notice that one of our tenets of physical health is to eat less meat. The American diet is heaping with meat, to the omnipresent point that even the omnivores among us have a hard time appreciating it. It’s just in everything. Just by reducing our intake of meat, we’ll do loads of good for our longevity, our immediate health, and our shared environment. This is why it’s one of our founding tenets.

Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals undertakes the sensitive and important personal, familial, and cultural issues woven into food and diet. He wrote a lovely, honest account of his family’s decision to reduce and ultimately remove meat from their diet for The NY Times Magazine. Even if you’re a committed meater, it’s worth a read.

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Eat Late, Gain Weight

Your body runs on routine, whether your daily schedule is clockwork (can anyone do this anymore?) or erratic, your body is constantly trying to maintain consistency. This is just how it operates. And is why Gymnasium’s approach includes placing simple, consistent anchors for intake (food) and output (movement) into your erratic schedule.

Recent studies show that eating late at night does your body no favors even if you had a workout and ate real food. Same goes for skipping breakfast (you eat more to compensate later). The heart of the issue is a disruption of routine:

“Researchers from Northwestern University have found that eating at the ‘wrong’ time leads to more than twice as much weight gain, even when the overall calories consumed are the same as those eaten at appropriate times.”

Read the article at WebMD

The fix? Simple: Eat real food regularly, rest nightly, and move daily.

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Dieting: Doesn’t work and it hurts your body

A diet post as promised! It pains us to know that diets and dieting are still a major business. It’s one of the many reasons that inspires Gymnasium Blog to seek fresh air on such topics, and why we continue stick to our food guns:
(From Gymnasium’s Philosophy)

• Eat real food, and not too much
• Eat less meat

It’s not just that fraudulent claims from deception and persuasion departments still make money, what’s worse is that a comprehensive analysis of long-term diet studies at UCLA also shows dieting is actually bad for your body:

“We decided to dig up and analyze every study that followed people on diets for two to five years. We concluded most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all. Their weight would be pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back.”

“Eating in moderation is a good idea for everybody, and so is regular exercise,” Mann said. “That is not what we looked at in this study. Exercise may well be the key factor leading to sustained weight loss. Studies consistently find that people who reported the most exercise also had the most weight loss.”

Read the article here: UCLA Study

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Surprise: Food Beats Supplements!

Article is a little heavy on the science jargon, but that’s not all bad given the magnificent lack of science to support the hype in the vitamin and supplement aisles and stores–especially as they seeps out into our drinks and smoothies and packaged food. We’re sticking to our approach: eat real food, and not too much. It’s always funny(-sad) when science needs to put numbers to the obvious:

“Are food supplements helpful? Are there particular nutrients that will prevent illness and disease and possibly prolong life? The answer, notwithstanding thousands of positive [unscientific study results] and, in some cases, small inadequate clinical trials, is there is no rigorous scientific evidence for the utility of dietary supplements.”

Read the article at CSICOP

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