[Gem]

Originally Posted by Sapphirez

This is an interesting topic and the discussion of childhood eating brought back some fuzzy memories lol though also less savory ones too..


I'm a little unclear what exactly you meant for the direction or concept of this thread JustBe. Is it about specifically how we may relate to food psychosomatically? or something different? either way I like the directions it's turned and the conversation you guys are having in here. to be honest I started writing a really lengthy post but I am gonna scrap that in favor of writing this shorter one lol


oh my gosh Gem that is sad that you weigh your food out!! don't you think that a person can eat almost as much fresh food (ie raw vegetables and fruit) as they want and it not negatively impact their weight or muscle quality?

Athletes in my sport have to maximise physical strength, which means building muscle to your particular genetic potential, and to build muscle is to gain weight, so you have to eat in a caloric excess and ensure a pretty high protein intake. The issue here is, as you gain muscle mass you also gain fat, so after a while it is necessary to reduce calories, go into a calorie deficit, to shed that excess fat, but retain the gained muscle. The fat loss periods require the same protein, but less carbs and fats, and you have to do resistance training so the body knows it needs the muscle, and take the energy it needs from fat stores. Regulating this weight gain and weight loss is not all that easy because if you eat too many calories during the gain you accumulate much more fat than muscle, and if you eat too few calories during the weigh loss, you lose too much muscle tissue. A person my size needs to be about 250 calories excess during the gain and maybe up too 400 calories deficit during the loss. Because the calorie excess and deficit are very small, one has to be exacting about their daily caloric intake, and weighing your portions is the most accurate way of doing that - while also ensuring your protein carbs and fat are at reasonable rations.


This seems strange to most people, but how one eats is individualised, and for my aim is to lift really heavy things, so the way I eat supports that goal. Other people with different aims shouldn't do what I do - they should eat in a way that supports their own circumstances and preferred lifestyle.


If you eat whole food plant based diet, it is difficult to eat the volume of food you need to make up your calorie requirements, so people who turn to veganism generally can eat as much as they want and still lose the excess fat they carry, and because your metabolic rate decreases proportionately to your body weight, there comes point when they stop losing weight and maintain an equal calorie balance. Unfortunately, people often lose significant muscle mass in this process due to excessively low calorie deficit, lower end protein intake and no hard physical work or resistance training.


When people start to lose weight, it starts out as a physical thing, just math the calories and get lots of fresh veg instead of coke and cake, but then it becomes emotional because any person's way of eating is attached to their emotional condition, and there is an internal physcological journey that people have to go through, and there is a social trauma involved in shedding the people who don't support and enhance their life-change, which is also an emotional issue, and their families have to change their ways of sharing with the person... and what we deal with as 'diet' and body composition starts to become a very difficult an complicated thing that affects all the dimensions of a person's life.

I do think that food combining is important and abusing it could have dire effects even if one is eating raw, so I guess that is one area where I would think being tedious would be worthwhile.. I'm sorry but I think if you are doing it right you shouldn't have to worry about or bother literally weighing your food out. perhaps this is an example of a food hang-up that would be beneficial to overcome like this thread seems to be about. Unless you just enjoy weighing food and worrying about the quantities you eat like that.. I guess it could be seen as a form of playing with your food lol and maybe you just find it fun. I mean of course there is a time and place for portion control, especially with cooked foods, but even then you could just eyeball it right?

Yes, it common for the physique athletes, body builder, fitness models, etc, to develop disfunctional relationships with food, but strength athletes are much less prone because our 'success' is not judged on aesthetics (body image). We don't tend to succumb to the body-image/self-image issues which are common in physique sports, modeling and so forth (but there are a few steroids going around). In strength sports it's normal to weigh food, near enough everyone counts calories and everyone regulates their muscle gaining and fat loss cycles. What I do is normal in my world and it doesn't cause me any distress. Because I'm not 'obsessed' I don't experience food anxiety.

I signed up for the Cronometer. I think I used a different site/app before but I didn't experiment with it much because a lot of things I'd consume weren't on there.. but this one seems impressive so far and has something like moringa powder on there, and tons of other moringa options lol and I don't think I could find moringa at all on another site I used in the past so that is awesome. I am still interested in devising a meal or even single drink/smoothie that contains all the recommended nutrients so hopefully this will help with that. I am curious to see how small of a serving one could get such a super-meal made of fresh foods. well fresh foods but also a limited amount of other substances like moringa powder, especially if you don't have access to fresh leaves of that.. I love experimenting with things like Cronometer so thanks for bringing it up.


yeah that'd be the best for children to grow up in gardens and being involved in kitchen preparation. Thankfully my fiance's mother grew a great garden last year so I'm hoping this year we can grow even more and my daughter will be able to help,

That would be so fantastic and really help your daughter to develop a loving relationship with food.

though she will mostly help by just being there since she is not even a year and a half yet.

Oh she'll just love tasting things!

but it'll be great for her and me and all of us. We don't really have the best ground to grow stuff here at our house but we at least grew awesome flower gardens which I just absolutely love.. and eat a little bit sometimes lol like I was eating 'weeds/flowers' today and recently as they sprout up. some are pretty tasty! Eating flowers as well as weeds are things I want to learn more about and experiment with.

Be careful. Some plants can make you really sick.

JustBe wow seven of you! what kinds of things did you eat growing up as per your choice then? My parents weren't terribly totalitarian or anything, but we were poor a lot of my childhood so we had typical cheap American fare a lot, like sandwiches, fish fry my dad caught (though I quit eating any seafood, hamburgers and eggs on their own early on), lasagna, meatloaf, scalloped potatoes, etc. or more processed foods like canned soup or spaghettios, tv dinners, etc.
I did eat a lot of candy growing up also when I had a choice or more freedom. I don't remember a ton of it being in our house when I was that young, but I recall trips to the corner store and frequent enough indulgence. and my dad's parents fed us a lot lol. We ate meals with multiple courses, a meat sometimes grilled, vegetables and potatoes, usually with dessert and a candy bowl available most of the time, soda, and so on. They lived in another city so we saw them pretty often but not all the time. Actually my paternal grandma struggled with being overweight and would try all sorts of fad diets and supplements and new ideas.. none of them obviously working well.
Then when I was 8 or so my parents separated and my mom moved my brother and sister and I in with our grandma and two aunts. My grandma was into health stuff so we had more wholesome meals once we lived there. We made fun of a lot of grandma's choices though lol.. unbeknownst to us some of them were actually very unhealthy, like margarine and low fat things with sucralose for example but anyways overall she tried to eat more fresh healthy things and that was a good influence.


I've done a lot of research into food because I realized how integral it was to wellbeing and I needed to find out how to heal myself since I was not healthy from childhood or perhaps infancy or even birth Idno.. I just never recall feeling very well or energized. and I fell for all kinds of gluttonous things including energy drinks and alcohol and whatever foods or guised excuses for food. Now I avoid eating a lot of common foods, or of course additives and fake or compromised food ingredients too. but the things I've been learning show issues with almost all food groups that are generally recommended.. and I don't know I think that at this point on the planet it would be good for people to understand and adopt the truth of what is really meant for us to consume or what takes the body too much extra energy or hassle.. but at the same time I'm conflicted because I do also love the idea of energetic possibilities and what you talk about with making foods less of a threat with things like TFT.. I'm familiar with an adaptation of that EFT. What you said also made me think of this Energy Clearing Protocol I found a group supporting. and it is probably close to what you are thinking about or hoping for. Apparently it was inspired by some scientific studies where they had representations of a certain substance or something in a glass vial and somehow helped people become inoculated to it. that wasn't practical for an environment outside of a giant super-funded lab, so this person thought to put the names of the substances on paper and use that to make this healing and desensitizing protocol. They have different steps or pages with a variety of things, like one day you do it for foods, another for bacteria microbes and pathogens, another for emotions and less tangible things I think they had, and so on.. It involved some rubbing certain points on the body while holding the paper in one hand and I forget what else. Some people reported miraculous benefits but I don't know I didn't do it dedicatedly enough. I wouldn't say it could automatically be a miracle for everyone, but that sort of technique does hold promise for healing in general I think. but at this point I think we should be more mindful and choose to control what we put in our bodies or create in the world, because we're not going to evolve as we should if we just devote so much energy and time to taking and creating shortcuts instead of learning how to honor life and our intended existence more.

but what you're talking about I think could hold a lot of value, like someone may be averse to fresh or raw food or a certain kind that could actually be good for them, for some psychological or whatever reason, and that should be worked through. I do think that we could lessen negative impact potential of things with esoteric and mental or emotional healing techniques, but I wouldn't want to use it as an excuse to do things that go against our nature.

What food were you facing an issue with JustBe if you want to share?