Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Secret Life Of Women: Extreme Diets

Tonight I actually got to hold the remote for about half an hour! It was amazing, it was exciting, it was educational!! Even if I did get up on the commercials to do dishes. I almost got to watch the whole program before Scott got home and started stressing about missing "Samurai Jack" or something stupid like that. Sheesh.

Anyhow.

I was doing some channel surfing and ended up watching Extreme Diets: Eating Garbage, Going Raw, God's Diet and By The Numbers.

Very interesting stuff here!!

As a woman that has been on Weight Watchers so many times she could lead a class by the subject (and yet is still 50 pounds overweight), done the "South Beach Diet" (at least until I was into Stage 2 and went to Vegas, never saw that diet again). I've done Fit Day where you track all your food, tried Spark People, and many other of the "more natural" diets that you can think of. I'm not into doing anything that involves pills or weird shakes, although I take that back, I did try pills once and they didn't do a damn thing.

So. Here's a few new? ideas.

I'll start at the top. The Garbage Diet, or as the woman called it being a Freeganists. Basically that means she only eats food she gets for free by "dumpster diving". When I first heard the title there I was thinking of the bums we have around here that will rifle through dumpsters and trash cans looking for cans and bottles to recycle. These people, are so not those people.

Freeganist to me sounded more along the lines of "recyclers" and less about the diet. The story shows how they go on "tours" of where they can get the "goods". I think she said she lives in Brooklyn, and it looked like basically they hit the garbage cans of the stores and restaurants. Places that would throw out day old food and food that was getting close to the sell by date and such. It sounds nasty but you could tell that the places were used to people "going through their garbage" and would kind of accommodate them. Such as one place that had day old bagels that only put the bagels in a trash bag, all by themselves. So it was really just a bag of bagels. Where's the cream cheese???

While the whole idea sounds gross I can definitely see where these people are coming from. They are pulling fully unopened packages of good quality food out of the "trash". Obviously they aren't looking for your half eaten subway sandwich that you dropped and tossed in the trash. I think the whole sad part of this though is that all that food (that's not picked out) goes to waste! There is so much "paperwork" involved in donating food that they would just rather throw it out than feed hungry people that don't have money to buy food. Sad.

The whole "Going Raw" was very interesting. Although I really can't see myself mixing let alone buying all those different powders and misc things all together and slurping them down for breakfast. I'm definitely too lazy. Plus what do you do when you go somewhere and they only have cooked food? The woman was a vegan also. I don't know. I don't think I could give up the occasional steak and I don't even own a proper blender. (Damn mudslide mix killed another one!) The woman in this segment was totally cute though. I kind of wanted to take her home so she could pep talk me into drinking her mixture of whatever it was so I'd have lots of energy.

Hmmm God's Diet. This woman has a book. And a BIG Diamond. And a BIG house. And wears lots of scary make up and has weird hair. The overall idea I get...

By the numbers. These people don't even look healthy to me. The whole idea of not eating after lunch until breakfast the next day makes me want to sweat and hug my skillet.

So I learned a bit but don't think I'll be trying any of these things anytime soon. I think it's actually illegal here to dumpster dive and it would DEFINITELY get around quick in our small city that "that mom was climbing in the dumpster behind Save Mart".

I'm destined to be fat forever I'm afraid.

PS: I use the word DEFINITELY a lot and I still can't spell it right. TG for spell check!!Pin It

3 comments:

Carin said...

Julie, I did the raw thing for a while, I did drop a few pounds and I felt great.
It was just REALLY hard. I didn't buy a bunch of mixes to make shakes with I just made "swap smoothies" as my 5 year old named them with spinach, apple, carrot, blueberries

To do raw you pretty much have to go vegan because animal products need to be cooked.

I finally snapped when my daughter made chocolate chip cookies, after a month or so of nothing but veggies I was ready to kill for chocolate LOL!

~Sheila~ said...

I saw a program about the Freegans where one guy's sister was reluctant to try the foods that they found. I'm not sure if I can do it either but the food looked good.

JC GONZO said...

I'm pretty happy that you're so open minded. When I saw it with my family they were pretty horrified by most of it, haha! I must admit, when my friend made a short film about Freeganism I couldn't tell if it was a serious thing or not, it was just a whole different concept. But it really expanded my mind. Right now I'm vegan and I've tried to eat as much raw food as possible, but I enjoy non-raw foods a bit too much.

I've been on weight watchers too, it worked for me but it didn't change my horrible love/hate relationship with food. If you're still trying to lose weight, I don't know how old this post is, try replacing a few meat meals a week with vegan/veggie alternatives. Vegan burgers, vegan dairy products, etc. taste pretty good and have SO MUCH LESS fat and calories. You don't have to go completely in one diet or lifestyle, but pick and choose what works for you.

Honestly, daily exercise is really a big factor. Simple walking is really god.

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