I am so disappointed in myself.  I have been preaching to myself, eat right, diets don’t work and exercise and I’ll be a healthy weight.  Well I have been doing a bunch of research the last few days, weeks, years…… and I am embarrassed to say I think I have been grossly underrating….  and I was doing it unintentionally, and blindly for probably most part of my life.  Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t want you to think I’m this anorexic or have some eating disorder or something.  This is totally different.  I eat.  I actually eat enough that I feel full and let myself have pizza and fries from time to time.  So I’m sure your saying bull Tracy…. your chubby because you have pizza and fries from time to time.  Well just listen to my theory for a minute.

I am willing to bet that most of us my friends are not CHUBBY because we overeat.  I also think it’s time that we stop beating ourselves up because we have pizza once and a while or a piece of cake.  You know I could never understand why I would gain weight.  I now believe that most people who are chubby (not obese)  but chubby don’t over eat.  You won’t find me sneaking from drive thru to thru eating bag after bag of fast food, you won’t see a bag of chip beside my bed empty from the night before.  I eat, I but I know when to stop and I know when I am full and limit the foods that aren’t good for me.

I’ve been so sick of book after book telling me eat less!  Exercise more!  If you can’t lose weight, you must be under estimating your calories you eat and over estimating the exercise calories you burn.  YOU MUST BE LYING!  I am not lying you freaking book!  Then I would throw the book at the wall…

Speaking of books, something I read in the book younger next year, that didn’t make me want to throw it against the wall was a story of how fawns (you know baby deer) stop growing in the fall and winter, but they put on weight.  They put on weight at a time when food is sparse and they are moving less and they stop growing, but they gain weight.  Then when spring comes and food becomes plentiful, they can eat all day, they begin to move more and eat more!  What doesn’t happen is the fawn doesn’t get fat because it is eating more, the fawn begins to grow again, it becomes lean and muscular, the fawn has energy to run from predators, find its food and grow strong.

Heres how I believe I got chubby by not eating enough.  Our bodies need food for fuel. Back inthe day (like before I was born) we (the human race) worked very hard, we had manual jobs and moved all the time.  We are hunters and gatherers.  We would go through cycles of having food in the spring and summer and less in the winter, there were also times we would face famine.  Our bodies were designed to get us through those tough times.  As fall would crest over the prairie …. (lol good story telling eh! anyway)  our bodies would have less work to do the crop would all be harvested the nights would come earlier and we would put on a little chub, our bodies would know there would be less food over the winter because we would not be moving as much as we were months earlier.  Any extra calories we ate at that time would be stored for future use.  That would get us through the winter.  Finally when spring arrived morning would come earlier we would begin to get our field ready for the crops to grow and the food would start to grow and we would be moving more and eating well again.  We never worried about what we ate, we ate because we were hungry and because we were working.  Now most of us don’t have manual labour jobs we spend most of the day sitting and we have food when ever we want it.  The problem is our genetics haven’t changed.  But we are smart enough to know that we don’t have manual jobs and we shouldn’t eat everything we see and we try hard to make good choices 90% of the time.  We also recognize that we don’t work on our feet all day so most of us try to get some exercise, we go for a walk, run take a class at the gym, I really believe we try.  But something is sabotaging us, something is sabotaging our bodies.  Could it be we are actually not eating enough, our bodies think it’s winter because we are eating just enough to “get by”  and that 10% of the time that we indulge and not eat properly our genetics tell our body that it better hold on to those extra calories because food has been sparse and our bodies are tired and we have not been moving so it better hold onto those extra calories as and extra pound on our hips?  Then we wake up one morning with an extra pound on our hips and what do we do we punish our bodies and feed them less for a few weeks and we move them more, we give them LESS FOOD and we EXERCISE more and we lose nothing.  Then for weeks and weeks we go around the same circle eating less, exercising, failing, eating more, gaining.  Or we start eating less and moving less because we have no more energy to exercise anymore, losing the game not any weight.  We read books, we are told we are lying, we are eating more then we say, we are not exercising as much as we say.  There is know way if we were not lying about how much we eat and how much we exercise that we wouldn’t lose weight.  We are not getting the right information, or when we are told about starvation mode or screwing up our metabolisim by not eating enough we don’t believe them how could that be possible?  So we don’t believe it we continue to starve ourselves.  Here is another good article about this…  but then again it may just be another fitness trainer trying to sell his product.

Fuelling your body, hmmm.  Thinking of food differently, not feeling guilty every time we put something into our mouths.  Athletes don’t starve their bodies, they fuel their bodies.  We need to move and eat, I believe it’s that simple.  But then again I may know nothing?