A wise doctor once told me, many years ago, that if I just exercised for 30 minutes every day that my weight would take care of itself and I would never have to diet. Did I take his advice? Oh, no..
I've spent the last 30 years or so skipping from one diet to another, I've tried them all, occasionally exercising, yo-yoing my way through life. I've lost up to 30 pounds at a time, but always managed to gain it back and then some.
Another doctor, more recently, gave me a healthy eating plan, not a diet, to follow. Did I follow it? Of course not. I was still looking for that magic bullet. I wanted a quick fix; a diet, a pill, or potion that would take the weight off for me. Any diet (whether it's high-protein, low-fat, low-carb etc.) will work, but only for as long as you are on it. When you stop, which most of us inevitably do, the weight comes right back. At the end of the day it's the calorie count that matters most. If you take in more calories than you expend then you will gain weight. If you take in less calories than you expend you will lose weight. According to my online dictionary, Merriam-Webster, a calorie is 2 a : a unit equivalent to the large calorie expressing heat-producing or energy-producing value in food when oxidized in the body b : an amount of food having an energy-producing value of one large calorie. Diet's, while low in calories, usually exclude or limit one or more food groups at the expense of the nutrients that our bodies need. I suspect I'm not the only one to ignore the simple facts that we probably all learned back in Biology class.
Today, I'm going to discard all the diet paraphernalia, that I've accumulated over the years, and go back to the basics - plain and simple. An excellent food guide can be found here. I'm going to stop the craziness and stop looking for that magic bullet. I've known all along that it didn't exist, but continued to completely ignore what I already knew, and stubbornly kept looking anyway.
While there is no one eating plan generally accepted for helping control the symptoms of fibromyalgia, I do believe that a sensible, healthy eating plan, including all food groups is the way to go. I know that for myself, when I was limiting bad carbs, basically all junk
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