What can I say, I'm overweight and need to correct some things!

This is part two on weight loss. Or healthy eating really. Part one has been so hard to write. You can have it when I have it cleaned up and made it easy to read. This however is easy to write and you will be happy to have this to think about.

I have a cook I watch on PBS, his program is called Mexico: One Plate at a Time. The cook is Rick Bayless. I have so enjoyed his program which now comes on very late at night sadly. I have become a much better cook because of his cook books. I still have the smells of Mexico in my head from childhood and I'm sure it helped me buy his cook book "Mexican everyday". The real gift in this book is his introduction at the beginning of the book. He didn't want to be a heavy weight famous cook like so many gifted cooks are. He didn't want to sacrifice his health to his love of cooking. So Rick began to look at his life and his choices and he came up with some essential learning points to control his weight. I will list them here. He writes a lot about each point and you should check your library or local book store if you want to read more.

Essential learning #1 My weight reflects a mental picture I have of myself.

Essential learning #2 No matter what weight-loss diet plans promise, monitoring the quality of food is essential to maintaining healthy weight. The real truth is: I need monitor the quantity of calories I consume....

Essential Learning #3 Eating a wide variety of food ingredients is fundamental to nutritional fitness.

Essential Learning #4 Processed foods, many prepared foods and most fast foods have no place in everyday eating.

Essential learning #5 The world's most time-honored cuisine's illustrate that: 1) everyday eating is best kept to deliciously seasoned simple preparations of natural ingredients (mostly unrefined and balanced among a variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, and meat) served in moderate portions, and 2) fabulous feasts-once a week, or, for special occasions, more often-are an essential part of our healthy nourishment.

Essential Learning #6 For us to be able to enjoy great food without gaining weight, our bodies need to burn as much fuel as possible.......

I list these essentials because I think Rick Bayless has found some of the truths I have been collecting. The truths that Steven Gurgevich has in his Medical Hypnosis tapes I suggested you listen to. The truths that Mireille Guiliano shares in her book 'French Women Don't Get Fat. And more recently people like Michael Pollan, as in his interview with Night line, are voicing my thoughts about food and eating.

(read his interview at http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=4757669&page=1 ) I remember how my grandmother ate and it's not even close to how we eat now!

So to get us started let's think about #5 from above. If we develop a simple daily eating style and save our bigger, richer meals for special occasion will we be happier? I can come up with 6 simple meals a week. I can cook up some grains and have them ready in my fridge. I can prepare some healthy meals based on just the ingredients. We could ask my #4 child what was in the fridge, most days, when she was on her mission in the way south end of California and I'll bet she'd say Menudo , a tripe soup that is a mainstay in Mexican kitchens. In Japan it's Miso soup, in Mireille's books it's leek soup, can you think of other cultures where there is a basic food everyone depends on for daily life? This week I'm going to work on a list of simple meals based on variety and freshness. Will you look at your meals, do they fall into the fast food, the middle of the grocery isles, in a box style of eating? Let's look at our food, what we eat. Maybe at the end of each day we could think about what that days eating was to us. As you look at this I will start a list of foods that can be prepared once for the basis of several daily meals.

Food is going to be fun to talk about weight is going to be hard and self image even harder but talk about all these I will.

This is just a beginning....