Live Free, Laugh Hard

The current culture of political correctness and circling around issues to assure no one has a chance to find anything offensive in our words have me often feeling powerless. I want to help people understand health and weight loss and it seems that plenty of people still want to get healthy and would like to lose weight. However, I feel that it's just so easy to end up the target of an attack, if you give unsolicited or public advice. Your words can be taken out-of-context and your well meaning advice be labeled extremist. Yet, now at 42, my friends and family are getting sick. They're not just getting randomly sick either. They're getting the ailments that their lifestyle would predict. Those who always ate a lot of meat are getting cancer and they have intestinal issues ranging from constipation and diverticulitis, to IBS. Those who drank a lot of alcohol have elevated liver enzymes, cancer, and auto-immune diseases. Those who have been overweight get ...

I had been a health focused person all my life.  Yet, there were several poor health behaviors that I couldn’t quite kick.  The worst of them was my tendency to binge eat and binge drink.  I was also extremely hooked on sugar, finding my cravings often impossible to control.     In my 20s, I compensated for my binging and sugar consumption by exercising more after a “bingy” weekend or evening and by limiting my calories 4-5 days a week to allot for a few binges each week.  It worked well enough to keep my weight in control but inside my head, I was often going crazy with the desire to stuff myself silly or to eat a half a German chocolate cake in one sitting.  I was often bloated, my skin would break out after particularly bad weekends, and I always gained about 10 pounds on vacations when I would allow a total loss of control.     In my 30s, I got busy with school and life and my poor choices got out-of-control.  Ins...