I talked to a woman today who had financial problems. She was complaining that if her relatives didn't give her help, she wouldn't have food to eat. She was AT LEAST 150 pounds overweight, and could barely breathe because of it. She was getting plenty of calories from somewhere. Sounds mean, right? I know. It sounded mean to me when I wrote it, too. It just illustrates the problems with our society, though. The absolute poorest in this country still have such an easy physical lifestyle that the fat just keeps packing on. Ironically, the food that seems to be the easiest to get cheaply in large quantities is loaded with carbohydrates. That is exactly the WRONG thing that someone needs nutritionally.

In short, don't let yourself fall into this woman's trap. Earn your food every day, and pick foods to which your ancestors had access. Your body will love you for it, and will, almost immediately, begin to regulate itself back to normal proportions. Send it the message that the hunt for food is on, and the feasting is over.

When it comes to weight management, mind-set is everything. The feeling of hunger is something most of us never really experience. Those few individuals who have become stranded, without access to nourishment for an extended period of time can tell us what it is really like. Those pangs at 11:30 am when your breakfast begins to wear off are just an early warning signal to Ogg. Time to start looking for food. If you ignore them for a while, they subside. If you begin to feel a drop in energy, or weak or shaky, then your body is telling you that it is necessary for you to find something to eat, or it will go into energy preservation mode. Hunger pangs are not a bad thing. If you keep stuffing the furnace with fuel, you never even get a chance for your body to tell you that it's finished digesting the last load. Give it a little time to burn off breakfast before you stoke the burner with lunch.

These sensations are something you can learn to look forward to, even enjoy to some extent, as your body puts you in touch with your ancestry. Looking for food isn't a challenge to us anymore, so we need to simulate it. If you can, wait an hour after the first pangs of hunger hit. Take a walk, do something a little bit physical, so Ogg can earn his lunch. If you run to the vending machine and eat a package of cookies the first time you get a twinge of hunger, your body will shrug it's figurative shoulders and happily digest the quick sugar that you have just ingested. A few minutes later, the old hunger will be back, though, along with a "sugar crash" as your insulin levels shoot up to deal with the unexpected sugar equivalent of a dozen bananas or more.

Substitute something close to what old Ogg would have had access to. Fruit, nuts, vegetables and meat.

So our mantra of the day: "WWOD" What would Ogg do?"

I have a friend who tries every fad diet that they can find. Books, Internet, you name it. They all end up in failure and cost money. Today that friend is on the third day of the "detox" phase that is supposed to rid your body of all of its toxins in order for you to lose weight. You have to drink this stuff that's some kind of mixture of algae and berries, and, I think, cabbage. This friend is thrilled today because of a 3lb. weight loss in 3 days! YaaaaYYYYY!!!! Well, ...............duh! You drink nothing but cabbage juice and algae for 3 days and, yeah, you're bound to lose some weight. The problem is that a crap diet like that is not sustainable, nor healthy. This friend did not want to hear that the weight loss was just an initial drop from eating nothing and drinking cabbage juice. Drinking just that stuff=less caloric intake=initial weight loss. So much for the book that cost, I don't know, 20-30-50 bucks!

Multiply this times the number of overweight people in our society, and you see the potential for abuse. Everybody, including my friend, is looking for the "magic bullet" that will be the end all cure all for FAT. It won't! It is just a reaction from our bodies from too much food intake. We store it for future need. The trouble is, the future need never arrives in our advanced society, so everybody just keeps getting fatter! Eat less, move around more. Lose weight and you don't have to drink cabbage juice and algae! Ogg no like cabbage juice!

It occurred to me this morning that our bodies will react well if we simply don't use modern "labor-saving devices" when we don't need to. If you live 10 miles from work, you probably need transportation. If your office is on the 10th floor, though, you don't need to take the elevator. Take the stairs, and do it regularly. Once will do you no good. 10 times and you will start to feel good. Take any opportunity to burn up some of those calories. Little amounts burned add up, just as do little amounts consumed.

The nice thing about this blog is that I can be as brutally honest as needed. I can attack you and make statements about laziness and flab because guess what? I'm included in the readership. These comments are about me as well as you, and I'm not going to go easy on myself. We need RESULTS! Not gonna get 'em by telling ourselves what we want to hear.

I took a walk for a couple of miles at lunchtime today. I need to do it frequently, but I noticed things that you don't see from your desk, workstation, car, wherever you happen to be. I saw the rampant overindulgence in graphic display. It became surreal as I walked. I saw people, some probably a hundred pounds overweight, waddle out of the building, waddle to their cars, and trundle off to gorge themselves on a 1500k calorie lunch at one of a dozen fast food or other eating places in the area. 1500 doesn't sound like much. Probably 3/4 of your daily need.

Throw in a 400 calorie bagel with 200 calories of cream cheese for breakfast, a big "coffee" (milk, lots of sugar, caramel, with some coffee thrown in) on the way to work, a handful of cookies when you get home, a piece of your co-worker's birthday cake, a bowl of ice cream and/or a bowl of potato chips in front of the TV while you watch "Biggest Loser", and you're at 4,000 calories NOT INCLUDING YOUR DINNER! Guess what?.........Eat that way one day and you're ok. Eat that way everyday and you are GONNA BE F........A.............T!!!

I walked past a fast food chicken place (No, not that one, just for the record), and saw a line of cars lined up behind the drive through. I suddenly realized.........that's nothing more than a trough! Have you ever been to a farm where pigs are raised? Aside from smelling really bad, there's something else that stands out. When the food comes, slop, grain, miscellaneous scraps, garbage, whatever, they all come running and squealing for their turn at the trough. As long as you throw food of any kind in there, they'll keep gorging and grunting until it's gone. This line of cars is no different. We don't have to expend any energy to obtain nourishment now. Is it a wonder that the country is getting fatter by the minute? Two things have the potential to change this, and one is unimaginable to us. A catastrophe of such magnitude that the food supply is seriously interrupted would reduce our waistlines, but at what price? Kids would go wanting for nutrition, people who are in marginal health would suffer.

The other thing that can change it is ...........YOU. One meal, one step (literally) at a time. I am now announcing the greatest diet in the history of the world.....it doesn't cost you fifty bucks a month plus prepackaged food. It doesn't require meetings. It is "THE TWO WORD DIET" soon
NOT coming to a bookstore near you. OK 4 words if you count the alternative..........ready?.............here it is...................... (drum roll simulated here).................................CALORIE DEFICIT. You're ingo's gotta be less than your outgo. The opposite, (which is really easy by the way) is CALORIE SURPLUS. You eat more that you use, so you store it. You're FAT. You've been doing "CALORIE SURPLUS" to the point that you need your own zip code. Time to use your body's paleolithic metabolism to clear out the storehouse.

How you want to do it is up to you. Don't go extreme without a physician's ok. Just keep track of your caloric intake (and I mean ALL OF IT), calculate your caloric need, and keep the intake less than the need by either reducing the intake, or increasing the activity (hopefully a reasonable amount of both).

Don't believe the old saw "One cookie a day less will lead to (X# of pounds lost in the next year. .........................B.S.

If your caloric need is 2500/day, and you've been taking in 4000, well, one less cookie will mean that you'll gain weight a little more slowly than you would've with the cookie. Don't expect to lose weight unless you eat below your need level. Don't go too far below, or your body will react by shutting down to conserve energy due to a perceived starvation situation.

I like to use a rule of thumb that you need about 13 times your bodyweight per day. That's not totally accurate, and will vary from person to person, and according to activity level, but it's an OK guide, and it generally works for me.

Different people find what works for them. I know that, for me, it works to keep a food log. I use About.com "Calorie Count", and it seems pretty easy to keep track. You have to track EVERYTHING, however. Don't cheat or you will have bad results. Every drink, every peanut, cracker, mayonnaise on your sandwich...........EVERYTHING. It will surprise you how quickly the calories rack up. You will find yourself looking for healthy low cal alternatives, and passing up the co-worker's birthday cake.

Fortunately, although our bodies haven't evolved much since Ogg, we have developed our intelligence and skills. We have the ability to manage weight in this high-tech, physically non-demanding world, but it is necessary to be really pro-active in order to do it. Go get in touch with your Ogg.