Let my Reclamation Project Begin
I’m on a “reclamation project.”
After a thorough evaluation during my first chiropractor visit, it turns out that on a scale of very good to very bad, I’m at the bottom of “good” and about to enter “bad.” I’ve also been blogging less, and need to finish editing The Divine Anvil, the sequel to The Divine Meddler. To make time for the stack of non-fiction books I want to delve into, I need to tweak my daily schedule. Besides all that, I’ve gotten away from my vegan diet with too much restaurant and junk food.
And wouldn’t you know it? I recently came across another of Dr. William Li’s videos; this one is about visceral fat and foods that help reduce it. I like his approach to food. Eat the good stuff (but not too much) because good, natural foods are nature’s medicine.
Visceral Fat versus Subcutaneous Fat
Visceral fat surrounds our organs to cushion them from harm. It’s a “good” fat, but too much will expand our waists and hips and contribute to cardiovascular and metabolic disease. Eating fatty foods and too many carbohydrates, as well as stress, add visceral fat that we don’t want.
Subcutaneous fat is fat just below our skin—the jiggly stuff. What you do to eliminate excessive visceral fat will also reduce subcutaneous fat. Most of us know the drill: be active, watch what you eat, get sleep, and reduce alcohol intake.
While Dr. Li agrees with the above, he encourages people to add certain foods to deal with too much visceral fat. (I enjoy adding and not removing.)
Foods that Fight Fat
Tomatoes are full of lycopene, which triggers the body to burn off visceral fat. People in a study ate one tomato every day before lunch. That’s all they did, and in one month waist measurements were down and people lost one pound. Just by eating one tomato a day! Li said that one could “supercharge” (by 250%!) the lycopene by sauteing it for about 20 minutes.
This is my favorite breakfast: I sauté a zucchini and tomatoes in vegetable broth. I slather guacamole on a generous slice of toasted rye or seed bread (NOT white bread) and cover it with the zucchini and tomatoes.
Pomegranates, either the seeds or pure juice (but not too much juice), help to grow akkermansia, a strain of gut bacteria which improves metabolic health by regulating sugar levels and has anti-inflammatory properties that help reduce fat. Dr. Li described it as the body’s own GLP1 (without those side effects).
Kiwi has lots of Vitamin C, which reduces inflammation caused by too much fat in the body. He said with the kiwi’s fiber, one can get better gut bacteria in just one day. (So many foods get to work—reach a therapeutic level—much faster than drugs.)
He recommends cacao, which is the source of chocolate. But don’t leap for joy yet. We’re not talking milk chocolate, or even just dark chocolate. We’re talking dark chocolate with 85% cacao. It’s an acquired taste. I like it now, but it’s not sweet—which I guess is the point. A cup of hot chocolate made with 85% cacao powder makes a good nighttime drink. I couldn’t find the cacao powder (not cocoa) in the hot chocolate section of the store. Instead, it was in the pharmacy area — which should tell you something.
Soy will trigger burning brown fat as well. That includes the tofu, miso, and tempeh, which I’ve learned to include in my recipes. Honestly, it takes a lot of trial and error to find soy recipes that taste good to our Western palate, but it can be done.
End of Deprivation
This is about adding (good) food, not just eliminating bad food choices. It’s about moving more, adding reading and writing time. I hope that will work better than focusing on giving up bad habits. I guess that’s why I call this my RECLAMATION PROJECT!
