Today, I looked on Amazon and read parts of the book and was really interested to see that much of his research centered around that old demon stress hormone, cortisol. I've known about this for years, and have made efforts to cut stress out of my life, but he brought up a wide variety of stressors that can stimulate cortisol and one of the biggies is cold. If your body is thrust into a cold weather situation, it wants to eat in order to gain weight in order to better insulate against the cold. Makes sense, and it really clicked with me.
My weight gain began when I first moved to Oregon 15 years ago and where I just wasn't comfortably warm most of the year. Despite exercise and careful dieting, I couldn't keep the pounds off and finally accepted living with 10 or so extra pounds. When I moved to Brookings, that 10 extra pounds grew. Despite all the hiking and walking I did, and despite eating healthily, my weight just shot up, mostly belly fat. My apartment faced north, never got sun, and was hard to keep warm even in the summer. I think that's the only place I ever wore sweats year-round. Because electric rates were so high, I couldn't afford to keep the place comfortably warm.
Since I've been here, I've mostly been either cold or hot and of course, this winter has been particularly cold. Plus my office is cold all the time. It was during the December cold snap that I suddenly put on a bunch of extra pounds and even now that fat doesn't want to go away despite the healthy diet I've been on, despite no alcohol or sugar and very little in the way of refined carbohydrates. I haven't been dieting to lose weight, but I'm not eating high-calorie foods, either so I did think weight loss might be a side benefit.
Interestingly enough, the times when I've lost weight have been in warm weather situations -- two weeks sailing in the Caribbean plus last summer, when the weight went away until the August heat wave when I began eating KFC and other fast foods rather than cook.
So, I'm thinking maybe the cold is the problem -- the only place I can get warm is in the car and usually, in bed. Sometimes in the house once the place warms up for the day. Other than that, it's just plain cold and my body is stressed by that. Who's to say if this is really the issue, but it makes sense to me for now. He didn't offer up much in the way of specifics about food during his interview, but when one caller asked for specifics he said that what he did was be sure to include certain things in his daily diet: lots of Omega 3 and 6; 'living' food (fresh greens, other raw fruits/veggies); and plenty of protein. I already do pretty well on all of those, but haven't been eating much 'living' food since my garden gave up the ghost to the cold. I've started adding ground flax seed to my daily diet and a daily salad. It's not much, but it's about all I can do for now. I already can't eat cruciferous veggies (cabbage, broccoli, etc) because they negatively affect my thyroid, and our local stores offer a really poor selection of fresh veggies. Hopefully, my garden will start producing greens again before too long. I peeked under the storm window the other day and at least one lettuce plant has survived!
Speaking of survival -- I started a bunch of Rudbekia (black-eyed Susan) last summer and nursed them through all kinds of efforts on their part to die. They are on my back porch and while more or less sheltered from frost, do get the cold temps and did get a dusting of snow. And they are still alive! A bit stunted, but alive.
I plan to set them out this spring, if I get a place to do that. I need to paint the brick foundation first, then bring in a bunch of topsoil to raise the slope of the land away from the house, and then I can plant. I'm proud of these guys -- if they survive this, they should be able to survive anything.
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