It's raining, I'm feeling sickly, so I'm scouring the Internet today

Been finding all sorts of interesting things to read today. Started on the Green Mountain website, which led me to all sorts of lovely blogs on health and wellness. Will be adding a few of them to my list on the right. There were many notable passages on why obsessing over losing weight was not helpful, how all this modern research on the effects of diet and exercise doesn't help paint a complete picture of the truth about optimum health, and the U.S. isn't the fattest nation on the planet (there are, in fact, 10 other countries in line ahead of us!).

Here's a passage from Refuse To Regain, a site by Dr. Barbara Berkeley and Lynn Haraldson, "dedicated to providing information and support to people who have lost weight and want to keep it off forever."

From the article by Dr. Berkeley of March 5, 2011, "The Perfect Diet: Does It Exist?" She shares wise and balanced guidelines for finding the right diet for you.

1. Your diet is good if it is helping you achieve normal blood sugar, decent cholesterol readings, low triglycerides and a good blood pressure. If you already have some of these problems, your diet is a good one if it is lessening these markers or allowing you to decrease your medications.
2. Your diet is good if it is allowing you to stay at a good weight. That weight doesn't have to correspond to a perfect BMI, but it should be as low as you can comfortably maintain and should stay relatively stable.
3. Your diet is good if your energy is good. If you are sluggish or have no energy to get out and move around, look at making a dietary change.
4. Your diet is good if it exposes you to the fewest carcinogens.  We get enough exposure to cancer causing chemicals in our air, plastics, x-rays, and modern products.  Avoidance of processing and additives is the basis for every healthy diet whether it be Primarian, Pritikin, Vegetarian or an Atkins variant.
5. Your diet is good if you can believe in it and stick to it. If you are simply eating reflexively, without any specific thought, it's unlikely that your diet is healthy. The reason is simple: we are presented with few good choices. In order to eat well, we have to eat mindfully.
6. Your diet is good if you wake up without guilt.
7. Your diet is good if eating it makes you not only healthy...but happy.

Well, reading all of that validates my choices. I'm still not earning stars for sodium intake today. Even homemade chicken soup tastes pretty bland if you don't salt it!