Canada I'm In Love

The number of people cutting down on meat and dairy, or cutting these foods from their diets entirely, has been rising over the last decade. The number of vegans in the UK, for example, quadrupled between 2006 and 2018, according to research by The Vegan Society. One common motivation for shunning steak and stilton and going vegan is the promised health benefits. The vegan diet is generally considered to be higher in fibre and lower in cholesterol, protein, calcium and salt than an omnivorous diet – but there are still misconceptions and concerns around cutting meat, fish, eggs and dairy completely from our diets.   One common concern is whether a vegan diet provides enough vitamin B12. B12 helps prevent nerve damage, and is found in meat, fish, eggs and dairy, but not in fruit or vegetables. It's recommended that adults consume 1.5 micrograms of the vitamin per day. “A B12 deficiency can lead to neurological symptoms such as numbness, and it’s irreversible if the deficiency...

All of my life I’ve been overweight and started emotional eating already as a child. I have always struggled with sugar cravings, been hungry almost constantly and my weight has yo-yoed throughout most of my life. The first time I felt fat and thought that I neeed to go on a diet, I was probably no more than 8 or 9 years old. Life has been filled with a lot of feelings of shame, and I, together with so many others, was taught that fat was sinful. Fat was what made me fat, that was it. After many strenuous attempts to lose weight, I only weighed more and more. My weight increased rapidly after I stopped taking my birth control pills, and back then I had no idea that I had PCOS. I went to see doctors several times but didn’t really get any answers. My weight ended up at 309 lbs. (140 kg) and I reached a dead end, deeply depressed and everything was heavy and difficult. I had always been chubby, but I had never been this big before. Everyday life became hard and the limitations of w...

I essentially woke up one day and somehow everything clicked, and I was ready. My children were ages 1 and 3, and I wasn’t going to be here for them. I was in pain, could barely walk or breathe, had such severe mobility issues, I couldn’t even get my own socks or shoes on my right leg without assistance (and those socks are knee-high compression socks at that)! No doctor, specialist or diagnostic test was able to determine why I had the lost mobility, but on account of being on a blood thinner, I was medically unable to take over the counter or prescription strength anti-inflammatory pills, so SOMETHING had to change. Within a week, I landed in the world of keto and have never looked back. I knew in my heart it had to be the food. Having been diagnosed as celiac disease in 2012, I was well versed at the positive impact of ruling out even some, if not all grains, on inflammation, so I decided to return to the celiac diagnosis stage of eating. Within a week, I landed in the world of ket...

What worked: 1. Eating a low-carbohydrate diet with a caloric intake slightly below maintenance. This meant no bread, pasta, grains, beans, fruit, or high carb vegetables. Typical day: Breakfast: 3 eggs, two cups broccoli, 2 tbsp ghee. Lunch: 300 calories of sunflower seeds, two cups broccoli, 1 red pepper, 2 tbsp coconut oil, 1 bar of 99% Lindt dark chocolate. Supper: 7 oz salmon, 2 tbsp ghee, 2 cups broccoli, 2 cups coconut milk, 1 scoop vega protein powder. This averages out to about 1700-2000 calories. Drastic caloric restrictions would make it difficult to sleep, as would intermittent fasting. Anything somewhat sweet spikes the false hunger. 2. Cutting out natural and artificial sweeteners. These would create false hunger. This included Stevia, and Zevia (a pop made with Stevia). This was difficult as I was addicted to Stevia. 3. Maintaining a moderate work-out schedule. I used to work out hard in order to lose weight, which created a lot of hunger. I now use exercise as a body...

About a year and a half ago, I set out to lose nearly two decades of weight I had put on thanks to desk jobs, poor eating, and an out-of-control soda addiction. At 5 feet 10 inches tall and 208 pounds (lb), I was looking to get to a goal weight of 168 lb, which is closer to what I weighed in college. Knocking some of the obvious targets out of my diet — Coca-Cola, pizza, bagels, and pasta — made a quick dent in my weight, and got me to 188 lb. It was a 20 lb weight loss in just a few weeks. When my weight began to stubbornly plateau at 188 lb, even after I joined a boxing gym, I asked for help. And that’s how I stumbled upon intermittent fasting, a style of eating that places more of a focus on when you eat instead of what you eat. Combined with exercise, this diet plan helped me reach 154 lb.The idea behind intermittent fasting is that it increases your metabolic rate, which helps you burn more calories. And by restricting the time periods during the day when you eat, you take in fe...

isneyland is about rides, but Walt Disney World is about infrastructure. Consider that in order to get Disneyland built, Disney asked the city of Anaheim to run a sewer line and allow them to demolish part of Cerritos Avenue… and that’s about it. Walt Disney World involved such matters as land reclamation, mass transit, hotel operation, urban planning, drainage, waste treatment…It’s said that Walt Disney chose the location of Walt Disney World based on Bay Lake and its natural island. In the 1969 press conference announcing the first phase of Walt Disney World, Roy Disney remarked: “I remember when we walked out there one day – we had looked at the land from the air, from the ground, tramped a lot of it, and Walt stood alongside of Bay Lake and he said, ‘This is where we’ll put the park’.” And they did.Bay Lake… what is up with Bay Lake? I’d wager that despite its incredible importance to the development of Walt Disney World, most visitors never even see the darn thing. But it’s the so...