Just a few more words about Diabetes

I read this book last summer, my daughter sent it to me and it was the right time for me. Now it's been almost a year since I stopped eating sugar completely. I didn't miss it and I am not going back to adding sugar into my coffee. Now I believe it's taster without sugar :) I lost about 30 pounds during this year, by just taking sugar out. Not all sugar, I eat unlimited amount of fruits. Sometimes I think I'll go bankrupt because of apples, $10 of apples per day seems excessive. My apples are so expensive because they are either organic or from local farms. These apples cleans my liver from fructose and other toxins stored in a form of fat that had been deposited on my stomach for all the previous years. 30 pounds of fat is a lot of volume. I probably lost 2 dress sizes, all my cloths are hanging on me. I reached a plateau in my weigh lose so I added some Pilates exercises recently, they build long slim muscles, so I hope to lose more fat, but I am not sure if I'll lose any weight. We'll see. During this year I had 2 slices of cake, 8 portions of potatoes, and 4 portions of rice. I didn't suffer, I chose my protein diet and I liked it. For breakfast I eat ricotta cheese and coffee with half&half. Lunch always contains some meat and veggies. I drink combucha once or twice every day. My "desert" is made mostly of nuts. I love all kinds of nuts, so I practically do not limit myself in this area. Dinner is different every day, if I ate too many nuts, I just drink green tea and eat my apples. But if I am hungry I would eat soup, or eggs, or anything I have at home even some more meat or ricotta cheese. For those who would like to follow I also drink some water or lemon water (water with squeezed lemon juice) first thing in the morning. This is a good advice for regular bowl movements. I understand that this kind of diet would be much harder to follow if I was a person who loved pasta, rice or bread, but I am not. I am still a menopausal woman, I am still sweating every day, my hormones are still playing games with me. My vision is less blur and this summer I am going to train my eyes to work harder and I will wear glasses less and less. I have some thoughts about some TV adds for people with Type 2 diabetes, vegans, and other people who want to change their diets. Just think about it: why do I need a chocolate cake? or why would a vegan want a burger? Why? The adds on TV make us believe that there are some kind of substitutes for what we suppose to be missing. Instead we have to tell ourselves that we are better off without all those products that made us sick in the first place. I do NOT want a chocolate cake. NEVER again I want to poison my body with any man-made product that will overload my poor liver with work it does not want to do. I am not a vegan, meat does not make me sick, but if it did, the first thing I would cut meat out of my diet for ever and wouldn't ask for a fake burger. Good luck to all of you people in creating your own diet that works for you :) and keeps you healthy.

About Discipline

I do agree that kids need rules and discipline, they respect you more if you know the rules, follow them yourself, and enforce them, but they will be the first to curse you out and break all the rules if you apply negative reinforcement or if you do not apply the same rule to yourself. Even if they obey you and pretend that they follow the rules you are enforcing, they will break them the moment you turn away. So before using positive reinforcement you must use your own example for every rule you want to set. Too many people still think that to enforce the rules you have to be mean. The reality often is right opposite. The nicer you are the more kids will try to abide. Research shows again and again that positive reinforcement works much better than negative reinforcement, which only provokes and encourages resistance. I want to share my personal experience on this topic :) It happened in June 1982. We just started our Group for Establishing Trust between USA and USSR (peaceniks). The KGB and the soviet authority could not decide what to do with us. All we were saying was that we wanted peace, like everybody else in the country, but we wanted it independently. We never criticized the powers, but we made suggestions for building step by step atmosphere of trust between the people of these 2 countries. To decide what to do with us the KGB needed to talk to us, get the info of what it was all about. So they picked a few of us and brought to different militia precincts “for conversations”. I was one of those few people. I found myself sitting in front of a nice intelligent man who tried to make a conversation. I, in turn, did not want the conversation, I wanted to stop talking. But he was so polite and nice; my tong could not turn and say something rude. I was sitting making short abrupt answers and thinking how can I tell him that I didn’t want to talk to him. Suddenly, he decided to change his tactics: he raised his voice and started to scream at me. We looked at each other, and we both knew, that whether he wanted or not I got what I wanted. I got the reason to stop talking to him. My entire posture changed: I set back, relaxed in my chair. I started to breathe deeply and freely. I think my eyes smiled. I did not need to talk to him any longer; he was not polite nice man any longer, so I didn’t have to do as he said either. The rest of that hour was not important. He was saying some stupid things like: calling for peace during cold war could be punished by capital punishment and other stupid things like that. I didn’t listen. I was fine. This story, just shows how hard it is to be rude to nice and positive powers. Same happens with my students every day. Very often they do not want to follow my instructions, but I never give my instructions in a command-like manner. I just ask them politely to do something and they just follow. Very often they find the assignment interesting. Sometimes they try to rebel anyway. The best thing is that their rebellion is also quite polite and we usually can find some compromise when I do not make them complete the whole assignment, or I make a variation that best suits their taste and interests. You see, with positive reinforcement everybody wins: you have your rules in place and the kids learn.