As an update to my New Year’s diet post, I attach this little article from Bill Frist. My strange experience since November with food is evidence to me anyway that our medical establishment is in the dark on the thing that is causing more health problems than anything else in our environment: our carbohydrate-centered diet, even the “healthy balanced” diet. I am very skeptical about giving these people more authority as long as they are not clear on what we should be eating.
http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/228248/how-to-wean-america-from-its-dangerous-food-addiction
Much of the conventional wisdom about obesity, including what your doctor has probably told you, is wrong. My fellow doctors, for the past four decades, have preached a “calories in — calories out” approach, suggesting that weight loss must be achieved by restricting calories or expending more energy. That approach is failing… miserably.
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So why do we get fat? It’s not a simple matter of calories consumed and calories expended. It’s probably wiser to think of obesity as a result of a hormonal imbalance, with the dominant obesity hormone being insulin.
Insulin secretion is stimulated by eating easily digestible, carbohydrate-rich foods: Refined carbohydrates (including flour and cereal grains, starchy vegetables such as potatoes, and sugars) and high-fructose corn syrup. Eating more of these makes us fat, hungrier, and even more sedentary.
PS I am down to 188 from over 250 and many of my other health problems such as high triglycerides and other blood markers, arthritis and soft tissue injuries, gum disease, migraine auras, apthous ulcers in the mouth and throat, exhaustion after exercise and general obesity have abated. I recommend anyone with any combination of these problems read Gary Taubes’ “Why We Get Fat” which is what I did.
Unfortunately carbs are a weakness of mine and it shows.
I know how you feel, I had a dream about eating a whole birthday cake last night.
… that often comes up in conversations I have about food is the issue of the need to fight our own instincts. This happens because the food availability profile is very different now than the profile we adapted to over hundreds of thousands of years (not counting the millions before that of our very close ancestors). A sweet tooth is pretty adaptive thing in a hunter-gather context. It makes you eat fruit. In the modern context it can literally be deadly (albeit slowly) and is maladaptive.
high triglycerides, and high cholesterol. All this together is known as metabolic syndrome. Though I don’t look it, I’m 30 pounds overweight. Exercise isn’t enough to shed the pounds. I need to diet, which I have a hard time with. It sucks. I don’t feel great most of the time. I do feel tired a lot.
I’m not looking for sympathy, but much of that has to do with diet and me. My doctors tried to get me to do stuff, but I didn’t. From an individual point of view, I’m responsible for my situation. On a societal level, however, we should be working to reverse this trend. Other people don’t understand the situation and have limited access to healthy food. I grimace every morning standing in line at the convenience store where I buy my Diet Coke and see these guys buying multiple packages of Hostess cupcakes for breakfast.
Mark, don’t beat yourself up. That’s what leads us to keep taking it, and keep hoping that if we just followed a low-fat, low-calorie program perfectly (plus exercise at your max heart rate for an hour a day!), we would change our bodies. I got to a point where I physically just could not do it, and had to search for other solutions.
Part of the attraction to me is breaking big-media, big-society, dare I say it big-government rules about what we’re supposed to eat! But that’s what attracts me, most people want to follow the rules and will blame themselves and never seek out new solutions.
If this carb-insulin theory has much basis, then carbs make you in particular a little hungry and a little lazy. Then it’s just a matter of adding up. When it comes to hunger, there is probably nothing you could do to stop yourself eating the foods you crave, except by substituting high-fat foods that a whole other branch of medicine was telling you not to eat.
check out the Google ads running down the right-hand side of the page. They are completely different from the usual political variety, due of course to the different subject matter of this post. An interesting window into how Google’s ad servers operate.
And docs and nutritionist ave known this carb/insulin/fat stuff for many decades. Both of Taubes’ books are great. I also benefited from The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living by Volek and Phinney. Among their findings are that maybe 25% of us can thrive on high complex carbs.
I went to a nutritionist when eating less than you exercise didn’t work. She use the same wildly oversimplified lingo.
I’ve learned better.
I’m beginning to believe that these are the people who have the energy to make it through medical school.
After having read a few different books on the subject (Why We Get Fat being one of them), all of which suggested the same thing, I decided to make a change in my diet, which I have to imagine is similar to the one you’ve made. Nine months later, I couldn’t be happier. I’m back down to the same weight and basic body composition as I was in my early 20s (I’m 40), all without changing my level of exercise; I have better energy than I’ve had in years (certainly more than a decade); and I believe my overall health is better than before.
For anyone that thinks it’s hard to give up carbs, I think you’ll be surprised at how easy it can be once you get started. I didn’t have great confidence, myself, as potatoes are probably my favorite food, hands down. But once you cut them out of your diet, the cravings go away to a surprising extent. Another trick that I have employed comes from Tim Ferris in Four Hour Body. He advocates giving yourself one “cheat day” per week where you can eat whatever you want. In fact, he claims that your diet will be less effective if you skip your cheat day! Now, if I’m craving chocolate cake or, more likely for me, ice cream, I just tell myself that I’ll eat it on Saturday. And on Saturday I do. I eat so much junk on Saturday that it’s almost embarrassing. But the fat — and particularly the belly fat — still melts away and stays away. I challenged myself to try it for a month and I haven’t looked back. I challenge anyone else who is interested or even remotely curious to do the same.
Keep it up, Seascraper! I’ve got your back.
The double switch reverse frontpage promotion. Isn’t it enough that you’ve beaten up on poor Curt Schilling, now you have to go after us conservo-fatties too!
😉