Category: Nutrition

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We Have to Get Off the Sugar!

Here’s the thing about sugar. We are raised on it. We are trained as kids to love it. We use it to celebrate and to finish off a good meal.

And it’s killing us.

Up until the 1950s, low-carb diets were the accepted way to stay lean. Yes, it’s true. Low-carb is not some fad that started in the 1970s. Low-carb was the way to lose weight, until scientists discovered that excess fat in our bodies is the cause of so much distress. Heart disease, diabetes, you name it, excess body fat is quite destructive.

So, they reasoned, if excess fat is bad, then we must remove fat from our diets!

This seemed to be sensible, but the science has never upheld the conclusion that fat in our diets leads to fat on our bodies, and the great experiment that has been going on with the American population over the last 5 decades also seems to deny the validity of high-carbohydrate eating.

We have lowered our fat consumption and increased our carbs, and you know what? We are fatter and sicker than ever.

Renowned science writer Gary Taubes illustrates this well in his fully researched and documented book Good Calories, Bad Calories. That book got me almost completely off sugar a few years ago. Then I saw the YouTube video with Dr. Robert Lustig last year, and that sealed the deal for me.

Fnally, mainstream thinking is coming around. That very same Dr. Lustig was the primary expert in a story on 60 Minutes this past Sunday. The story explored the toxicity of the overconsumption of sugar.

Also, on April 1, 2012, the same day they ran the above story, CBS posted this short video interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta entitled “Sugar and Kids: The Toxic Truth“.

I have read some of the comments on the page with the Dr. Gupta video. Of course, people are defensive. Who likes to be told they have been poisoning their kids?

Sugar is found in nature, and there is a safe consumption level. In fact, our sweet taste buds are there to allow us to know if something is safe to eat. Sweet means not poison.

However, in modern society, there is so much sugar pumped into all our foods, so much sugar in soft drinks and juices, that it goes way beyond what nature intended.

And that is the point.

The truth about sugar is finally coming into the mainstream. Will you listen?

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Slow and Steady Wins the Body Reshaping Race

The reason many of us fail at having the bodies we want is that it’s hard work. There is no magic pill or patch. We have to put in the work and control what we ingest. Why are we so weak? We expect quick results, when, trite but true, slow and steady does win the race.

Lose 2 pounds a month for 2 years and you are 50 pounds lighter.

50 pounds lighter!

Can’t wait 2 years? Wow. You took a lot more years than that to put those pounds on. How do you expect to drop them so quickly.

And, look, 2 pounds a month is nothing. You could really go at it with diet and exercise and safely lose 4, 6, even 8 pounds a month.

How about this plan. You go “all in” for 2 months, get into the swing of things, but, then, at the point where you would normally just say “screw it”, and go back to being lazy and undisciplined, you simply back off a bit.

(NOTE: You may find that this time around, you don’t want to back off. You love what you are doing and the results are keeping you motivated. Keep going!)

If you’ve been really hitting the diet and exercise thing for a couple months, you should have a pretty good idea of what you can eat to be healthier. You should have a decent feel for how much exercise it takes to be more fit.

But if you’ve decided by the 2-month mark that this lifestyle is not for you right now, don’t go back to your old habits. Keep some of the good habits you’ve developed.

Maybe during your 2 months you gave up all fast food. Hey, now, that’s a great idea! You used to eat 7 meals a week at fast food places, now you are eating none. You could go back to your old ways, but do you have to?

Maybe during your 2 months you took a 2-mile walk every morning. Nice start to a fitness plan! You used to just sit and watch tv every morning before work, now you’re moving. You could go back to the tv, but do you have to?

It’s pretty obvious to me that fitness isn’t for everyone. All I have to do is look around to see that. But if you are reading this, you must have something inside you that wants you to improve yourself.

Maybe this isn’t your time to go “all in” for fitness.

I went through many stops and restarts on my way to being fully involved in my own fitness. Finally, something clicked in my mind, and I know now I will never go back.

If you are not there yet mentally, take your move to fitness in smaller steps. Slowly, steadily, you will win this race.

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My high fat diet PLUS yoga PLUS allergies

I am in day 20 of my high fat diet, which aims for 70% fat, 20% protein, and 10% carbs.

My body seems to have adapted to the lack of carbs, so I am not feeling as run down, although I’ve been doing only yoga the past 10 days. I switched from Insanity to yoga because I tweaked my back, but I liked the yoga so much, and my back was feeling so good, that I decided to stick with yoga for a few weeks. I haven’t done that before and have been wanting to give it a shot, so now’s a good a time as any, right?

I’ve always liked yoga, and I am really thankful that  Tony Horton got me into it during P90X. It seems like a great way to stay in shape, although I do feel the need to add some cardio. I will do that once I feel my back is in really good shape. Honestly, my back hasn’t felt this great in years, so I don’t want to do anything to mess it up.

As for the high fat diet, I am again feeling like it’s a mixed bag of pluses and minuses.

First of all, I continue to struggle to stay under 2000 calories, which was not a problem on my high-protein diet. For some reason, when eating high fat, I end up in the 2200 to 2400 calorie area almost every day.

Not that there’s anything too wrong with that. I burn enough to still be able to see negative net calories on that regimen, but I’d always read that fat is far more filling and satisfying than carbs and protein, and I am just not finding that to be the case.

Also, I am feeling some of those same episodes of “hitting the wall” after a high-fat meal. I had previously attributed that phenomenon to too much carbohydrate, but now I wonder what the real cause is.

For example, as I write this, I feel somewhat sleepy. Well, I had a good 7.5 hours of sleep last night, and it’s still morning. However, about a half-hour ago I had a heavy cream latte that had about 20 grams of fat in it. So, yes, I wonder what is causing the sleepiness.

Honestly, it could be allergies. While my mountain cedar sensitivity is severely diminished during this period of no-grain eating, it’s been raining a lot here, and mold still seems to have a pretty strong negative effect on my body.

Aside from all that, I feel great. My energy level is fine, my strength is great, and I haven’t had any problem sticking to the diet. When I go out to eat, I usually have a salad with some protein in it, which is usually what I had to eat when I dined out before anyway.

Today’s Super Bowl party at a friend’s house may prove challenging — not sure what to expect for food there — but I can always eat nothing, and maybe that will keep me under 2000 calories for at least one day.

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I’m giving high-fat eating a shot

I started a high fat diet on Tuesday.

High fat, of course, implies low-carb, and I’ve always been intrigued by the low carb lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle, not a diet, because once you go low carb, you gotta stay low carb.

Well, to be fair, low-carb is not necessarily a lifestyle, per se. There are plenty of people who cycle low-carbs with high carbs or do intermittent keto runs, like my friend Rob Gioia. But my body does not respond well to that.

Let me explain why high-fat / low-carb is a lifestyle for me.

The primary benefit of low carb living, if you are trying to lose fat, is that it puts your body into a state of ketosis, which depletes your body’s stored glycogen and forces it to burn fat for fuel.

To get to ketosis, you need to consume 50 grams or less of carbohydrate per day. That’s do-able, but the body takes a good 2 weeks to get accustomed to this new way of eating (which is really just an old way of eating, but you can read the book for the specifics).

All that is fine, but the problem, and the reason low-carb is a lifestyle, is that if, after you are into ketosis, you splurge on carbs just one time, you pretty much reset the clock on the glycogen stores, and it’s a week or two before your body is burning fat again.

Okay, well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

So this new way of eating was brought on by a well-researched book, The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living.

I’ve read Protein Power, which is the definitive book concerning the power of low-carb living and science behind it.

I’ve also read Good Calories Bad Calories, which is the definitive book concerning the politics behind the U.S. goverment’s push for low-fat regimens.

Both of those books are well-researched and include a lot of impressive data. So when one of the authors of Protein Power, Dr. Michael Eades, said that the recently published The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living was the book he wished he’d written, well, of course, I had to buy it.

The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living is a quick read compared to those other two, and provides a lot of the science you might want to know about the low-carb lifestyle.

I’ll stop there, because this is not a book review. Read the book.

I’m in day 4 of a high-fat diet because of that book. I also happen to be in week 3 of my Insanity with weekends off program.

According to the authors, it’s not a good idea to engage in high-level fitness activities while transitioning to the high-fat lifestyle, but I ain’t stoppin’ and everything seems to be fine so far. I guess I’m fit enough that Insanity is not that much of a stretch for my body.

Plus, I learned 2 things from that book that I had not picked up from other low-carb books, and those 2 things might be helping me out. Maybe the info was there in the other books, but I missed it.

  1. You gotta add salt. Low-carb diets cause salt to pass out of your body rather quickly, so you must be sure to consume salt. Low salt puts you at risk for all kinds of things, like soreness, fatigue, um, death. You know, bad things. Read the book Salt for more on that.
  2. You gotta add fat. Lots of fat. That’s why I call this a high-fat diet, rather than a low-carb diet. I’m in the 70%-of-my-calories-from-fat range.

When I read concept #1, about the salt, that made a lot of sense to me. If you buy into the paleo theory, which claims that our bodies have not evolved to the point where we can healthily consume all these grains/carbs that we eat, because they are relatively recent additions to our diet — and I do buy into that way of thinking — then the salt thing makes sense.

Doctors tell us not to eat a lot of salt — it’s bad for us. But … but … we like salt. Seems to me that fits with paleo theory. Our ancient ancestors, who survived mostly on fat and protein, needed a lot more salt on their paleo / low-carb diets, than modern humans do on their high-carb diets.

So from paleo days it is natural for us to like salt, but on our modern high-carb diet, salt causes health problems.

So, that clicked with me. Paleo diet = low carb = more salt.

As for #2 above, combining low-carb with high-fat, as opposed to high-protein, eating, wow, that is a no-brainer. I feel like an idiot for not seeing it before, but I am a product of my society. I’ve been told for so long that fat is bad, it’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that it is not.

Yeah, if you’re going to cut carbs, you have to get energy from somewhere, and fat is the way to go, because the body does not efficiently turn protein into fuel.

So, to the point: I’m in day 4 of a high-fat diet, which is 2000 calories a day, with 70% of calories from fat, 10% from carbs, and 20% from protein. And I feel great!

This lifestyle is not for everyone. My fasting blood-sugar hovers right around 110 (which is the cusp of normal/high), so I’ve always gravitated toward low-carb. I have noticed that I get that “sugar coma” feeling even after consuming only 20 carbs at a meal, and … I really don’t like that feeling, even though it passes fairly quickly.

So I thought I’d give this high-fat thing a try for at least 3 months. So far, so good, but it’s early. I’ll keep you posted.

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Fitness 2012 — how’s it going?

Many people — perhaps you, too — set fitness goals for 2012.

If you are like most people, your dieting and workout regimen started out great! You were enthusiastic, eager to shed those pounds and unveil a new, thinner you.

The first few pounds came off easily as your body got used to the initial shock of decreased calories and increased movement. But after the 4th day, you’d plateaued, and all this hunger and exercise didn’t seem worth it any more. Then the weekend arrived and your friends were all going out for pizza and beer….

And here you are.

That’s okay!

You have not failed … yet.

Taking the weekend off is fine. The problem many people have is getting back into the fitness program on Monday. Back on the diet. Back into the exercise.

Being fit is not easy, it takes effort, sticking to a program.  We’re adults, we can do that, right?

  • Have you decided that you need to get off that blood pressure medication? Then you need to get fit!
  • Have you decided that you are sick of being out of breath after one flight of stairs? Then you need to get fit!
  • Have you decided that carrying around those extra pounds makes you look like a fat tub of goo? Then you need to get fit!

You had already come to one of the above — or another more personal to you — conclusions only a few days ago. Was your resolve so weak that here we are 7 days later and now you are thinking, “Well, really, it’s okay for me to be fat / have high blood pressure / gasp for air / [insert your own challenge here]”? I’m guessing you are not thinking that.

So get back on it.

If you stick with it, you can create a new, fit lifestyle for yourself, a lifestyle where it’s weird if you have dessert after a meal, where it’s odd if you skip a workout, where it’s strange if you eat that whole pizza by yourself.

You can create a lifestyle where you feel good about the way you look and feel. As they say, ain’t nothing to it but to do it.