I was doubtful this would work for me because I was out of onions, but it’s so good that I will be making it again soon. Obviously the tuna is not a perfectly pure food, but I like it, and I have a lot in the pantry. I’m trying to work with what I have.
Mixed Salad Greens (big pile – probably 3 cups)
4.5 oz package of Starkist Hickory Smoked Tuna
1/2 an apple
1 stick celery
1/4 of a med. green pepper
1 T. EVOO
1 T. Mayonnaise (homemade!)
1 T. Apple Cider Vinegar (or Red Wine Vinegar)
Whisk the apple cider vinegar, mayo and olive oil together in the salad bowl.
Dice the pepper, celery and apple.
Add greens and veggies to the bowl that holds the dressing. Toss well. You can either break up the tuna with a fork (those mylar pack are pretty compressed) and toss it with the greens and veggies, or you can just top the salad with tuna chunks.
My mom used to put apple in tuna salad, so that’s where I got that idea. In fact, my mom used make fantastic tuna melts in the broiler on Health Nut Bread with cheddar cheese. That was, of course, the old Health Nut recipe, but you can’t get that any more. The geniuses at Arnold bought the Brownberry/Catherine Clark bread recipes and then did away with them and only used the brand names. It’s a bit of a travesty, I think. I couldn’t eat it any more, of course (gluten!), but still.
I make my own mayonnaise because otherwise, I can’t avoid soybean and canola oils, both of which I think are crap foods. There’s *one* mayo you can buy that’s made of sunflower oil (Delouis Fils), but it’s hard to find and very expensive. If you have a food processor or blender, mayonnaise is very easy to make.
My maintenance plan involves using Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution Phase 1. Technically, it’s a weight loss plan, but I sincerely doubt I will lose weight on it. I’m mostly using it as a tool to reduce my protein portions, something I’ve been having a hard time doing. By reducing the portions, I’ll reduce my overall calories. Some of those calories will come from fat that would have been in the meat I’m not eating, so there’s a bit of a savings there.
I do believe that diets tested by physicians in their practice represent a system, so I can’t throw out all the stuff I don’t like and only keep the things I do like, or I’m not going to get anywhere. The one thing I’m not doing, however, is eating soy products. He really, really likes them, and I haven’t eaten them for a long time, and I don’t want to go back. How he justifies this as something our paleolithic ancestors ate (something he talks about a fair bit), I don’t know. He doesn’t take up soy specifically. Suffice it to say that any protein can be subbed with soy, but I will not be doing that.
Vegetable oils are totally banned. Olives are a fruit, so plenty of EVOO is encouraged. Nut and seed oils are allowed, but not peanut oil (I think). He seems to be fine with peanuts. At later stages, he allows whole grains (in serious moderation), though he doesn’t think they are a great idea.
The hard parts:
- I’m cutting back my protein portions by about 1/3rd. I’m not using his suggested measurement (compare to your palm) because I know that won’t work for me. I’ll be using a scale and eating 4-5 ounces in a meal. I want it closer to 4oz, but based on my utter failure at this in the past, I’m giving myself a week to get used to it.
- Fluid milk products are banned. He mentions Insulin-like Growth Factor in passing, and I decided that before I gave up my beloved raw cream in my coffee, I’d better understand why. I’ve certainly heard before that IGF is uniquely fattening and halts weight loss for some people, but I kind of glossed over it. It’s not something I wanted to hear. Yesterday, I read a study and found that fermenting dairy greatly reduces IGF, which means yogurt is OK. Phew!
- Cheese is severely limited. Only one ounce of aged cheese is allowed per day – basically, you can use it as seasoning. Cheese is something that stalls weight loss for a lot of low carbers. It seems like the perfect low carbohydrate food, but like nut butters, it causes issues. He doesn’t ban nut butters, but I only use them once in a while – I’ve had the same jars of 100% natural peanut butter and little jar of almond butter in my pantry for too long. Cheese on the other hand…
- Plain, full-fat yogurt, cottage cheese, farmer’s cheese and ricotta are allowed but count as a protein choice or part of one if you don’t have a full serving.
- Slab bacon is banned. Traditional prosciutto and properly cured dry pork sausage is allowed in moderation. No deli meats, no nitrates. Again, I’ll abide by this one because it does seem to have a point. Low-carbers have issues with cured meats too.
- Let me say that again: no bacon, and no cream!
The good parts:
- Two 1/4 cup nut snacks are allowed per day. They are to be raw and unsalted. I believe in the supremacy of crispy nuts, but those aren’t cooked, so good enough.
- All the green leafy stuff I want. This is a lot of green leafy stuff, but he says that he likes to see people eating the equivalent of an entire bagged salad mix per day. Done and done, I can totally do that. I think this is really the key to cutting down on meal sizes. It’s a *boatload* of fiber, but more about that later. Kale Chips, anyone?
- Most veggies are allowed. Pumpkin is limited to 1 cup per day, starchy veggies (potatoes, winter squash, cooked carrots, cooked beets, parsnips) are banned entirely. I can live with that for a while.
- Two portions of “friendly fruits” per day are allowed. Avocados and tomatoes are fruit, and since he states that several times, it’s probably an important part of the system. I like the friendly fruit list. I’ll miss some of the tropical stuff like mangos and pineapples, and I’m not sure I like green-tipped bananas, but we’ll see.
- Up to four eggs a day are allowed. He suggests Omega-3 eggs, but I can go one better – local and pastured.
- Plain, full-fat yogurt, cottage cheese, farmer’s cheese and ricotta are all allowed. That’s also a good thing since I can make this stuff out of my weekly raw milk share.
- A daily glass of wine or shot (1.5 ounces) of straight spirits are allowed. Yay!
He justifies the suggested supplements really well, and I already do most of what he suggests in that regard. I’m adding chromium picolinate, something I took it back in 1999 when I was on a low calorie diet and that he advises. I had a lot of success with that, so who knows, maybe it’s doing something, and it’s not expensive. I’ve recently started taking fish oil. After reading a few anti-fish oil screeds (yes, they exist), I decided that I’d rather just concentrate on a high quality capsule from fresh salmon squeezings (I take 6000mg per day of salmon oil) and see how that works out for me. I do love me some nuts, and they do contain a lot of Omega-6, so I feel it helps balance that out. I eat fish, but not that much of it. Certainly, I don’t eat it on any kind of a schedule.
Today is my third day on the plan, and it’s going really well. In addition to the food changes, I’m stepping up my exercise a bit. I won’t write about that since reading about other people’s workouts really bores the hell out of me. I did buy a body fat scale (BIA method). I know they aren’t totally accurate, but I hope to see some shift as I get exercise back into my life.
Speaking of scales, my weight went up two pounds (!) after the first day, but since that always happens if I eat a lot of fiber, I’m going to give it some time to settle down. In the past, I’ve cut way back on my portions of green vegetables because of that weight gain, and in hindsight, that seems really stupid. My weight today was the same as yesterday, which is fine with me. If it goes up tomorrow…well, I’ll worry about that when it happens.
That stuff is fuckin’ poison for your liver, people.
Now that I’ve reached my goal weight, I have to maintain it. This is one of the most obvious things about weight loss, but it is the most misunderstood. If you’ve hung around diet boards very long, you’ll see that the biggest reason people decide to end their reducing diet is because they want to eat like a “normal” person. In many cases, low-carb diets in particular, it’s because they miss all their favorite foods. In other words, they want to go back to what they were eating before.
The elephant standing in the middle of the room, being studiously ignored, is that “normal people”, at least in the US and the UK, are fat. What the now-reduced person ate before is what made them fat in the first place.
What is particularly hard to grasp (and especially slippery if you lost the weight quickly) is the fact that 30, 40 or 50 pounds down, you are now a smaller person with lower caloric requirements. While I don’t really believe that all calories are created equal, neither do I believe that calories don’t matter. The more restricted the diet, the more anxious people are for the day when they can have fried chicken, pizza, ice cream or whatever their go-to comfort food may be. For me, that would be bacon. While I love ice cream, I love bacon even more, but then I’m not much into sugar.
This is a particular problem for people who’ve been on a low-carb diet instead of adopting a low-carb lifestyle. In their mind, there’s a point at which the diet is over. It’s no accident that Atkins dieters often fail at maintenance. Most people get through Induction and few more weeks of the second phase, drop 15-20 lbs, and then start sliding down the slippery slope of carb creep. Pretty soon, they give up and blame low-carb diet for failing them when the truth is that they *still* can’t handle the blood sugar issues that drove them to the diet in the first place.
So, back to me. I now need to eat less. Less of what is still a bit of a mystery, but after my blood glucose meter experiments, I know why I don’t get sugar cravings – my insulin response is perfectly fine. I handle fruit with no trouble – two hours after eating a banana, my blood sugar was 90. Two hours after eating yogurt with grain-free granola with a bit of raisins in it for sweetening, it was 83. And supposedly, raisins and bananas are sugar bombs for your pancreas. Tonight, I’ll find out what happens if I drink red wine, my first alcohol since December 31.
I have been very hungry (duh, I’ve been starving myself), so I tried using protein to fill the void, but that makes me put on weight. In the past, I’ve cut carbs and made up the space with fat (typical Atkins strategy), but that won’t work any more either. I’ve also tried an Optimal Diet approach, but that failed spectacularly. I gained 1 lb. plus over night both times I tried that, and the lack of protein made me hungry. Most people report that the stunning quantity of fat on that diet makes their appetite diminish immediately. Not so for me.
Since none of that worked, I’ve settled on a new plan. Back when I reviewed Dr. Steven Gundry’s Diet Evolution, I said I could remain on his Phase 1 plan indefinitely, so I’ve decided to try it. While his end-game is not somewhere I want to be, his stages for getting there incorporate a lot of things I’ve read about but haven’t been willing to try before.
I’ll lay out the boundaries of my experiment in my next blog entry as I think this one is getting a bit too long.
At the moment, one of my favorite bloggers is Melissa McEwen at Hunt/Gather/Love. She was recently featured in a New York Times article on Paleolithic Diets. She’s written a lot of great things in her quite new blog, but this one about Kale Chips … well, this is my new favorite way to eat dark leafy greens. And my previous favorite way included bacon grease. I’ve been hearing for some time that a bag of baby spinach done like this is also delicious, and I kept meaning to try it but never got around to it. Now I’ve gotten around to it, and wow!
Another that’s high on my reading priority list right now is Richard Nikoley of Free The Animal. He’s also a paleolithic eater, but he’s less dogmatic than many. Paleo tends, like fruitarian diets, raw foodism, veganism and the pure carnivore diet, towards dogmatism, something I find dull and kind of annoying. Richard has a real attitude, and I do enjoy watching him rip into conventional wisdom/idiocy. Here is one of his great entries about this very thing. His comment feed has grown so large and popular that I think it merits a forum.
And one for the road: Kurt Harris, MD. His Smoking Candy Cigarettes piece is destined to become a classic. While it covered something that’s always driven me nuts about paleo food blogs as well as low-carb recipes, it seems to have struck a chord with others as well. This is the idea that whatever you’re making has to be prefaced with “low-carb” or “paleo” because it’s really an *imitation* of some other food that doesn’t contain any foods on the blogger’s banned list.
OK, back to my delicious kale chips.
I’m really big on having more data for my experimental group of one, and now that I’m very close to being at my final goal weight, I want to make sure I don’t gain weight back. I’m sure I will gain some weight back once I start working out, but I certainly want to know if I’m eating the wrong things, and the meter can tell me quite a lot about that.
After reading at the Heart Scan Blog about how cheap blood glucose meters are, I decided to buy one.
I’m currently on a very low calorie diet (though probably for just a few more days), and though I’ve never been good at skipping meals, whenever I split up my tiny ration of food to make three meals, I wind up less happy and more hungry. This means I’m skipping breakfast, something I normally don’t do. Yesterday, I came home with the blood glucose meter at 11:30 and decided to see if the number matched how lousy I felt. It sure did: 63. Yikes. My post-prandial number for that meal was 89, the PP for dinner was 98, and my fasting blood sugar this morning was 96. So, everything is in line there. I’ll have to do some testing again when I start eating a more reasonable amount of food.
I’d been leaning pretty Paleo/Primal with my diet before this round of low-calorie dieting, and my little meals are actually very close to Primal: 100g lean meat, pile of low-calorie veggies, small apple or orange or can of V8, and two little rice crackers. I’ve tried dropping the crackers for more veggies, but I don’t lose as much weight that way. I find that mystifying, but I want the weight loss part over as soon as possible, so whatever voodoo is going on there…I’m sticking with it.
Anyway, I’m planning on doing a 30-day maintenance period where I watch my weight and intake carefully. It’s not like I’m going to go hog-wild after that’s over, but the maintenance period is not going to include any starchy stuff. It will include grass-fed (mostly raw) dairy products. They don’t give me any trouble, I love them, and since I already have a cow share, I’m keeping that in my diet. I already eat very little grain and legumes, typically they pop up in an occasional holiday meal or otherwise special meal at home, or in mexican food. When I say grain, BTW, it’s never gluten grains as I can’t digest them. I’ve been off those since October of 2008, and I never eat them except by accident, and wow do I feel it when I do. While I will be off potatoes for the 30 days, I’m not prepared to banish potatoes and cooked carrots from my life either, and this is the main reason for the blood glucose meter. Yams are not under debate. I intend to eat them (though maybe not for a month, we’ll see) as they don’t seem to put weight on me. When I say potatoes, I mean whites, yukon golds, fingerlings, etc.
I’ve always been a bit better at being an absolutist about dietary rules than making on-the-spot modifications, but I’ve got to learn some moderation if I want to be happy, and I think more information will help me answer the question of “how much is too much carbs?”
I also won’t be adding any Intermittent Fasting for the foreseeable future. I’ve never been good at skipping meals, and now I know why, again, thanks to some confirmation from the glucose meter. I wasn’t sure my problem wasn’t related to electrolytes. I drink a lot of water, so I thought that could be an issue. I have *never* been able to eat a sugary breakfast like pastry or cereal and not turn into a raging bitch and need to eat again in about 90 minutes. When I was in high school, I used to make a ham sandwich for breakfast before school and have that with a glass of milk. It’s just as fast as cereal, and I wasn’t starving and cranky by the middle of second hour. I don’t have any problem not eating snacks though. As long as I eat normal meals, I don’t need snacks.
The New York Times and the Washington Post have both run articles on Paleolithic diets so far this year. Yeah, it’s diet season.
Both are interesting, but their focus is different. The New York Times was mostly about lifestyle, and the Washington Post talks a little about CrossFit, but has more about the diet than the NYT.
I’m not sure I’ve detailed what a Paleolithic diet *is* on my blog, so for those who don’t know: meat, vegetables, nuts and fruits are the allowed food groups. No grains, no legumes, no dairy.
I was particularly interested to find out that Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Paleo eater.
I’m so delighted to see that our new Democrat Senators are looking out for the folks back home:
WellPoint Inc., a for-profit insurer whose business is composed largely of Blue plans that it has acquired, oppose the exemption for nonprofits from the new tax. The company says the exemption would unfairly tax some states, such as Virginia, where primarily for-profit plans operate.
“We’ve talked to the states where there are a high proportion of for-profit plans to let them know this is a tax on those states,” said Brad Fluegel, WellPoint’s chief of strategy. “Just because they are not-for-profit doesn’t mean they don’t make money,” he said of the nonprofits, citing income that goes toward administrative expenses and overhead.
So, I guess I now get to pay YET MORE for health insurance? AWESOME! I love when the government tries to solve problems!
One of the blogs I read regularly has a nice summary of studies related to saturated fat and health.
You’ll find it here: The Dirty Little Secret Of the Diet-Heart Hypothesis
While I want to make it clear that I’m not denying the importance of insulin, I think that the importance of the GI of foods is nowhere near as useful to non-diabetics as it’s made out to be.
The way I see people talking about the GI of foods seems to indicate that they think a low GI gives them a free pass. What really ticks me off in particular is agave syrup. A food having a low GI can mean either that it’s digested slowly because it contains fiber, fat or protein. It can also mean, as it does in the case of agave syrup, that it’s almost entirely fructose. Fructose is metabolised in the liver and turned into fatty acids (raising your cholesterol and, more importantly, your triglycerides). Your body then uses it as energy or stores it as fat. Glucose is hits your bloodstream more directly and raises blood sugar. Your body either uses it or turns it in to fat to store for later.
Either way, it winds up as fat attached to your backside.
You’re better off considering the actual carbohydrate and caloric content (though you don’t have to count fiber) than you are the glycemic index. Coca-Cola has a GI of 63 (medium), and Cantaloupe has a GI of 65. Which one is better for you? Coke has 33g of sugar in a 12oz can. One-quarter of a cantaloupe has 16g of sugar, yet Cantaloupe’s GI is a little higher than Coke’s. Which is more fattening?
Let’s pretend you don’t care about your waistline. This is from a 2005 paper called “Fructose, insulin resistance, and metabolic dyslipidemia”.
These metabolic disturbances appear to underlie the induction of insulin resistance commonly observed with high fructose feeding in both humans and animal models. Fructose-induced insulin resistant states are commonly characterized by a profound metabolic dyslipidemia, which appears to result from hepatic and intestinal overproduction of atherogenic lipoprotein particles. Thus, emerging evidence from recent epidemiological and biochemical studies clearly suggests that the high dietary intake of fructose has rapidly become an important causative factor in the development of the metabolic syndrome.
Not generic “sugar” but specifically fructose: the sugar that doesn’t raise GI too much. It still messes you up. This is from the same paper:
Fructose is readily absorbed and rapidly metabolized by human liver. For thousands of years humans consumed fructose amounting to 16–20 grams per day, largely from fresh fruits. Westernization of diets has resulted in significant increases in added fructose, leading to typical daily consumptions amounting to 85–100 grams of fructose per day. The exposure of the liver to such large quantities of fructose leads to rapid stimulation of lipogenesis and TG [triglyceride] accumulation, which in turn contributes to reduced insulin sensitivity and hepatic insulin resistance/glucose intolerance.
So, no help there. Honey and Agave Syrup both have about 60 calories per tablespoon. Agave is mostly fructose, and honey about half fructose and half glucose. Table sugar actually has fewer calories per tablespoon (48), and it’s all sucrose. Maple syrup is mostly sucrose with a tiny amount of fructose and a little glucose and has 52 calories per tablespoon.
What matters with sweeteners is how much of them you use. They are 99-100% sugar, so it’s really just a matter of which one you like best. There’s nothing special about any new-fangled sweetener like agave syrup or brown rice syrup (GI 25). A low GI is not going to save you from any one of the calories from sugar that it contains, and high-fructose sweeteners might be even worse than other sugars.
And, my final point: You shouldn’t cut yourself a break on Agave syrup. People seem to think it’s more natural, but that’s just not so. It can’t compete with maple syrup or honey on that score.
“If fructose were natural, I would be able to go out to corn field and get a bucket of sweetener. I can go to a beehive and get honey that I can eat without processing it. I can go to an apple tree and pick an apple and eat it. I cannot go out into a cornfield, squeeze corn, and get fructose syrup, and I cannot go into an agave field, and get the product sold on retail shelves, as agave syrup. Falsely labeled agave fructose and high fructose corn syrup are both products of advanced chemistry and extensive food processing technology.”
Later in the same article:
“The simple answer tends to be the correct one. There is no land of milk and agave. Milk comes from goats, cows, humans, etc., and honey comes from bees. What I want people to understand is that mislabeling a sweetener like agave syrup is about money and profit, to the real determent of your health. The unethical factor is that the natural health food business has gone to great lengths in the case of agave to defraud consumers, by deceiving and lying to those who are trying to seek better health. There is something ethically worse about a company pretending to sell something all natural to people seeking health, than a mainstream company not pretending that their food is healthier. For example, nobody selling fast and junk foods is advocating it is health food. When you are in a natural health food store, you expect to pay extra money for something that is good for you. We have con artists here, pretending to deliver better health at a higher cost, when in reality it is equal to, or much worse than the many other sweeteners or harmful junk food. People are expecting to receive health, and are intentionally being defrauded for profit.”
Caveat emptor!
(Both quotes above are from Russ Bianchi, Managing Director and CEO of Adept Solutions, Inc., a global food and beverage development company.)
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