This is something I did for my own reasons, but I’m talking about it on a mailing list, and posting a table in there is *not* convenient.
Mostly, I was interested in polyunsaturated and saturated fats in various foods, but it’s always interesting to be reminded about some other facts. We’re always hearing about how, say, bacon is chock full of ARTERY-CLOGGING SATURATED FAT(!), but it actually has more monounsaturated fat than saturated.
I was also surprised (though I really don’t know why) at how much more fat farmed fish has. I knew about the lack of Omega-3, but I didn’t realize just how much fattier it is generally.
Anyway, the fats are at the bottom of the chart. If you want an excel copy to mess with, I can email that to you.
All the numbers are courtesy of the USDA food nutrient database (free for the taking). I have it loaded into MySQL on my computer so that can get up to all sorts of trouble with it.
Towards? Children? We’re all doing it!
“This raises the question of whether the physiological basis for eating is becoming deregulated, as our children are moving toward constant eating.”
This is one of those news bits for the day. I heard it on KMOX while I was still in bed – I’m sure it will be repeated as a snippet all over the place.
All anyone will get out of it is that it’s too many calories as that’s primarily what the article is about. I’m sure calories matter, but I can’t believe this many researchers are totally disinterested in other effects beyond a surplus of energy.
Nearly all diet books these days recommend five or six small meals a day or three meals and two or three snacks. Supposedly, this is to regulate appetite by keeping blood sugar constant.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I find that eating every few hours actually makes me *hungrier* resulting in more food eaten in a day.1 Here’s a graph of typical post-prandial blood glucose fluctuations on a three meal a day plan:
When your blood glucose gets low, your body will try to make some from your fat (these would be ketones from lipolysis). Unless you’re trying to put on fat, this is a *good* thing. Even if you’re not eating carbohydrates, you still won’t reach into your fat stores if you’re taking in enough fuel during your snacks and meals. If I were conspiracy minded, I’d suggest that diet authors who call for all this snacking are just trying cause failure and make sure you need their next diet book!
In short: Americans seem to eat constantly. We also seem to be getting fatter. Maybe these two things are connected.
Here’s a terrific quote from The Leptin Diet by Byron Richards:
The advice to eat five to six small meals a day or to snack between meals to maintain a steady blood sugar level and keep metabolism “stoked with food” is among the worst advice possible. It boggles the mind that a majority of doctors, dieticians, nutritionists, and fitness instructors promote this absurd approach to energy management. It is as if someone started a bad rumor and everyone accepted it as a truth. If a person does lose weight eating this way, it is usually because he or she is eating fewer calories in total than before. This may “work” for a few weeks, until leptin levels readjust to the new level of calorie intake and slow down metabolism. However, this eating strategy inhibits normal fat burning by interfering with the proper function of leptin and insulin.
There are several diets that prohibit snacking, but they are not in the majority. First, there are plans mostly about fasting: The Fast-5 Diet, The Warrior Diet, and Eat Stop Eat.
More traditional ideas can be found in The No-S Diet and The Leptin Diet (quoted above). These give advice more like what you’d get from your grandmother. The No-S Diet takes a simple, logical approach in that it doesn’t really talk about the science at all.
The Leptin Diet covers a lot of science and is about mostly about inflammation and hormones. It has no meal plans or food lists. Here are the basic rules:
- Never eat after dinner. Allow 11 to 12 hours between dinner and breakfast, and finish eating dinner at least three hours before bed.
- Eat three meals a day. Allow five to six hours between meals and do not snack. Snacking causes leptin to malfunction.
- Do not eat large meals. Eat slowly and stop eating a meal when you are slightly less than full. Consistently eating large meals is the easiest way there is to poison your body with food.
- Eat a breakfast containing protein. Your metabolism can increase by 30 percent after a high-protein meal. A high carb meal such as cereal or a bagel will increase your metabolism only by four percent.
- Reduce the amount of carbohydrates eaten.
While poking around on the web for info about The Leptin Diet, I saw a lot of people (incidentally, all were women) saying that it was too hard or totally unrealistic to not eat for five or six hours or to let 11 to 12 hours pass between dinner and breakfast. I find that totally baffling. Why is that so hard? If you really can’t go that long without eating, you either aren’t eating enough at meals, or your meal choices simply don’t have enough nutrients.
Of course, I’m also confused by people who can’t manage to eat protein at breakfast or can’t stomach breakfast at all.
While writing this entry, I read an entry on the Fat Head blog. Check out this hilarious take on energy balance from Tom Naughton’s blog.
1This was one of the problems I had with Gundry’s Diet Evolution – the nut snacks were just keeping my appetite up all the time. I can eat nuts at meals, and I do just fine with them. If I eat them between meals…I get hungrier and eat more at meals. In the case of that diet, I was eating a *lot* more green vegetables and possibly making other choices that involved eating more. While more vegetables seems like a good thing, it really is possible to eat too much of them. It’s a lot for your system to deal with, if you eat enough of them. I also seemed to discover that some vegetables cause inflammation for me, but enough about my adventures with broccoli for the moment – inflammation is a subject I’ll be covering in the future.
A couple of days ago, I read Why Diet and Exercise Fail, an e-book by Daniel Matthew Korn. It’s offered for free, and I really appreciate that. Since I read the whole thing, and I feel that I got something out of it, I made a donation. I have no use for more diet books on my bookshelves, but he does sell a paperback on Amazon.
What I particularly liked about the book is that he did not blame any one thing, at least not directly. Instead, he goes over all the likely culprits, the things other diet books complain about (sugar, Omega-6 fats, grains, etc) and comes up with what I think is a compelling case.
What I got out of it, and it may not be what the author actually intended, was that food additives (flavorings, artificial sweeteners, MSG, vegetable gums) and prescription drugs are causing our gut bacteria to be completely out of whack ultimately resulting in weight gain and chronic disease. He’s arguing for an all natural foods diet; if it didn’t exist 100 years ago, don’t eat it. If your great-grandmother wouldn’t have recognized it as food, don’t eat it. This is *not* a new idea, but most of the arguments that I’ve seen for this kind of a diet are strongly associated with political ideologies that I consider to be pointless hair-shirtery. This makes them easy to dismiss. That the same people are all about ablutions like colon cleansing makes it even more annoying.
If you don’t know anything about the important role that all the wee beasties living inside you have on your health, it’s worth knowing about. There are literally *pounds* of them in there, and you will have the best results if it’s the friendly kind.
Accepting that my Very Low Calorie Diet with a very short list of allowed foods significantly reduced gut flora and diversity really explains a lot of things. Now that I have a better understanding of that, I’m not having water retention, gas and bloating from eating lots of green vegetables. Seeing the scale creep up eating *salads* is an incredible annoyance, and I’m pleased to think I’ve got a handle on it.
The other problem with diet books and eating plans is that most of them seem to believe in eating five times a day. That’s a huge contrast with most of the other stuff I read that talks about the value of intermittent fasting. These are two extremes, and neither one works for me. What *does* work is a traditional plan of three meals a day.
Up next – a post about the dangers of snacking.
I don’t think I can call the Dr. Gundry plan a success as I have gained three pounds in a little over a week.
I’m still trying to sort it out, but if I look at my food journals and the timing of large, sudden weight gains, a pattern emerges. I think that broccoli causes me to bloat like mad, retain water and therefore gain weight. The morning after the days I was *out* of broccoli, I had weight losses, so I feel like there’s some confirmation there. I’m sure some people would love to say that they have “broccoli intolerance”, but I recently re-discovered that I like it. It’s not something I’ve eaten much in the last few years; maybe a couple of bits off a veggie platter at a party, and that’s all. Back in my single (and broke) days, I used to eat pasta mixed with carrots, broccoli, onions and parmesan for many dinners. If I was super broke, the pasta was ramen, but the basic ingredients were the same. I never ate broccoli on Atkins either – I had cauliflower fairly often, but again, I haven’t eaten that for a long time either.
As a correction, I’m only eating animal products today. In particular, I want my system to recover from the ridiculous amount of fiber this plan entails due to the ad libitum consumption of green vegetables and the large-ish quantity of nuts. Since the protein is pretty limited and the fruit allowed is only two servings per day, I’ve really been loading up on the green vegetables. I don’t think the fruit is an issue for me at all as there’s no pattern with that and weight gain. I also don’t have a problem with the sugar. I can, for instance, eat a banana all by itself, and my blood glucose is 83 an hour later. I do equally well with apples.
But what animal products do *not* contain is fiber. I’ve generally found that fat, not fiber, is required for proper digestion. I’m not the only one who thinks fiber isn’t really important – fiber gets its bowel-moving reputation by creating mucous that is an response to *irritation* in the digestive system. There’s an entire (very informative) chapter on fiber in Good Calories, Bad Calories that explains how it came to be worshipped by the food nannies as desperately important.
I’m just glad I gained the weight and had the problems when I was completely out of cabbage. I love cabbage, though only cooked, fermented (sauerkraut) or in vinegar and oil slaw (dressing is dumped on when very hot, so it’s a little cooked). In fact, I don’t care for most cruciferous veggies raw (watercress and arugula are the exceptions), so all the broccoli I ate was well cooked. Hopefully, kale is not a problem, but when I try it again, I’ll make sure I have only known-good veggies that day. At this point, the only green vegetable I’m willing to try right away is lettuce, and what I eat tomorrow really depends on whether my plan today causes me to shed some of this bloat.
———
I wrote that last night. I lost 1.8 pounds after doing my all animal products day. I’ll probably add back in some plants today. Probably.
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. Extra Virgin Olive Oil
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.
|
|
Recent Comments