A four-year post-weight loss study by the NIH shows that motivated people *do* keep weight off. I weigh 50 [...]]]> If you read Tara Parker Pope’s article The Fat Trap, you might be led to believe that weight loss is difficult and maintaining a weight loss is a herculean feat. This is just not true.

A four-year post-weight loss study by the NIH shows that motivated people *do* keep weight off. I weigh 50 pounds less than I did in 2000. I lost that weight in two big pieces, one in 2000 and one over the end of 2009 into 2010. Don’t let her defeatism convince you to not bother.

People who maintain a weight loss do pay attention to what they eat. I do not weigh and measure everything, and I do drink alcohol and eat sweets or chips sometimes. The key is to eat the most nutritious diet that you can, using fruits, vegetables and healthy protein sources to crowd out foods that don’t contribute much to your nutrition bottom line.

A few points:

• If you go back to what got you fat, you will gain back the weight. You need to find a weight-loss formula that is really a lifestyle change.
• Eating like “everyone else” isn’t what you think. If you mean the “everyone else” that’s overweight or obese, that’s an obvious problem. If you mean someone who is active all day and you aren’t or someone who is still growing, that’s another problem right there.
• People who are naturally thin don’t eat the way you imagine. The two very thin people I know DO eat a lot less than I do on average. One of them fasts and binges, which is actually a formula for weight loss if done correctly.
• You must eat high-quality food while dieting and afterwards. Yes, you can eat a bit more afterwards, but the basic composition of your diet needs to be the most nutritious food you can get.

I think the next big thing in dieting will be micronutrient sufficiency. I’m see it becoming a popular topic on blogs and podcasts. Here are three references to it from the last week:

Paul Jaminet’s The Perfect Health Diet
Free The Animal’s post on Malnutrition and Obesity
Jimmy Moore’s Podcast with the authors of Naked Calories.

That could not be farther from the truth. I have tried this stuff it in protein shakes, bars and muffins, and nothing can disguise it’s horrible, horrible flavor.

Do yourself a favor and order your protein from these people. Get it unflavored and [...]]]> Jay Robb claims this is the “best tasting protein on the planet.”

That could not be farther from the truth. I have tried this stuff it in protein shakes, bars and muffins, and nothing can disguise it’s horrible, horrible flavor.

Do yourself a favor and order your protein from these people. Get it unflavored and spice it up yourself. You can thank me later.

On the heels of that, they published a real stinker in February. It starts [...]]]> In January, Men’s Journal had a terrific article about fitness by Daniel Duane. The gist of it is that you should pass on the treadmill and elliptical and lift heavy. If this is news to you, go read it.

On the heels of that, they published a real stinker in February. It starts out well. The #1 rule is “Don’t go on a diet, change your diet.” Daniel Duane starts out by quoting Gary Taubes theory of Why We Get Fat. I mostly agree with Gary. Mostly, but not entirely. That’s a subject for another time, however. The #2 rule is to shop the periphery of the supermarket:

If you want to live by one rule instead of 10, this is it, not least because it’s the easiest to follow. Shop only the periphery of the supermarket, choosing whole fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, and dairy products…

Again, agreement here. After this, Mr. Duane presents a food pyramid (god save us all from food pyramids!) that goes like this:

Never Eat: refined carbs, simple sugar
Eat as a treat: whole fruit
Eat these less often: whole dairy, whole grains
Eat these every day: nuts, seeds, legumes, tofu, extra-virgin olive oil, canola oil, avocado
Eat these every meal: leafy, cruciferous, brightly colored vegetables, meat, poultry, fish, game, eggs

Whole grains are NOT found on the periphery, and it’s suggested here that one should eat more whole grains than fruit. Tofu is also a processed food and should be on the “do not eat” list, but here it is presented as something it’s ok to eat every day. Canola oil is heavily processed. You’d be better off using coconut oil or ghee for higher heat cooking.

It’s abundantly clear that Mr. Duane is leery of saturated fats. He quotes this:

Many major research institutions, including the Harvard School of Public Health, no longer believe that dietary fat, even saturated — found in red meat, pork, butter, and cream — is bad for heart health. What’s more, a study published last year in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found no link between saturated-fat consumption and incidence of heart attacks.

But then says this in the next paragraph:

This rethinking of dietary fat doesn’t mean you can consume all the steak and eggs you want. While it’s best to eat a little protein at every meal, you should vary the type you consume by rotating through beef, poultry, fish, game, and pork, in addition to eggs and plant-based protein like soybeans.

Again with the damn soybeans!

He later concedes that butter made from organic cream might be OK, but his meal plans contain this oh so appetizing breakfast: Oat-bran toast with extra-virgin olive oil; scrambled egg.

Wow. Sounds delicious! Here’s the breakdown on this meal assuming 2 slices of toast, one scrambled egg and 1 teaspoon of olive oil:

This is not a low-carb meal, it doesn’t contain enough protein, and 266 calories *might* keep a child satisfied until lunch time, but a grown human? I really doubt it with that level of protein and fat, the two most satisfying macronutrients. If you subbed egg whites (keeping one whole egg) and vegetables instead of the toast, you could get the same amount of calories and a *filling* breakfast.

His third rule is to not count calories. I’m fine with that one – it seems to psych people out, make them feel deprived and make them stressed. Four out of seven of his breakfast meals are distinctly NOT low-carb and sound pretty calorie restricted to me. On Monday and Saturday his breakfast includes meat and eggs, and are pretty normal for an adult.

Monday: Mixed-herb omelet with applewood-smoked bacon; side of sauteed spinach
Saturday: Scrambled eggs with bacon at your neighborhood diner; swap cottage cheese with hash browns

Both of those sound good to me, and they are actually low in carbs. They appear to contain sufficient protein as well. Good luck finding cottage cheese to sub for potatoes – this is something I try to do sometimes, so I do actually know about it. At least half of the breakfast places I eat don’t have it at all, and the ones that do charge you for substitutions. Most will charge you the normal price to leave off the hash browns (or anything else) and then charge you for a side of cottage cheese. It’s annoying. Anyway, on to the other days.

Tuesday: Steel-cut oatmeal with organic raspberries and sliced almonds

Wednesday: Sprouted-grain toast with almond or peanut butter; whole orange

Thursday: (oat-bran deal mentioned above)

Friday: Steel-cut oatmeal with halved, raw walnuts and fresh blueberries

Sunday: Time to cheat again: banana pancakes with melted butter and maple syrup

Since he acknowledges that Sunday is a “cheat” (I hate that term), I didn’t bother to run the numbers on it. On a typical day, breakfast averages out to 350 calories, 15g of protein and 50g of carbs. That is a recipe for failure. I’m too lazy to analyze all the meals (and let’s face it, reader’s eyes would glaze over), but this is a lot of cooking for not enough calories. He later quotes Gary Taubes’ rules for weight loss, and the first one is to eat 20g or fewer carbohydrates a day. This meal plan is moderate in carbs, but it’s nowhere near 20g! He’s big on the glycemic index, but it does not take into account the total carb count, just the way a food causes a diabetic’s blood sugar to react. A low-GI food can be very high in fructose, and eating fructose is no way to lose weight. I’ve complained about the glycemic index before, of course.

His plan doesn’t include snacks, but he knows people will eat them – I know I’d be starving at 10:30 with most of those breakfasts. Here are his snack suggestions:

Stay stocked up on healthy, low-GI foods like nuts, beef jerky, cheese, plain yogurt; low-sugar fruit like berries and apples; and even energy bars made from only whole ingredients, like Lärabar, Raw Revolution, and Clif Nectar. In the store, reach for natural nut butters like Justin’s Classic Almond Butter or plain organic yogurt from Stonyfield. Pair a stick of Golden Valley Natural organic beef jerky with cheese sticks from Horizon Organic, or indulge in a low-sugar treat by looking for dark chocolate with a cacao content of greater than 70 percent.

Craving something salty? Avoid pretzels, potato chips, and rice cakes, and reach for a bag of mixed nuts or pop your own popcorn and flavor it with extra-virgin olive oil. If you like crackers, choose RyKrisp, Ryvita, or Wasa instead of Saltines, Ritz, Melba Toast, Wheat Thins, or others made from enriched wheat flour. Sweet-potato chips and even protein-packed pork rinds can be healthy snacks when consumed in moderate amounts.

Larabars and Clif Nectar bars are made of dried fruit with some nuts and are mostly carbohydrate. If you’re going to eat popcorn, why avoid rice cakes? Their nutritional profiles are very similar. And as for flavoring popcorn with olive oil…I sure hope people don’t pop the stuff in extra-virgin olive oil (oxidized fats, anyone?), so I’m assuming he suggests you should use that instead of butter. Ew!

After the awesome article on fitness, I’m really disappointed in this one. Most of Gary Taubes diet advice is taken straight from Dr. Atkins, but this reads more like a Dr. Oz diet than anything Dr. Atkins would recommend. I feel like this is an opportunity missed after the goodwill engendered by pointing out that cardio is a waste of time. You’d do a lot better following the Tim Feriss slow carb diet.

First of all, they don’t eat there and take pride in that fact. Second, McDonald’s menu and marketing is not aimed at them, so complaining that the menu isn’t what they want is utterly [...]]]> It really drives me nuts when elite food writers complain about the McDonald’s Menu or, really, complain about McDonald’s at all.

First of all, they don’t eat there and take pride in that fact. Second, McDonald’s menu and marketing is not aimed at them, so complaining that the menu isn’t what they want is utterly pointless. It just comes off as elitism, and the food writing world does not need more of that.

The article I’m about to complain about can be read here and is titled “How to Make Oatmeal…Wrong.”

From a marketing perspective, they can do almost nothing wrong; from a nutritional perspective, they can do almost nothing right, as the oatmeal fiasco demonstrates.

Yes, Mark Bittman feels that the Fruit and Maple Oatmeal reaches the level of a “fiasco.”

First, he complains that the Oatmeal has too many ingredients:

Real oatmeal contains no ingredients; rather, it is an ingredient. As such, it’s a promising lifesaver: oats are easy to grow in almost any non-extreme climate and, minimally processed, they’re profoundly nourishing, inexpensive and ridiculously easy to cook.

If people wanted to cook at home at all, they wouldn’t be at McDonald’s. No matter how easy it is, they’ve washed up at a fast food joint. I take serious issue with calling oatmeal “profoundly nourishing.” Mr. Bittman consistently compares the McDonald’s product to rolled oats. First is the USDA Nutrition facts for regular oatmeal, second is the USDA Nutrition Facts for a medium sweet potato.

The oatmeal has a wee bit of fat and a little protein, but it’s basically a pure carbohydrate. Compare that to the mighty sweet potato. Oatmeal pales in comparison in terms of nutrition, and the sweet potato does it with 50% fewer calories. I would not call either profoundly nourishing, but among starches, the sweet potato kicks oatmeal’s ass.

The oatmeal and McDonald’s story broke late last year, when Mickey D’s, in its ongoing effort to tell us that it’s offering “a selection of balanced choices” (and to keep in step with arch-rival Starbucks) began to sell the cereal.

By balanced choices, McDonald’s means much lower fat than their other breakfast offerings. End of story there – it certainly meets that criteria.

I’m sure that Starbucks would be both surprised and offended to find that McDonald’s is its “arch rival.” Seriously, WTF? I don’t think Mr. Bittman patronizes Starbucks either. Certainly, they don’t compete in the same market. McDonald’s offers no pastries, and Starbucks has only microwaved sandwiches which cannot be customized in any way. McDonald’s will sell you any combination of breakfast components and they are cooked to order.

Yet in typical McDonald’s fashion, the company is doing everything it can to turn oatmeal into yet another bad choice. (Not only that, they’ve made it more expensive than a double-cheeseburger: $2.38 per serving in New York.)

Newsflash: you can’t choose between oatmeal and and a double-cheeseburger as they are not on the menu at the same time. I call apples-to-oranges on this one.

“Cream” (which contains seven ingredients, two of them actual dairy) is automatically added;

Again, Mr. Bittman is wildly out of touch here. “Cream”, as it is sold in a typical grocery store also contains similar bullshit ingredients. The only way I can get cream that’s really just cream is to drive 100 miles round trip to a Whole Foods or to make a special trip to a local store that carries local farm direct products. As cream with garbage in it is a personal annoyance of mine, I buy the locavore stuff, but it does cost three times as much and the hours are very limited. Sometimes it’s short dated, and sometimes they run out. Most people simply won’t bother. Here’s a picture I took this morning of an ordinary store brand light cream:

Five ingredients, and only two of them are dairy.

A more accurate description than “100 percent natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

Again, he apparently doesn’t keep soy milk in his kitchen. It also contains some of the same weird fillers and stabilizers. Most people have a fridge full of dairy products containing this stuff, even the ones who never eat at McDonald’s and think they eat very healthily. In fact, the more fat that has been sucked out of a dairy product, the more weird fillers, emulsifiers and stabilizers it contains. And we know that lipophobes think they eat very healthily.

Since we know there are barely any rules governing promotion of foods, one might wonder how this compares to real oatmeal, besides being 10 times as expensive. Some will say that it tastes better, but that’s because they’re addicted to sickly sweet foods, which is what this bowlful of wholesome is.

Dude, all restaurant food is much more expensive. A 10x markup isn’t especially high. I’ll get to the sweet part in just a moment.

If you don’t want to bother with the stove at all, you could put some rolled oats (instant not necessary) in a glass or bowl, along with a teeny pinch of salt, sugar or maple syrup or honey, maybe some dried fruit. Add milk and let stand for a minute (or 10). Eat. Eat while you’re walking around getting dressed. And then talk to me about convenience.

Yum! Cold oatmeal! Besides, if you add sweetener and dried fruit, you’ll get right up to the sugar level of the McDonald’s product: 57g of carbohydrate. If you make a one cup serving of old fashioned oats and add two tablespoons of raisins and one tablespoon of honey (those are all the default serving sizes of each thing, per the USDA), your cereal will have, drumroll please, 57g of carbohydrate!

I asked them this, via e-mail: “Why could you not make oatmeal with nothing more than real oats and plain water, and offer customers a sweetener or two (honey, the only food on earth that doesn’t spoil, would seem a natural fit for this purpose), a packet of mixed dried fruit, and half-and-half or — even better — skim milk?”

Their answer, via e-mail and through a spokesperson (FMO is “fruit and maple oatmeal”): “Customers can order FMO with or without the light cream, brown sugar and the fruit. Our menu is entirely customizable by request with our ‘Made for You’ platform that has been in place since the late 90s.”

Ah yes, skim milk. Sooo delicious with oatmeal. Jesus Christ. Grim. Meathook. Future.

Anyway, McDonald’s has packets of honey, but since he doesn’t eat there, I wouldn’t expect him to know that. I can’t figure out why anyone would want oatmeal with NOTHING in it, nor can I figure out what Mr. Vegan-Until-6pm has against the dried cranberries and diced apples McDonald’s puts in the FMO.

Here’s what it is: Diced Apples (Apples, calcium ascorbate [a blend of calcium and vitamin C to maintain freshness and color]), Cranberry Raisin Blend (Dried sweetened cranberries (sugar, cranberries), California raisins, golden raisins, sunflower oil, sulfur dioxide (preservative)).

He has apparently never read the ingredients in a package of dried cranberries that might be purchased by the typical member of the proletariat.

I would never eat this oatmeal and not just because it contains gluten (barley malt – tasty stuff, as I’m sure you know if you drink beer or scotch). I would never eat a 57g serving of carbs and call it breakfast whether I made it myself or someone else made it for me. I need protein in all my meals, and I much prefer some fat in my food as well.

Whether Bittman knows it or not, the nutritional profile of the McDonald’s oatmeal is damned close to what he’d make in his own kitchen. I know he’s not the only one that thinks that is an appropriate breakfast, so for those that do, you can now get it at McDonald’s.

I already have a Level-1 CrossFit certification, but liability insurance companies do not [...]]]> At present, my blogging has been very thin because I’ve got a lot of other things going on. Sadly, these things are not paid work, but the primary distraction from keeping up my blog has been studying for a personal trainer certification.

I already have a Level-1 CrossFit certification, but liability insurance companies do not recognize that as a mainstream certification and thus charge more for insurance. If I get a mainstream certification, I get an annual insurance discount that covers the certification in the first year. Seems like a no-brainer here, but there’s 310 pages of material that I need to absorb.

A lot of it has been interesting – I had forgotten a fair amount of biology (big shock, I last studied that in high school – all my college science was physics), and the biomechanics chapters were interesting on their own.

Of course there are 30 pages on nutrition. Of course it’s all conventional wisdom. On the second page, I encountered this:

For athletes and physically active adults, each meal should consist of 60-65% of the calories from carbohydrates, specifically complex carbohydrates, 15% from lean protein and 10% from fat. Carbohydrates, which are converted to the forms glucose and glycogen, are the body’s primary source of instant energy and longer term energy storage, respectively. Additionally, carbohydrates are required to burn fat; without a sufficient quantity of carbohydrates, a person will not effectively lose body fat. Protein is required to build and repair body tissues and structures. It is also used in the process of synthesizing hormones and is also used in the process of synthesizing hormones and hemoglobin, and is the body’s alternative source of energy if there is an insufficient source of carbohydrates.

That ought to come as a shock to anyone who has lost weight on Atkins Induction.

While protein can be turned into glucose, that process does not require carbohydrates. Furthermore, they seem to have not considered ketones that are created out of your own fat, and your brain can certainly run on ketones.

I think there’s a lot [...]]]> After years of long study of nutrition and diet, I seem to be coming around to the idea that you can either have carbs or fat along with your protein, but not both. When I saw that this appeared to be Zoe Harcombe’s thing, I bought her book right away.

I think there’s a lot of great information in there, particularly the folly of counting calories. Her basic rules are good ones, but her explanations of what is a carb meal and what is a fat meal bother me. First, here are her three rules:

1. Don’t eat processed foods;
2. Don’t eat fats and carbohydrates at the same meal;
3. Don’t eat foods that cause your cravings.

Personally, I don’t really have food cravings. All my compliance issues with diets are usually about eating too much generally, but anyway, these are sound, yes?

The problem is this: she defines anything containing a food that had a face to be a “fat” meal, which means that fish and lean meat cannot be eaten with a high carb meal. Carb meals may contain tofu, quorn, milk, cottage cheese or high quality yogurt. Skinless chicken breast and fish aren’t OK, but coconut milk is OK? She has a recipe for a delicious sounding butternut squash curry that contains 25g of creamed coconut per serving. That’s 195 calories and 16.9g of fat. It’s all healthy fat, but it’s still fat. For 6g of fat and 150 calories, you could have a 1/3 lb. pork chop, so why is the prohibition on meat instead of fat?

Why allow tofu at all? Soy can’t be eaten by humans if not processed, so I’m not really clear why it’s allowed at all. It causes problems for *so* many people, and if they can’t eat dairy, what’s left? Quorn? I still can’t actually figure out what that stuff is. The wiki entry for mycoprotein sounds kind of…creepy somehow. “The fungus can double its mass every five hours.” Ewww…

I think she’s really on to something here, but the arbitrary nature of how she defines a fat meal and a carb meal really leaves me cold. I know a lot of people find fat to be the most satisfying macronutrient, but for me, it’s definitely protein. There’s an experiment in my future, but done my own way.

Like any diet that’s ad libitum, I don’t think I’d lose weight on it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a healthy way to eat. I am leery of the fact that the non-mixing of carbs and fat just “sounds right” to me, but I think it’s worth a try for maintaining weight while eating some high carbohydrate meals. Sometimes, the hunting wasn’t good.

I’ve been messing around with my training schedule lately. I’ve generally found that I’m sore pretty much all the time. [...]]]> First, I found a great series by Andy Deas on Loving/Hating CrossFit. For those of you who have not heard of Andy, he is the co-host of Robb Wolf’s podcast: The Paleo Solution.

I’ve been messing around with my training schedule lately. I’ve generally found that I’m sore pretty much all the time. I’m now doing 2-on-2-off down from 2-on-1-off.

OK, now the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. I appreciate the sentiment, but the implementation will be no better than the crap we feed kids in the current school lunch program.

The bill accelerates the budding healthful-food movement in public education – think whole wheat pizza with low-fat cheese and low-sodium sauce – but leaves unanswered key questions about whether schools can afford to give tens of millions of students better meals.

Jesus wept.

In the name of making certain standards, we wind up feeding kids crap. Make no mistake: that suggested pizza is nutritionally deficient. Children DO NOT NEED low-fat cheese. They do NOT NEED low-fat milk. They do NOT NEED low-sodium. In fact, all those things are detrimental. Basically, what we’re seeing here is a “this thing we’re doing here is not working (and is, in fact, making things worse), so I think what we *really* need to do is hit it harder!” Complete fucking idiocy.

Setting aside the insane idea of nutrition, I think there’s a bigger problem with school lunches in the U.S. Jamie Oliver did a series in a school in Huntington, West Virginia called Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution[you tube trailer]. Watching that, I found that many problems were made clear, and the pizza crap above illustrates that perfectly. If you’re the least bit interested in American school lunch programs, watch the shows. There are lots of annoying things in there, and some of his goals are a little silly, but the meat of the thing just demonstrates the total tragedy of what we feed children in the name of supposed health.

Instead of feeding children a meal an adult would recognize as such (a meat, a veg, a starch and a fruit), we feed them junk food that the Feds think has been healthied up. In reality, it’s total crap. They might as well eat fast food every day, because nutritionally it’s no different. Worse than that, it’s not an ACTUAL MEAL. Even worse than that, it represents the worst attributes of what we can loosely call American Food Culture. It teaches children absolutely horrible habits.

Just because kids want pizza and fries or chicken nuggets and fries every single day does not mean THEY SHOULD HAVE IT. They are children! They should be fed what’s good for them, and there’s certainly no reason it can’t taste good. Better than that, how about feeding kids a proper meal that requires a knife and fork and includes something that is not mass-produced industrial crap!

If kids don’t learn a basic three-meal system of healthy eating, they will go on to a life of grazing on garbage and only eating fries, pizza, ice cream, juice and chicken nuggets.

Don’t even get me started on what passes for breakfast in the D.C. schools. This breakfast contains no protein and is entirely sugar (orange juice, muffin, graham crackers). This one beats all! It’s three containers of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal floating in strawberry milk, graham crackers and apple juice. WHAT THE FUCK??!!! In loco parentis MY ASS. What parent would allow their child to head off to school after eating THAT? The breakfast program is supposed to see that poor children get a healthy breakfast so they can learn something. I fail to see how this is better than no breakfast at all! No wonder kids have attention problems – starting the day with a pile of pure sugar with no fat (1% milk!) and almost no protein?

This is what kids eat NOW. By all means, double-down on this crap because clearly, you just need to push your agenda harder and those kids will start dropping weight like mad.

If you want to see what a proper lunch looks like, check out more on the What’s For School Lunch blog to see what kids in France, Japan or Taiwan eat. You’ll be horrified at where the US falls on that spectrum, even compared to some of the much poorer countries.

Crikey. Again, I am ashamed of my government. What else is new?