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.
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!
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.)
I was interested in reading this particular book after seeing it mentioned in several of my usual nutrition haunts.
There’s useful information within, and there are a few recipes I’ll try.1 I could, in fact, do his Phase 1 diet with little difficulty. Beyond that? It’s not something I’m going to do, and where it winds up at Phase 3 (ie, the rest of your life) is simply not somewhere I want to go.
His “Phase 1″ diet involves eating protein portions the size of your palm and as much greens and other low-carb vegetables as you like. Pumpkin is limited to 1 cup per day, beets and carrots are allowed raw only. His vegetable list is about what you see on any low-carb diet. What really got me interested is that he’s claiming we are in a summer mode, and we should tell our genes that Winter is Now in order to let go of fat. There’s a lot about that in Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar and Survival, a book I really liked and found fascinating.
A deviation from most low-carb plans is that the dairy allowed in the form of fresh cheeses like ricotta, mozzarella and yogurt (1/2 cup to 1 cup) and only a maximum of 1 ounce of aged cheese is permitted. Eggs are in the dairy section and are permitted.
Virtually any soy substitute is permitted for meat or dairy, which I find kind of baffling in a book that complains quite a lot about how lousy the modern diet is. He even lists seitan as OK, which surprised me.
Also included are a two snacks each to consist of 1/4 cup unsalted, raw nuts (except peanuts – they should be roasted). He recommends eight to ten glasses of water daily, as most diets do. Men may have two glasses of red wine a day, and women may have one. After the first two weeks, you can add back up to two servings of a list of fruits, though he says they will slow weight loss. Avocado and tomato are on the fruit list (they *are* fruits, after all), so you can’t have them the first couple of weeks. The fruits are all the lower sugar ones you’d find on lower carb diets.
That all sounds pretty do-able to me. This is where it gets a bit sideways:
As you continue in Phase 1, slowly cut back on the size of your protein portions and simultaneously upsize your portions of “Friendly Vegetables,” especially leafy greens. In doing so, you’ll decrease the amount of calorie-dense but micronutrient-sparse food and increase the amount of those denser in micronutrients but lower in calories. For example, if you’re already eating 2 cups of salad or cooked vegetables a day, up it to 3 cups. If you’re already at 3 cups, take it to 4 or 5 cups. If you have always been a big veggie fan, you can eat even more. By the end of your sixth week in Phase 1, your protein servings should be roughly half the size of your palm.
His goal is to get you to a mostly raw vegan diet. He uses meat and sometimes cheese as a seasoning in the Phase 3 meal plans. He’s very big on tofu shirataki noodles, in particular, but soy is all over the place. I guarantee our ancestors, primates or humanoid, were NOT eating soy.
Over the past twelve or more weeks, you’ve transitioned from Phase 1 of Diet Evolution, which emulates the diet people ate roughly a century ago, to Phase 2, based on the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our earlier ancestors. As a result, you’ve normalized your weight—or are on a steady course to do so—enhanced your health, and are well on the way to making permanent changes in your lifestyle.
Uh, apparently, he’s never looked at a cookbook from a century ago. I have, and l can say that people were afraid of raw vegetables. They cooked everything, and certainly, they ate plenty of bread and cooked root veggies.
As far as hunter-gatherers, there seems to be some romanticism that they were out gathering plants all day. This is simply not possible for half the year in a lot of places that humans *did* live before agriculture. They were killing animals, especially in the fall when the animals were fattest, and when they needed that fat themselves to make it through the winter. Furthermore, have you ever eaten wild fruit? We’ve subdued fruits so that they produce small seeds and lots of sugar because we’re smart, have thumbs and love sugar. Wild fruit is very seedy and has it’s own future as it’s primary concern, not ours. Never mind the fact that plants were only available seasonally and for relatively short periods for each. We can have damn near anything we want, any time. Do you really think a hunter-gatherer would have killed a fowl and then only eaten the white meat without the skin? If you believe that one, I have a bridge to sell you, as the kids used to say.
Phase 3 reaches back even earlier for inspiration. I regard the Longevity phase as the natural culmination of my program. But I am well aware that it is not for everyone. Up to now, you have been eating both cooked and raw foods, the latter primarily in the form of salads. In Phase 3, you eat primarily raw food, as our earliest ancestors did. For them, the opportunity to consume meat and other animal sources of protein was not a daily event; they relied instead on plant protein, consuming most of it raw.
So, in other words, our primate ancestors because the first humans ate mostly meat. I’m not really sure what he thinks plants were like before we started mucking around with them and growing them ourselves, but our guts simply cannot get enough nutrition out of what was available then.
In particular, people like to point out that gorillas are big and strong, a close relative of humans and eat mostly plants (they also eat insects). What goes *in* to a gorilla is low in fat. They get protein from plants, but they eat an enormous quantity of them. Dr. Gundry specifically says you should get your protein by eating lots of vegetables. He also says you should cut your nut portion to 1/8 of a cup for each of two snacks, so less protein there. I can’t find the quote right now, but he eats an entire bag of pre-cut and washed romaine per day in addition to lots of other vegetables.
Anyway, we aren’t gorillas. Our small intestine does 50% of our nutrient extraction and our colon does 20% (estimates, obviously). A gorilla (and other large plant-eating primates) are set up opposite this. They extract most of their nutrients in their large intestine and cecum.
This difference is highly significant. In a herbivore such as the gorilla, the caecum and colon harbour huge colonies of bacteria which ferment carbohydrates, particularly fibre, and use it to produce short chain fatty acids (SCFA) — principally acetic, proprionic and butyric acids. These are then absorbed into the body to be used as a source of energy.
So, the gorilla’s diet looks like it’s mostly carbs, but the gorilla gets something quite different out of it. It eats foods containing 5.9% fat, 37.1% carbohydrate and 57% protein. After it’s bacteria do their job, it’s estimated they wind up getting more like 24.3% protein, 15.8% carbs and 59.8% fat. Our systems just can’t do that.
Based on what I see in his Phase 3 meal plans, it looks like he’s suggesting around 800 calories a day. Throughout the book he stresses not counting calories or weighing foods. Now there’s nothing wrong with that. Both of those things are a pain in the ass, but the critic in me says that it’s so he can take your calories waaaaay down without you knowing. By the time you figure that out, you’re already doing it!
I find it really hard to believe I wouldn’t be hungry on that little protein, never mind the calories. Every time I’ve tried to reduce protein, I get hungry and can’t control my appetite. The only time I’ve gotten away with that, I was taking HCG! Getting a lot of protein from soy is no solution either. When I tried that, I got to my fattest *ever*, and it completely fucked up my hormones.
All that aside though, the dirty little secret of every diet is that you can’t ever really go off of it. If you go back to what you were eating before, you gain the weight back and then some. Watch this space for more about that.
1The Seed-Sar Salad recipe is fantastic. I don’t see it attributed at this link, but the text is identical to that in the book. I used half walnuts and half sunflower seeds because I didn’t have pumpkin seeds, but wow, was it tasty.
Tino and had a conversation about why people eat junky food, and it turned into a discussion about quick meals. The upshot of it was that I got a craving for pot roast.
I also added a glass of red wine (plonk Merlot, in this case) and an equal amount of water. The meat was $5 worth of conventional Angus London Broil, 1.25 pounds. Later on, I added three big handfuls of raw collard greens, but those cooked for at least an hour. It wound up looking like this:
Underneath that is about one cup of home-canned green beans from the summer CSA. I had it with more of the plonk, natch. It looks like I’ll get four meals out of it. I put 1/2 cup of frozen, blanched kohlrabi under last night’s serving, and I’ll do that again today. That was also put up from our CSA share.
When I got hungry this morning, I had this:
I put two teaspoons of bacon grease in a small non-stick pan and added frozen red mustard (also CSA) and got that thawed. I cracked two local eggs (from the same farm where our shared cow lives) on top and stuck the lid on. When I was about to plate it, I remembered that yesterday at breakfast, I was unable to get all the yolky goodness off the plate, so I put it in a bowl instead. It was delish.
I’ve also been eating home-made raw milk yogurt lately, but I haven’t snapped any photos yet.
I could write ten blog posts about this subject, unfortunately. Most of my complaints come down to the fact that the proper way to state that is Calories In = Calories “Out”. The next thing out of the mouth of Conventional Wisdom is that “a calorie is a calorie.” Nothing allows for any possibility of calories not being burned efficiently. That, however, is a topic for another day. Today, I’d rather talk about Cognitive Dissonance from nutrition and exercise nannies.
Methods: Fifty-eight sedentary overweight/obese men and women (BMI 31.8 ±4.5kg/m2) participated in a 12 week supervised aerobic exercise intervention (70% heart rate max, 5 times a week, 500kcal per session). Body composition, anthropometric parameters, aerobic capacity, blood pressure and acute psychological response to exercise were measured at weeks 0 and 12.
And the results that cause a certain type of health nanny’s brain to explode?:
Results: Mean reduction in body weight was -3.3 ±3.63kg (P<0.01). However, 26 of the 58 participants failed to attain the predicted weight loss estimated from individuals’ exercise-induced energy expenditure.
I generally like Calorielab.com, but their nutritionist suffers from the usual delusions about ARTERYCLOGGINGSATURATEDFAT and ACALORIEISACALORIE.
A major news magazine’s cover story sent out ripples of shock waves when it suggested that exercise, although good for you, may not make you lose weight. Actually, research shows that if you burn more calories without increasing calories from food and drink, you will lose weight.
Except that it doesn’t. That was the WHOLE POINT of the study! Then we have this:
A 150-pound adult who adds that activity daily (and doesn’t cut back on other activity) burns about 120 to 140 extra calories per day.
With no changes in diet, that should lead to weight loss of one pound in 25 to 30 days. On the other hand, if the new walker rewards that walk with an extra muffin, 24-ounce soda or second helping at dinner, after 25 to 30 days his or her weight would probably be a pound higher, not lower. That’s because the increased calories from any one of those are more than double the calories burned in the walk.
Here’s what I take away from that paragraph: You people adding exercise to your lives to lose weight? You’re far too stupid to realize that adding an extra muffin or two cans of coke or another plate of food at dinner? That stuff might make you even fatter!. One of the overwhelming ideas one sees coming from those who think they know better than us is that everyone’s fucked but me.
Whenever we hear about how something that tastes good is also good for us, these people have to come out and yell NO IT ISN’T or say that just because resveratrol is a good thing doesn’t mean we should take up heavy drinking to get more red wine into our diet. Because, you know, we couldn’t figure that out because we’re all idiots and morons.
Near the end of the article, a different study is being discussed. This one is specifically about the idea of afterburn, but there’s something really important they discovered. It’s worse than the idea that afterburn apparently doesn’t exist:
Each of Melanson’s subjects spent 24 quiet hours in the calorimeter, followed later by another 24 hours that included an hourlong bout of stationary bicycling. The cycling was deliberately performed at a relatively easy intensity (about 55 percent of each person’s predetermined aerobic capacity). It is well known physiologically that, while high-intensity exercise demands mostly carbohydrate calories (since carbohydrates can quickly reach the bloodstream and, from there, laboring muscles), low-intensity exercise prompts the body to burn at least some stored fat. All of the subjects ate three meals a day.
To their surprise, the researchers found that none of the groups, including the athletes, experienced “afterburn.” They did not use additional body fat on the day when they exercised. In fact, most of the subjects burned slightly less fat over the 24-hour study period when they exercised than when they did not.
Um, wow. So, that number of calories burned you see on your Wii or the treadmill or elliptical at the gym? 100% fictional. I’m not especially surprised by this, but the Well Blog decides to point out how stupid people are:
“The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”
Because no one is aware that every snack sold in the U.S.? It has this thing called a Nutrition Facts label on it that says how many calories are in it! WOW, who knew, right?
Then right after that:
This does not mean that exercise has no impact on body weight, or that you can’t calibrate your workouts to maximize the amount of body fat that you burn, if that’s your goal.
“If you work out at an easy intensity, you will burn a higher percentage of fat calories” than if you work out a higher intensity, Carey says, so you should draw down some of the padding you’ve accumulated on the hips or elsewhere — if you don’t replace all of the calories afterward.”
Because we don’t like the results of the study, we’re just going to ignore it. Obviously, those people in the lab were not working out right.
In fact, it always comes down to saying that Americans are fat because they just aren’t following the government’s advice closely enough. It’s never that recommending the same thing over and over and expecting different results THIS TIME is simply insane.
I am suspicious of all zero calorie sweeteners, even stevia. I think they promote an endless cycle of sugar cravings in a lot of people, but what it really boils down to is this:
This is from a margarine commercial well-known to those in my age group. We can see where telling everyone to eat margarine got us, so I’m not going into the trans-fat travesty here.
I think most of us have heard that aspartame (Equal, Nutrasweet) is bad stuff. Some doctors even claim it’s inappropriate for diabetics because it messes with blood sugar, but mostly, we hear about it being bad for our brains or causing cancer or whatever. Most of the websites talking about this seem a bit nutty, but there was talk in the summer that the FDA might ban it.
Agave nectar is NOT a zero calorie sweetener. Some people seem to have the idea that it’s magical stuff. The only actual claim made is that it’s lower on the glycemic index than other sugars, but it has the same caloric value as honey (about 60 per Tablespoon). Agave nectar is mostly fructose, which is why it’s supposedly better for diabetics (and thus it’s G.I. rating). My guess is that most people who are so into agave nectar would not buy “artificial” diabetic products, many of which are sweetened with refined fructose. Agave nectar IS refined fructose.
Anyway, moving on.
You’ve probably only heard great things about stevia because, like agave nectar, it’s billed as “all natural.” I’m not going to refute that claim since I don’t have issues with it. I do have issues with it’s effects, and I happen to think its taste leaves a lot to be desired. Taste is hard to refute, but I don’t think this is:
An intra-arterial catheter was inserted into the rats after 5 weeks, and conscious rats were subjected to arterial glucose tolerance test (2.0 g kg 1) during week 6. Stevioside had an antihyperglycemic effect (incremental area under the glucose response curve [IAUC]): 985 20 (stevioside) versus 1,575 21 (control) mmol/L 180 minutes, (P less than .05), it enhanced the first-phase insulin response (IAUC: 343 33 [stevioside] v 136 24 [control] U/mL insulin 30 minutes, P < .05) and concomitantly suppressed the glucagon levels (total AUC: 2,026 234 [stevioside] v 3,535 282 [control] pg/mL 180 minutes, P < .05).
It causes a release of insulin. This is a drug-like effect. If you’re not consuming sugar – let’s say you’re sweetening your black coffee with stevia – do you really want insulin released? Is that I good idea? I sure would not want to use this in green tea or coffee if I’m trying to, say, do an intermittent fast. It also may lower blood pressure, which may also not be a good thing.
The moral of the story here is that There’s No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. You’ll pay for it one way or another, and the best thing to do is to get used to the actual taste of foods. If it’s Christmas, your birthday or Thanksgiving and you’re not a diabetic who will have serious problems from ingesting sugar, just eat the real thing. If you really want a soda, just have the real item. High-fructose corn syrup is more natural than any of the artificial sweeteners, and studies keep popping up that diet soda does NOT help people lose weight or stay thin anyway.
Along with colleague Ken Williams and principal investigator Michael Stern, M.D., Fowler examined the association between consumption of diet and regular soft drinks and weight gain in 622 non-overweight adults. The researchers measured each participant’s Body Mass Index (BMI) and individual soft drink consumption at the beginning of the study, and the participants returned for follow-up measurements seven or eight years later.
After adjusting for age, gender and ethnicity, the investigators found that regular soft drinks were not significantly associated with the development of obesity, but diet soft drinks were.
“Preliminary analysis of the data showed that for every can or bottle of diet soda that a normal weight person drank per day, there was a 65 percent increase in the risk of becoming overweight and a 41 percent increase in the risk of becoming obese for every can or bottle consumed,” Fowler noted.
If none of that suits, there’s always fruit. A ripe bananas is very sweet, and it’s always in season at the grocery store. If you really need a sugar hit, raisins, dates and dried figs all contain a lot of tasty, tasty sugar in the form mother nature intended.
Richard at Free The Animal blogged about a study that was both interesting and timely, at least to me.
I’ve been successfully controlling my weight in a within two pounds of my final diet day weigh-in for about a month, but I’m always interested in tips and tricks.
I’ve recently read about the Johnson Up Down Day Diet. There’s also the Bang Bang Diet, but I don’t think that would work for me for a variety of reasons.
After reading the study, I’m encouraged re: trying their method (including intermittent fast, something the JUDDD does not require) to lose about 10 more pounds. I’m really impressed with it in particular because a feast day / fast day diet is something that could be done through the holiday season and would allow me to not worry about what I’m eating *every* day, but only every other day. At first, I think I would track the up day too because I really want the data.
I never take my calories as low as 25% of maintenance if I’m over the range, but I do make cuts and changes, and it always knocks off the weight. I only need to make cuts or changes about once a week, not every other day. I’m also very confident that I know my maintenance calorie level, and without that, I might not try this.
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