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.

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.

We eat 3% more calories than we did before conventional wisdom started striking us over the head with the idea that eating saturated fat is akin to worshipping satan, but you can see where the changes are. We eat less meat and less fat and as a result, we eat more carbohydrates. A lot of this is in the form of what the USDA calls “fruit drinks and ades” and some more of it is from soda, but we do eat 10% more fruits and vegetables (mostly because we eat more *fruit*) and grains (44% more than 1977). We consume 47% less whole milk than in 1977 and 230% more skim milk (no one drank skim milk before, apparently). We have shifted 50% of our meat consumption from red meat to poultry and fish.

We did what we were told to do, and low and behold, the future was NOT sunnier. The future is instead full of fat Americans. Poor people and children are even fatter and sicker as a group then Americans on the whole. Kids, of course, eat a lot more government provided meals via WIC and school lunch programs. If Keys was right, we should not have wound up where we are today.

This yogurt is part of the problem:

People who are healthy and therefore eat a healthy diet eat more fiber, therefore we will be healthier if we eat more fiber. Why would we think this is true? We eat more fiber than we used to – fruit and grains (whole or not) both contain fiber. We also eat 14% more legumes and 17% more nuts and seeds than we did in 1977, so there’s more fiber there too…and yet we still aren’t healthier.

I will posit that people with more fiber in their diet are healthier because they also happen to be eating less food out of boxes, bags and cans. Once you take foods apart into components to process them, they taste worse because they lose their more subtle flavors, so salt and sugar are added to make them palatable again. Most grain products lose virtually all their fiber during the process. Processed food has very little fiber because that makes it spoil faster. Even 100% whole grain breads have added sugar (well, high-fructose corn syrup anyway) because it retards spoilage.

The solution is always to add more of some magical component, in this case, fiber.

Look at olive oil, for instance. We were told that the Mediterreanan Diet is very healthy and since they eat a lot of their fat in the form of olive oil, having us switch to more olive oil is healthy. This data comes largely from the Seven Countries Study, but what you don’t know is this: 60% of the study participants [warning! PDF!] were members of the strict Greek Orthodox Church that prescribes almost 180 days of fasting per year. This was the easiest way I could make my main point here: they follow a system through their culture and lifestyle, and eating more olive oil, fish and yogurt doesn’t even come close to emulating that.

We often hear about the “French Paradox.” While I like wine as much as the next girl, I really doubt an entire country is being protected from heart disease because they drink more wine than we do. French culture has a system of eating that values culture and tradition. If you check that article, you’ll find that most of the French women questioned claim they just eat less, ultimately. That may be true, but their meal size and order is actually quite different from ours.

They start their days earlier than we do, and they eat a Continental Breakfast. That term separates it from the idea of an English Breakfast, which is a closer to what Americans consider to be traditional breakfast. When you’re offered a “free” Continental Breakfast in a hotel in the U.S., it’s generally of much lousier quality than what a French person would be willing to eat, but in any case, they eat early and their pastries are smaller. The French eat their largest and most leisurely meal at lunch time, and that’s not the middle of the afternoon. If you don’t eat when you’re supposed to eat, you aren’t eating because restaurants close in the afternoon. The French eat slower, take food more seriously and eat a smaller dinner. They certainly eat fewer processed foods than we do, and as a result, that breakfast contains butter, not some ersatz-low-cholesterol-processed-crap that you’d find at a Residence Inn. Lunch isn’t a microwaved Lean Cuisine, and it also includes wine. Americans don’t drink at lunch, for the most part, but maybe a glass of wine at lunch reduces stress in the afternoon.

I wouldn’t discount *any* of these things. Getting up early and eating lunch on time probably play a part too.

Adding red wine is not going to help all by itself. Switching out olive oil for butter isn’t going to make much difference, and adding fiber for the sake of fiber is not going to help either. Eating less saturated fat hasn’t caused us to get thinner – it’s had the opposite effect. Taking whole milk away from children over two (yes, that’s what the government says is good and proper) seems to have the opposite effect.

We’re told that we are just not following the USDA recommendations perfectly enough. We’re always told the next component change will make the difference. Kids cereals are now having whole grains added because they can be made palatable and be preserved by the buckets of sugar that are already in there. So, conventional wisdom says that kids will be healthier just because they eat more fiber. I can hardly wait to see the results.