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Wednesday, April 17, 2013

My Battle With Food Is Over: I Win

So my last post on this blog was almost a year ago. I had used the Skinny Bunny Cleanse a few times to "reset" my eating habits and weight, but had recently crept back up to just under 140 which is so discouraging since I was hopeful to stay in the 130-135 range. I would eat healthy during the week, be able to lose the weekend weight then gain it all back and sometimes then some at social and family weekend events. Then I would be done for if there was a long weekend, or a mid-week event. I would be so angry with myself and felt guilty that I could binge for a day and undo what I had worked so hard all week to accomplish. I thought that was just the inevitable never ending battle, and was ready to just fight a losing battle for the rest of my life.

Meanwhile, I had been fighting with Ryan about healthy eating and why it is so important. Here I am struggling to lose weight and be healthy, and there he is not caring at all and unintentionally thwarting my efforts by making the girls brownies for lunch on days he has off, and not caring about eating vegetables himself. I have been a huge fan of the health craze documentaries (Supersize Me, Forks Over Knives, Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead) and so I started looking for books on it to make him read to really get the point across. I wanted him to take our health more seriously and I felt that information was the key. So I found two books on Amazon, and I bought them. I wanted to read them first, since I felt it was unfair to make him read something before I had. I started with Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It by Gary Taubes, then moved to Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease by Robert Lustig. I had no expectations, and didn't know what it was about besides more health & diet books. Boy was I in for a surprise.

Essentially the books break it down from a historical and scientific standpoint to prove how and why; the problem is simply a perfect storm of things: too many carbs, mostly processed, devoid of fiber, not enough vegetables, added sugar and lots of fat in almost every manufactured food, how cheap it is, how good it tastes...

Now at this point if I were reading this, I would say, well duh. We know all that stuff. How is that a novel idea? And, in general, I live by those standards, so why do I struggle? Why am I still fat? Well I guess what it boils down to is that I had to read all the background to have my "ah-ha" moment. I was so close. I was almost there. But I had to have it broken down for me on the biological and evolutionary level so that I really understood the process of how our body turns food into energy & fat.  And suddenly, everything that I had ever heard, read or experienced for myself clicked into place. I always knew that a bag of chips was bad for you. That candy was bad for you. But I always thought that it was only as bad as the empty calories that I was eating. I always knew that being fit and working out was healthy for you, but in my mind I was putting it in the context of how 3500 calories burned = 1 lb. Even though my weight would yo-yo up or down several pounds in one day and I know I had overdone it but not 10,000 calories worth I still believed those simple explanations and formulas of health and diet. I knew that everyone has different metabolisms and different thresholds for how much someone can eat without gaining weight because I had experienced it myself, but I still held on to the idea that anyone should be eating 1500 calories a day if they wanted to lose weight, and that they should be burning about 500 a day to help further. Essentially I was on the edge of understanding and being able to implement it in my own life, but didn't have the full picture - the full comprehension - to do it before. I needed to be able to dispel the myth from the truth, since there are a million diets, exercise routines and tricks to lose weight.

I was amazed and fascinated, intrigued and absorbed. I ate it up. Interesting, both books came to the same conclusion. Different studies, more science, more "biology class" of how our body actually processes the food we eat, what hormones are involved, and what happens when we eat different kinds of foods. The food industry and why it manufactures food the way it does, and what that does to our body. Then I found a documentary series that Lustig did - he's with UCSF and they have the series "The Skinny on Obesity" on youtube. (Fantastic overview of the latest science & research)

I found that the key was a few ideas that I was allowed to dispel. This is funny because they never made sense to me anyway based on my own experience but they are so ingrained in common knowledge you just believe them.


The Myth: The reason people are overweight or obese is because they are gluttons and sloths. Disease and obesity is simply a function of eating too much and exercising too little.
The Truth: In fact, those things are side effects of the real problem. Diets that focus on controlling the supply of food (how much you eat) rarely work. Diets that are able to control the demand (how much food you want to eat) are much more successful. How? The answer is eating the right foods so that our body chemistry is regulated and we are not hungry but also satisfied and so that we have enough energy to be active. (We have just had it backwards the whole time.)


The Myth: Our bodies are simple machines, and consume X number of calories, burn X number of calories (based on activity level and metabolism) and whatever is left over is stored as fat. Eating less and working out enough is the key to maintain a healthy weight.
The Truth: If our body is in "fat storing" mode, it will send certain calories consumed right straight to fat. This leaves  little for your body to run on, so your body will tell you to eat more since you are "starving" (even though in fact you have eaten plenty). If that doesn't work and we resist that hunger, our bodies shut down and we become lethargic, to conserve energy.

The Myth: Fat is the culprit. We should be eliminating fat and sticking to healthy fats in low levels. Processed carbs are bad, but whole grains are healthy for you and we should be eating a proportional amount of them for a balanced diet.
The Truth: Too much carb & fat, together, is the culprit - and sugar is both, all in one. And for those of us who struggle with our weight, we should be minimizing or reducing our carb consumption, the amount determined based on our own bodies unique tolerance for carbohydrate, and the ones we do eat should be very limited (20-200 total grams of carbs per day), coming from whole grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes. And when we eat the right foods, our body regulates a healthy weight on it's own and adjusts our feelings of hunger, satiety and how much energy we have available to burn. This is called ketosis.
The Little Realized Truth: Carbs are all starches, grains, and sugars. This means carrots and potatoes, rice (even brown), wheat (even whole), oatmeal, beans & fruit too, not just what we normally think of when we think of carbs (white bread, chips, cake). If you have a problem with weight, you should be decreasing the healthy ones, avoiding the bad ones altogether.


The proof is in the pudding. I've been implementing what I have learned into my diet for about 3 weeks now. Eliminating carbs where I can, decreasing consumption and trying to choose healthier carb options when I can't eliminate. Without measuring food or counting calories I am now down to 133. My weight does not yo-yo by up to 4 lbs in one day anymore. It is steady and varies by not more than a pound each day. When I do eat the bad stuff - cake, cookies, chips - I eat smaller amounts and don't have the same animistic craving and need to continue eating more of it. For the first time in my life, I feel satisfied. (Feeling full is different, and I would feel full or over-full often due to overeating but still crave food).

I have changed my perspective and realize now that processed carbs and sugar are addictive, toxic substances to my body. Of course they taste amazing but I realize that the more of them I eat, the more I will crave them, the more I will shift my body to fat storage mode instead of fat burning mode. I know that if I avoid those foods, I will have more energy to be active. If I avoid those foods, they will lose their power over me.

It sounds like a terrible diet, right? No carbs, no sugar? How can that be fun? I went to lunch with a friend and this is what I had: Tuna Poke, grilled artichoke with basil-garlic aioli, baked mussels with spicy cream sauce and steamed clams in butter. My typical breakfast is a 2 (whole) egg omelet with veggies, avocado and plenty of cheese (Eggs every day you say? There goes your cholesterol. Actually its decreased by 10 points). A favorite dinner is caprese salad. I found a really awesome "diabetes friendly" bread that has only 6 grams of carbs, 5 grams of fiber and nearly 9 of protein. I love to toast that, spread with cream cheese, and top with smoked salmon. Any hearty salad with some sort of protein, just make sure to hold the croutons or crunchies. Any pasta sauce - just replace the pasta with julianned zucchini. Remember, carbs are the enemy, not fat. You do have to be careful about hidden sugars.  Anything fat free - like salad dressings - almost always replace the fat with sugar. Canned spaghetti sauce. Ketchup. Brand name bread (sugar keeps it from going stale as quickly so it has a longer shelf life). And some things have far more carbs than you would expect. Pasta is terrible - almost 50 grams of carbs for a 1 cup serving! A tortilla has like 35.

So that is the long of it. That is such a basic overview it doesn't really touch the details of what the research and science goes into, but it is the outline of my journey over the last few weeks, and how it has changed me.

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