Читать книгу Paradise in Cheeseburgers - Matt James - Страница 3

Dieting is a relatively new phenomenon. A diet is not. Explain please! Your diet is what you make of it every day. If you eat Twinkies morning, noon, and night, your diet consists of a lot of enriched bleached wheat flour, high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, B vitamins, whole eggs, animal shortening, and a whole bunch of stuff I can’t pronounce. Your body doesn’t necessarily care what the name on the box is or what it tastes like. It will break that Twinkie down into its core parts. As far as energy goes, that means carbohydrates, fat, and protein.

A Twinkie has 150 calories per serving (one Twinkie). Those calories are made up by the 4.5 grams (g) of fat, 27g of carbs, and 1g of protein. This is when most dieting promoters tell you that you need to significantly reduce or eliminate the fat. The reason for this is mathematical for the most part.

A gram of fat contains about nine calories. So, you must burn nine calories to burn off one gram of fat. Makes sense. A gram of carbohydrate and protein contain four calories each. Cool. If this was a logic problem and this was all the information you had, you would conclude that by eliminating fat, it makes it easier for our body to burn calories. I’d rather have 28g of carbs and protein at four calories per gram equaling 112 calories than the 4.5g of fat constituting 40.5 calories.

This simple formula says to eat more carbs because you literally get more food without the high caloric intake. Easy-Peezy-Lemon-Squeezy, right?

Remember, all the ‘splainin’ for this comes later on, I’m here to tell you what I did to reduce my weight without reducing my food consumption to the point of semi-starvation. So, remember this Twinkie example as I delve in to it later on.

My point of bringing up the Twinkie now is to show you what most dieting promoters tell us what’s bad about that Twinkie and why. “It’s the fat, stupid” they shout from their rather well lit exercise havens full of beautiful people (if you’re in to tight bodies and ample bosoms).

As the kids would say, here’s the straight dope. Yes, Twinkies are bad for you. They got that much right, but they give the wrong reason. “It’s the carbs, stupid!” I shout from my not so well lit dungeonesque room full of me. Speaking of me, I don’t eat Twinkies. That’s one of the first rules of my low-carb diet. So here it is in all of its bold text glory:

Rule 1: Don’t eat Twinkies

More rules will come as you read through the book and if you’re lucky, I’ll provide all of the rules on one page for easy reference.

You’re now asking “I should eat more fat?” Yeah, Fat and protein. Dietary fat is not really the reason we get fat. Let’s say you’re on a diet (if you’re reading this, you probably are) and I offered you something that had zero grams of fat, zero grams of saturated fat, 50 milligrams (mg) of sodium, 39g of carbs while one serving contained only 140 calories. Would you take it? If you were on a low-fat/high-carb diet you would and you’d thank me.

Now, on that same diet, would you accept the Coca-Cola Classic I just offered you? No. Why not? It’s fat-free, right? No one believes that a Coke will help you lose weight. Hell, the Coca-Cola Corporation knows it so well they make several other products like Diet Coke and Coke Zero to capture the “diet crowd.” So why do we fall for the idea that low-fat/high-carb diets help us lose weight? Most dieting promoters are, in fact, promoting this in a roundabout way.

The next thing they tell us is to exercise regularly. On the surface, this is good advice. Fitness can be an important part of anybody’s life. But here’s my advice on the subject; exercise because it makes you feel good and results in better cardiovascular health, not because you are trying to lose weight. Because we have been trained to believe that if we simply burn more calories than we consume, we will lose weight, we commit ourselves to rigorous exercise programs that make us feel terrible and don’t actually result in any significant weight loss. Wait a minute, how can that be?

Again, I am speaking about myself, but test after test has proven this to be correct, exercising to lose weight fails almost every time¹. I say almost because there are people that have the discipline and DNA to shed pounds while exercising. The most visible of these specimens are athletes (no, not bowlers) or your friends that seem to be able to eat anything and not gain weight.

Here’s the dirty secret about trying to emulate that lifestyle. If you’re fat right now, you do not have the DNA to do it. Sorry. You also may not have the DNA to be 6’ 4” or have naturally smooth skin or grow a lot of facial hair. Here’s the thing. There is no billion dollar a year industry trying to make you taller or help you grow a beard. And when some company does try to sell you these things, they get exposed as the phonies they are, and banished to the 2 a.m. infomercial scene.

I believed it too. I used to work ten hours a day on my feet walking and lifting, burning roughly 2,750 calories at work per day. After work, I would either get on an elliptical or play basketball in the summer and hockey in the winter. My weight never fluctuated by more than 5%. Then one day, I decided to reduce my caloric intake significantly. I went from eating 2,250-2,750 calories down to 1,200 calories per day. You know what? It worked. I dropped 20 pounds in about three months. Awesome, right?

Not so awesome as it turns out. Having reduced my calories so drastically, I was essentially starving myself. At first, my body burned my fat stores to make up the difference in energy. The problem presented itself when my metabolism pretty much went in to preserve mode. I became easily fatigued, I could sleep for ten hours and still not feel rested and of course, I was starving literally and figuratively. This type of diet, if you can call it that, is sometimes referred to as a “crash diet.” This causes more problems than it solves.

The lowest my weight became during this experiment was 192 lbs. I am 5’ 11”. Yeah, I was skinnier than before. My pants fit better (actually I needed new pants). The problem was, I was miserable and still not all that lean.

Counting calories is a horrible way to spend your day. I’m going to take a guess here. I bet you, as did I, made deals with yourself when you were on similar diets. You said, “Hey, I’ll have this piece of chocolate cake tonight but I’ll be up early tomorrow to run three miles and burn it off” or “I just won’t eat that muffin for breakfast tomorrow.” My next guess is maybe you did run or maybe you didn’t, maybe you ate that muffin or maybe you didn’t, but it more than likely led to the ultimate downfall. The “Oh, yeah” moment, meaning “Oh, yeah, I love the taste of chocolate cake or enter vice food here and I will continue to eat it because I can now balance that out with the rest of my routine and diet.” That vice food led to more vice food which led to more fatigue and less time to work out and ultimately, added weight.

Then, of course, you went back to the weight you were before or close to it. Don’t be mad at yourself for this, just about everyone that has tried this approach has come to the same conclusion.

For me, I reverted to my old diet of junk food mixed in with healthy food and that 20 lbs. came back posthaste. What made matters worse weight-wise is that I changed jobs. I went from running around and lifting product to sitting in front of a computer making pretty graphics all day. My daily caloric burn fell accordingly. My diet did not initially match that fall. This culminated one day with an unpleasant glimpse in the mirror. I was huge. Not Maury Povich needs to take down a wall huge, but huge nonetheless.

I had ballooned to 248 lbs. in less than three years. That’s a 36 pound increase above the 20 lbs. I had already gained. I was eating horribly too. I ate fast food almost every day, lots of pastas, breads, and sugary/corn syrupy foods, especially soda. Here’s the odd part; I stayed at around the 245-250 pound range for over six months eating this way. I didn’t keep gaining weight at the rate I was. It actually slowed down. How can that be? The calorie counters and the simple math discussed earlier states that I should continue to gain weight at a pretty steady clip. Why wasn’t I? DNA.

Our bodies regulate themselves with remarkable efficiency. My body, according to my DNA, said that eating this amount of calories with this amount of carbs, fat, and protein will place me at this particular weight range. The term for this is of course, metabolism. If I ate a huge crappy meal, my body would tell me so by feeling full or super full. What did that do? I didn’t eat for a while, or if I did, the next meal was tiny as I was still full. Our bodies will balance that out. It knew that I didn’t require those extra calories and told me in its most annoying way. Think back to your diet failures and look at the results. Did you revert to your old diet and gain back all the weight you lost? Probably. Well, why is it that you can gain weight so quickly from your lowest weight back to what you live with as “normal” yet do not gain more at a similar clip.

If you emptied a water balloon and then gradually filled it back up, it would get bigger and bigger. Unless you shut off the water, and if we pretend that it couldn’t explode, it would just keep getting bigger. So, you are filling yourself with calories that are supposedly making you gain weight. Then, you stop gaining weight at the rate you were. How can that be? You didn’t stop eating those calories did you? If you are taking in roughly the same amount of calories from when your diet changes from dieting to normal and you gain all that weight back, shouldn’t your weight continue to increase no matter what, like that balloon? It doesn’t though. The math says it should. The diet promoter’s logic says it should. Very interesting, no?

I must note that if you go nuts and eat horribly bad foods high in simple carbs, like sugar and refined grain (flour for the most part), you will continue to gain weight above and beyond that range you seemed to have lived with all your life. I am simply saying that the gain affected by these foods will slow down from when you ended your latest diet to what you live with as normal.

Let’s get back to exercising. Again, do what makes you feel good. I love playing basketball and hockey, so I continue to do so. It doesn’t change my weight in any significant way. Here’s why. After I play basketball, hockey, or partake in other exercisey things, I get hungry as I am sure you do as well. So, naturally I eat. In fact, I eat enough to replace just about every calorie I just burned during said activities. Hmm. Well, that dieting promoter’s math is coming back to haunt me again. I effectively lost no weight. So, here is my second rule.

Rule 2: Exercise if you like to, not because you think you have to, to lose weight.

On a side note: I get on my stationary bike three or four times a week and ride until I burn 80 calories, or more appropriately when the display reads 80 calories. I choose 80 calories because if I ate 20g of carbs that day, the amount known to enable you to enter the ketosis phase (can be a higher amount, more on that later), I would need to burn 80 calories to use up those carbs. This is purely a psychological exercise as there is no technical reason for it. I doubt it is doing anything seeing that I am on the bike for only 9-10 minutes. Again, it just helps me mentally, and I don’t have to get all sweaty.

Here’s where you step in and say, “Matt, just don’t eat as much after working out and you will burn more than you take in.” As the previous paragraphs discussed, it doesn’t work that way. Starvation cannot be the answer. Furthermore, how much less should we eat? 5%? 10%? 20% or more?

Let’s break out that math then. Let’s say you intake 2,000 calories and burn 2,000 calories per day, but you’re overweight and want to lose it. So reduce your caloric intake by 5%. That’s 100 calories per day. Instead of one Twinkie, you can have one-third. Bam! That’s 100 calories right there. Think about that for a second. Do you believe you will lose weight if you only eat one-third of a Twinkie everyday instead of the whole thing?

How about reducing your intake by 20%. This is something I bet you have done. Let’s take the same 2,000 calorie diet and reduce it by 20% or 400 calories. Your new diet now contains 1,600 calories per day. Your body burns 2,000 calories a day. Guess what? Your body will manage to only spend 1,600 calories per day in energy. At first it won’t, and you will see that initial drop in weight, but then your body will adjust, so now what do you do? Reduce your caloric intake by another 20%? As I stated earlier, I did just that. I realize now that because I cut my calories so drastically, I cut carbohydrates as well. This was the reason for my weight loss. Pretty soon, however, my body went in to protect mode because I was not ingesting enough calories compared to my expenditure. It’s the reason I got so tired. My body basically said enough. This is not a rare phenomenon.

To further the point, behavior is significantly affected by semi-starvation. In 1950, Ancel Keys and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota (Keys et al., 1950) performed an experimental study to determine such behavioral trends. The team intensely studied 36 young, healthy men. These men were physically and physiologically at the highest levels (more than 100 signed up as an alternative to military service and the top 36 were chosen). They were placed on restricted calorie diets for six months, and their behavior was monitored closely. The observations of this study were that the volunteers experienced similar symptoms of patients with eating disorders.

The most exceptional change in behavior was a preoccupation with food. Focusing on usual activities would become difficult as the men “became plagued by persistent thoughts of food and eating.” During the phase of semi-starvation, food became a central topic of conversation, reading, and daydreaming. Rating scales were used to determine that the men were experiencing increased thoughts of food, as well as similar declines in interest in sexual, and other, activities during semi-starvation.

After the six month semi-starvation period ended, the men slowly received more food during the refeeding phase. Even after 12 weeks of refeeding, some of the men simply could not stop eating. In fact, some would intake 8,000 to 10,000 calories daily over the weekend. This is commonly known as “binge eating.” Emotionally, the men were more prone to mood swings and full on depression. From the study:

Although the subjects were psychologically healthy prior to the experiment, most experienced significant emotional deterioration as a result of semistarvation. Most of the subjects experienced periods during which their emotional distress was quite severe; almost 20% experienced extreme emotional deterioration that markedly interfered with their functioning. Depression became more severe during the course of the experiment. Elation was observed occasionally, but this was inevitably followed by “low periods.”

On top of the behavioral changes, their bodies showed an overall slowing of physiological processes. Body temperature, heart rate, and respiration all decreased, as well as basil metabolic rate (BMR). BMR is basically the amount of calories, or energy, our bodies require at rest (i.e., no physical activity) to accomplish our normal physiological processes. Two-thirds of our bodies energy needs are accounted by BMR while the rest is used for physical activity. By the end of the semi-starvation phase, the men’s BMR had dropped about 40%. That drop represents our body’s incredible ability to adapt to low-caloric intake by reducing its need for energy. This is one of the reasons why when you reduce your caloric intake by 20%, your body will match that reduction of its output.

Recent studies have shown that many dieters reduce their metabolic rate and still not lose any significant weight. The moral of the story is that you could be fat, reduce your caloric intake significantly and still not lose all that much weight. Our bodies don’t like starvation. Why this even needs to be said is odd, but here we are.

This experiment started with healthy men and semi-starvation negatively affected their lives to the point of depression, binge eating, anger, as well as increased anxiety. Hmm, I wonder how many people have felt these same emotions while on diets that aren’t closely monitored by researchers. I’ll take a guess and say almost everyone.

I’d like to point out that these studies kept macronutrient percentages close to what post-WWII Europe would be going through (determining the effects of famine was one of the reasons for the study). These men were being fed 1,560 calories per day, made up mostly of carbs while being low in fat.

A group of University of London researchers led by John Yudkin performed a similar study in 1970. This time, the subjects were given a low-carb/high-fat meal plan. From the study:

The instructions relating to the low carbohydrate diet were identical to those given to patients attending a hospital overweight clinic under our supervision. Essentially, the subjects were asked to take between 10 and 20 oz milk daily (about 300-600 ml), and as much meat, fish, eggs, cheese, butter, margarine, cream, and leafy vegetables as they wished.

The results were similar to what Yudkin had observed over the previous fifteen years at his weight-loss clinic. The subjects didn’t complain of hunger or show signs of other ill effects. On average, caloric intake decreased from 2,330 to around 1,560 per day—the same amount as the Keys study. The main difference here is the Yudkin group was not on a restricted calorie meal plan. They could’ve eaten more if they liked, but they were not hungry enough to do so. Something must be going on here.

One more note about exercising. Fitness and well-being is one thing, but if you’re looking to develop muscle mass or body-build, this isn’t the book for that. As far as getting “toned,” I personally stick with a military routine. Pushups, pull-ups, and sit-ups are about as far as I go. The one advantage of being overweight is that doing pushups can build your triceps and chest relatively quickly. As you lose weight, increase your “reps” as you are obviously lifting less weight as you go. At some point, if real nice definition is your goal, hitting the weights may be the only option. Of course, you have to lose all that fat before you will see any definition. C’est la vie. One of the points of this book is to do this stuff on the cheap, and there’s nothing cheaper than pushups, pull-ups, and sit-ups.

Speaking of military routines, one of you may ask, “How is it that overweight teenagers lose weight while at Marine boot camp. Isn’t that calories-in/calories-out?” First, if someone shows up overweight to Parris Island or San Diego, they will be put on a “diet tray,” which means they will have a calorie restricted meal plan (which may reduce carb intake as well). Couple this with the intense physical training they will undoubtedly go through, they will lose weight. They may not get as lean as other recruits, but they will obviously reduce their fat percentage.

If you want to live your life everyday as if you were in Marine boot camp, I can almost guarantee two things. One, sooner or later, your body will break down to the point that you will no longer be able to function properly. Marine boot camp is about 70-days long and the average recruit is just about at the peak age for doing physical activity. You are probably not. Even Marines stop performing the rigorous amounts of physical training after boot camp ends (they still perform PT, just not at boot camp levels). Two, you will go broke because you won’t have time for a job (unless you’re independently wealthy or are supported by someone else, of course).

I will also point out that the “Boot Camp” your local gym provides, although possibly just as rigorous as its military counterpart, gives you the choice of when to participate, and for how long. I highly doubt you’ll be in there eight-hours a day, 365-days a year. Even if you did do this, how long before your caloric intake matches your output. I wouldn’t bet on someone going the same 70-days without increasing meal size and calories when given the option. There’s nothing wrong with that either. If you are hungry, eat. Just choose foods that will not make you fat. By almost all accounts, this means choosing foods low in carbohydrates.

¹ The British Journal of Sports Medicine reports that exercise fails to help many people lose weight. A team of sports scientists conducted a study which involved monitoring the calorie expenditure of a group of people on a rest day and then again on a controlled exercise day. The results showed that exercising did not generate a calorie “after burn” that many people believe. In fact, in some cases people burned less fat on their exercise days than on their rest days.

² The Joy Project + Effects of Starvation on Behavior. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.joyproject.org/overcoming/starvation.html

³ Nutrient Intake of Subjects on Low Carbohydrate Diet Used in Treatment of Obesity’. (1970.). Retrieved from http://www.ajcn.org/content/23/7/948.full.pdf+html