Talking Out Of Turn

Having hit 199.5 pounds on the scale this morning for the first time in over five years, it is now time to reveal my secret. What is Diet #2 on the sidebar, and what is the exercise program?

First a little history. I have tried a few diets. My biggest problem is sustainability. It really takes a will of steel for me to maintain a low-calorie diet, considering (a) feeling hungry all the time is incredibly distracting, and I am already very easily distracted, and (b) convenience is the big killer. I am too busy to make salads and juice fruits and vegetables constantly. “Ah,” you might say, “but are you too busy to sustain your health and live longer?” But the answer is, my priorities are not as black and white as all that. There are things I need to do. Well-meaning people suggest that I should take less time for work (but I’m down to 40 hours/week, can’t do that) or less time for church/ministry (yeah, right). All that’s left is family, and they are already getting the short end of the stick.

The most successful diet I ever did before this was the “Hallelujah Diet,” which claimed that God never meant for man to eat animal products, and advocated a vegan approach fortified with tons of carrot juice, Barleygreen (later Barleymax, if I remember correctly) and herbal fiber supplements. I managed this for nearly six months once. There were some problems, though; one is that I was spending 1-2 hours/day juicing, or getting the juicer out, or putting it away. We had purchased the recommended “Green Power” juicer, the low-speed juicer that basically crushes the juice out between the teeth of large gears, to keep from heating up the juice. I had lost 20 pounds after a month or two of that, and that was pretty good. But the convenience factor was killing me. Who has time to do that, and then for all your labor, drink carrot juice? Frankly, that stuff was rarely good (it makes me nauseous to think of it even now). This diet was not made for supertasters. (The guy recommended letting Barleygreen dissolve under your tongue. Have you ever tasted powdered kelp?) Eventually I fell back to starchy vegetables, fruits, and tubers (potatoes) as convenience foods, and then at some point I was sick for a week or two and couldn’t keep up the strain of the diet at all, and fell back to fast food. Another problem with this diet is the theological issues inherent in such claims.

Last year, I had sworn off fast food for a few months after I ended up in the hospital with chest pains. But convenience reigned again, eventually; the struggles of getting the house ready to sell, and then moving, killed that attempt at better eating. And still, the result was that I simply wasn’t eating. I had been told previously that I was hypoglycemic (but never tested for it, interestingly enough) and not eating made me quite faint and confused.

So, this year we knew that I had to lose weight because of my other health problems. A friend at work recommended the “South Beach” diet book, and I read it, and decided that while it seemed kind of fluffy, I’d give it a try. But at the same time, Tracey had been doing research, and ended up checking out Fuhrman’s “Eat to Live” diet, as well as his comments about low-carb diets. He seemed to have the credentials, so we decided to give this one a try. Weighing nearly 240 lbs. (not my all-time high, but close), we decided to turn over a new leaf in January and start “Eat to Live.”

“Eat to Live” recommends as much vegetables as you can eat, some fruits, and 10% of the diet as lean meats. You are welcome to eat all the calories you like, but of course most people couldn’t possibly match their old caloric intakes eating raw spinach and romaine lettuce and that sort of thing. I certainly couldn’t. And, as you can see from the charts I have posted, it worked. I was dropping weight fast. I started posting a little bit in relation to this.

Two things happened. First, I couldn’t eat enough to keep my energy up. I mean, it was impossible. I would eat whole heads of romaine lettuce at a meal, and half a pound of celery and carrots, and half a bag of spinach, and that sort of thing. I’d get to the point where I’d feel sick from the volume of the food, but still be hungry. OK, I thought, well, I’m just still getting over the addiction to bad food. But after two weeks the problem was getting worse. I hated to stop just because I felt bad, because I was getting results.

Second… well, I wandered over to Justin Taylor’s blog to see a dustup between Steve Camp and Tim Challies, and I mentioned it here. Soon after, of all things, Jollyblogger ends up at my site, and comments on my first weight post, suggesting the book Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.

Now, I have been anti-low-carb for a long time. I mean, every right-thinking person knows that fat is bad for you, right? And I have deplored it when friends went over to the dark side and tried it. Most of them didn’t stay on it, or only had twenty pounds to lose, and conventional wisdom about this is, you can always lose twenty pounds on low-carb, because you’ll drop the water weight, and then ketosis stops and then you’re stuck.

But there’s nothing conventional about wisdom. Tracey got the book from our library, and I read it. It took two weeks, which is a lifetime for me when I’m reading — not because the book was 700 pages (it was), but because it was dense, packed with scientific information, particularly in revealing the actual parameters of many of the studies that have been done about weight loss (and diabetes, and so on) in the last hundred years. The author is a scientific journalist; he does not claim to be hawking a diet, he is merely pointing out that… yes. “Everything you think you know is wrong.” And if you know me, you know that those are the words that just send me running away screaming. Because everybody claims this, particularly those who are presenting the indefensible.

But I read it, carefully. And looked into things when I was able to do so.

And I found that Taubes was right, at least about the studies that had been done. There has been almost no actual scientific (properly controlled, scientifically and objectively interpreted) experimentation done in this field at all. The four food groups, the Food Pyramid… all a load of garbage, not really put together by a consensus of scientists who had actually studied in the field. It turns out, insulin causes the body to store fat. And carbohydrates cause the body to produce insulin. Usually a little of this is fine, but we’re so stuffed with carbs (and therefore overloaded with insulin) thanks to high-fructose corn syrup and the huge amounts of bread and potatoes and just plain sugar that we eat that our bodies are constantly using a few of the carbs for energy in the moment and storing everything else we take in as fat. And as we get to be insulin-resistant, we need more insulin pumped in to accomplish the same amount of work.

Taubes isn’t just about fat, though. He gets into heart disease and the links there (are you aware that eating fats and high-cholesterol foods doesn’t directly raise your cholesterol (or more importantly, LDL) levels, but carbs do?), he gets into fiber, the need for exercise, and even cancer and its connections to all this. Mostly he’s just raising questions, but they’re good questions. And you finally start to realize the hatchet job that has been done on people like Dr. Atkins all these years.

The anti-low-carb crowd all appear to be dismissing Taubes without actually engaging him. Fuhrman and his ghost-blogger say that Taubes is crazy. But nobody actually appears to be ready to go toe-to-toe and answer the questions raised in this book. And it was enough for me to decide, before I’d even given the old diet a month, to switch.

Diet #2 is Atkins Induction. Less than 20g of carbs per day. Meat, cheese, vegetables that don’t have carbs. I can eat as much as I want, as long as I don’t eat sugar, bread, potatoes, that sort of thing.

It’s working. I have energy again. I feel great. My skin’s clearing up. And I have now lost 22 pounds since I switched diets, even though I don’t count calories.

It was slowing down a couple of weeks ago, but then I ran into an exercise program recommended on Jimmy Moore’s blog called Slow Burn.

A word about Jimmy Moore. First impressions sometimes must be overcome. Anybody who puts a Ricky Martin song into my head upon landing on his site tends to end up in my “never go back there” pile, and the first time or two that I checked his site out, that’s just what happened. That plus the fact that he’s very, very, very, very, very positive. Frankly that’s a turn-off for me, too; I must confess, I’m more likely to appreciate snark and pessimism. Sad, really, because neither are Christlike, but it’s something I’m working on. Anyway, after David Wayne pointed there for the umpteenth time I decided to seriously read up on his blog, and I ended up impressed. Yes, you have to wade through sidebar ads and a bit of self-promotion. But the man did seriously change his life (he dropped 180 pounds on Atkins), and I could see why somebody would become such a passionate advocate for the low-carb lifestyle (no, I am not going to say it the way he does, I just can’t bring myself to do it) after that. He really does have good information, and he’s not the kind of health fascist that acts like you will certainly die in the next six months if you don’t follow his advice or example to nine decimal places. That is refreshing. I recommend it, overall. And, hey, the man professes to be a Christian, and demonstrates some real transparency, so double-bonus there.

Anyway, he mentioned Slow Burn once or twice, so I thought I’d try it. Hey, thirty minutes of exercise per week? Why not? I started it last week, and all of a sudden I’m losing way more than I was before. So at the moment I’m pretty excited about this.

OK, before you decide to leave a comment telling me that I am going to end up dying of a cardiovascular disease before I’m 45… you have to read the Taubes book, first. That’s the rule. Then we can talk. In the meantime I weigh less than two hundred pounds, I feel great, I am fitting into old clothes, and I am ready for the next goal of 180 pounds (at which point my official BMI, for what it’s worth, will be rated as “overweight” and not “obese”).

That’s six pounds I lost this week, for one hour-long exercise (it took me an hour because it was the first time and I didn’t know what I was doing) and eating all the meat I wanted. Boo-yeah.