Skip to main content

Ripping Away the Veil, or Think and Grow Thin

Have you ever had the wrong idea about something, then saw the truth and wondered how you could have been so blind? Most of the common sense people have about weight gain is an illusion.

My mother has been overweight most of her life. She's been sedentary since middle age (she started getting arthritis around age 40), but pictures of her in her 20s and 30s from before my time show her on horseback when she and my father went hunting together. She also took care of my brothers and sisters with few modern conveniences. In other words, she was overweight but pretty active.

My parents and I always ate dinner together, almost always steak or chicken, potatoes, gravy, bread, corn and green beans. My mom never seemed to overeat. She wasn't a drinker, either.

I was an average thin kid (I didn't like my mom's cooking) and a little on the fleshy side as an adult until age 34 when I started Body for Life. After three years on this program, which includes lots of protein, carbs and hard workouts, I started gaining back the weight I'd lost. At age 41, I weighed 140 pounds--over 20 pounds more than I weighed at age 18.

What made me think that gaining weight was caused simply by overeating and lack of exercise? I had forty-one years' observations to the contrary. My mom was active (in her younger days, at least) and a moderate eater. I was eating a low-fat diet, doing a lot of workouts and gaining weight and didn't know why. It was only when I started thinking about how and when my weight gain started and I began to read other points of view and put them to the test that I began to tear away the veil.

But sometimes even seeing isn't believing. When I visited my best friend in May, I had dropped 20 pounds since the last time she saw me, and I told her how I did it: a very low-carb diet. Yet she still had a hard time believing I was eating a fatty diet and losing weight--even though she cooked the bacon herself.

This is my challenge to you: set aside common knowledge for a moment and consider what you've seen with your own eyes or felt in your own body. If it doesn't square with what you've been told, then what you've been told needs to be modified. Confusing and uncomfortable? Yes, but it's the first step to getting to the truth.

If you're confused about what causes weight gain (and how to lose weight), others have made progress on this front. Recently, others have written some terrific blog entries on this subject. Read them, and see if they make sense to you.

However, I’ve seen a lot of people who have found that aerobic exercise is not the weight loss holy grail it’s often claimed to be. These individuals generally do well to know that when they fail to get the results they’re seeking, they are not the problem – the approach is.

I like watching the reactions of people who see me for the first time since last winter. That is, if they even recognize me.
Read the rest of Sami's mini-autobiography, with before and after pictures, here: The How and Why of Weight Loss by Sami Paju

In this first part I'll focus more on the conventional wisdom and its shortcomings in explaining why people become overweight.


One thing missing from the conventional hypothesis (Change in weight = Calories IN - Calories OUT) is the arrow of causality. Even if we'd believe this formula to be correct, it doesn't tell us anything about what causes people to eat too much and expend too little of their energy.

Now it’s time to put it all together and discuss what you can do to lose weight, gain better body composition, better health, and feel more energetic.


In a nutshell, this is what the [government] committee concluded:

  • We’re fat because we consume too many calories and don’t move around enough, period, end of story, so would everyone please shut up about macronutrient balances and just go on a low-calorie diet for Pete’s sake, and then maybe go jogging.
  • We consume too many calories because we eat too much fat … uh, and sugar too.
  • We eat too much fat (uh, and sugar too) because there are too many fast-food establishments and not enough grocery stores and produce markets.
Read the rest of this funny take on USDA dietary guidelines here: 2010 Dietary Guidelines: Fat Made us Fat by Tom "Fat Head" Naughton

Keeping blood sugar to 100 mg/dl or less after eating teaches you how to avoid provocation of insulin. A shrinking tummy will follow.

Read the rest of this unusual weight-loss approach here: To Lose Weight, Prick your Finger by Dr. William Davis
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

30-second Fix for a Cracked Stick Blender

Use Mighty Fixit (if you still have some from 2012) or Rescue Tape (which looks like a similar product) to fix a cracked stick blender. After I fixed the attachment, I washed it in the sink and the tape held up. I also wrapped a knife handle several years ago, and it's been through thousands of washings.
Post a Comment
Read more

Holiday Dinner Tip from Restaurant Pros: Limit the Menu

After watching some people online getting freaked out about trying to put on holiday dinners and getting overwhelmed to the point that they're thinking about canceling the whole thing, I thought I'd put out a restaurant tip that will help people put on a dinner with less aggravation. A big complaint among the frustrated home cooks I've seen is that family members are not contributing to the dinner. But a bigger problem I see is that their menu is just too big. One lady's family is having her make 12 dishes all by herself, and some of these dishes look pretty complicated. Watch the video here or read on. The reason this is aggravating is that more dishes mean more shopping, more prep, and more cleanup. It's hard to make several dishes that will all be ready at the same time. Even though I used to be a prep cook at a restaurant, I've put on Thanksgiving dinners myself, and I cook from scratch almost every day, there's no way I'd try to make a 12-course di...
Post a Comment
Read more

Moving on to YouTube

Remember when the blogosphere was a wild ride? Doctors, writers and researchers dove into research, picked apart studies and stood up to official advice and conventional wisdom that didn't work. We found each other in the comments and made a community.  Along the way, Dr. T. Colin Campbell's research got exposed as shoddy by an English major, Tom Naughton made us laugh, "safe starch" fads made us scratch our heads, "Diabetes Warrior" Steve Cooksey almost went to jail, CarbSane trolled everyone who was anyone, and CarbSaneR trolled the troll.  Now it's very quiet. Blogs don't come up in Google search results anymore and even if they did, most of the bloggers have stopped writing.  That's why I've moved on to YouTube. Videos do come up in search results and my shorts--which are mostly what I make--get pushed out to hundreds of people or more. My videos are on food and health (biohacking), but also on growing things and fixing things. If you...
2 comments
Read more

The Inner Circle Site is a Maze!

If you're a member of Dr. Davis's Inner Circle site, you know how hard it is to navigate. But I have a YouTube Playlist of videos I've created on using the site--finding yogurt recipes, using the search function, uploading lab tests, finding which lab tests you should take, and more. All videos are under 11 minutes, the longer ones have chapters and time stamps in the description, and in about 30 minutes, you'll be navigating the site like techno-boss. Link here . 
Post a Comment
Read more

Fly with Reuteri

If you're planning to travel by plane and you want to keep enjoying the benefits of l. reuteri yogurt, you might have gotten sticker shock from the price of l. reuteri probiotics. MyReuteri * costs $46 to $83 for 30 capsules, depending on the CFUs (colony-forming units, or the number of viable microorganisms). If you're thinking about economizing by putting some yogurt in a sturdy container and taking it with you, you can do that. I'll break down the pros and cons and look at some alternatives.  Photo from Unsplash . Cost Yogurt might be less expensive than probiotics, but it isn't free. A half-cup serving costs about 70¢ to make if you start with a previous batch. It contains about 90 billion CFUs if fermented for 36 hours.  This is a lot less than $5.56 for two capsules of 50 billion CFU MyReuteri, but for a one-week vacation, you'd only save $34 by eating yogurt instead. (You can freeze any unused capsules for later.)  Furthermore, the yogurt would have to go in ...
Post a Comment
Read more