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

Black Friday Deals for Good Health

Here are some great Black Friday deals--all ONLINE--that can benefit your health. I've used most of these products and vendors and recommend them. I'm not an affiliate.  Vitamins iHerb.com is having a 25% off Black Friday and Cyber Monday site-wide sale. Vitacost.com is offering $10 off $50, stackable with a variety of other deals. Tried and True Supplements I use: Doctor's Best magnesium ( peach powder , unflavored powder , and tablets ) Country Life kelp tablets Solgar zinc, 22 mg NOW vitamin D, 5,000 IU NOW astaxanthin, 4 mg Jarrow hyaluronic acid, 120 mg Solaray vitamin C tablets, 485 mg Collagen Powder, Dips, Dressings, Mayo and Sauces Primal Kitchen products--all made without added sugar or Frankenfoods--are on sale. If you remember Mark Sisson from the Mark's Daily Apple blog, Primal Kitchen is his company. PrimalKitchen.com  (25% off this week only) iHerb.com  (25% off) Vitacost.com (20% off) I love their vanilla, peanut butter and chocolate-mint collagen pow...
Post a Comment
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...
21 comments
Read more

In Defense of Fast Food

Another modern trend - healthy food should be expensive, not nutrients-dense and preferably exotic, or you would be eating like plebs who live on a dollar McD menu. --Galina L. I don't try to jump over seven-foot hurdles, I look for one-foot hurdles I can step over. --Warren Buffett, pleb who eats at McDonald's Despite all the talk about wild-caught v. farmed, grass-fed v. CAFO and the vilification of fast food, a lot of us plebs benefit simply from carbohydrate restriction. But even though diabetes and obesity are rampant, and carb restriction alone would help millions of people, the impression is out there that you need to eat in a very specific way, far beyond just watching the carbs. Following a low-carb diet is already a high hurdle for many people. If some people want or need to raise the bar for themselves, that's fine with me, but there's no need to turn low-carb into a hurdle that a lot of people can't jump over. Organic produce and grass-fed or p...
17 comments
Read more

My New Favorite Sweetener

If you're looking for a low-carb sweetener with no aftertaste, no franken-ingredients, and that doesn't upset your stomach, try monk fruit (also known as luo han guo). This is what Quest bars were sweetened with when they first came out. Monk fruit is Dr. Davis approved. You can buy monk fruit in powdered or liquid form; both are super-concentrated. They might seem expensive, but you use the powder by the spoonful (even in baking recipes) and the liquid by the drop. The baking recipes I've made with the powder have turned out well. Available from Amazon . Beware monk fruit sweeteners with erythritol.  The package of powdered monk fruit sweetener I bought says, "Use 1/8 teaspoon to create the same sweet taste as 1 teaspoon of sugar." But it's so sweet that I use 1/10 the amount. To replace a cup of sugar, I would use 5 teaspoons of monk fruit sweetener. Tip: hand-stir this in before using the beaters. It's such a fine powder that it flies up and out of the ...
2 comments
Read more