Pain, Pain, Go Away!

If I listened long enough to you, I'd find a way to believe it's all true. From "Reason to Believe" At the end of January, I saw my doctor for pain in my shoulder. He examined me and assured me it wasn't injured. Since he rarely sees me, he ordered a blood workup while he had me there. This was about the time I cut out wheat; a month later, I started a low-carb diet. I've read a lot about a low-carb diet not ruining your cholesterol or your waistline, so a few weeks ago, I asked my doctor to order another workup. Here are the before and after results. BEFORE January 28, 2010 Typical daily menu: banana protein shake cup of caramel corn one-half baked sweet potato and cottage cheese turkey sandwich small salad one-half apple and low-fat cheese sticks meatloaf and mashed potatoes several chocolate candies Exercise: Daily workout of either 20-minute high-intensity aerobics or 50-minute weightlifting session (Body for Life) Weight: 140 Triglycerides: 46 HDL: 42 Tot...

I sometimes hear pronouncements on the dangers of cutting out entire food groups. Generally, these red alerts are rich in adjectives ("dangerous!" "unhealthy!" "extreme!") poor in verbs (like "causes" or "leads to") and generally empty of substantiation (like "your body can't make the needed nutrients found in only X food group"). Just for fun, let's look at some food groups these folks have probably cut out of their own diets, if they ever tried them. Plankton. If these tiny sea creatures nourish fish and water mammals, why couldn't they nourish us too? Insects. "Throughout history," says National Geographic, "people have relished insects as food. Today, many cultures still do." The magazine adds that insects are high in protein and pound for pound, require far fewer resources to grow than beef. Marilyn vos Savant once remarked that the insects farmers kill are far more nutritious than the c...

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

If there's anything that will make my knee flare up, it's dancing for hours on a sticky floor. The floor I danced on last night was the stickiest dance floor I've ever danced on; it was as if it were coated with epoxy. The shoes I wore weren't sueded on the bottom, either, which would have helped. And this being a big dance weekend, I had partners who really put me through the paces. Yet after a few hours of dancing, I had no knee pain. None. I attribute this to a few things. First, after I started a low-carb diet, a lot of my joint pain disappeared: I believe the carbs were inflammatory; my doctor thinks I may have had a wheat allergy. Second, I've been doing a new strength training program (Slow Burn) that has strengthened my legs. Having lifted weights for six years and danced for eight, I thought I had strong legs. But the single-leg, slow-motion doorknob squats have strengthened them further without hurting my knees at all. I noticed something similar a year or...

Previously: Body for Life: What Went Wrong, Part 1 and Body for Life: What Went Wrong, Part 2 I didn’t know anything diet or metabolism or how prehistoric humans ate when I first read BFL. But if I’d only read the book with a more critical eye, I might have questioned its assertions. Little Meals throughout the Day? For example, Phillips claims it’s better to eat small, frequent meals throughout the day, or "graze." He has some iffy reasons for doing so. On p. 44 of Body for Life, Phillips states, It’s revealing to take a look at the animal kingdom and notice the relationship between creatures’ eating patterns and their body “types.” At one end of the spectrum are animals that load up on large amounts of food at one “meal,” then go for days, weeks or even months without eating at all. Bears are a prime example of this type of infrequent feeder....At the other end of the eating-pattern spectrum are the frequent feeders: animals that eat almost constantly but in far lesser amou...

Previously: Body for Life: What Went Wrong, Part 1 What is a High-Carb and Low-Fat Diet? So if eating a high-carb diet is bad, how does it follow that the solution to balance protein and carbohydrates? Phillips seems to understand that a high carb, low-fat diet hasn’t been good for Americans since they took heed of the Surgeon General's warning about fats (BFL p. 47): In place of fat, more and more carbs were added [to foods]. And the myth that “fat free” means “all you can eat” spread like wildfire. But yet, over the past 10 years [since 1988], we’ve continued to see a dramatic rise in the incidence of obesity....I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years who were consuming a low-fat, high-carb diet and exercising, but they were getting even fatter! Why not just adopt a low-carb or a paleo diet, then? Phillips writes of our ancient ancestors’ health and vigor before the advent of farming and attributes their good health to their diet. But according to what I...

Some readers may know that I was a Body for Life enthusiast for six years. At age 33, I had no workout program, was a little on the fleshy side, and yet I was constantly hungry. A friend showed me a book called Body for Life (BFL) by Bill Phillips, and I was so impressed by the before and after photos that I tried the program. The plan consisted of eating six servings each of carbohydrates and proteins and two servings of green vegetables per day, plus six short but hard workouts per week. (A serving is the size of your fist.) I did, indeed, go down two dress sizes quickly and build muscle while eating more on BFL. Four years later, I had recovered from a sprained neck and back from a car wreck and resumed BFL in earnest. But it stopped working, and by late 2009, I had put on 20 pounds of fat despite following the diet as well as I had before and being diligent about workouts. Why did the same program produce different results at different times? This is the question I’ll explore in th...