Day 33 – A Bridge Over Troubled (Brown) Water

“Way too much coffee.  But if it weren’t for the coffee, I’d have no identifiable personality whatsoever.”

~David Letterman

208.9 lbs.

Let’s look at the figures we have so far:

• 1 or 2 of every North American teen girl is anorexic, according to recent studies.
• More than 1 in 2 North Americans are overweight
• According to the CDC, about 34% of adults are obese.

Here’s one that really frosts my mini wheats: Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology recently gave a talk in which he mentions an epidemic of obesity in 6 month old children. Oy.

So it seems a small percentage of us are starving, and a large percentage of us are eating ourselves to death – and both in numbers greater than just 20 years ago.

Why? Those of us in the West live in a wealthy, industrialized society. Food, which used to be 30% of a household budget, is now so cheap and plentiful that it only costs 10%. And we actually have to pay money to go to a gym and lift heavy things in order to exert ourselves.

But just as my body is slowing things down to try to prevent me from starving during this 100 day project of 250-400 calories a day, surely our bodies have safety mechanisms to try and stop us from eating? There’s a system in our bodies called leptin, a hormone released by your fat cells that tells your brain when you’ve had enough food to meet your body’s energy requirements. But lately it ain’t workin’.

Even though food is cheaper, it isn’t like it didn’t exist before. Back in the 1950s you could go get a greasy burger and a milkshake, yet fewer people were overweight. Of course they didn’t have KFC Double-Downs back then, you could argue. But it’s not all about fat. We’re eating 175 to 350 Calories more per day now, but only 45 or so of those are from increased fat intake. More than 81% of the increase in food we eat is from increased carbohydrates. But which carbs?

I can’t help but think that the 41% increased consumption of sugary soft drinks and 35% of fruit drinks play a role. More teens are drinking pop (soda to the Americans), and in larger sizes. Adults who think they’re being responsible forgo pop for fruit juices, but the natural sugar is often bolstered with extra sweeteners. Even the pure stuff is high calorie.

Then there’s another new trend: coffee. Canada is proud of how fast Tim Horton’s franchises have spread around the world. I read somewhere about a year ago that “Timmy’s” now makes more money than McDonald’s. And they’re not alone – Starbucks and other coffee chains are doing quite well for themselves. The other day I was meeting someone at a Starbucks and a boy who looked no older than 10 walked in and ordered himself a frappé!

“Oh, but they drank lots of coffee back in the 60s! I seen it on Mad Men!”

Yeah, they drank coffee in the 60s. And the 40s. But more people drank their coffee black, they drank it less often, and the cups were smaller. I don’t think Starbucks has a made-up size name for just how small they were, but smaller than the ubiquitous “coffee mug” that sits in staff rooms, unwashed, usually with an unfunny joke printed on it. And would your take-out coffee in the disposable paper cup fit in that enlarged mug, even? Probably not.

People sometimes think they’re getting their recommended water intake because they had 4 extra large cups of coffee in a day, but as one of my regular readers, a registered nutritional consultant, writes “…most people don’t realize that coffee is a diuretic (something that causes a person to lose water), and yet they feel they have gotten their recommended fluid intake by having 8 cups of coffee a day.”

She goes on: “90% of people are clinically dehydrated but don’t realize it. If you feel thirsty you are already dehydrated. When it comes to the 8 glasses of water a day slogan…. that is the bare minimum a person should be consuming.”

When you’re getting less water your body isn’t able to use up the fat it already has stored. Fat is water soluble. This is why people on low-carb diets lose so much weight in the first week – their body uses up a lot of water weight to start burning their body fat for energy.

Long story short, what we have here is a perfect storm. We’re eating and drinking way more calories from sugar than we used to, and it’s become trendy to guzzle large amounts of dehydrating coffee on top of it… often with added sugar in the coffee.

It’s no wonder then that people who give up their daily double-double see a decline in their weight and waistline over time. Shaving off a couple of hundred calories a day and allowing your body to actually have water are both steps in the right direction, and dropping the coffee habit offers both.