Day 48 – I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

“Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the ‘Titanic’ who waved off the dessert cart.”

~ Erma Bombeck

201.8 lbs.

Getting close, but no cigar. Still, if I drop 2 lbs in the next 2 days I’ll still pass the pale of dropping 40 lbs in the first 50 days.

I get a few emails of the “reads, shots, and leaves” variety – people who apparently skim an article and immediately start clacking the keys. They sound rather like that radio DJ in the first part of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, insisting that those of us who are showing the dangers of a poor diet just want people to “sit around and eat lettuce all day”.

I wish it was that easy. It would be boring, but easy. In reality there is no “magic bullet”. Reducing your diet to a few foods can actually cause malnutrition, which is as bad as eating a lot of harmful foods.

Lemme ‘splain. No, there is too much. Lemme summarize. If you want to occasionally have bacon, ice cream, or whatever, fill your boots. “Sensible eating” isn’t about deprivation, it’s about moderation. If you’re overweight and want to slim down, it can be as easy as cutting a few hundred calories a day out of your food or drink intake.

A friend of mine who was about to hit 300 lbs complained that he didn’t get it; he had stopped drinking pop and was guzzling orange juice instead. Regular, natural orange juice has a lot of good vitamins and minerals in it, and is very good for you… but not all the time. Most fruit juices are very calorically dense. Even moreso when they have high fructose corn syrup added, as many do (read the labels carefully). So if you drink fruit juices whenever you’re thirsty, you’re adding several hundred calories per day to your intake.

Have pizza. Have chocolate. Have bacon. Life is short, and if you enjoy those things don’t sit there pining for them while thinking that they, and other fatty foods, are solely to blame for expanding waistlines. It’s a lie we don’t believe anymore.

In 1982 the US and Canadian governments, hand in hand with the American Heart Association, made a dangerous leap in logic. Based on studies some people concluded that if eating high fat foods lead to an increase in cholesterol, and an increase in cholesterol leads to heart attacks, drastically reducing fat and increasing carbohydrates would solve our obesity and heart disease problems.

They were so successful at this bit of misguided propeganda that hucksters like Susan Powter made a fortune telling people that if you stop eating fat altogether, you won’t get fat at all.

This lead to products like Snackwells and other low fat treats which were meant to be delicious solutions to the problem, and we’d all be shiny happy people, sleek and godlike.

Unfortunately, the opposite happened.

Since then not only has heart disease and obesity not gone away, it skyrocketed. Ya see, on one side you have people claiming that “low fat” is the same as “low calorie”. But fat adds flavour, so when they remove fat they boost the sweetener content to make the foods stay palatable and less sawdustlike. On the other side are nutritionists saying a calorie is a calorie. Each side contains a grain of truth and a lot of misinformation.

In defense of the “fat is bad” camp, if you eat fatty foods all the time (especially saturated fats) you’re going to be shoveling dirt onto your grave each time you shovel more of that food into your mouth.You can eat fatty stuff, just do so in reasonable moderation.

Smart choices also come into play; this summer, when you have a barbecue or three, serve hamburger or steak instead of hot dogs. Processed meats like hot dogs are high risk for heart diesease, whereas unprocessed (but still fatty) meats are far lower. Instead of buying processed deli meats, buy “home style” roast turkey or something similar, where you can actually see the grain of the muscle in the meat instead of a puréed slurry pressed into a loaf and sliced. But things like olive oil? Good fats. Don’t be scared of using it in cooking. Italians and other Mediterranean culltures traditionally use it in sautéeing – frequently – and have a lower rate of heart disease than North Americans & Brits, who prefer deep fried foods cooked in animal fats or hydrogenated oils.

In defense of nutritionists, who in most cases know their stuff, if your goal is weight loss you want to cut down on the number of calories you eat. For women the average recommended intake is 2,000 kCals per day, and for men it’s 2,500 (men having, on average, less fat and more muscle mass, pound for pound, and therefore requiring more energy). Drop that by a few hundred and your body taps into your fat reserves… you slowly and safely lose weight. It takes time, but it took you time to gain it in the first place.

Keep in mind though that not only do different components of food contain different amounts of calories, but your body processes different kinds of these components in different ways. Lets start with a breakdown of the calories:

• Carbohydrates: 1 gram = 4 calories
• Proteins: 1 gram = 4 calories
• Fat: 1 gram = 9 calories
• Alcohol: 1 gram = 7 calories

At first blush you notice fat has more than twice the calories of protein and carbs, so it would seem that cutting out fat would be an easy way to cut down on calories and therefore a high carb diet is good for you. But there are ‘good’ fats and ‘bad’ fats, and ‘good’ carbs and ‘bad’ carbs.

Cutting out anything fatty means you may miss out on good fats like the omega 3 fats found in fish and other seafoods like crab and shrimp. Omega 3 fatty acids actualy reduce the risk of heart disease, so (keeping in mind the rules of moderation) the more fat in these dishes the better. No, not the butter you dip the shrimp in. The fat in the shrimp.

Switching to high carbs may mean reading labels and, seeing a high carb count, thinking “awesome! This is what I want.” Complex carbs are good for you; these chains of 3 or more natural sugars (polysaccharides) are found in plants, and plants also have a lot of cellulose in them. So you get easily digestible starches along with not-easily-digestible fibres. It’s a 2 for 1 win-win. Energy and dietary fibre.

Watch out for simple carbs though, like refined sugars and other processed things like high fructose corn syrup. By now you know I’m not a fan of HFCS at all. It’s processed by your body differently (entirely in the liver, causing damage much like alcoholism) and, like other refined sugars, gives you squat for nutrients but adds a lot of empty calories. Refined flours are pretty bad too – all the nutrients thrown away, leaving just calories.

But if you want that pepperoni pizza and a slurpee, have it! Just have it once in a while, not every week or every day. Eating better will make you live longer. Denying yourself pleasures will just make it seem longer.