The Steaks Are High

Steak Keeps You Clever

This just in...going veggie shrinks your brain.

No, really. Scientists in Australia this week discovered that those following a meat-free diet are six times more likely to suffer brain shrinkage.

The reason? Vitamin B12 deficiency. The best sources for this powerhouse vitamin are meat (especially liver), as well as milk and fish.

Check out the article here.

Sample Menu for Intermittent Fasting

I've had a few people ask me what exactly I eat while intermittent fasting. (For the basics on fasting, read this post: Intermittent Fasting.)

First of all, I usually do a 23/1 or 22/2 schedule fast (that is, I fast for 23 hours and eat for 1, or fast for 22 hours and eat for two). That means I need to get my calories in during an hour or two, and in order to do this I up the fat content of my meals. If you have a longer eating window - say three to six hours - you can have a couple of snacks or a protein shake and then a less caloric meal.

I checked over some of my food logs to find some sample days:

Day 1
Drinks: Coffee (black), black tea, green tea, peppermint tea, Diet Coke, water
Meal: Pork souvlaki skewers (6) with tzatziki dip
Dessert: Peanut Butter Batter (1/2 egg, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 2 tbsp erythritol, 6 drops Sweetzfree, 1/2 cup unsweetened smooth peanut butter - can also be baked into crumbly cookies)
Numbers: 1900 calories, 123g fat, 19g net carbs, 189g protein

Day 2
Drinks: Coffee (black), black tea, green tea, peppermint tea, Diet Coke, water
Meal: Chicken strips sauteed with jalapeno peppers, dipped in mayo
Dessert: Atkins Bake Mix pancakes with Walden Farms pancake syrup
Numbers: 1451 calories, 97g fat, 5g net carbs, 130g protein

Day 3
Drinks: Coffee (black), black tea, green tea, peppermint tea, Diet Coke, water
Meal: Ground pork and veggie burger with mayo and Walden Farms barbecue sauce; 1 1/2 grilled chicken breasts with mayo. Just The Cheese Crunchy Baked Snack (jalapeno flavour).
Dessert: Heilmann's 85% dark chocolate (40g)
Numbers: 1644 calories, 117g fat, 13g net carbs, 135g protein

Day 4
Drinks: Coffee (black), black tea, green tea, peppermint tea, Diet Coke, water
Meal: Rib steak with melted butter, Tofu Shirataki angel hair with cheese
Dessert: Sugarless Chocolate Frosting (2 tbsp melted butter, 2 tbsp good quality unsweetened cocoa, 2 tbsp erythritol, 4 drops Sweetzfree, 2 tbsp heavy cream)
Numbers: 1584 calories, 131g fat, 12g net carbs, 88g protein

As you can see, for these days I didn't have much in the way of vegetables, since I was doing a rough Meat&Egg approach also. I really don't think this is necessary if you're doing intermittent fasting, so feel free to add in low-carb friendly veggies and salads. I've also noticed that keeping protein around 100g is the magic number for me so I don't get hungry between meals.

You'll have to play around with your own numbers and find out what works for you in terms of food variety and satiation. You might also notice I have some sort of dessert every day, which gives me a lot of psychological satisfaction from a meal. I also never feel deprived doing low carb this way, but you may not need or want dessert items.

Good luck, and enjoy watching the pounds fall off!

It's Not A Fad: Why a Low Carb Diet is Actually Better For Your Health

I'm going to stop myself before I even begin to get rid of some of the instant recoil many feel at the term “low carb”. While the upsurge in the popularity of low carbing in the late 1990s could have been a great thing, it seems to have ended up giving a great way of eating a bad name.

Dr. Atkins Did Not Die From a Heart Attack

On April 8^th 2003, Dr. Atkins slipped and fell on ice outside his office in New York. He sustained major head injuries which put him into a coma, and never recovered. His medical records, released by mistake to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (a vegetarianism-promoting group associated with PETA), showed his weight at the time of his death to be 258lbs – technically obese for his height. Needless to say, the Committee and PETA were loving this. However, he weighed only 195lbs at the time of admission to the hospital, suggesting that the apparent increase in weight is due to the treatment he received at the hospital, and fluid retention following the failure of his major organs.

If You Stop Following a Diet, You Will Regain Weight

A common criticism of the low carb approach is that people gain all the weight back as soon as they go back to eating carbs. If you make major changes to the way you eat, and then go back to eating the way you did before, you will most likely gain all the weight back. This is true of any diet.  A diet shouldn't be something you “do” to shed weight – it's a change in lifestyle that needs to be sustainable (and sustained) long-term.

Low Carb Is Not a Fad Diet

One of the side-effects of the popularity surge was that people labeled Atkins and low-carb a fad. This implies that the enthusiasm about the diet was only temporary, a brief bacony madness. However, low carbing is one of the oldest weight loss methods around. Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina in the 1870s, and describes Count Vronsky avoiding starches and sweets in preparation for the horse race: “He had no need to be in strict training, as he had very quickly been brought down to the required weight of one hundred and sixty pounds, but still he had to avoid gaining weight, and he avoided starchy foods and desserts.”

Even Dr. Spock agrees, writing in Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care: 8th Edition (first published in 1946): “Rich desserts and the amount of plain, starchy foods (cereals, breads, potatoes) taken is what determines, in the case of most people, how much they gain or lose.”

In fact, for more than one hundred years, common dietary wisdom dictated that anyone looking to shed pounds should ditch the starches and the sweets.

If you want to go even further back in time, consider our current evolutionary status. The physical bodies we currently inhabit are tuned to a pre-agricultural diet. Think about how many thousands and thousands of years it takes for evolutionary adaptations to occur. Now consider that agriculture came about only a paltry 10,000 years ago. Refined grains were only introduced to our diet about 200 years ago. During 99% of our evolutionary history, we ate like hunters and gathers. I sincerely doubt we were hunting and gathering Twinkies. Or whole grains. Humans are designed to eat animal meat, animal fat, and a small amount of nuts, vegetables and berries when animals were scarce.

One frequent rebuttal to the caveman argument is that cavemen did not live long. Their life expectancy was less than half ours. But, looking at the stats sensibly, the rates of accidental death were much higher in these truly more dangerous times. To take one simple example, the likelihood of dying from a wound that would be easily treatable today was also much higher. Add this to the high infant mortality and you can see how the average gets quickly pulled down. Also consider that cavities and other “diseases of civilization” are unheard of in pre-agricultural socieites. Starvation was also a very real threat to life, and I don't think hunting mammoths was quite so risk-free as grocery shopping.

A Brief Look At the Science

“The fallacy that eating fat will make you fat is about as scientifically logical as saying that eating tomatoes will turn you red.” - Dr. Richard K. Bernstein in Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution: The Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars

Let's be clear to begin with: the belief that saturated fat and cholesterol are deadly is just that, a belief, and a belief entirely separate from nutritional science. Check it out:

• Dietary trials of diet and heart disease began appearing in journals in the mid-1950s. Only two trials ever tested the benefits and risks of the low-fat diet recommended by the American Heart Association since 1961, also recommended by the USDA food pyramid. (By the way, if you want to know who funded the bread-heavy pyramid, look no further than the grain industry. The corn industry also paired up with the AHA in promoting margarine and vegetable oils...until the AHA had the audacity to discover they were associated with high cancer risk.) One study, from a 1963 Hungarian medical journal, found that cutting fat consumption to 1.5oz per day reduced heart disease rates. The other, a British study, concluded that it did not. The authors wrote, “A low-fat diet has no place in the treatment of myocardial infarction,” in The Lancet, 1965. [Data from Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes]

• Eating carbohydrates stimulates the secretion of insulin. Insulin causes glucose, the product of carbohydrate digestion, to be rapidly absorbed into body tissues for fuel consumption. Any glucose left over – and a huge majority of the carbs we eat aren't immediately used for fuel – is stored as fat. Sugar, not fat, makes you fat.

• When glucose levels in the body drop, insulin levels also plummet. Nothing is going to make you feel starving like a high carb meal followed by spiking and dropping insulin levels. Eating sugar makes you hungry. So you eat more. This is why people often finding themselves snacking incessantly on low-fat diets, that rice cake hitting the crunch spot, but leaving you hungry soon after.

• By avoiding carbohydrates, you also avoid this rollercoaster of spiking insulin levels. Insulin is the hormone that causes your body to make and store fat. Thus, by keeping insulin levels low, you stop storing fat and start burning it. Once you've adapted to a diet low in carbohydrates, you primarily use your fat stores for fuel instead of the ingested glucose, and thus your fat burns off rapidly.

• Why, after over 40 years of promoting a low-fat approach, are Americans getting fatter and fatter?

"A calorie is a calorie is a calorie."

No, it's not. If you honestly believe that 100 calories of orange juice will give you as much nutrition and sustenance as 100 calories of filet mignon, then I'll propose my favourite challenge. You drink 2,000 calories a day of orange juice for a year, and I'll eat 2,000 cals/day of steak and we'll see who is alive at the end of it.

Some low carb proponents have actually taken to calling it a “nutrient dense” dietary approach, which makes a lot of sense to me. You can't argue against the fact that you're getting more nutritional bang for your caloric buck from meat, fish, eggs, nuts, and vegetables than bread, pasta or potatoes.

The Disadvantages

I'm trying to present an honest as possible account of low-carbing here, and I'd be remiss if I didn't present some of the downsides.

• It is more expensive to eat this way. Buying quality sources of protein and fresh produce is much more costly than a box of pasta or a loaf of bread, no question. But doesn't that tell you something about the quality of fuel you're putting into your body? It's better, and better for you. Only you can decide how much your health and longevity are worth. I'm just sayin'.

• Following a low carb diet can be socially awkward. This is going to affect different people in different ways. If you're the kind of person who just doesn't give a damn what others think, you can skip this one. For anyone else, it can be difficult eating in a way that differs from most of your social circle. There are often ways around it – and just eating pizza toppings means you get the best bits anyway. In all seriousness, I find this to be the most annoying part of the diet, but I can usually find something to eat, or at worst, sneak in some almonds in my purse or pocket. Another thing to remember: people are often paying way less attention to your eating than you think they are. Those that do harp on at you are usually revealing their own insecurities.

• Ketosis sucks. The first two weeks of your low carb life will be MISERABLE. Make no mistake – this is why many people give up on day three. Your body needs this time to adjust to a different energy source, and in the meantime you may experience lethargy, headaches, other aches and soul-crushing sadness.

• Unless you don't get bored eating the same 5-10 things, you're going to need to learn some basic cooking skills. This, I feel, could also be an advantage, but I know some people finding cooking a pain.

And the Many Advantages

• You get to eat absolutely delicious food. Let's be honest – a lot of low-fat food tastes like cardboard. Or rubbery cardboard. Low carb gives you the real stuff: steaks and butter and salmon with hollandaise sauce and chicken wings with blue cheese dressing. Real mayonnaise. Bacon. Eggs. Did I mention butter? Cheese, cream, and cream cheese. Lobster. The recipes you can enjoy with this diet are incredible, and incredibly tasty.

• You don't have to feel hungry. Remember that up-down spiking-falling craziness of your insulin levels on a carby diet? Low carbing is renowned for appetite suppression, for people simply forgetting to eat. If you've battled with cravings and hunger while dieting, this will be a biggie for you. You don't have to constantly fight the urge to eat or need an iron will to resist the call of the vending machine. I wrote a post about how little self-control or will-power you need to stick to this diet here: The Power of Low Carb.

• For the most part, you're eating much more natural food. This is comforting to me, as a person somewhat suspicious of profit-maximizing food vendors. Eating fresh protein and vegetables avoids a surprising amount of the guesswork and controversy about food and additives.

• Your skin, hair and nails will never look better.

• You'll lose weight rapidly. So fast you won't believe your eyes, and will probably replace those scale batteries a couple of times before it sinks in that this is real.

• You'll have more energy and won't feel a slump about three hours after you eat.

• You'll grin as more and more studies come out showing low carb diets kick ass and low fat diets make people hungry and fat.

• You'll probably notice a reduction in symptoms you currently have. For me, it was joint pain and headaches.

• It's very, very easy to follow this diet. Studies have shown that low carb has greater short and long term compliance rates.

• There are more and more low carb substitutes for culturally favored foods. Tonight I ate spaghetti and meat sauce – using the 1g net carb, 20 calorie Tofu Shirataki noodles. For a pasta connoisseur, these may not fit the bill, but they do just fine in terms of texture and holding up some meat on soft white noodles. Other items you don't have to give up forever: pancakes with syrup, donuts, cheesecake, chocolate cake, frosting, barbecue sauce, pizza with the crust, and cookies.

• Increased sex drive.

In Conclusion

• Fat does not make you fat. Sugar does. And don't fool yourself - sugar is sugar, whether it comes from a white bag or a yellow banana. "No sugar added" does not mean no sugar.

• Low carb provides you with all the essential nutrients. Carbohydrates are the only food group you can completely do away with and survive.

• When you read misinformation about low carbing in the media, don't forget about the massive industries who stand to lose if this dietary approach becomes widely adopted.

• Do your research, and come to your own conclusions. Start with Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes for a wealth of studies and the latest in nutritional science.

• Eat well, and eat simply. This means foods your body has adapted to handle: meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, nuts, and very occasional berries.
  

Luscious Lemon Cheesecake

Luscious Lemon Cheesecake

I made this recipe by combining some awesome ideas from the Sweet Treats section at the Active Low Carber Forums. The base is a standard low-carb cheesecake crust, the cake is a slightly tweaked version of the incredibly Bawdy's Cheesecake, and the topping is a higher-fat version of NancyLC's Lemon Curd.

Here goes:

Preheat the oven to 350*F.

First make the base by combining:

1.5 cups almond flour (if you have other nuts you like, feel free to throw a few crushed ones in - macadamias are great for this)
5 tbsp melted butter
5 tbsp granular Splenda

Line an 8x8 cake pan with greaseproof paper. The easiest way to get the paper to "stick" to the pan is to smear a little butter from the butter wrapper around the pan and press the paper into place.

Press the cheesecake crust mixture into the bottom of the pan, and pop in the oven for 10-15 mins, until the edges start turning golden brown. I find the pre-baking stops the base soaking up the cake batter and becoming soggy.

While the crust is baking, combine the following in a large food processor or mixing bowl:
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp lemon extract
Juice of one lemon
1 1/2 cups sour cream
1/2 cup sugar-free vanilla syrup (or 1/2 cup of Splenda or equivalent sweetener)

Blend until combined. Then add:

16 ounces (2 packages) cream cheese (it's easier if the cream cheese is softened beforehand, and cut up into pieces before you add it)
2 tbsp melted butter

I usually let the crust cool a while before pouring the batter on top. Then, I bake the cheesecake in my own improvised water bath. I plop the cake tin into a wok half-filled with water and then put the whole ensemble in the oven to cook. The water prevents the top of the cake from cracking. Alternative methods: a pan of water placed below the oven shelf you use for the cheesecake. This isn't absolutely necessary, so if you feel intimidated by it or don't have the pans, don't worry about it - it just makes for a prettier overall result.

Turn the oven down to 325* and bake for 35-40 minutes. IMPORTANT: After the cooking time finishes, don't open the oven door. Just turn it off, otherwise the whoosh of cool air will crack your cake. Leave the cake in the turned-off oven for an hour (more if you can), before letting it cool at room temperature, and then moving to the refrigerator.

While the cheesecake is baking, it's time to make the topping.

Grate the zest of two lemons into a bowl. (When you hit white, stop grating and move to the next section.)
Add the juice of both lemons
Stir in 3/4 cup of Splenda (or other granular sweetener)

Now, add two whole eggs, plus two egg yolks, and stir everything up.

The next part is to slowly, slowly cook the mixture so it turns to curd. Place your mixing bowl over a pan of simmering water, and keep the heat low-med. If you cook it too fast, you'll get lemony scrambled eggs. (I always found this double-pan method intimidating, but give it a try, it's not as hard as it seems.) It should take around 10-15 mins to cook. Keep stirring so the heat moves through the mixture evenly. It should start thickening, and once it reaches a pudding-like consistency, remove it from the heat.

Add 6 tbsp butter for a richer, creamier taste. It will melt and combine if you stir pieces of butter in immediately. This is optional, so you can skip it if you'd like to marginally lower the calories of the final product!

Put your lemon curd in a container and place cling wrap over the top so it's touching the mixture, otherwise a skin will form. Place in the refrigerator to cool and thicken. This can be used as a topping for more than just cheesecake - on low carb yogurts, flax muffins and more. It tastes like an extremely intense lemon custard.

Once everything is cool, you can remove the cheesecake from the pan and spread the lemon curd over it. The result is a deliciously creamy, rich cheesecake with tangy lemon topping. Heaven for lemon lovers.

Makes 14 good size slices, each one:

331 calories
31g fat
8.5 carbs (7.5 net)
6.6 g protein

Does the Economy Make Us Fat?

I've blogged before about low carb being a more expensive way of life, at least when it comes to the grocery store bill, so I was excited to pick up this book on the economy of obesity.

Eric A. Finkelstein and Laurie Zuckerman's answer to the question "Does the Economy Make Us Fat?" can be determined by a quick glance at the cover of their book, The Fattening of America. The subtitle, below a burger bun packed with twenty dollar bills, reads: "How the Economy Makes Us Fat, If It Matters, and What to Do About It."

So how does the economy make us fat?

Finkelstein and Zuckerman's first chapter asks "Craze or Crisis?" and provides some detailed breakdown of the rising obesity rates in the United States. One of the great things about this book is the clarity of the number crunching. The authors break down obesity rates between adults and kids, by race, by income level, by gender, and even a comparative graph by country. (Saudi Arabia, by the way, is the only country to top the US in obesity prevalence. Third and fourth go to the United Kingdom and Australia.)

As far as kids go, the rate of overweight 6-11 year olds tripled from 4% to 19% in the past 30 years, as did the rate for 12-19 years old, jumping from 6% to over 17%. For adults, the picture is no prettier: the US has seen a 38% increase in obesity prevalence since the early 1990s. Americans are, as the authors put it, "indeed fat and getting fatter". Combining these numbers with the long list of medical complications from obesity, the obvious answer to "Craze or Crisis?" seems to be, well, both.

Chapters 2 and 3 take a look at the two biggest factors in causing this crazy crisis: in short, eating more and moving less. This is perhaps no big shocker to anyone who reads about weight loss, but the interesting part about Finkelstein and Zuckerman's treatment of the subject is that they take a look behind the scenes. Here, you won't find any admonishing for lack of will power and people just lazily sitting around stuffing themseves. Instead, they point to concrete economic factors that produce an "obesity inducing environment".

Graphs show unhealthy food (soda, sugar and sweets, fats and oils) getting relatively cheaper, while healthy foods like fresh fruit and vegetables and fish get more expensive. (I do take issue with fats and oils being categorically placed in the "unhealthy" category here, but more on that later.)

Other factors include the ready availability of warm-and-eat meals. The powerful example of french fries speaks volumes. Fries, if made from scratch, take about 40 mins to prepare, complete with peeling, slicing and messy, splattering oil. Frozen french fries? Ready to eat in under 14 minutes if baked. To an economist, then, it is entirely unsurprising that the average American now consumes almost 60lbs of frozen potato products per year, more than triple the amount in 1965. Yep, sixty pounds! I don't know about you, but I feel lumpier just reading that...

They continue in this tone, pointing to the increase of high-fructose in corn syrup in food as an obvious effect of these economically attractive properties: highly-subsidized, cheap, easy to transport, with a long shelf life and good resistance to freezer burn. A frightening echo of the potato stat: the average American consumes 60lbs of high-fructose corn syrup a year.

So we have high energy foods which are easier to prepare, high in calories, and very tasty. What makes more economic sense, 80 cents for 1,000 calories of potato chips, or $4 for 1,000 calories of fresh carrots - which you'll then have to peel and chop?  Some people choose the chips because they taste better, others choose them because they're simply cheaper.

We're also moving less as a result of increasingly sedentary jobs. Technological advances help the economy, but also leave workers burning less calories as they push a button or tap instructions into a computer. When it comes to leisure time, surprisingly, we have more free time, but we also have more lazy entertainment options: movies, hundreds of television channels, video games, computers.

Finkelstein and Zuckerman emphasize that small changes in diet and exercise patterns can, over time, lead to large increases in weight. They do outline some lifestyle changes that might induce weight gain. These include increased use of prescription medication with weight gain as a side effect, decreased sleep, pollution, increased use of air conditioners, as well as debunking ideas like the "fat bug" and the decrease in smoking. However, they conclude that "it's the economy, stupid." They find the most convincing explanation for the escalation in obesity rates the simple fact that technological and economic advancements have created an obesity-inducing environment.

One of the frustrating things I've found when explaining this part of the book is that most people go "Well, duh!" Ok, point taken - that there's way more cheap food around and we move a lot less isn't exactly headline news. I still found their explanation of the underlying factors extremely enlightening, bringing up factors that may seem obvious but I hadn't thought about before.

One such moment was when I read about the decreased costs of obesity to the individual. The argument here goes something like: an individual with health insurance is more likely to take risks with their health, just as drivers with car insurance take more risks on the road than those without. Sure, I may be overweight, but my health insurance will cover any side effects, so who cares? Also, the increase in drugs and treatments for obesity means that the symptoms of obesity are more treatable now than ever before. One shocking fact: obese individuals today have better cardiovascular disease risk factor profiles than normal-weight individuals had 30 years ago! Technology hasn't just made our jobs easier; we can also pop some pills or get clogged arteries cleaned out with relative ease, making the health costs of obesity appear lower.

The rest of the book continues to dissect various possible solutions, from the role of government and different public policy options for both adults and kids. The employer's dilemma is laid out with stark rationality: why should employers invest in their employee's health when the greatest likelihood is that another company, possibly a competitor, will reap the benefits?  Sure, we can argue that employee morale will increase, productivity will improve and sick days will decrease...but here's the kicker: employees in today's job market change positions on average every five years.  An employer who invests in  obesity prevention or treatment for an individual will likely not see a return on that investment.

The solution offered by these economists, is, unsurprisingly, an economic one: lower the cost of health-promoting activities, and increase the payoffs for maintaining a healthy weight. Do the opposite of where the economy is taking us, and make it cheaper and easier to be thin, not fat.

This last sentence sums up the take-home message of the book. We are described as utility maximizers - a fancy economic way of saying that given all the possible choices we could be making, we're choosing options that make us best off. The two biggest factors constraining most people's choices are time and money, and The Fattening of America clearly shows that a healthy lifestyle costs more in both time and money.

Can a book be depressing and refreshing? I think so. Depressing in terms of the grim economic picture, refreshing in the simplicity of the number-crunching. Fat people are depicted not as moral failures, but as rational people who make rational decisions in an economy that provides an abundance of cheap, fattening food and little motivation to exercise.

Although I disagree with the authors' categorical condemnation of fats as unhealthy, I found little to argue with in their recommendations for weight loss. They even admit that different weight loss strategies will work for different people, and I believe following their simple dietary strategies could help anyone concerned about their weight. In brief: cut out sugary drinks, buy fresh foods and fewer boxes and cans, eat out less, and stay away from snacks.
I'd strongly recommend this book for anyone interesting in an economic argument about the obesity crisis. Well-written and easy to read (I flew through it one Sunday morning in bed), you'll come away with a fresh and intriguing perspective on why grocery shelves and Americans look the way they do today.

Interview with the Carnivore

Jimmy Moore posted this week about a ludicrous "Interview with a Carnivore" posted by Allena Rose Tapia over at DietDective.com. Check out Jimmy's answers to her questions here: "Moderate Vegetarian" Goes To Extremes In Her Mock Interview With A Carnivore. I'd like to offer my own answers to Tapia's questions, since I think some of these questions are valid and deserve real answers:

Question: What's the one thing that keeps you from being vegetarian?

Answer: Credible research up to this point indicates that humans need a dietary source of amino and fatty acids. Some of these are only available from animal sources.

Question: What about the fact that alot of these tastes can be replicated by meat substitutes?

Answer: They absolutely cannot be replicated by meat substitutes! Are you kidding? You think a juicy steak and a Boca Burger taste anything near alike?
(Also, it's "a lot" not "alot".)

Question: I notice you have children. Do you worry about the environment you're leaving them?

Answer: I don't have children, but the argument about meat-eating being bad for the environment is based on faulty logic. Vegetarians like to tout the "one acre of land can produce 165 lbs of beef or 20,000 potatoes" line, but let's examine that briefly.

Firstly, while you do get more potatoes, potatoes are a vastly inferior source of nutrition to beef. If you doubt this, let's go head-to-head, and I'll eat only beef for a year while you eat only potatoes, and we'll see who's alive at Christmas.

Secondly, this argument rests on the faulty premise that every acre of land in the world is suitable for arable farming. This simply isn't the case - there are many areas where it is impossible to farm, but animals like sheep can graze freely. Until humans evolve a mechanism to derive nutrients from grass, perhaps we could continue to eat the ingenious devices which turn grass into nutritious protein - animals.

Question: Why aren't you worried about it?

Answer: I think there are more pressing concerns, like 8,500 people dying from AIDS every day and a largely ignored genocide ongoing in Darfur.

I am concerned about damage to the environment, however. To that end:
- I recycle whatever I can
- I use a canvas bag to go grocery shopping instead of using environmentally-damaging plastic bags
- I pay a carbon offset charge when I fly (for example, $70 for a round trip flight from Montreal-Orlando for two people)
- I don't smoke or litter
- I don't own or drive a car

Care to rack up your environmental damage next to mine just because you eat veggies instead of delicious meat?

Question: You're familiar with some of the methods by which meat animals are killed and tortured. How do you get past that when you bite into a burger?

Answer: I find the inhumane treatment of animals disgusting and unnecessary. I absolutely favor reforms so animals are raised and slaughtered in the most pain-free way possible. Temple Grandin has made some great progress with slaughterhouse improvements around the country. Buying free-range grass-fed beef, and free-range eggs are just a couple of ways to support more humane farming. Plus, happy cows taste better!

Question: How much do you worry about your health in connection to what you eat?

Answer: I pay very close attention to my health in connection to what I eat. I've noticed that eating a diet full of high-quality protein from meat, fish and eggs, and a few vegetables thrown in has made me healthier and happier than ever before. I also don't have the sallow complexion and the big dark circles you often see under vegetarians' eyes from iron deficiency.

Question: Would you be willing to reduce your meat-eating days to 3 per week, plus one fish day?

Answer: No way. Would you be willing to reduce your eating days to 4 per week?

Intermittent Fasting

I've been encouraged by a few people to blog the bad as well as the good...so here goes.

I'm completely annoyed. I've stuck to low carbing faithfully since October 19th, mostly doing the shake plan during the week, and just regular Atkins-style eating on the weekends. I've been going to the gym 4-5 times a week, doing a mix of cardio and weights.

Since gaining weight on my honeymoon and the following month, so far I've lost a grand total of...11lbs. And, honestly, most of that was the first whoosh of water weight. I lost 11lbs in a week and then nothing since then. This is dangerous territory for me. When I work out, eat well, and don't cheat, I expect to lose. When I don't lose, I get discouraged and start thinking things like, "Well, if I'm not losing weight anyway...hand over the Krispy Kremes!"

Okay, clearly that is not a good solution here. The thing is, low carbing is the only thing I know how to do, and the only thing that has worked for me. I know I could see the scale move if I did something drastic like Kimkins, but I also know that wouldn't be a long term, sensible fix. I figure if I'm going to keep eating low carb (less than 20g per day), one of the things I could play around with is the timing of my eating, rather than the content.

Dr. Mike Eades' seductive introduction to Intermittent Fasting reads as follows:

"How would you like it if I told you there was a way to eat pretty much anything and everything you wanted to eat and still maintain your health? Or better yet, what if I told you that you could eat pretty much anything and everything you wanted and even improve your health? Would you be interested?"

Intermittent Fasting, as the name implies, involves fasting for a given period of time. Most people recommend a fast less than 48 hours long, since after 48 hours, you will start losing muscle mass. Some practitioners fast one day, eat the next, fast the next, and eat the next. Others do an up-day, down-day approach where they eat high calories one day, and low the next. Interestingly, across schedules, the average caloric intake doesn't change. Fasters make up for it by eating more in one sitting.

From what I have read, it is more common for intermittent fasters to try to get one meal in per day. How is this a fast? Well, check out my schedule for the last two days:

Thursday
Brunch 11:30am-1pm

Friday
Brunch 10:15am-11:45am

Saturday
Lunch: 12pm-2pm

So, from Thursday to Friday I fasted for 21 hours. From Friday to Saturday, my fast was 24 hours. Fasters talk of their eating time as an "eating window". You choose your fasting period, and your eating window. Schedules look like this:

15/3 = 15 hour fast, 3 hour eating window
22/2 = 22 hour fast, 2 hour eating window         ...and so on.

Old-timers recommend easing into a longer fast, starting with 15 hours and working up to a comfortable number. Many people who try intermittent fasting (IF) and hate it are usually trying too much at once and shocking their bodies.

You can read more about the Eades' experience on fasting here:

Fast way to better health

Protein Power versus intermittent fasting

Inflammation and intermittent fasting

There was also an interesting story on NPR about IF, which you can listen to here:

Retune the Body with a Partial Fast

Some benefits listed on the NPR site:
- Improving glucose regulation, which can protect against diabetes
- Lowering blood pressure
- Potentially beneficial effects on the brain, protecting against Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and stroke
- Reducing inflammation
- Reducing cancer risk

                        

Partial fasting may even extend lifespan, in the same way calorie restriction has been shown to do in monkey studies!

I am just beginning my research on this fascinating topic, but I'll post more links as I come across them. One thing that seems to fit intuitively to me is thinking about the way Paleolithic humans ate: probably not three square meals a day, with snacks in between. The theory is that they would eat a larger meal after a kill, and then rest and digest. Think lions devouring their dinner and then sleeping until they need to hunt again. If you believe, as I do, and many in the low carb community do, that our bodies are naturally adapted to a Paleolithic style diet (focusing on meat, a few vegetables, and very occasional berries), why wouldn't we be adapted to a Paleolithic style eating schedule, too?

I'm sure I'll be posting more info on this soon, but for now I'm just going to try it. Essentially, it shouldn't be too much harder than the shake fast...just without the shakes! So far I haven't felt particularly hungry or deprived, and man, does that meal taste amazing when you finally eat. 

Other tips:

• Make sure you aren't going too low on calories. Lengthen your eating window to get a sensible amount of food in for the day if necessary.
• Drink water or other non-caloric drinks (diet soda, black tea, black coffee, herbal teas) to keep hydrated during your fasting.
• Don't go crazy with hunger. If you feel hungry, have a shorter fast for that day. It's not about starving yourself. Listen to your body.
• You can intermittent fast intermittently. You'll get benefits from doing it even once or twice a week. The important thing is to let your body go for some time without any caloric intake - that means no cream in coffee, no protein shakes, no juice.

If anyone feels like trying this, let me know how it goes!

Want to see some real pictures?

My interview for the awesome Weight Loss Tips site is now up, including some before and after pictures I finally felt brave enough to post:

Kate's Low Carb Weight Loss Method: Her Journey to Better Health

What I like about this site is that they feature REAL people, with real weight loss struggles and successes. You won't find any fake Russian bride pics here!

For those of you to whom that last sentence was, well, Russian, a brief update on the Kimkins Controversy is in order. The infamous woman-in-the-red-dress pic which Kimmer claimed to be her "after" pic turns out to be snatched from a Russian dating site profile. Here's a screenshot:

Anyway, many, many folks have blogged about the recent explosive discoveries, including most of the success stories also featuring photos from dating sites. A court date is set for November 1st, and I truly hope all the folks who were scammed by Kimmer get their both their money and health back in full.

Back when I first blogged about the issue, I was trying to be even-handed about it and see it from both sides. After all, when low carb became popular, there was a huge knee jerk reaction to declare it "dangerous" and "unhealthy". Now that study after study is proving those naysayers wrong about low-carbing, I didn't want to jump to conclusions about a new approach.

However, I find the utter dishonesty Kimmer has displayed by using fake pictures deplorable. She's preying on vulnerable people, those struggling to lose weight and desperate for a quick fix.

As far as the diet goes, you can find some great information here, at Kimkins Exposed, on why going on a very low calorie diet (defined as 800 calories or less) is incredibly damaging to your body. I still maintain that the Kimkins Experiment, or K/E, where you eat as much lean protein as you're hungry for, and enough fat to make the menus work, is a viable way to break a stall or get back into ketosis quickly after a stall. For a long term diet though, I think you need more fat, which is why I use mayo and full fat dressings to up my calories when I follow the shake plan.

All of these picture scandals had me pondering. It's so easy to throw up a picture and claim it's you - and people generally won't go searching for evidence to the contrary. As Photoshop skills become more and more sophisticated, it gets even easier to doctor pictures you already have. I heard of someone actually photoshopping a "No Parking" sign out of a photo and taking it into court to get himself out of a parking ticket - and he won!

I was looking around for information on how to detect such trickery, and I came across an interesting interview with a guy who does this for a living. He's developed software to detect image manipulation, and works with the FBI and companies who rely on real digital images. I found this info at a pretty funny fishing site, of all places. They care about the veracity of the images submitted to them because that's the way they give out prizes for who caught the biggest fish - and they don't want any fakers!

I find this whole mess pretty sad, and was glad to read about someone fighting the good fight against fakery. I don't think it's a huge deal if someone removes bags from under their eyes in a picture, or blurs out a pimple on an otherwise pretty photo or takes out the red eye. To me, none of those things alter the essential portrayal of a face or body. But when you're shaving the edges off arms and shrinking bodies digitally - that's dishonest. So check out some real stories (or some real fish!) to brighten your day.

Critical Mass

I have to admit, I thought getting back to low-carbing after a honeymoon off-plan would be a breeze. After all, I reasoned, I LIKE eating low carb more than eating carbs. Meat, steak especially, has always been the "best bit" of the meal for me, so discarding the surrounding crap never felt like much of a sacrifice. And after discovering low-carb alternatives for my favorite sweets, like the sugar-free chocolate cakes or deliciously creamy low carb cheesecake, I thought I had it made.

So what's going on? I am baffled by how difficult I'm finding it to get back on and, most importantly, stay back on plan. Judith Beck, in The Beck Diet Solution, has some insight to deviations from diet when she writes about the brain as a muscle. Every time you cheat, or, in her terminology, "give in" to a craving to eat (whether it be eating more, or eating unhealthy food) you're strengthening the "giving-in muscle" of your brain. You're more likely to give in the next time, and the time after that. The flip side of this, of course, is that by resisting the temptation to eat unhealthy foods or unhealthy amounts, you strengthen your resisting muscle. Next time, you're going to have a much easier time resisting. It's a way of thinking about the brain as getting into a groove.

Here's how I picture it: imagine scoring a line in a block of wood with a blade - not too much difference, right? The next time you run the blade down the line you've made, it's pretty easy to skid off course. However, the more lines you score right on top of that one, the deeper the groove you make in the wood, and the harder it is to run off course. Eventually, you've carved a deep enough path in the wood that it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get out of your groove.

It's helpful for me to think of dieting this way, as a choice between carving out a healthy path, or entrenched myself in a valley of unhealthy choices. Here is my disclaimer: I am pretty much an all-or-nothing type of girl, flinging myself into projects wholeheartedly or abandoning them as useless. I know there are dieters out there who follow programs like the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet (CAD), which allows a carbier dinner, and even sugary desserts, and people who practice re-feeding (a day of higher carb eating) on the weekends. I can't hack it. Tasting sugar makes me want more, and, hedonist that I am, I forgo my long-term goals of health and happiness for the short-term sheer pleasure of food enjoyment.

One thing I've found interesting is that when I've been eating carbs, I've avoided the low-carb community, the forums, the blogs, the journals, the newsletters, everything. How's this for twisted logic: I think I know, deep down, if I'm reading the wisdom of low-carbers, I won't cheat. If I want to cheat, I don't read it. It's as though I'm covering my ears and shaking my head, drowning out any voices that may pull me from my syrupy pool.

Such is the power of addiction. Having observed it countless times in others, it's still harder to turn that critical gaze upon oneself. I woke up this morning feeling like crap, again, and not wanting to step on the scales, again. I think, and still purely in line with my hedonist leanings, that critical mass has been reached in more ways than one. The pleasure of enjoying foods I've restricted for two years has turned into something not so pleasurable at all, with the costs far outweighing any crunchy benefits.

I know part of the extension of this carby phase is deeply connected to that very restriction. I know once I get back on plan these foods will no longer be available to me. It seems pretty logical on the part of the body to say "Hey, we're not going to eat this stuff again in ages - what's the harm in one more day?"

Clearly, the harm in one more day is that it's not just one more day. It's filling your body with sugar that leaves it craving more sugar, scoring a deeper and deeper tendency to give in to tempting off-plan foods, and ultimately setting yourself up for another day and another day.

Today, I get into a new groove.

Wedded, Breaded Bliss!

Apologies for not posting ahead of time about my long absence. I was off getting married and then honeymooning in London, Ireland and Amsterdam.

The wedding was absolutely perfect. I was prepared for things to go wrong or to have some mishaps, but we kept everything so simple that the whole day went smoothly. The ceremony was beautiful - our friend Sameer did an incredible job, explaining to everyone why there was no priest or rabbi standing before them, and making everyone cry as he spoke about how honoured he was to perform the service and talked about Simon and me.

The reception was, above all, fun! The food and bar were great, and everyone enjoyed eating, drinking and dancing. I was overwhelmed by the sheer force of happiness throughout the day: every single person at the wedding seemed genuinely happy for us and genuinely happy to be there. We were surrounded by warmth and love.

Then, Simon gave the speech to end all speeches. He was charming and funny and loving. He managed to quote a Middle English text about love from the Chaucer tale I'm using for my Master's thesis (this was pure coincidence, since he didn't know I was studying that tale!), and then read an astonishing Shakespearean sonnet he'd written himself. It was so good everyone thought he was quoting Shakespeare and just reading something to me. He had tables of people in tears by the end of it.

We danced the night away under the stars, and then were surprised by a room at the Ritz by two of our good friends. The honeymoon was fantastic too: London, Dublin, southwest Ireland, and Amsterdam. Above all, I feel so, so lucky to have married such a brilliant partner.

As for the breaded part of all this bliss, I did indulge in carbs on my honeymoon. Lots of carbs: Guinness throughout our Ireland trip (starting off at the brewery), and traditional Irish meals that included three kinds of potato - roast, boiled and mashed - and then onto the glory of fries covered in mayonnaise in Amsterdam.

More thoughts on "cheating" or off-plan eating to come, but for now I have some serious poundage to remove! Returning home to the scales was a bit of crashing return to earth, but I'm sure I can shed the extra by getting right back to low-carbing.