It Turns Out I Need Rules

My long struggle for mindful eating resulting in gaining a significant amount of weight!  Eating mindfully cannot mean eating impulsively. I need rules and planning or else the pounds pack on.

And yes, I care about those pounds packing on. I feel worse, I feel fat, my clothes don't fit, my knees and back go out. And yes, I can see it in the mirror or in photos.

So I'm back on a conscious plan to lose weight. This means a restricted set of food choices and lots of planning. My experiment with being an omnivore has not gone well. It's so much easier to eat what most of America eats, building a meal on bread, potatoes, pasta, or rice. Well, that really doesn't work well for me. I tried adding beans and more starchy vegetables such as sweet potatoes and winter squash into the mix, and that hasn't worked out so well either. The food tastes great! It's very filling. But, I'm hungry again too soon, and portion control goes out the window.

So back to basics on my menus. At least two meals a day have to be built around leafy greens, preferably all three. Meat in decent but not obscene portions (I just read - from Jane Brody, of all people - that older adults need much more protein than younger ones.) Cooking at home, and limited eating out.  This is the basics of Atkins. What I have found is when I actually do this, my appetite falls and so it becomes easier to stick to the plan. Less often do I have the cravings.

So it's been about a month, and I've arrested what is actually a three-year increase in my weight, since I hit my goal weight and allowed a bounce back up.  I can do a month; I've often done a big push for about a month. Then, I fall off the wagon and bounce back up. I'm at that falling off point now.

So that's where the mindfulness and other psychologically-based strategies come in. I still need to plan, I still need to focus on veggies and I still need to eschew starches. But I can't count on the diet to prevent all cravings. I also need to avoid an emotional feeling of being deprived, of feeling I'm missing out.

Here's some of what I'm doing:
I have a late afternoon slump in energy that has led to snacking on crappy chocolate candy at work in the afternoons. Physical problem: very real drop in energy, sometimes (but not always) genuinely hungry too. The mindful techniques I've learned include really checking in with my body to see if I'm hungry. Further, on days in the past when I've given in to the craving, staying in touch to find out, "what am I actually getting from this?". When I eat a bunch of candy, often it feels bad. However, when I eat one or two or three pieces, sometimes it just feels good- gives me energy. There is remorse, but no bodily bad feeling. After struggling with this for months, what has worked for the last couple of months are two new strategies: I bought a small Keurig coffeemaker for my office, and I'm careful to bring a really good, but appropriate, snack. I showed off a wide variety of snacks in a previous post, but that was when I was more omnivorous than I am now.  Now, it's usually macademia nuts, and sometimes guacamole. I've found that caffeine and fat and salt work. Cheese would also work, I bet.

In the month I've been back focused on actually dropping weight, I've had a few social engagements. I've been able to bend my rules, without throwing them completely out the window. I'm not one for more than one or two drinks, ever. So that's fine. When there is a dessert I want, I have some of it. Based on results so far, this limited indulgence has not derailed the actual weight loss.

Eight Dove squares last night

But last night was a problem. With all hatches battened down against a steady deluge, I was restless, bored, under exercised, and jazzed from reading a too exciting book too late into the night. I keep Dove chocolates in my refrigerator, and often have had one in the evening after supper. Sometimes, more than one, and that is a very slippery slope. I can't allow auto-pilot to just munch. I have to go get them one at a time, and ask myself, feel in my gut, each time: do I really want this? As I stayed awake to make sure our hero was going to come out ok, I kept making trips to the fridge and coming back with another Dove square. For accountability, I piled up all the wrappers. There were way too many this morning. I did in fact feel bad in my body before I went to bed - I knew I had messed up. But I was in the "I just don't care" mode. Sigh. What has gotten me in the past is sheer exhaustion, from thinking about this all the time.

I feel like I'm on the right track, but for how long? I beginning to think I'll never hit a weight balance where I can eat the diet I think is normally healthy, whole grains and beans and plenty of fruit as a regular part of my diet, unless I'm willing to weigh a lot more than I do now. I see lots of leafy greens in my future. Good thing I love salads.

Broken Promises

I'm not keeping commitments, especially to myself. I continue to gain weight, and I'm not exercising enough. I'm not doing other things I want to be doing - cleaning out my basement to renovate it, planning a family vacation, being more involved with my community, getting my finances in better order, upping my mindfulness practice, more time with my girl. Work continues to be me my excuse for not following through, but I don't think that cuts it. Yes, it's many hours, and exhausting. But it's not soul-crushingly awful, and I should be able to design my way through this to a better balance.

I know self-care is a priority that helps everything else, but the self-care I've been doing is coming home, flopping on the couch, eating junk food, not walking the dog "because it's dark and cold and I deserve to relax". This feels good at the time and erodes my self-respect. Every morning I wake up and vow to do better, and make specific time-bound measurable goals to achieve, not just vaguely vowing to do "better".  I have been having good breakfasts, bringing my lunch and eating the way I want to. But by late afternoon I'm pooped. Physically tired, though odds are I haven't moved much. Mentally tired dealing with many people, and looking at at least a couple of hours of documents and emails to handle before going home. Even if I fight off junk food at that moment, it's still the couch flop when I get home, unless it's a gym night. I'm still seeing the trainer, usually twice a week, where we focus on heavy lifting because I don't have the aerobic energy to do much else. 

 So I want to focus here on diet and exercise, not all the other stuff. I'm gaining weight, and I want to stop that. I want to get back outside and exercise. I don't think this is the right time in my life to be relying on mindful eating to reach my goals. The mindful strategy to avoid the binge involves both embracing the craving and observing it. But when I'm having the cravings is late in the day and I'm out of resources. I have plenty of evidence to support this. I can continue to strengthen other aspects of my mindfulness practice while going back to more tried-and-true diet tactics that have been so successful for me. I think the mindful tactics will eventually lead to a good place for me and food, but I'm not willing to live with the weight consequences of not having rules about what to eat. That's where my head is now. 

Today's Whole Foods breakfast: Spinach frittata and sausages

Before 4 pm every day, my diet is one most nutritionists would think is ok. I make my 7 servings of colorful whole fruits and vegetables every day. A usual day is sweet potato hash (with brussels sprouts, onions, and apples) with a couple of either eggs or chicken sausages for breakfast. Lunch is meat from home, usually chicken, with lettuce and spinach from the salad bar from work, and bottled salad dressing I've brought from home, low sugar versions. I am bringing fresh fruit and nuts for the afternoon snack, and many days that is what I have, not being tempted by the ever-present candy dish. Supper is either left-overs from the weekend - something like chicken thighs with cauliflower in curry sauce - or a frozen dinner, or sometimes the food bar at Whole Foods after the gym. Always vegetables. Quite often, brown rice or lately, naan. Then, on a good day, there will be tiny bedtime snack of a couple of dark chocolate peanut butter cups from Trader Joe's.  On a bad day, there will be three or more servings of chocolate in the evening, whether or not there was any (lower-quality) chocolate at work in the afternoon.

This is cumulatively way more carbohydrates than I have been striving for over several years. I would never eat even sweet potatoes, much less rice or bread. So am I gaining weight because I'm eating more carbs or because I binge on chocolate half the nights? Or, am I binging on chocolate because I eat carbs during the day?  I feel my body, mindfully sensing what is actually going on, observing, and my body is jonesing for carbs. I thought giving it healthful carbs in moderate portions during the day would satisfy it, and reduce the bingeing. Not sure that is the case.

I sometimes test my blood sugar myself (because why wouldn't I have the gadget for that?) and certainly my morning fasting numbers indicate pre-diabetes for me. It does reflect sugar binges the night before, for sure. A couple of days eating moderate-carb low sugar, and the numbers are back in the below-100 range that is good and out of pre-diabetes. So that tells me it is not necessary to eat very low carb or go into ketosis for my health. But it might be necessary for my weight and my sanity.

The strategies that have worked for me to lose weight and maintain the loss have been cooking, planning, and tracking. I moved away from the second two because I got tired of them. I wanted (still want) mindfulness to keep me eating only good things in the right quantities without the work of planning way ahead and writing it down and looking at the numbers, using that for more planning and decisions in the moment about what to eat next.

So I'm going to do tracking, I think. I'm more sure about that now than I was when I started this post. I'm going to cut the morning and afternoon snack carbs down and go more protein and leafy vegetables. I'm not sure I'm going to try to get the carbs all the way down to Atkins level, but I might. Start with the basics - track and plan, plan and track. See where that puts my energy and drive to binge. Tracking and planning doesn't prevent an evening binge by itself - so the key is really to check on whether the physical drive for the evening binge weakens when the good carbs go down.

I think I'll go walk the dog now. Maybe the cold (if not the dark) is done for the season.

Weight Checkin

In spite of the flu, I was successful at sticking to Atkins induction eating, and so had the typical Atkins dramatic drop in weight.  On this graph, a keen-eyed viewer would notice the individual weight points just before the drop, higher than anything else in over two years. This is what caused the alarm bells to go off.

This impressive one-week plunge in weight is typical when narrowing the diet from including sweets and starches to only vegetables and protein on Atkins. It's water. But, of course, the high reading on the scale also included water, so both the gain and the loss have the same components.

My pants feel slightly better, but I haven't worked out in over a week and I had all-time lows on fitbit steps while I dozed through my fever. The way my clothes fit should be further improved just by getting moving again.

Clearly what actually counts as weight loss success is seeing a trend that lasts longer than a week. But let's admit seeing the plunge is motivating!

Where I felt my best, in terms of how strong I was, how I looked, and what I was eating, was the first half of last year.  I wasn't blogging then.  I wasn't tracking my food. My weight had gone up from achieving my goal - but I always figured that goal wasn't sustainable, so I wasn't sad about that. It seemed I had some stability, at a new and better set point.  But, eventually, whatever precarious balance I had went kerflooey.  So now I need to figure out how to get back to that range, and how to keep it there in a sustainable way.

Atkins Flu

One of the things that sometimes happens when I go to a severely carb-restricted diet is I get "Atkins flu".  This happens in the first week or so -- head ache, muscle cramps, nausea.  I remember one particularly problematic night in a hotel room in Salt Lake City, very miserable, without remedies available in the middle of the night.   Last night also wasn't so great, at least in the early morning.

Some variations of low carb diets say this is just a natural result of de-toxing.  "The worse you feel, the better it is, because it's all the bad things leaving your body."  This is horseshit.  Something that feels that bad is bound to be bad for you.  This is how we know there is something wrong that needs to be addressed.

I like grainy salt for roasted vegetables, so this has been a staple on my counter for a while.

I actually can't detect differences in taste between different salts, 

but the texture is important to how the dish turns out.

The Atkins folks make it very clear - during the first couple of weeks on their diet, there will be a lot of water loss.  The water is stored throughout your body.  The whoosh of losing water flushes out salt that is also in solution throughout your cells, almost as if you were losing it through sweat.  You have to drink a lot of water, and you have to replace the salt loss.

So when I decided I couldn't toss and turn any more, I got up and consumed very quickly: 2 extra-strength Tylenol, 10 ounces of water, a half cup of coffee, and not quite an eighth of a teaspoon of salt, put in the palm of my hand and licked off.

Now, an hour and a half later, I feel fine.  But the Atkins folks note it is much harder to cure this feeling than to prevent it.  They recommend adding an extra half-teaspoon of salt, or two tablespoons of soy sauce, or a couple of cups of regular-sodium broth, every day above how you would normally cook, for the first several weeks.  I love salt.  I may have learned to like roasted vegetables because they can be covered in grainy salt like french fries.  So I just have to remember to add salt to everything, and don't feel abashed or ashamed of doing it.

Hi Again

This past year has not been a great year for blogging, nor for weight management.  The last post foreshadowed the issues I am still facing, and things have not gone so well on the weight front.  Two days ago, the scale hit a weight twenty pounds over my goal weight, that I achieved slightly more than a year ago.

The Evidence

Clearly, I can't be trusted to make decisions in the moment, and equally clearly, I haven't developed habits that keep me from going too far off track.  So it's back to the tried and true techniques, that require effort and discipline and focus and work, in an effort to stop this trend and wrestle my weight back down to where I want it to be.

Why worry about my weight, when the world seems to be going to hell in a hand-basket around me? How First World of me, to care about how I look and how I feel when there are so many real problems I should be doing something about.  But you know what? While I feel bad, and feel that I look bad, and my clothes don't fit, I feel less effective in everything else I do.  A big portion of my self-image is that I am competent, and out-of-control eating and a sloppy body makes me feel incompetent.  The rest of my life goes better when I feel in control of my eating and thus my body.

Here are the tried-and-true techniques that science tells me should work to create weight loss, confirmed by my own records showing they have worked in the past:

TRACK FOOD

I'm back on board My Fitness Pal, tracking every morsel that passes my lips.

WEIGH DAILY

Of course, I have continued my coming-up-on twenty years of almost daily weighing. It's accountability. My weight will continue to bounce up and down 1-3 pounds a day, so for me daily weighing enables the assessment of trends while avoiding the disappointment that would come from a single weekly weigh-in that happened to be on an "up" day.

HAVE A BUDDY

That would be you, dear reader. Even though you are few, you are vital for my accountability.

CUT THE CARBS

Ultimately, calories matter.  My history tells me the way to cut calories is to cut the carbs. This is sugar, but also bread, rice, pasta, potatoes.  I am following rules:  I am on Atkins induction.  I am apparently a rule-follower, and it is more productive for me to arrest a bad trend by planning a specific length of time to follow a specific set of rules.  I can be 100% for a month, I know that.

COOK VEGETABLES

This morning's breakfast: fried eggs over cabbage and bacon

There are luscious wonderful vegetables.  I like salads, and eat them often, and my body even seeks them out when I'm not following rules.  But cooked vegetables satisfy my soul in a way most salads cannot.  And they bring what carbs I do eat.

MOVE

I continue to go to the gym twice a week (for mostly weight training), run about once a week, and track my steps on fitbit.  Science says you won't lose weight from exercise alone, but combined with a calorie reduction it is helpful, and it's vital for maintenance.  Also, it really helps with that self-image of being competent thing I mentioned above.

I've got a new technique I'm adding to the mix.  I'm not sure of its effectiveness, but my reading indicates it should be helpful:

MINDFUL EATING

I'm personally getting a little bit annoyed with the promotion of mindfulness in everything, and meditation is not the same thing as mindfulness.  I'm a big fan of abstract thinking, planning ahead, and being transported out of the moment by daydreaming.  But that's a rant for a different day. Evidence suggests mindful eating should help with curbing out of control eating both in terms of what I choose to eat and how much of it I eat. I'm thinking mindful eating as I practice it is worthy of a separate blog post.

So guys, I'm going to try to be more frequent and faithful on the writing as try to arrest my upward trend and return to the body I had just fifteen months ago.  I think there may not be so many lavishly illustrated carefully crafted essays as shorter notes about what I am doing and thinking.

Thanks for reading.

Cheat Days

Because eating very low carb causes your body to switch how it processes food, a single day of eating high carb can cause weight to fluctuate.  Just as the original 4-8 pounds loss is water, so the quick gain is also water.  I've now got an N=2 example of this.  Here is the stackup of the nutrients I've been eating, with net carbs in red on the bottom:

I went on Atkins seriously on 1/20/2015, initially aiming for less than 20 net grams of carbohydrate a day, now less than 30.  The big peak on the right is my birthday, 3/22.  There is a small peak around March 1 - I was being social, which included eating much more liberally - not so much in calories but in content, allowing a wider range of carbohydrate foods.

Here is my weight for the same time period, with daily numbers in blue and the weekly average in red:

You can see two bump ups-in my daily scale weight, the first from the 2-day smaller peak and the second from my birthday.  In each case, it took about a week to get back on trend.

Is it worth it to deviate like that?

Short answer:  YES - to a point.  I live in the real world, and relationships are more important.than what I eat or what I weigh.  But there comes a point where it is not about the relationships, but just about really really liking the Carvel ice cream cake with birthday candles... and that's the point where it would make sense to stop!  At any rate, it's always reversable, and you just have to acknowledge (even at the time) this is what will happen.

But it's fine. Excelsior!

Absolutely Actively Atkins

Today I saw a number on the scale I last saw a number on the scale I last saw in the year 2000! And the weekly average is also down!  I am overcoming the bounce!  Not blasting through, but maybe an image of chipping a slightly bigger dent with each bounce.

This is taking a whole lot of effort. I'm not sure how long I'll maintain the effort, but I'm really working on finding sustainable things to eat and short cuts and habits to make doing this easier.  I would like to achieve a certain goal - which is less than 10 pounds away - but may be satisfied 5 pounds short of that - if it becomes my new set point.

So this time I am totally, completely, "doing Atkins".  In the past, I have read the books and done it, but decided in many cases that I know it, and so I made choices without thinking them completely through.  I also have been influenced by cultural stigmas around Atkins, which resulted in me being ambivalent about the process, and only committed to it for a short-term weight-loss goal, not for the rest of my life.  I wrote about it this in the past. I've gone back and read those posts, which are newly tagged "Atkins". Now, I'm all in. For life, but that doesn't mean just like what I'm doing now.  I'm out of the closet, and dangerously close to wanting to proselytize.

The science is finally catching up with Atkins, which was developed by Dr. Robert Atkins based on his clinical experience, not conventional wisdom. Current dietary recommendations - and even the way Weight Watchers scores points - is relatively Atkins friendly.  You want to lose weight, control your blood sugar, or improve your cholesterol numbers?  Cut carbs, up protein, and don't worry about "healthy fats".  This is now the conventional wisdom. In fact, the newest recommendations by the "Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee", (which are draft recommendations and yet to be finalized) basically say this, walking away from the old food pyramid with starches on the big bottom.  The part of this that seemed to grab the most headlines was the point that dietary cholesterol has essentially nothing to do with the cholesterol and so you can feel fine about eating eggs.  The original recommendation was based on a reasonable hypothesis - but no clinical evidence - that there was a relationship.  The science testing this hypothesis has been repeated several times in the last twenty years, always with the same result - the cholesterol in your blood is manufactured by your body, not from eating cholesterol.  But due to prejudice, and scientific and bureaucratic inertia, the draft guidelines finally (and grudgingly) acknowledge this.

There is a counter culture underground that has followed Atkins for years. There are also many other named variations of eating like this - Paleo is the current most popular label. I am sticking with the detailed Atkins guidelines right now, not mixing and matching from other diets. But there are of course sub-variants even within Atkins. I've found several discussion groups on-line where folks are adamant about following "the Atkins diet as Dr. Atkins himself specified it". That is captured in a book published in 1980; there was an update in 1993 and maybe some revised editions until Dr. Atkins died (from injuries sustained in a fall) in 2003.  They seem to think he was a prophet, where I think he was an insightful clinician.  But science has moved on. So there are books written from 2010 on that modify The Doctor's prescriptions slightly. That is what I am following.  I'm going back and reading and re-reading a couple of different books that stick to the same rules but describe and talk about them differently.

Certainly anyone reading this far knows the broad outlines of the Atkins Diet.  Eat meat. Eat fat.  Eat bacon and eggs for every meal. Eat bacon-wrapped bacon.  Eat steaks with bearnaise sauce with a daily glass of red wine. Eat Atkins-labelled shakes and energy bars.

Well, actually not so much.  The main new point is to focus on getting enough vegetables.  This is an element for life.  Limited portions of meat, limited amounts of dairy, limited amounts of avocados and nuts.  No fake sweeteners (though there are raging debates about what is fake - for example, is stevia fake?  Are sugar alcohols?).  Read every label and eliminate any with sugar (in any of its synonyms) listed within the first five ingredients, or that has more than five carbohydrate grams per serving.  Generally, don't even bother looking at anything labelled "low fat" because chances are it has starch and sugar - this is very true in the dairy world, including greek yogurt. Track your food, and start with an average of 20 net carbohydrate grams per day, +/- 2 grams.  "Net carbohydrates" means you can subtract fiber grams from the total, so high fiber vegetables like cauliflower and avocados can add volume.  As you track your food, also track your calories because they do matter if you want to lose weight. I read a lot, and there are tidbits, pointers, and new ideas coming up all the time.

In practice, this pretty much means cook from scratch from primary ingredients.  Almost all prepared salad dressings or sauces have sugar in them. Almost all prepared meats have too many carbs. No yummy beef stews or curried chicken from the food bar at Whole Foods - because I don't know what's in them, but they are almost all thickened with some form of starch.  (I can grab a roast chicken, though, hooray!)

The general idea is to strictly limit carbs and calories initially. One's body takes a couple of weeks to learn how to process fat as the main source of fuel. Once the transition is made, food choices can be slightly expanded, along with the carb count which can ratchet up by about 5 grams a week. Generally, to lose weight, carbs need to be stopped under 50 grams.  Because meat is limited, and carbs are limited, but generally you should eat at least 1100 calories a day, a lot of the food is fat. Atkins does not really emphasize "good fats" versus bad ones, though a consequence of limiting meat is limiting fat from meat.  As I am losing weight, some of my fuel by definition is coming from my own body fat, and I'm limiting total calories.  Once I decide to stop losing weight, I won't be burning my own fat, and so will need to up my calorie count to provide adequate fuel. NOT FROM CARBS, and not from protein, so my fat intake should go up.

So I'm staying under 30 grams of net carbs now, and only gradually widening my food choices. Blueberries are my favorite berries, which is the first fruit allowed. Melon is also allowed early on, but that's hard to do in small portions for just me. I've got all tree nuts, (but not cashews or peanuts) and most green vegetables, and would eat small amounts of winter squash, sweet potatoes, and carrots, but I haven't gone out of my way to get them.

I travelled for work this week, and managed my way through even without a concrete plan. We went as a group of six to a famous barbecue place. It was St Patrick's Day, and everyone had beer.  I looked at it longingly, but found a "dirty martini" on the menu. Alcohol has no carbs, it has a tiny amount of vermouth, and brine from the olive jar. Salty and tasty.  Dinner was way too much meat (no red sauce) and a tasty vegetable kabob.  I boxed up the meat, left it on the hotel room windowsill overnight, and had some plain meat for breakfast, got a green salad from the cafeteria to go with the last of the meat for lunch.  My a handful of almonds I had brought got me home.

Folks on the discussion group are full of discussions about how to make sweets. They use stevia and xylitol. Not for me. They also make "fat bombs" with these fake sweets, to up calorie count without carbs.  But I did make my version where I melted in the microwave roughly a quarter-cup each of almond butter, coconut oil, cream cheese, and 80% dark chocolate. Poured into mini-muffin tins and frozen (because not stable at room temp) a single treat has 120 calories and only 2 carbs - and nothing fake!  One a day max, if my calorie count is low.

I intend to make shrimp alfredo with basil pesto zoodles for dinner.  (Zoodles are strings cut from zucchini, using a vegetti which happily my girl gave me for Christmas. )  Yum!

Tomorrow, I'll eat a treat, and allow myself to go up in carbs - but ideally would like to be under 50. I won't take the whole day off, because I'm on a good trend, and I don't want to upset it.

Excelsior!  Nothing motivates to stay the course like seeing progress!

*BOUNCE*

Just as I thought - my rubber floor has caused my weight loss to stall.  Why?

I've reallygot to get moving at this moment, so I can't analyze this fully now. The weight point circled in red is my actual scale weight from one day this week - 4 1/2 pounds heavier than today!  This is why I weigh myself every single day, so a single anomaly cannot drive me crazy. Without Tuesday (no idea why it's so different - it has to be water, but I don't see it in my food logs), my average weight for the week would be flat.

I know I've neglected exercise - I got a cold two weeks ago, it's mostly gone now, but it's snowed or rained every day and so even the dog walking has suffered.

I've done a look at what I'm eating. I log every bite through My Fitness Pal, and I learned a couple of weeks ago how to do an export of the data using an add-on.  It's kind of annoying to use so I brought things up to date manually just now.  The light area at the bottom are net carbs, which is what I'm trying to manage, while keeping an eye on the total I'm eating as well.

Based on Atkins procedures, at this point I should be widening my food choices and slowly increasing my net carbs. Until I see a true drop on the scale, I'm going to hold at about where I am right now - 25 grams of net carbs per day, with berries and nuts but no beans or grains or very starchy veggies.  Bacon and egg breakfast salad, steak and asparagus dinners, I'm lookin' at you!

The Crucial Tipping Point

I've been very good at sticking to eating well, or at least controlled. I started this determined round of weight loss on January 20, four and a half weeks ago.  I've been focusing on the details of Atkins, not just the general principles. I've been concentrating on eating vegetables at every meal, even breakfast. And it has had results. I've lost about six pounds, and I feel great.

But now I'm once again at the crucial point.  I've hit my "rubber floor", the weight at which I lose momentum, turn arounc and gain weight again. This has happened to me four times before, in the time I've been doing this blog. Here's my post on this from 2013, when I hit this point.

Here is what is going on that makes it difficult to keep going:

• The weight loss has slowed. The instant and heady success of the first few days and weeks are gone. This week I lost weight but less than before. (This is using my simple average of the week's daily readings.)
• The work of cooking is starting to seem to hard to sustain. I have other ways I'd rather spend my time.
• The food is starting to get a bit boring. When I make a big batch of something, I get bored before its done. 
• I want to eat with my girl more often, but she often she doesn't like what I like in the limited selection I have available.
• I crave certain treats which aren't allowed.

So here's what I'm doing to counter these problems, which are always the same:

• I'm upping the exercise. I'm working towards the first 5K of the season in March. I've kept up with two weight training sessions a week besides. 
• I'm really focused on getting sufficient vegetables at every meal. This is often harder than finding the protein.
• I'm really focused on portion control. Previous runs at Atkins used the food lists of "allowed" foods, without paying attention to how much of each is reasonable. Nuts, for example, no more than a quarter cup a day. Dairy, only a couple of ounces.
• I am ratcheting up the carbs a bit. Atkins recommends adding in a wider range of foods, and upping the carb level slightly, when you are close to goal, which I am. But I'm striving to keep it down. The other point they make is the wider range of foods cannot be at the expense of the main foundation vegetables that you have to eat every single day.
• I've got a set of "go to" quick and easy foods. A roast chicken from Whole Foods, for example, with easy vegetable sides. I found some Atkins and other low carb frozen meals when I stopped by a fancy new supermarket in a different neighborhood.
• I'm reading recipes and finding new things to cook. This also helps in trying to find things for my girl - adding sides she will like.
• I've got a couple of treats I allow myself, that are naturally low carb. (I tried a "low carb" Atkins brand chocolate-coated bar and couldn't stand the taste of malitol.) The two so far are blueberries (fresh or frozen) with creme fraiche or mascarpone, or crunchy almond butter with celery.  I think anything with actual chocolate in it is too dangerous right now.
• I've been giving myself some non-food rewards. I've bought some clothes, about which I may post later.
• I'm making very short term goals. Right now I want to sustain this through the next weekend. It's likely to be a social weekend, and I want to have fun!  But I'm setting parameters on what that can include.

So I've played with my data all morning while writing this post. Time to get out there and move!

Buckling down with Atkins

I've written before about my recurrent trend hovering around the same weight- for more than two years! I'm pretty sure that maintaining my weight within a five pound band, even with a pattern of rapid loss followed by slow gain, is more good for me than bad.

I drifted upward in weight over the summer, and its time to wrestle it back down. I started by simply cutting back and upping the exercise. (This sounds very simple but its not. Especially the activity levels. I just couldn't have done it sooner for other reasons.)

But I got re-energized with Atkins as the way to eat. I surfed into a video of Gary Taubes again explaining what really is going on in our bodies with nutrition. Here is my understanding of the explanation which makes total sense to me.

We don't get fat because we eat too much while exercising too little. When we eat too many calories and burn too few calories, the result is we get fat, but there is no "because" there. Why do we eat more? Why do we burn less? Its not because of sloth and gluttony, moral failings on our part. There are many physiological reasons, but the big one for Americans today is insulin regulation. Sugar and simple carbs are the reason we eat more. Carbs make us hungry and screws up out insulin and other hormones. And on the calorie burn side, exercise has less impact than your internal hormonally driven metabolism regulation, which is also affected by the carbs. For many people, simply cutting the carbs sharply with no other changes will result in a weight loss. But for many people that have eaten otherwise for years, it is more complicated than that. And even for those for whom the magic formula works, it is very hard to persist in our society that doesn't build menus that way.

Nuances I have picked up: many people who try Atkins get the "fat is not bad for you" message and so end up after a time eating the worst of all possible worlds- high fat AND high carb. This is a recipe for all the bad things that come from bad nutrition, not just fat but unhealthy hearts and diabetes. So after being on Atkins for a while, moving away from strict adherence is a time for caution.

Here's a tidbit I got from a new book I just started: Mild depression is a positive evolutionary adaptation! I love this, understanding why our bodies have evolved to do certain things. We evolved as hunter gatherers, moving all the time. The only reason NOT to move was because food was scarce. So hunkering down, slowing your metabolism to make it through the dry season, or the winter, was an adaptive semi-hibernation type strategy. The obvious problem we have is we have no food shortage during the time our metabolism is dialed down. The trick is learning how to break the depression-which is the catalyst and which the result? Does moving break it, or does it break for other reasons, and then we start moving? I'm only a little way in the book, maybe the answer will appear.

In the mean time, I'm experiencing the basic Atkins induction rapid loss of 4-5 pounds of water. Very rewarding to step on the scale each day and see huge progress. I know my normal pattern would be two more weeks of faithful adherence which cements the gains into true loss, followed by several months of allowing it to creep back up. Stay tuned to see how I handle this.




What's different this time so far: I started up running before going into Atkins. I've kept it up, and I have a 5K coming up. The Atkins book does not recommend starting exercise the same time as the diet, but I'm currently more focused on strong versus slim.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Fat Chance

If you want to skip to the specific recommendations out of the book, scroll down to the section in purple below.

Part of what I do to motivate myself is read books about diet and exercise and health. The topic interests me, and it affects what I actually do and eat.  So the latest one, picked from hearing interviews with the author on the radio book tour circuit, is Fat Chance, by Robert Lustig. This is much more about health than about diet, and has added to my understanding of what is going on inside me and everybody else.  I've read a lot about how we metabolize fat and sugar and this book didn't contradict what I thought I knew, but adds depth to this in a very relevant way for me.

Dr. Lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist, where for decades he has worked with children that have extraordinary weight problems, sometimes as incidental to much more serious problems.  Here, in the order I happen to remember them, are some of the observations in this book.

He starts from the premise that Gary Taubes introduced me to:  we don't grow fat through sloth and gluttony, ie not through eating too much and moving too little. Turn that upside down: we eat too much and move too little because of genetically and environmentally driven imperatives.  When a teen age boy eats his way through the whole refrigerator in a few hours during his growth spurt, we don't say he grows tall because he eats. We say he eats because he is growing tall. So it is with our body shape and our weight: how much we are driven to eat and how much or little we move is a result, not a cause, of our body chemistry.  Why our body chemistry is driving these imperatives is not necessarily (yet) well understood and agreed to, but never-the-less this point is critical:  it is not just a matter of will power.  Not only is it not our fault for being a slothful glutton, but even if we exercise more and eat less we might not lose weight. Taubes cites research on squirrels that are genetically driven to add weight in the fall - they can literally starve to death from organ failure while their body chemistry is diverting food energy to fat deposits.  Lustig has plenty of examples as well of abnormal children whose bodies are driven to add fat. He has to change something in their interior chemistry for them to be able to lose weight.

Lustig also distinguishes between health and fat.  Part of it is by distinguishing between types of fat: subcutaneous fat (big butt fat) and visceral fat (beer belly fat). It is the second that is unhealthy, and it is the fat that coats your internal organs. You can be skinny to the outside eye but be coated with visceral fat inside. He notes that a significant portion of "normal weight" people have unhealthy diets and internal fat. A significant portion of overweight people are quite fit, though they may have big butts. You might be better off being slightly overweight than underweight, at least in terms of how long you live.  But being morbidly obese certainly drives many major health issues. It is the collection of symptoms known as metabolic syndrome that comes from being obese that he is targeting his effects at.

Sad news: Lustig says pretty much no one will lose weight from exercise. Your body will compensate, and you will burn less calories when you sit and and sleep, and your appetite will increase. However, exercise is still the magic bullet for health.  You are probably swapping bad visceral fat for muscle or better (if unsightly) big butt fat, and there a gazillion other benefits.

Lustig also distinguishes between carbs, going much deeper than Taubes. He goes down to the molecular level of different sugars to discuss how they impact our health. His conclusion as I understand it: fructose is the worst for us, whether it comes from cane sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Anything that tastes sweet is bad.  But fiber offsets the bad impacts of fructose. This is why fiber-rich starchy foods can be fine for us (including whole fruit, but not fruit juice or even smoothies). He goes deep into the hormonal system (makes sense, he's an endocrinologist), and frankly I decided not to try to follow it all.

This was the first explanation about how both meat-centric low carb diets and bean and whole grain vegan diets can be equally healthy that made any sense to me.  Being a bread-itarian won't work - white rice and white bread, even without sugar, are calories that will drive fat storage. He also notes that processed food almost always has eliminated fiber and added sugar, and explains why that makes perfect sense from the producer's point of view: it actually makes it last longer. Our industrial food system requires us to make, package, and ship food over long distances and times. Grocery store bread will last on the counter for up to a couple of weeks, in contrast to home made bread which goes bad in a day or two.

Lustig is careful not to paint anything with too broad a brush. He distinguishes between ethnic populations, nations, and specific genetic conditions. He has a sweeping survey of environmental things that might be bad for us. We can't change our genetics, but we can change our environment and what we eat, and thus change our biochemistry.

So what does he recommend we actually do as individuals?  First, he says he really doesn't care much about weight, only health.  But we can do three things:  eliminate the poison, and take the two antidotes.

The poison is sugar, and it is insidiously everywhere.  Almost everything that has a bar code on it has sugar added to it. He sees no reason to ever drink any sugar.  Soda, frappuccinos, and fruit smoothies are almost equally bad for you, according to Lustig. He also condemns artificial sweeteners, for driving certain chemistries or responses. He actually recommends a national level public health intervention to counteract sugar's pervasiveness in our food, and in the meantime, he notes that only Americans above a certain income level or in a certain environment can afford the time and money to find, cook and eat foods without sugar.

The two antidotes:  fiber and exercise.  He makes a persuasive case that fiber causes our bodies to process sugar differently and better. He notes that the new Atkins prescription aims at many grams of fiber from vegetables, but few people achieve those levels (me included). Meat is so much easier to prepare, and it lasts longer and can be frozen and defrosted more easily.

I won't go into the benefits of exercise, which we all believe. It adds muscle, and it lowers insulin resistance, and it counteracts depression. We should all do more of it. Yes of course.

So what does this mean for me? I have not lost any weight this week, according to my weekly averaging. My body seems to be stabilizing a few pounds above where it was before the holidays. No. I can't allow this. I have tracked my food faithfully for the past few weeks, and my carbs have been around 100 grams a day, (this is about a half to a third of a normal American's diet, according to Atkins) with 10-20 grams of fiber (about average for Americans, but less than recommended). Yesterday's food was crazy, with grazing all evening while home alone. I'm going to go purely Atkins for a couple of weeks, and see if I can blast through this plateau.  I am also going to up the exercise, only to try to keep the body from shutting down. I'm going to hunt for fiber, and fill up on hunks of meat (not sausages or meatballs). I'll try to erradicate sugar, including no nightly treat - only a weekly one. We'll see how it goes, because I don't control my life completely but I've been at this long enough to know some of the things I need to do.

Why Diets Fail

Jane Brody's New York Times column this week talks about a series of articles  in The Lancet, a medical journal.  Three of the four articles are focused on public health and the obesity pandemic. The third, of greatest interest to me, focuses on quantifying weight changes based on energy in versus energy out.  (I'd like to save the world, of course, but how about me first!)  Because I am a geek and because I wanted to avoid all chores and other problems for a while, I flopped on the couch this morning and read the actual Lancet article on this quantification.

So guess what? Existing projections of how much weight you should lose by cutting calories or upping exercise are wrong, and overestimate weight loss.  Well, duh. We knew that, those of us out here in the trenches of the weight wars. The sophistication they have added to the calculations isn't overwhelming:  very fat people lose weight more quickly than others for a given cut in food or increase in exercise, simply because it takes more calories to maintain their body weight (they burn more calories while lying on the couch) and because they burn more calories during aerobic exercise (it takes more calories to move those big bodies). As your weight declines, you lose that effect and so it takes cutting out more calories or upping exercise even more to continue to lose at the same weight.

(They do not include in their model any assumption that exercise leads to greater muscle mass which burns more calories - they include the relative burns of fat versus muscle, and assume the fat goes away as weight loss occurs, but explicitly do not include any increase in absolute muscle mass. They say it's probably not a big deal for aerobic exercise. Very fat people have to have muscles just to move, of course. I know I've added muscle, not just relatively but absolutely, but I do quite a bit of weight training.)

An additional conclusions they reach which I have to quote because I can't follow all of how they got there:  when there is a lot of fat to lose, you will lose faster by adding exercise, but after a certain level of exercise has been added, there is more benefit to cutting food than to adding more exercise.  Going beyond the math, they suggest it does make sense to "go on a diet" - have a big, artificial restriction in food - at the beginning of a weight loss program, because otherwise their model's predictions of how long it will take to get to goal is very discouraging. Most books I've read of popular diets follow that approach - lose, then taper off towards maintenance.

They spend some time looking at plateaus. They note that many dieters reach a plateau after eight months, and speculate on why.  Apparently no in-patient studies go beyond six months, and they say only in-patient studies are accurate for food intake and exercise records - "diaries are notoriously inaccurate". Because there is no change in the math they have calculated during the six months, they don't think there is a sudden change at month seven or eight to account for the plateau. Instead, they note there is a lag between adding food and gaining weight back, and they hypothesize most "free-living" (their term) dieters stop being rigorous in their diets after a few months, but the weight loss continues and so they think they are ok doing that, but it finally catches up with them and they plateau on the scale with no additional cheating going on. This is a second answer to "why doesn't what I do now work the way it used to?".

There is a side-bar on whether diet composition (eg high carb versus low carb) makes a difference.  There is a very grudging tone to any discussion about whether low carb works - there really is a prejudice out there - it's not just purely scientific. They say several studies support that low carb leads to greater weight loss, "at least in the short term". They offer some possible reasons for this: (1) physiology at the cell / molecule level means (I think they say just like Atkins et al) that carbs take less energy to turn into fat; (2) eating protein means you feel more energetic and thus burn more calories; and (3) high protein, low carb may lead to more satisfaction with your diet and therefore fewer calories consumed. They go on to say that since diet logs lie there is no way to tell what people are actually eating. They go on to conclude that any effect from composition doesn't matter over the long term (based on what?) and so they say it doesn't matter over the short term either and a calorie is a calorie is a decent rule of thumb. I don't exactly get this.

So how might I use this information? I don't know. The very short takeaway for me is that if I want to lose weight, I have to keep up the exercise, but I really have to cut calories, and even then it will take a long time.

Sigh. I think I actually knew that already.

Two Weeks of Atkins

I've followed Atkins faithfully for the last two weeks - and how has it gone?  First, the results.

The first week I lost 4 1/2 pounds. Last week I lost one pound, for a total of 5 /12 for the first two weeks.

This sounds better than it is. My starting weight was ballooned up from the trend I had been on, fueled by holiday excess.  Most of the holiday weight, it turns out, probably was water. Most or all of the first week's weight loss was certainly water. The Atkins book even asserts that it is likely water because on this diet you retain less salt and thus it is naturally diuretic. They urge being careful to not get dehydrated, and even up your salt intake to make sure your blood pressure doesn't drop too far (and of course, if you have blood pressure issues or medication, talk to your doctor first). Here's a picture of how my weight loss first stalled at Thanksgiving, ballooned up at Christmas, and now is back on track.

So hooray for me!  This is good, worth celebrating, but hardly a miracle. I did follow the eating guidelines faithfully, completely cold turkey on chocolate and other foods. That has resulted in a middling calorie intake, 1500 to 1800 calories.  The carb target has been 20 net carbs, and I've been slightly higher than that many days, but not more than 25 grams. I've followed the food lists, but my preference is for hearty vegetables like broccoli. Even the leafy vegetables I prefer cooked which lowers the fiber count and thus ups the net carb total. To actually keep the carb totals low, while still achieving the goal of eating lots of vegies, more salads are necessary. I'm strategizing how to get there.

I have felt pretty good. I have gotten hungry, especially at the half way point a week ago. I've eaten an egg/spinach/cheese bake for breakfast almost every day, and it wakes my appetite so I'm hungry for lunch and dinner. I've added in an afternoon snack most days, as I've found foods that are allowed and easy.  This has been cheese and/or olives most days, either grab and go in the office or at home as I make dinner.

Now comes the hard part:  deciding where to go from here.  Atkins, like many diets, has phases.  The first two weeks the idea is to de-tox your body from carb-fueled insulin levels. After that induction phase, the idea is to gradually add back carbs - both types of foods and total net carbs - until weight loss stalls. This requires assiduous tracking and self assessment.  You need to track your food in order to count your carbs. But you also need to monitor what types of foods you are eating to see if certain ones seem to trigger cravings or hunger.  Those foods are ones to eliminate, potentially forever for all practical purposes.

This part is really work. Tracking and adding up is actually a lot of work. The more you cook combination foods from raw ingredients, the harder it is to enter into any automated tracking program which will do the math. They do single foods great, they do name brand prepared foods great - good databases, and easy to enter a new one you will use again - but cooked from scratch foods with many ingredients are guesses or stretches for close matches.  I've started entering my recipes into my recipe program on the computer, generating a nutrition analysis out of that program, and then entering it into the tracking database. Lots of work, and of course I never actually make anything the same way twice.

But I think I'll stick with the very limited induction program for another week. I'll add in some lemon juice as an ingredient, almonds as a snack, and give myself a one time treat this weekend of blueberries in creme fraiche.  Then decide what to do the week after that.

The Atkins Stigma

There is a real stigma attached to the Atkins diet. I wrote a bit about Atkins a few days ago (here), when I picked up the newest book and decided to follow it.  Dr. Atkins invited and welcomed controversy.  But the science has moved on, and the diet has evolved. I see it as a very healthy alternative way of eating, and I think it is going to really work for me.

But the stigma and the controversy remain. So much so, I'm not telling many people that's what I'm doing.

If you haven't been living in the low-carb world, perhaps it continues to appear radical and risky. My own low-carb history starts back in the 1970's, when my mother lost a large amount of weight on a more-radical diet that was Stillman. Since my mother cooked for the family, I managed to lose a fair amount of weight while she was following it faithfully, while my father was traveling for a couple of months. At least as I remember it, that was an all-meat and fish and dairy diet, without any vegetables at all.  It was known on college campuses as the "hamburger and water diet". The summary from my mother was, "it works, but it's not particularly healthy, so don't ever do it for more than four weeks at a time".  I skimmed the book she had, and my takeaway was "it simulates diabetes", so that reinforced for me the unhealthy aspect of it.  This was a serious misunderstanding of ketosis, which I will eventually explain, but maybe not in this post.

My next venture into low-carb world was The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet.  I read a tattered paperback my mother had received from a friend, and perhaps it was a pivotal moment for me, in terms of how my life as a dieter has evolved since then. It had to have been the mid-nineties, because the book is copyright 1993. I had been on Weight Watchers once or twice with limited success, but I was very fat and getting fatter. I had totally subscribed to Jane Brody's Good Food Book, which I sum up as "ditch the fat and ditch the meat", and translated for me into massive amounts of starch to replace the lost items. I don't remember a focus on fresh green vegetables.  I had a vegetarian house-mate in the eighties, and that moved me along the starch path as well.  Again, not such a big focus on fresh or green.  Bread and pasta were my go-to foods. The biggest bagel factory for the Chicago area was in between my home and office, and I took them to the office all the time - and at least once was known to eat FOUR of them.  This was the era of "low fat is everything". There were commercials about the clamor and scarcity for the new line of sugar-loaded but low fat "snackwells". And I got fatter and more ashamed of myself all the time.

What clicked for me in reading Carbohydrate Addict were the pages that focused on the science behind it - insulin.  This first book is very unsophisticated in its discussion, but for the first time, it began to make sense to me why this approach works - not just to lose weight, but to reduce cravings around carbs and make it easier to stick to. They also were careful to distance themselves from Atkins. The basics of the diet as I first tried it in 1995, then used for the Big Loss in 1998, is "you can eat anything you like in moderation for an hour a day, the rest of the time is no or low carb". So there was no deprivation - if there was candy or a sweet to be had, I could set it aside to eat at dinner. The emphasis was on protein, not on fresh green vegies.  But their main hook is: if you keep your insulin levels managed by few carbs most of the time, cravings will go away. They asserted like Atkins that calories don't matter, weight will be lost from the insulin management. I decided it didn't matter to me whether calories mattered or not, because following this mode of eating meant my calories stayed relatively low with no serious need to suppress cravings or desires.

I followed this approach closely for two years, and loosely for a decade.  I lost fifty pounds, and it has never come all the way back.  As I loosened my discipline, weight did come back. When it came back, it stayed, unless I went back on the discipline.  In the meantime, I read massively about the science behind it. I also found and read many other low carb books. There is a whole sub-culture out there. It is the worst kept secret in the diet world.  I finally read Atkins, and was put off by the pugnaciousness of Atkins - but also appalled by the backlash and attacks that regularly came his way.  The attacks were personal and vehement, and not based on results or science.  I was particularly incensed by an American Heart Associate attack that I took the time to write a rebuttal to-without any justification it defined a "healthy diet" as one low in fat and then scored low carb diets against that standard -and guess what -they scored low, and thus were unhealthy.

As I read more and more of the science, I completely accepted the insulin argument about carbs, cravings, and fat storage. This has moved more and more mainstream, but there is still a visceral rejection of meat and fat. There is a disconnect between the science as I understand it, and translation into eating advice. At my gym, "eating healthy" is assumed. The ideal would be no-fat vegetarian food, manufactured low fat vegetarian food like substances, and bananas. Not for me. Hasn't been for years. I've had incredibly intense cardio health screening, and my low carbohydrate but relatively high fat diet has not lead to any apparent issues.

So I'm mostly not telling people I'm doing Atkins. I am completely comfortable in my own mind about the health, safety, and effectiveness of the eating approach I am on. But I don't want to have to go through all the explanations and justifications to others, and so I'm keeping it quiet. Even with my family. I'm planning meals with the same old meat or fish centerpiece, making starches for sides, and adding salads and green vegetables. No lasagna or pizza for a while, because I can't separate out the starches, but mostly I'm doing this under the radar.  We'll see how things go.

Getting the Carbs Out

Going down as low on "net carbs" as the induction phase of Atkins says to is not easy. I'm at 23 net carbs (the target is 20) and while most of it comes from a huge helping of broccoli, a lot of it comes from estimates of sauces I used in cooking. I am going to need to make my own sauces, or hunt out the few bottled sauces that don't have "sugar" listed in the top five ingredients. Standard serving sizes are 2 tablespoons; I've got to find sauces with fewer than two grams of carb per serving. I just bought some mayo with zero carbs - that will help in the tuna department.

I'm entering the week with a good stockpile of breakfast and lunches ready to grab and go in the fridge, and a good plan for dinners.  Sadly (for me), my boy who got an excellent book on bread-making from Santa has taken it to heart and is baking away. I can do anything for a week or so, and this week is critical to my mindset. I've got to make a clean break from the holiday food.

A Day on the Diet

(I will post a brief summary of the previous year, but I'm all about looking forward right now, and I want to ride this wave.)

So I'm sick with a sore throat and feel crummy, but I won't blame that on Atkins. I think I'll be able to make these first two weeks of a very restricted diet work for me. One key - I'm able to log in the food on the go through the iPhone. I can't build new foods - have to be on the computer for that - but the logging in the palm of my hand from anywhere is very helpful, especially in these early days of focus focus focus.

Yesterday was a lazy day due to feeling crummy - but again, the low energy is hardly coming from less than 24 hours of no carbs. More likely coming from my "last night" indulgence on NY's eve.

Even though my logging program does not encourage a low-carb approach, it does provide the information I need to track what I'm doing. All of the data lives on the internet, and the very detailed reports and looks at the data require a full up browser running flash. There are pdf reports that can be generated, but they don't have as much information. Specifically, the nutrition information includes total carbs, but not the fiber count necessary for counting net carbs. On-line, there is a recap that includes that information.  This is an excuse for the poor quality of the report I'm posting here - I got it from an elaborate series of steps - printing my screen from the browser to a pdf, then converting and cropping it to a jpg.

I actually ate fewer net carbs than they encourage - 35 grams total carbs minus 21 grams fiber for a total of 14 grams net carbs.  The limit for these first two weeks is twenty grams; and they want at least 15 grams net carbs coming from leafy greens.  I had no leafy greens yesterday - no salads, no cabbage dishes. I got my carbs from mayonaise and cauliflower and an avocado. But, I'm about to make an egg-spinach casserole for breakfast, and I've got salad fixings a-plenty in the fridge, so I'll be doing better from here on out.

The yellow in the pie graph is fat, the purple is protein, and the green is carbs. This is why classic nutritionists freak out at Atkins. The picture gives me pause, but I have done enough reading to understand the science says you don't get fat from eating fat, you get fat when your body decides to store fat, and the most controllable factor in when my body decides to store fat is when I have too much insulin because I eat too many carbs.

Excelsior!

The New Atkins

Yesterday, cruising the book store for my annual New Year's crop of motivational books to back up my resolutions and goals, I was surprised to stumble on The New Atkins for a New You.  I knew that "Atkins" was a company that would have survived the accidental death of its eponymous founder. I also knew that each diet program has to come out with regular new versions at regular intervals. So of course they have a new book. Since I'm confirmed low carb in philosophy if not always practice, I decided to pick it up.

I'm about halfway through it, and very pleasantly surprised. I'm going to commit to trying to follow its guidelines closely, for at least the next two weeks. This is fairly unusual for me - I haven't followed any diet "rules" per se since early in the Big Loss in 1998 when I was doing the Carbohydrate Addict's Diet. So this will be new for me - paying attention to food lists, having to count carbs, buying and planning different foods than my normal routine.  This is all good - I've read about how periodic changes in Weight Watcher's plans keep their adherents energized and focused - it just makes you have to stop, think, and plan - which is a large part of the overall set of changes required to actually lose weight.

So what is so appealing about this? Let me start with what was unappealing in the "old" Atkins - its pugnacity in the face of fierce opposition.  Dr. Atkins was an iconoclast who apparently reveled in the role. He personified the diet - it had his name - and was personally demonized as irresponsible. He came out swinging, and seemed to enjoy focusing his diet advice on the stuff that drove his critics wild. And his justification was largely based on his experience - his advice worked if you actually followed it.

But aside from the fact he loved steering his diet advice to "steak with bearnaise sauce - perfect dish for losing weight and lowering your cholesterol!", I think he really was not very much into food. One of the advantages of Atkins is that your cravings do go down, you are satiated, and just eat less.  Not strictly from boredom, but from satiation. But that doesn't mean one doesn't wish for real food. I don't think Atkins had ever experienced brussel sprouts less than twenty-four hours from the farm, for example. These are the things that make food interesting, not just satiating.

So this new Atkins plan is absolutely terrific in this regard. It builds not just on all the science that has been done (which I've read and accepted a long time ago and will write about another time) but also on current food trends for fresh and local.  Their advice has a lot in common with Michael Pollen - shop the outer walls of the supermarkets - produce and meat - skip the inside where all the prepared foods with sugar and starch lie.  From the first day, there is a requirement to eat large portions of the low-carb leafy vegetables- a minimum of 15 grams. They suggest raw, but allow for cooked versions. The list of allowed versus prohibited vegies for these first two weeks is very logical - all the leafy lettuces and cabbages and spinach - as well as lower carb snap beans and summer squashes. But the higher carb winter squashes, and whole beans, are off limits.  Their general plan is, two weeks on this restricted diet of meat and vegies, then gradually add in berries and nuts and beans and other vegies and other fruits. Whole grains come in at the end, and refined grains and white potatoes are forever considered special treats for special occasions, along with other sweets.

These first two weeks of focusing on adding green vegetables up to 15 grams of carbs is actually going to be the most challenging part of the diet for me, and why I want to actually follow the food lists carefully, plan menus and and then shop for them and fix some food in advance. Atkins have adopted practices from several other diet books I've read, and one of the most significant is the concept of net carbs.  Basically, since fiber isn't digested, it is not part of your carb count - so net carbs are total carb grams minus fiber grams.  Atkins recommends two salads a day as the easiest way to make sure the carbs are coming that way.

I've looked over some of my food logs (back in November when I last logged fairly often) and it's going to be a real challenge to stick to 20 grams net carbs a day.  I'm also going to have to spend time creating my own recipes to log from, because I've used a lot of approximations in the logging software, focusing on total calories rather than the composition. So for example, there was a "lamb stew" already in the database, and it seemed to have about the right number of calories - but its carb count is much higher than my recipe would yield.

So I've got my work cut out for me in this remaining holiday weekend. I know the workweek will be incredibly hectic. I'm going to be drowning at work starting early Monday morning. So I've got be ready with food for breakfasts and lunches all prepared and ready to go. Dinners need to be planned in advance, and I need to skip the recent staples of spaghetti and lasagna. Back to stir fried chicken, tacos (salad), and salmon. It's all good, but I just have to plan.

Since cottage cheese is off the list for the next few weeks, I'll make egg casserole today - eggs, cheese, and spinach baked and cut into squares.  I'll make cabbage soup flavored with some lamb neckbones I picked up, and have that in containers for lunch. Then I'll cook meat for dinner, and take leftover portions to add to salad bar at work. I've got one lunch out of the office this coming week - I already know I can pick up a classic chicken caesar salad at the closest quick place, and I now know to tell them to hold the croutons and no bread on the side.

This new Atkins emphasizes exercise, but suggests not adding a lot of new exercise in the first two weeks. That works for me. I'll continue to go to the gym and walk when I can, but making my minimums will be enough for now. If I really do the eating right, it will take more prep time than I've been doing.

Time to begin my day, and my year. Excelsior!

I Am Not A Reptile

There is no doubt my deep reptile brain is pushing me to stuff myself full of blubber and then hibernate. But I am not a reptile. I always hate those studies that grab headlines in the newspapers that say "these kind of people are hardwired to behave a certain way".  Besides the fact they are usually based on about twenty college students studied for a couple of weeks, the fact is we may have innate dispositions towards behaving a certain way, but we are thinking beings. We don't have to act on our instincts. We can choose.

Gary Taubes wrote a book about the science of weight,  Good Calories, Bad Calories, where a major point he made is that we gain and lose weight due to things we cannot control.  One of the ways I remember what he said was a chicken-and-egg analogy - do we gain weight because we eat, or do we eat because we need to gain weight?  He pointed out that teenagers in growth spurts eat absurd amounts of food, but no-one believes that they grow because they eat - we all assume they eat because they need the energy to grow.  So, he says, there are times and forces that will make your body put on fat, and responding to those forces will drive you to eat.

I just went to double check the spelling of his name, and see that he has a new book coming out!  And the title is perfect for this topic: Why We Get Fat.  It comes out the end of December, but I know I'll be reading it over New Year's.

But, barring any enormous new insights, back to my current thinking....

I believe there are forces that propel your body to add or subtract weight. The change of seasons is definitely one of them. But, I am a human being. I cannot control chemical reactions inside my body.  I can, however, control my behavior.  Yes, it gets harder when the forces are pushing me in a different direction. Yes, it's not fair that my Norwegian ancestors survived those cold dark winters by evolving a thrifty gene that conserves energy to increase the odds of surviving till spring. Life isn't fair, and as a rational being, I can examine my behavior and act how I choose.

The facts are stark:  I am sleeping more than any time since snowmeggedon in February last year, yet I am stumbling with fatigue. I am burning less calories than any time since then and every footstep is an effort. My eating is up slightly from where it has been for the past several months, but I am hungry and mouthy both all the time.  But I have it in my power to affect this behavior.

First, go ahead and sleep. I will try to get as much as the body tells me it needs.

Next, move, dammit!  Keep adding in activities as much as possible. I am doing my two or three trips to personal training each week, but I need much more than that. Based partly on a suggestion from my friend Kim, and partly on the stairclimbing tips from Ms. Bitch Cakes, I took some reading I needed to do and wandered the stairwells while reading. No prizes for speed or gracefulness, but I spent about a half hour with my report and probably got nearly a hundred extra calories burned.  I work on the ninth floor of a ten-story building, so I will continue to have opportunities (today, I walked down all 9 flights and back up four of them when I was fetching my lunch.)  Tonight, I braved the cold to walk to my kids house and back - I know from experience that's another hundred calories.

The food:  this is the biggest problem. I need to log it all, even when the truth is so ugly.  I need to work out how to get portion control taken away from me. I do yogurt-like containers of cottage cheese for breakfast, in spite of the horrible waste of resources in the individual serving packaging. I need to buy pre-packaged salads at Trader Joe's for lunches again, if I'm not going to take the time or effort to go walking for a fancy salad from Cosi.  Dinners - that's where I need to be rational and on my guard, conscious as I plan and serve.  Tonight, I get credit for deciding not to add garlic bread to the spaghetti supper - I can keep small portions of pasta, but the bread would have been additive not to mention addictive.

Despite all this angst, I'm actually doing OK on both fitness and weight-loss fronts. I am so proud of my upper body strength, I'm going to go do push-ups in the gym at work in front of the guys. I avoided the scale during the Thanksgiving break (just accidentally of course, my morning routine was off) and Monday's weight was a full three-and-a-half pounds above the average of the week before, (which had been consistent with my tiny but clearly downward trend).  But Monday's number was fleeting water weight; Tuesday's weight was one pound down, and by this morning the remaining two and a half pounds had all been peed back out.  So I'm back in the ball game.  I need to keep reminding myself:  I cannot control the number on the scale, but I can control my behavior.  I can choose how I want to be.

I AM NOT A REPTILE.