Lose Weight, Fast! Intro Installment #2

Anti-Diet, KLC, SAD, Fat

Anti-Diet

      I want to explain why I am no longer anti-diet, while also being staunchly anti-diet.  I suppose that makes me anti-anti-diet.

     I am no longer anti-diet in the way that Christy Harrison espouses.  (I just read her recently published book, The Wellness Trap, which I think is terrific, except for the part about carbs and fasting.)

Her argument is a good one; that on balance, dieting doesn’t work.   Upwards of 95% of those who go on diets regain the weight they lost, plus more.  Dieting can cause even deeper food dysfunction, or a more chronic “food disorder.”  It can lead to orthorexia, a type of disordered eating that makes a person obsessed with “wellness” and the “purity” of food.

     I think she’s right.  Diets (in the common use of that term) require willpower.  You cannot sustain willpower over any length of time.  Therefore, you have to make changes to your diet that doesn’t require willpower to maintain. 

     But you can employ willpower to get started.  Think of willpower like a Big Muscular Sibling who can show up, occasionally, when you need someone intimidated. However, using that Muscular Sibling too often causes their muscles to melt.  Therefore, you have to carefully deploy the Muscular Sibling.

      So, the changes you make in your eating must change the way you want to eat.   So you don’t need too much will power.

Intuitive Eating, which Christy Harrison promotes, only works if your intuition is good.  If you are addicted to carbs, how can your intuition be good?  If you are an alcoholic, how does your intuition about what your body needs, even work?  For smokers who want to quit smoking, does intuitive smoking work?  No. It does not.

     For four years, I listened religiously to Christy Harrison’s Food Psychology Podcast, which is against dieting of any kind.  As I said in my earlier introduction, I read her book, Anti-Diet, rapturously.  I also listened to the audio version of it.  It took a lot of effort, but I did give up on dieting.  This was an important part of my journey. (Oh god, I hate that last sentence. It’s quite insipid.  But, no other will suffice.)

     I stopped thinking about my weight and how I looked to others.  I ate what I felt like eating.  I was amazed at the peace of mind and joy I felt, just taking the Dieting Overlord away from my consciousness!  I was free. I had many experiences when I ate less than I would have in the past, because I wasn’t about to start a diet, or breaking out from a diet.  There was no good or bad anymore. I was just responding to my hunger and what I felt like eating.  

     The pressure one feels being in a perpetual category of “good” or “bad” is deeply repressive. I thought my weight would go up and then settle at a certain place.  I didn’t think it would go up and up and up forever.  And that turned out to be true. My weight did go up some (I’m not sure how much, as I didn’t weigh myself for those years, so maybe 25 pounds?) and then I believe it did level off. 

       Now, what I believed happened is that my Metabolic Syndrome (I will go into detail what this is later) reached a tipping point.  Because of my age, and how long I had lived as a person eating much more sugar than my body could handle and remain healthy, I was tipped into a place where all kinds of bad things started to happen: the arrythmia, the diabetes diagnosis, and the perceived apnea and palpitations.  I now believe I was on course for a heart attack or stroke.  I could have gotten on medications to “control” my blood sugar, or lower, say – elevated blood pressure, or elevated cholesterol.  But the damage from prolonged sugar still has a cumulative effect.  It can lead to dementia, as my mother had.  In my opinion, worse than dying from a stroke. 

    I now believe I was addicted to carbs. I probably have been most of my life.  I am anti-anti-diet in that I think almost everyone who eats a modern diet is addicted to carbs.  And when you break that, you break free.  So, in the common use of the word “diet” you are not on a diet at all.  You just avoid certain types of food.

     I think we’ve poisoned ourselves with a certain type of processed food that hides sugar, amongst other things. I think that because of that, and constantly eating – not allowing ourselves time to be in a fasted state – we have fucked up our system.  I have come to understand that a significant percentage of our problems – heart attacks, blood pressure, excess weight, strokes, dementia, and even certain types of psychological problems, all stem from this. 

     I watch at least an hour of MSNBC every night and it is filled with commercials for people with Type 2 Diabetes.  All of those commercials sell drugs to deal with it.  But you don’t need drugs.  You just need to stop eating so many carbs.  You need to right your system.  It takes about 2 or 3 months to do this.  Your body is astonishingly good at correcting itself.  I’m not saying this is true for every person, there are some people who do need meds.  (If you are on meds, you can’t just go off them, you need to ween yourself off them.)  But I am saying that I have come to think that most people can correct these problems, or lessen the awful side effects of Metabolic Syndrome through a change in diet.  That change is simply to stop eating so many carbs.  And to give your body regular breaks from all the eating.  I’m not talking days, I’m talking many hours – y’know, in between meals.  Let’s call this way of eating KLC for Keto-Low-Carb.   (I will explain Ketones later.)

KLC

     Heavenly Fan, a Keto-Vegan chef I follow on YouTube, recently posted a video where she shared her thoughts on being “Keto” for 5 years.  Her description mirrored my own experience exactly.  It was as if the words were taken from my own mouth.  So, here I am, about to take words from “her” mouth!  I think it’s because the physical transformation is the same.  Heavenly Fan is one of 5 or 6 You Tubers who have truly gotten me through this entire journey.  I will tell you about them all soon.  You can follow them too.  They are a terrific group of fellow-travelers.

     But back to Heavenly Fan.  I listen to her videos – and I do mean listen - I don’t watch, or take notes, or even make her recipes.  I listen to her because her voice, her accent, in combination with the pitch and variation of tone, is hypnotically soothing.  I have gathered from her videos that she is originally from Taiwan, but now lives in London.  Come to think of it, I have made one or two of her recipes – both turned out excellently.  And I’m about to make a new recipe she’s posted for kale crackers using a lot of seeds.

     I am not Vegan, I am extremely not vegan.  I’ll get into why later.  I think if you are vegan and want to go KLC, if you follow Heavenly Fan’s lead, you will do very well.  But it takes a lot of dedication.

    Anyway, back to Heavenly Fan and her description.  She says before she went KLC she only understood herself to be in a state of hungry or full.  She didn’t know there was a state of being that was neither hungry nor full.  That describes my experience very well.  I now understand there are 3 states of being.  1.) Hungry  2.) Full  3.) Neither hungry nor full.   

     It took me about 2 months to get off the carbs.  Metabolically, that should have been only a week to 10 days.  I have a few friends who have told me about their experiences, as well as watching countless videos about other people talking about their experiences.  Based on that, I think my case is extreme. Most people feel a shift in a couple of weeks. For me it was 2 months.  The part of this that I cannot account for is why I stuck with it long enough to get to the other side.  It was a difficult 2 months.  I think I was so frightened by the connection of diabetes to dementia, I did it.  

     Also, I was still drinking one to two drinks per day at that time, and I actually think that helped. I did shift to low carb cocktails and avoided wine. I will get into all that later, alcohol is its own story for me.  Anyway, it’s perfectly possible to drink (even heavily!) and be KLC. 

     What did I do for those 2 months, exactly?  Well, I experimented and I had many slip ups.  This was mostly because I didn’t know what I was doing and I was reading about Keto and Low Carb and understanding the nutritional science and I simply didn’t understand it deeply then.  Looking back, however, I realize that I probably went down to under 30 total carbs per day.

     For comparison, on the average American, on the Standard American Diet (appropriately abbreviated as SAD!) takes in about 300 carbs per day. 

     I went out to dinners.  I had drinks. I tried to order what I figured were low-carb drinks. When dessert came, I encouraged sharing and had one bite.  Still, this was an enormous change. 

SAD

     Speaking of SAD, I got sad.  I know I’m not making getting through the low-carb initial phase seem very inviting.  But I did get depressed.  Wait, I don’t mean depressed.  I have been chastised for using the term depressed and I have been told that Depression is a medical condition.  So, what I mean is, I felt overwhelming sadness. It felt physical, a gong sounding from the abyss, all centered on my abdomen.  Now, there was a lot going on for me at the time – my daughter had just graduated from college (I felt elated, but I suppose you could say I was suppressing something) and I was increasingly under the thumb of my mother’s needs as she descended deeper into dementia. 

    I have a set point personality of… ebullient.  I know that might seem like bragging but to be honest if I had had a say in the psyche I accidentally got, I would not wish for it.  There are downsides to being too optimistic.  On the other hand, I am almost always in a happy mood. 

    I only mention this because when I eliminated most of the carbs from my diet, I went through a period of deep sadness.  It was astonishing.  It could be unrelated to the carb reduction, but I don’t think it was. I think I had artificially ginned myself up with carbs, and it took a while for my body to acquaint itself with a different way of being.

    It doesn’t mean I haven’t gone through periods of sadness.  I have had a lot of terribly sad times.  It’s just that my set-point is happy.  

     I live with someone who is mostly disgruntled.  It doesn’t mean he is impossible.  (Well, sometimes! I’m sure he’d say the same about me.) He just doesn’t have an ebullient set-point.  I actually envy him, often.  He doesn’t have an optimistic spin on any situation.  As a rule of thumb, he does not believe things will work out well.  In fact, he thinks the opposite.  But his view of life is very advantageous. He has prevented me from doing so many things that I would end up regretting, because of my bias for optimism.  The truth is, we each need what the other one has.   The good news is, we know it.  

     Anyway, I didn’t understand what not eating carbs really meant. As I wrote in the introduction, I thought eating low carb just meant not having sugary drinks and candy and cake.  But as I was following what I understood to be a low carb eating lifestyle, I learned more about what carbs really were. They included many things that I called “starch.”  Potatoes, rice, pasta, corn.  All things I loved intensely.  And don’t get me started on fruit!  (I will start on fruit, but not here.)

    It turns out that from your body’s point of view, there isn’t much difference between a candy bar and pasta.  That’s because we have an enzyme that breaks down starch immediately when we eat it and it becomes glucose.  It’s called Amylase.  It begins this process in our saliva. The good news is that if you need energy, you get it – from sugar, or fruit,  or say -  potatoes.  All the same to your blood.  (And to every other organ.) 

     I used to make myself eat brown rice because I thought it was so much healthier than white rice.  I preferred white rice because I was usually using it to soak up the flavors from something – a stir fry, a curry sauce, you name it. I loved white rice, probably still would if I had it. 

     I had became aware that brown rice was healthier because it had more fiber.  So I ate brown rice and felt like I was being “healthy.”  But, the truth is, both white and brown rice have high glycemic index scores.  Brown rice has more nutrients – magnesium, manganese, selenium, folate – than white rice.  But if you have high blood sugar, brown rice is not worth it. You can get all those nutrients elsewhere without the glucose spike.  (More about glucose spikes later.)  Brown rice has about one gram of fiber more per 1/3 cup than white rice. Again, hardly worth it.  For example, the low-carb tortillas I ate (Mission brand, love them!) have 15 grams of fiber per tortilla.  A whole cup of brown rice has 3 grams of fiber.

     Let’s get back to my sad time leaving SAD.   I was really sad.  I walked around in astonishment. My usual perky step was downtrodden.  I felt it in my gut.  It may actually be that my gut biome was changing.  When I thought about it, I didn’t feel sad, I felt… sober. It’s funny to use that word and not associate it with alcohol.  But I did. I felt sober in the way that I saw the world without tinted glasses. 

    I was lucky in my attitude about being sad.  Or I mean, sober.  It was a new experience for me.  I tried to experience it as an experience that was worth experiencing.  I mourned my old optimism.  My ebullience.  But I looked at my experience as a scientist.  I tried to tease out specifics.  I noticed that I felt on the verge of tears most of the time.  But there was no particular reason.  That was unpleasant, but it was also… interesting to me. 

    I stuck with the low carb lifestyle.

    I am so glad I did. I honestly do not think I would have gotten to the other side if I hadn’t stuck with it.  I let myself eat grandly and as much as I wanted, as long as it was low carb.   My mood stabilized.  I’m not sure anymore if I am less happy than I was.  I feel happy like I always did.  I feel happier, actually. I am no longer in the grip of an addiction that I believe would eventually lead me to a deeply unpleasant slow (or maybe prematurely fast) death. (Although spending 40 years eating high carb may still cause problems for me, so I’m not completely optimistic!)

FAT

      The true secret to getting to the other side, in my opinion, is fat.  I upped my fat.  I ate a lot of avocados, and cheese, and meat and dairy.  Full fat dairy. I went from milk in my coffee, to half and half, to heavy cream.  

      The combination of eating enough fat to feel truly full for hours on end, and being off the carbs, so that nudge to eat carbs was (mostly) eliminated, brought me to the other side.

      I now understand that consuming fat leads to satiety.  That is the key.  

     Now, I will write about animal fats later.  It turns out that enormous amounts of animal fats – and certain kinds of animal fats - may not be so great for you.  I’m talking enormous amounts!   (And whether it’s better for the environment is a completely different topic, one I want to cover here, but suffice to say that I think – on balance – we should stick with meat and it should be raised and consumed in particular ways.)

      But when you start KLC, the most important thing is to simply stick with the low carb way of eating until your body stabilizes and gets off the carbs.  So, I personally always recommend that you disregard the question of animal fats until you are on the other side.

    I figured I was going to be sad for the rest of my life, or at least as long as I did this low-carb thing.  But after two months, I felt my mood lifting, my attitude lightening.  My body was lightening up too.  I think I probably lost 20 pounds in two months.  That was my fastest weight loss.  For comparison, it took me another ten months to lose 30 more pounds and if I lose another 10 it will probably take me another year.  Again, I don’t care about the weight.   I care about the numbers, specifically my triglycerides and my A1c.  (I’ll write about cholesterol later.)  But weight is interesting if you can get past the social obsession with weight.  And again, weight is just a symptom.  Can be a symptom.  Many heavy people are perfectly healthy.

      What happened that was mind blowing was my relationship with food.  It didn’t have the hold on me it once did.  To me food, all food, was like Marilyn Monroe standing over the wind tunnel with her dress up in the air. I realize that is a weird analogy.  I am not attracted to Marilyn Monroe sexually but to use an analogy using a man (Gary Cooper?) doesn’t work for me.  What I mean is, certain foods had a hold over me and they caused me to respond the way many people responded to Marilyn Monroe.  Impossible to look away.  Exhilarating, tantalizing, alluring.  And suddenly that was gone. 

     Yes, I enjoyed the experience of eating very much. You might even say, more.  But differently.  The difference felt like the difference between satisfying an addiction and actually just… eating something you like.  Going past a bakery was like seeing Marilyn Monroe with her skirt flapping in the wind.  It was just… noticeable.  But not particularly attractive.

      I used to smoke and it took me many years to kick the habit.  One of the things that I began to understand as I researched the addiction to cigarettes (Which applies to all addictions) is that the joy goes from the thing itself to quelling the desire for the thing.  You want a cigarette. You want it so bad. It’s driving you crazy you want it so bad.  You do everything you can to delay having a cigarette.  Then you have one.  The relief you feel is 99% not-having-the-desire-for-a- cigarette anymore. The actual cigarette is less meaningful than the alleviation of overwhelming desire, endless craving, urges that have taken over your mind.  I have heard other people talk of their addictions this way: sex, purchasing things, alcohol.

     It was similar with food.  I just lost my desire to have starch and sugar.  I should qualify that as, for the most part I lost my desire.  I still wanted things like chocolate.  But it just felt… completely different.  It didn’t feel physical. It felt mental.  I decided when I had it. (I did find some great low carb chocolate! JoJo’s Chocolate Bites, you can get them at Costco.) 

     I would say that this transformation at the beginning of my journey was the most significant of all.  It’s the thing that happened that was unlike any other diet I’d been on.  All those joinings of Weight Watchers over the years never got me to the other side of carbs.  It has mostly been easy since then. If you take nothing else away from this, it’s this. 

    Get off the carbs.  Up the fat.  You won’t believe how different you feel.