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August 24, 2006

The Low-Fat Gospel

I forgot the book I meant to bring on this journey. I keep meaning to read Luke's favorite book, The Populist Moment. It's about a farmers' movement, and I know I should read it, but I've always found labor history deathly boring. I know that sounds terrible... I'm a union organizer... but it's one of those, "I do that all day, I don't want to read about it in my fifteen minutes of free time." Still, Luke is wonderful and he wants me to read this book. So I honestly meant to bring it with me. But I forgot it. It's sitting in my closet, where I hide paper objects from my paper-eating cat.

That meant that I have been trapped in Scranton for three days with nothing to read but an old diet book I borrowed from my father at Thanksgiving and left in the trunk. I'm not going to tell you the name of the diet book because I don't want to hurt its author's feelings when her google alarm goes off and she finds a blog entry slamming her work. In her defense, it's from the late nineties when people didn't know as much as we know now. There, I've said something nice. I'm done.

This book is total low-fat gospel crap. Base your diet on grains! Keep protein to 15% of total calories! Count fat grams, not calories!

Suggested breakfasts include: low-fat bran muffin, fortified cereal, and... my favorite... a bagel! With non-fat cream cheese. At least she got the non-fat cream cheese right. So you're ravenous two hours later cause your breakfast shot your blood sugar up to the sky and now you're crashing and it's only 9 am? Have a mid-morning snack: a banana! Still starving after dinner cause your entire day has been a blood sugar roller coaster? Have a bowl of nonfat frozen yogurt!

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. My friends, I actually lived this way for years. And let me tell you a few things about it:

a) I was never able to get my weight below 110, and usually hovered around 115 - 120 with considerable effort, constant stress about my fat intake, and lots of exercise (aerobic and weight lifting.) Now, I hover at 102 - 106 with almost no effort, and only get up to 108 when I spend a month celebrating in nice restaurants in Philadelphia.

b) I was a walking anxiety attack. I wouldn't have known calm if it bit me.

c) I was hungry all the time. So I ate all the time. Mid-morning? Banana, maybe some more rice! Lunch: big old plate of rice and beans, plus salad, plus fruit. Eat till my little tummy was stuffed. Two hours later: hunger. Solution? Eat more! You want to talk about food obsession? I thought about food as much as I now think about sex!

Here was my typical day as a low-fat devotee:

Breakfast:
bagel with mustard, tomato and onion (no butter, no cream cheese -- that has FAT!)

Mid-morning snack:
Banana, and a few scoops of my lunch beans and rice dish cause I'm so hungry I can't wait.

Lunch:
Giant dish of beans, brown rice, lots of spices and veggies (I was a good cook then too, btw, so my vegan dishes rocked.) Salad with fat free dressing (never mind that it was high sugar and high salt.) Another piece of fruit or a cooked fruit dish.

If I was on the run, my lunch would very likely be a foot long Subway veggie delight sub on wheat, no mayo, no oil, no olives, no cheese (NO FAT!)

Afternoon snack: ah, here's where the sugar craving hits. It has been my experience that going too low fat causes massive sugar cravings. So by afternoon I was raiding my candy jar for Jolly Ranchers, peppermints, Skittles, anything to calm the sugar freak-out.
Maybe a piece of fruit to go with my candy.

Dinner: Veggie sushi from the mall food court, or a big salad, fat free dressing, no meat, and a roll on the side.

After gym snack (9 or 10 pm): pint of grape tomatoes and a beer. No fat in beer.

I frequently felt shaky if I went too long without eating. I did lose weight eating this way, after my college weight gain, and I definitely felt better than I did when my senior year in college I ate an order of French fries every night at 10 pm (I am not making this up, ask my college roommate.) That's the thing these lowfat diets have going for them: they're better than the Standard American Diet of pizza, Big Macs and fries, the basic combination of high-sugar, high-carb, high saturated-fat and transfat, no vegetables. If you have been eating that way, you will both look better and feel better (and lose weight) if you switch to a low-fat diet.

But here's what I wish someone had told me: it's so much easier to lose a whole lot of weight, and keep it off, with very little effort! Eating a lot more protein, building a diet around vegetables and low-fat proteins instead of grains, and adding in the kinds of healthy fats that control hunger, kill sugar cravings, and make your skin gorgeous, is the way to lose more weight than you thought possible while enjoying life!

The book I was reading suggested that its readers accept that they will never be "skinny," and go through a grieving process for the body they want but can never have. I almost cried.

Please, please don't do this. I agree that most people will never achieve the body they really want if they eat bran muffins for breakfast and avoid protein. Like I said, I struggled to maintain a weight that now seems heavy to me. On a low-fat, high-carb, low-protein diet, lots of things are impossible.

But with adequate protein, all things are possible. [Or most. It won't clean your house or make your cat un-crazy, that I can tell you for sure.]

I just got an email from a friend of mine who battled her weight for years. The email includes a picture of her in shorts, looking great! She's been following the Zone, eating great food, and having a wonderful time. Weight loss is fun, not a miserable chore. And she's still losing! She says, "I wonder what I'll look like (and what I'll weigh) after 19 more months on this nutritious journey of deliciousness!!!"

I suggest that no one tell Mary Robinson to go through a grieving process for the body she can never have, because with the Zone and moderate CR, she's already got it. At 52. And she looks great! And her husband is so cute! (That's totally beside the point, I just think it's funny that a large percentage of CR'd women prefer skinny, geeky guys. Good thing, since it would be a real pain to live with a guy who ate gak.)

For too long, the American public has been faced with two choices: eat the Standard American Diet (and get diabetes, have a heart attack, find yourself unable to fit into an airplane seat, and forget ever wearing a bathing suit again) or go on a low-fat diet (and think about food all the time, eat tossed salads and plain baked potatoes in restaurants, exercise a lot and still forget about looking good in a bikini.) Those aren't the only choices! There is another way. And it's not that difficult. I've been low-fat, and I've done what I'm doing now, and what I do now is in fact easier.

Now I'm not an Atkins person. I have tremendous respect for the Atkins people because they did so much to bring public attention to the problem of sugar and refined carbs. They also brought us some really good sugar free syrup that we put on our low-carb whey protein pancakes. I'm all for the efforts of people like my friend Jimmy Moore to bring the low-carb toolbox to people battling with obesity. For people who find that Atkins works for them, I say go for it. For myself, I'm concerned about saturated fat and prefer to get most of my protein from sources that don't contain it, and to get my fat from unsaturated sources, keeping omega 3 and 6 balance in mind. I find that as long as my breakfast is almost all protein and fat and I get over 70 g protein a day, I can eat some non-grain carbs like fruits, tons of veggies (read: one or two pints of grape tomatoes per day on the weekends, plus salads) and drink wine without sending my body into a high-carb tailspin. I cook Zoned for MR, but I find myself eating much more like Ray Kurzweil (further proof that if I had been a bit older and his gorgeous wife hadn't gotten there first, I probably would have married Ray Kurzweil. Leave it to me to catch the geekiest genius boy of my generation. However, since I was born in 1974, I end up with MR, who definitely fits the brilliant geeky boy bill -- though he would be even more geeky if he would wear glasses, which he doesn't need but occasionally wears just to impress me.) Ray recommends higher protein, about 25% fat (almost all from unsaturated sources) and other wonderful things that you can read about in Fantastic Voyage. He also takes supplements out of little dishes that look like cat dishes, which I find adoreable. Between the high protein, the supplements, and the cat dishes, he'd fit right in at our house.

Point being, even if you don't find it part of your life's mission to capture the geekiest guy of your generation, you can still lose weight and have the body you want. Without suffering. You know what to do.

I am starting to feel like Samuel Jackson in Snakes on a Plane... "I am so sick of these motherf**&8 people who refuse to eat their motherf*&(^ eggwhites!" (Not you, Zeynep. You're absolved from eating eggwhites, as long as you keep eating other healthy foods. Or you, Mary, as you're allergic.) But really, how many times have I said it? You want to lose weight? Take a measuring cup. Measure out one cup of liquid eggwhites (you can buy these at the same store where you bought your gaky cereal that's making you a nutcase by 10 am.) Put them in a nonstick pan and scramble (if you want you can use spray, but don't use much, just a quick squirt.) Top with a teaspoon of flax oil (you go to the health food store anyway, just buy it and put it in the freezer.) Now you can add half-salt, fresh pepper, salsa, hot sauce, even Carolina Treet barbeque sauce (but not more than a tablespoon of Treet... too high carb in large amounts.) Eat. That wasn't so bad, was it? Do this for a week and you will start to feel more alert, less hungry, more energetic, and just plain saner all morning long. If you're a boy, you might want to eat 1.5 or 2 cups of eggwhites scrambled, since you're probably bigger than us little girls and have greater calorie requirements. MR's breakfast is around 600 calories, and I assure you, he's CR'd.

Losing weight, keeping it off, and being healthy doesn't have to be miserable. It can become almost effortless after awhile. (And don't whine that it's easy for me cause I'm only 32 because before CR, I was gaining weight fast and putting 140 pounds on my just under 5'2" frame. If you've got questions for people over 50, ask Mary.)

And please, please, eat your *&(*&#^(&! eggwhites!

Posted by april at August 24, 2006 5:30 AM

Comments

Posted by: istanbulwitch at August 24, 2006 12:51 PM

Posted by: taranwanderer at August 24, 2006 9:41 PM

Posted by: sheila at August 26, 2006 12:45 PM

Posted by: Judith at August 26, 2006 3:18 PM

Posted by: Jake Silver at August 28, 2006 12:15 PM

Posted by: Hazel at August 28, 2006 11:39 PM

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