April's CR Diary

Another Weird Thing About Me That You Didn't Know

Back in 2000 I ran an organizing campaign at Bayonne Hospital in Bayonne, NJ. One of my favorite workers was nuclear med tech who was absolutely brilliant, funny, and among other things sang in the New York Gay Men's Chorus. At night after I'd finished my work calls I'd call him to check in on how his co-workers were doing (in a union campaign things move really, really fast so nightly check-ins with key leaders are normal) but after that we'd stay on the phone talking about everything in the world, sometimes until late at night.

One of the bizarre tangents we got on once was strange things that turn us on. His strangest, and you'd think it would be mine with how much I adore vegetables, was that he found it really sexy if he saw a cute guy carefully checking out the produce at the grocery store. Like tapping the cantaloupe, squeezing the eggplant, etc. That's weird, but you can totally see the appeal.

Mine were pretty weird too, some more predictable than others. For instance, everybody knows that I am rarely in the slightest bit attracted to a man who *doesn't* wear glasses. Over time I've come to associate glasses with brains, and we CR girls like our boys smart. So that one's not too weird.

Second: typing. The one boy who really broke my heart in college, whose name I will not mention for fear of invoking him, was the best typist I'd ever met. I used to lie in his bed and close my eyes and listen to him type... one straight line, no stops. Amazing. Never got over it really. Until I met MR, I always knew that if he who shall not be named were to turn up, I'd probably leave anyone I was dating for him. I knew it was serious with MR when I told him that he was the first man I would not leave for HWSNBN.

Third parallel parking: I am so terrified of parallel parking that I have a mental block on how to spell parallel. I can do it, and I do have to do it sometimes, but I will do almost anything to avoid it, including calling MR from up the block and telling him to come out and park the car if there are no easily accessible spaces on the street. I find it almost unbearably sexy when a man can parallel park really well. My ex was the best ever: I would look at a space and say, "You can not possibly get into that space!" and he'd do it in seconds, without really even having to adjust. I, on the other hand, am the queen of the 64 point turn.

Then this morning a new one occurred to me, and it's really weird, but highly adaptive. I find it exstremely sexy when men shovel snow. I didn't realize it until today, but I just think that's really hot.

Of course we are having a giant snow storm in the Northeast, so attracting a mate who shovels snow is a highly adaptive behavior. Sorta like how MR was attracted to me in large part when he read all my blog postings of my delicious recipes... just waiting for someone to cook for... about a year later he realized the degree to which he fell into a carefully constructed trap, but by that time he was too hooked to mind.

In any event, ladies, I suggest that even if you do not genuinely find the concept of men shoveling snow inherently sexy, you should put out press releases that you do, as you may find that your husband/boyfriend/partner is more likely to clear the sidewalk without complaint.

But to be fair, you might want to make a nice stuffed eggplant afterward!

April and the Breakfast of Doom

"Are you sure you want to do that?" asked MR at 5:30 this morning as I scooped Nancy's Organic cottage cheese (the best on the planet) into a 1 cup measuring cup. I had said, two days before, that eating cottage cheese for breakfast causes me to be very hungry very shortly thereafter, and is probably therefore not a good CR strategy. In general, in fact, I don't eat breakfast at all, as I find that I am not much more hungry immediately preceeding lunch if I don't eat breakfast at all, and so it's a great way to save calories. But this morning I knew I was going to be doing nurse meetings in a room with a dozen Dunkin Donuts bagels: my arch nemesis. So I figured I'd better fortify myself, and I was trying to consume as little methionine as possible (see previous post for why/how this all came about) so the eggwhite and flax oil breakfast of CR glory days was out, and I wanted to eat something.

I ate the cottage cheese with flax oil. It was delicious.

I was still hungry. Even right at that moment.

I went to the meeting. I had volunteered to pick up food for the morning meeting (we are legally required to provide bagels if it's before 11 am, at which point we become legally required to provide pizza) so I went to Dunkin Donuts and ordered them.

In the old days, pre-CR, I would have eaten a sesame bagel with light veggie cream cheese (lowfat don't ya know???) and a Dunkin Donuts coffee with cream and sugar on my way to the meeting, and then probably another at the meeting, but those days are long gone... right?

I got to the meeting. My co-workers were there. The nurses didn't show, but that's not all that unusual. My co-workers ate bagels. We had a productive meeting amongst ourselves.

"Oh come on..." the evil inner voice said in my head..."You can have just a bite. You know you love sesame bagels. Just a little bit. You can go online and figure out the calorie count later and just adjust for it. Just a little bite... yum yum yum... you've been soooooo good lately..."

And I was really hungry in that wiggy, blood sugar out of whack way that you forget about once you're on a low carb diet for awhile. Apparently cottage cheese causes a weird insulin release because the protein in cottage cheese is the highest insulin spiking of all known proteins, and it only has a little bit of carb, so when you have a big spike of insulin as though you'd just had a big bowl of sugar, and then you have cottage cheese, the insulin surge sweeps all the glucose out of your bloodstream all at once and then you go, "AAAAARGH!" Causing a fairly quick explosion of hunger. This is made much worse by being in a many hour fasting state first thing in the morning.

So I was wigging out.

Then I ate a little bit of bagel. Then I ate a little more. Then the just one bite thing went swimmingly out the window, and I ate AN ENTIRE BAGEL.. With reduced fat veggie cream cheese, which really is quite good.

Here is the thing about me and bagels: I can not have just one bite. No, I can not. Bagels are the kind of thing for me that if I am going to have even the smallest sample, I must be prepared to commit to eating the entire thing. It's very important in CR to know if you have these triggers. There are plenty of foods of which I can have just a small sample and be satisfied, or at least stop myself from going forward. But there are a very few things, of which the bagel with cream cheese is the main one, that I can not even nibble at unless I am prepared to go all the way.

Bagel: gone. For the record, it really was just as delicious as I had remembered it, as I had perhaps fantasized about it being in the early moments of the meeting when I hadn't really been paying attention to Edward and was instead staring at the naked and defenseless sesame bagel just a few feet away from me. How can a girl with normal, healthy appetites possibly be expected to resist such temptation? (This is where changing the food environment comes in!) I am no anorexic: i have the compulsion to eat the bagel just like everyone else, but over time I've learned strategies to stop myself. *Most* of the time. And most of the time, I don't put myself in the same room with something I desperately want unless I'm planning to have it.

Then after the meeting, I looked for it's nutrition information online.

Okay, bad news. But not surprising... I vaguely knew it even before the evil voice in my head urged the oft-failed "just one bite" strategy.

It was 8:45 am and between the cottage cheese and flax breakfast and the bagel with cream cheese, I had already eaten 760 calories.

I wrote my CR girlfriend Paige in a panic, and she reminded me to eat normally for the rest of the day and jump right back on the CRCR wagon. Of course, she was right. (She was also, for the record, feeding my own advice right back to me. :)

Still, I berated myself. I'd been doing so well! Low carb is working for me! I feel great almost all the time! My yoga practice is soaring! I can wear my favorite skirt again! I would just not eat until dinner, I resolved.

Yeah right.

I went to a yoga class and practiced hard for an hour and a half. Excellent class, even though a class that isn't with Jonathan never measures up to what the Mozart of Iyengar can do.

Did yoga. Craved a Diet Coke bigntime, which I always do after yoga, but had no access to one so went back to the office.

All the things I was supposed to do there ended up either canceled or just as well done at home (I work from home a lot, which is great except that it means I never stop working) so I decided to run a few errands then get on home and work.

Went to the wine store... MR was almost out of Pinot Noir.

Went to Lee's Produce to pick up bok choi, shiitake mushrooms, and some other stuff. Was already very hungry... it was nearly 1:30 by this time. I'd had no protein or fat since the cottage and flax this morning at 5:30 am other than the small amount in the light cream cheese.

I ate a pint of grape tomatoes. That's not too bad.

Then I was overwhelmed with the worst sugar craving I've had literally in years. The little produce store (with great prices on fresh veggies) carries a whole host of sugary candies in small plastic tubs, including gummy peaches, pineapples, worms, bears, eggs, snakes, papayas, and little gummy figures of Obama as well as tons of dried fruits, which pre-CR I adored.

There was something so wacky going on with my blood sugar that I just about freaked out. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't look at sugary candies because sugar gives me anxiety attacks. But I was losing it.

I implemented a harm-reduction strategy: I purchased and ate one gummy fruit slice. Red. I love red candies. All my favorite candies are red.

Immediately I started to calm down. But I was still hungry.

"F*&k this low protein, low methionine s*^t." I thought.

I walked in the door of the house and went straight to the fridge. That no antibiotics no hormones lean turkey breast I'd told MR I'd give away after Sunday night's conversation when we decided I'd try to go vegetarian and low protein: I was glad it was still in the fridge. Straight onto the stove it went, in a saucepan with organic free range chicken broth, vinegar, garlic and capers. Bubble bubble, toil and trouble!

Upstairs I went, and burst in on MR's office where he was actually trying to get work done.

As usual, he drops everything for me. "I'm having a horrible day!" I exclaimed.

As it turns out, he had meant to tell me, after our conversation on Sunday night, that he actually didn't think I should decrease protein while I was still in active weight loss phase because those who do that often see too much lose of lean body mass. But he didn't want to micromanage my diet, so he hadn't mentioned it.

And if, in the end, I need high protein and meat to maintain CR calorie levels, then that way trumps methionine restriction or other concerns.

Yum yum yum. I ate my turkey. I started to feel like the sane, rational person I've come to fancy myself to be again.

I will probably go back to skipping breakfast entirely. On days when I have early yoga class, it's essential because you can't eat before practice (if you want proof, eat a big breakfast and then try to do a headstand.) Sure, I'm hungry from 10 - 12, but it seems I'm hungry during that time even if I eat breakfast, so may as well save the 200 - 300 calories.

In any event, my cottage cheese consumption, like most people's alcohol consumption, will be confined to after 5 pm with meals.

Feinman's First Law of Nutrition

[I wrote this last Sunday, but changed a few things in the draft. It will be rather important as background to the next entry so I re-post.]

Well, I've finally figured it out.

MR hid it carefully, cloaked in discussions of beliefs that we share that make marriage unlikely if not impossible. (We don't believe in marriage: we believe that it happens, but to other people. Like diabetes and plagues of locusts.) All this time I thought MR was genuinely ideologically opposed to marriage. We've saved our friends and family thousands of dollars by refusing to get married, and we've finally been together long enough that people stop asking when we're going to get the state's stamp on our relationship. He is on my health insurance. We have a joint credit card, we own a house together. We have no intention of ever breaking up. But we're not getting married. Ever. Not just because the thought of marriage makes me so physically ill that I can't even look at either red wine or Diet Coke.

Nope. Now I've figured out his real reason for not wanting to get married. It's a really sketchy attempt to get around Feinman's First Law Of Nutrition.

Thou shalt not interfere in thy spouse's diet.
- Richard David Feinman

You can see how this would be a very good law for maintaining domestic tranquility.

To be fair, MR has gotten very good about biting his tongue and letting me eat whatever I'm going to eat. He's survived many an episode of me going out with friends and overeating and overdrinking, and he long ago got over the notion that I would weigh and measure every single grape tomato. Most of the time he's just trying to be helpful. For instance, yesterday at lunch when he pointed out that since I frequently do not have dinner on Sunday nights (I eat breakfast only on Sundays, so I often don't have dinner. I'm a two meals a day person.) I should have flax oil with my salad at lunch instead of nuts.

To a normal person, this would be no big deal. But I over-react. I live with the world's icon of CR perfection, and it is at times a bit hard to not measure up. MR has been incredibly patient with me, especially considering that when we first got together I was both much better than I am now, and I also held myself out to be somewhat better than I am (who doesn't, in the early phases of seduction?) But my nerves are rubbed raw. So I overreact and turn into Ms. Mean Nasty B*t&h.

Having decided that we're already going there, I asked him what else he'd change about my diet, if he were given the opportunity to offer an opinion.

Silly me.

He'd have me quit or dramatically curtail meat consumption.

I'm really glad I ate those organic free range uncured turkey dogs before finding this out.

He has lots of good reasons: not methionine restriction, but methionine normalization. Epidemiological evidence that those who are either ovo-lacto vegetarians or eat meat less than once a week have lower risk of heart disease (for which I think my risk is approaching zero but anyway.) Environmental concerns.

So I figure I'll try it.

I created a template of foods to eat every day to make sure I get all my nutrition with minimal meat, moderate (rather than high) protein, and low carb. To this, I will add a) wine b) low carb veggies c) nuts, avocadoes, olives etc. d) little low fat cheeses, like Baby Bel and Laughing Cow Light (little processed cheeses are among my favorite things on earth) to get up to a target of 1400 calories/day.

2 cups nonfat plain organic yogurt
15 g pumpkin seeds
30 g almonds
150 g bok choi
150 g romaine
50 g radishes
300 g cauliflower
2 tsps flax oil
2 tbsps Lewis Labs brewers' yeast, which I will most likely put in organic veggie broth, no salt

Nutrition Summary for January 31, 2010
Report generated by CRON-o-Meter v0.9.7
===========================================

Lipids (42%)
===========================================
Saturated | 3.9 g 19%
Omega-3 | 5.1 g 321%
Omega-6 | 8.1 g 47%
Cholesterol | 5.4 mg 2%

Pretty good, eh? Plenty of room to grow in carbs from veggies before hitting 100, some room to grow in protein, but most of the nutritional bases covered.

Food is such a powerful issue in relationships. Back when I was a vegan, I dated a guy for two years who was really not good for me at all, but who was a vegan. We met at a political meeting to which I had brought vegan cookies. "Are these vegan?" he asked. "Yes, are you a vegan?" I asked. Sure enough, he was, and I decided at that moment to seduce him. We lived together for nearly two years of vegan cooking. He was an incredible tofu chef. I made lemon lentil soup that is to die for. He claimed that he was afraid of water, and therefore could not shower by himself. I was so enraptured that I actually bought this, and took a shower with him every other day. He didn't shower at all on the off days... he was a trust fund anarchist and had no job nor need of one... after leaving that relationship (for the guy who later, when I was 28, dumped me for a 22 year old Ruwandan refugee) I made a decision that from thenceforth, I would only date men who shower at least once a day. You know, some things should go without saying, but nothing ever does.

[Note, totally not CR related: I have observed that anytime I tell this story to a man, his reaction is something to the effect of, "Afraid of water? Why didn't I think of that???" So for all you gentlemen readers out there, try it on your wife or girlfriend today. If you are gay, I doubt your partner will fall for this trick, but feel free to try it anyhow. Afraid of water. Can't shower alone. Horrible panic attacks can be averted simply by having some company in the shower. If this works for you, it is evidence that either a) your girlfriend is really stupid b) she just wanted to take a shower with you anyway.]

The thrill of being with someone who shares your food beliefs, when you're one of us nutrition nutcases who thinks about this stuff all the time, is pretty amazing. I imagine it must be like when those people who play with model trains get together, or a Star Trek convention. Sharing a common passion is powerful and exciting, and it is certainly what drew me to MR in the first place. Our first few days in Calgary of CR-geeking out together were incredibly fun, and over the years we've had a lot of partner in crime moments as we weighed out our his and hers celery and played with DWIDP and later CRON-o-Meter. My creep off of CR and into mere healthy eating has been more frustrating for me than for him, but surely it has been frustrating and upsetting. Now that I'm back, things are better. He is so proud of me as I measure out my pumpkin seeds and read my scientific papers.

Still, I will never be quite like MR, and he accepts that. I will always go out, both for work and with friends. My idea of heaven is the Control Freak Salad at Marathon Grill, my favorite Philly salad place, and I don't know the exact calories on the salad I have there but I know it's low carb, high nutrition, and really really yummy. MR would never eat that because he only eats things that are weighed and measured, yet we've managed to make peace.

I doubt that, in spite of his very excellent best efforts, MR will ever be able to follow Feinman's First Law of Nutrition. He's too invested in my health and longevity to just leave well enough alone. So sometimes it's just easier for me to do what he wants rather than fight sad face. Argument from authority, no. Argument from the man you wake up next to.

And of course I want to live long and be healthy. I started to see signs of aging last week, though I think I was just tired, and I had that panic that drove me to hardcore CR in the first place. I need time. I hate the idea of aging, the idea that people who have finally learned how to behave like grown-ups don't stick around all that much longer. I want to look 50 when I'm 70. CR is the only intervention known to...

So very little meat, low carb, low protein, low sat fat, high MUFA and PUFA (awwww, the names of my eventual pet rats!) and I still get to drink wine. I can handle that. Hardcore we go again. 1400 with no going out, or at least very rare going out. At my activity level that will land me where I want to be in just the right amount of time.

The things I'm not eating are becoming a large list. Oh well. I've recently threatened to exist only on mashed cauliflower, flax oil and Laughing Cow Light. I don't need a lot of variety. Having found two things I really like, I don't really want much of anything else.

I've always felt sorry for the CR sisters who have partners who aren't supportive of their CR. I still do. It must be awful to be told you're too skinny (something that rarely happened to me even at 99) and have pressure to eat gak. I am grateful that I have a partner who is so supportive of my CR that sometimes he goes overboard. He forgives me for all the times I wasn't what I promised to be... I forgive him for the occasional micro-management.

Can I have an egg now?

Lemongrass Soup

Here's a new one: Lemongrass Soup

I just made it up, loosely based on an old lemon Thai coconut soup I used to make.

1 cup or so of veggie broth with Rapunzel no salt added vegan veggie broth
23 g lemon grass, fresh, diced
garlic
129 g portabello mushrooms, diced
300 g asparagus diced

I boiled the broth with the lemongrass in it, then added the mushrooms. Now they're simmering on the stove for two hours. I won't be home for dinner, but I popped home between work meetings to make MR's dinner. I've set out the asparagus for him to add just before heating to serve, so they don't get overcooked.

We'll see how it turns out. He's eating that along with his standard template of 5 g hazelnuts and 40 g avocado, which will go on the side salad of romaine, Quorn tenders, nonfat mozza, and 200 g zucchini that I've made him. The zucchini are marinated in Walden Farms Caesar dressing. He also gets a teaspoon of flax oil and one of olive oil plus his standard 3 oz serving of pinot noir.

I'm exhausted but the meetings are going well, and I did make it to the gym for a good 30 mins on the treadmill. I go up to 12 incline at 4.2 mph. It works up just enough of a sweat. Doing cardio daily also seems to help me sleep and make me less irritable.

Tomorrow I have to go to yoga. No... matter... what.

Today

===========================================
Nutrition Summary for February 2, 2010
Report generated by CRON-o-Meter v0.9.7
===========================================

Lipids (46%)
===========================================
Saturated | 5.6 g 28%
Omega-3 | 5.2 g 322%
Omega-6 | 8.1 g 48%
Cholesterol | 21.6 mg 7%

1 cup Nancy's Organic Cottage Cheese
1 tsp flax oil
15 g pumpkin seeds, unsalted, raw
30 g almonds
1 cup Butterworks' Farms nonfat plain organic yogurt
300 g cauliflower
150 g bok choi
150 g romaine
50 g radishes
50 g cucumber
90 - 110 calories worth of various favorite little processed cheeses: Laughing Cow Light, Mini Baby Bel, Weight Watchers string cheese, etc.
2 glasses red wine (5 oz)
2 tbsps Lewis Labs brewers' yeast
1 cup organic chicken broth (in which Lewis Labs is dissolved)

A little higher in protein than MR would ideally like, but I'm going to be locked in a room with bagels all morning, and I didn't eat dinner last night, so that high protein breakfast was important (cottage cheese today... not as bad on methionine as eggwhites.)

Room to grow by 200 calories... calorie goal currently at 1400. If I add calories they will probably be in the form of nuts. Nuts are so easy quick and convenient, and very low carb and relatively low protein. Who would have ever thought that I would be attempting to cut back on the two macronutrients that in my past life were the focus of my diet? Re-inventing... she's changing her name from Kitty to Karen...

Busy day today... meetings, gym, office, meetings, etc. MR packed my nut and seed bag, and the rest of my food is already at the office. Our new office is lovely. I actually like going there.

I am almost done with the Twilight series of vampire novels. Good thing, as I have actual important reading to do that has been on hold since I couldn't put down the vampire books.

Had a dream the other night that I was at a conference and every pop nutrition book writer I'd ever read was there. I gave Dean Ornish a big hug. Couldn't help it.

What do you think is the best thing to eat immediately after working out? If it's a high calorie burn workout, I find I like yogurt and almonds. If it's a lower calorie burn workout (like Iyengar, big muscle build but fewer calories burnt just in the practice) I like high protein + high fat. If it's Bikram, nothing goes well with falling in the floor in dehydrated and near death exhaustion, so you may as well eat whatever.

Don't get me wrong, I love Birkram. I'm just saying.

I should have gone to the gym instead of blogging. Oh well, later, between meetings, I will go.

Kieffer, contrary to whatever MR says on the subject, is a very good cat. Especially when he is * not* trying to stand on my computer.

Why do people not like to count calories? I really like to count. It's like a game. I like to count everything though. Carbs, fat, protein, average SAT score of men I've dated.

They apparently didn't take SATs in Canada. I asked. Just now.

You know you're a CR geek if you actually read the nutrition information.

Low Carb Cucumber Radish Salad

Radishes
Cucumbers
(diced, obviously)
red wine vinegar
parsley, chopped
garlic
dash Worchestershire sauce

Marinate overnight in fridge, serve cold.

Sorry for the lack of blog... had very busy week followed by lots of sleeping over the weekend and lots of work too. More soon!

Another Hazard of CR -- Stuffed Eggplant -- N&M Society Meeting

My right wrist is starting to hurt when I chop vegetables. Does anyone else have this problem? I chop so many veggies making food for MR and myself that I think I am getting a repetitive stress injury. I will ask Sage Jonathan, my yoga teacher, what to do about it, but other suggestions are welcome from excessive vegetable choppers.

Tonight's MR dinner: surprise! Another stuffed eggplant! Am I getting boring? He says he never tires of the old favorites, and I've rarely made the exact same dish twice, but will there come a point where he just doesn't want another stuffed eggplant? I doubt it. He's not a huge fan of variety. But still... I should learn some new tricks.

Here's a healthy way for us all to entertain our brains: I propose a stuffed eggplant recipe contest. You've seen the kinds of things I do with stuffed eggplant: mushrooms, asparagus, zucchini, Walden Farms Marinara, nonfat ricotta, nonfat mozzarella, etc. Always topped with olive oil, after cooking. Send me new and creative stuffed eggplant recipes.

Obviously, MR is not yet convinced of the okayness of sat fat, so keep the eggplant recipes low carb and low sat fat, k? If he has some sort of revelation, you'll be the first to know.

Meanwhile, here is something I should have told you about long ago: the Feb 27 meeting of the Nutrition and Metabolism Society. As of yesterday there were only about 17 spots left, and I'm sure they're going fast, so especially if you're in the NYC area, you should think about going. The cost is outrageously low, which I think is wonderful since this sort of thing shouldn't be reserved for only people who have a lot of money. Here's the description:

Reminder:

Saturday, February 27th, 2010. Join Dr.'s RD Feinman, RK Bernstein, Eugene Fine and many other Society members at our 2010 NMS planning meeting.

We will hear from Dr.'s Bernstein and Feinman, review science in the news from 2009, discuss our plans to make headlines in 2010, Adele Hite will share plans to strengthen our global presence and we want to hear from you, our valued members!

The meeting will be in Manhattan from 10:00am to 3:30pm
Location: Partnership with Children
299 Broadway, Suite 1300
New York, NY 10007
There will be lunch, raffles and lots of great prizes for participants! There will be a $10 fee for Society members and $15 for non members to participate in the meeting.

Space is limited and there are just 18 seats left. You may reserve your seat today by clicking here and then clicking on the "JOIN" button. This will take you to paypal. Type the word 'meeting' in the blank box and enter the appropriate fee to reserve your seat today.

Please note: We prefer you use Paypal by clicking on the link above, however, if you do not have a paypal account you may use this link and enter the reservation fee under 'general donation'.
All reservations are non-refundable.

And, not to compare this to the opportunity to meet the rock stars listed above, but I'll be there too!

What Works, What Doesn't

I can't sleep.

It's 3 am. I've been waking up at 3 most nights for the last while, but most nights I don't mind... I stay awake for a little while, lying in bed writing in my head or whatever, and then I go back to sleep till 4 or 5 or (gasp!) 6 on some really good days. I don't really mind waking up at 3 am if I wake up with particularly good thoughts, such as an entire chapter of the novel writing itself. But this morning I woke up feeling stressed out.

I was thinking about why I didn't sleep well tonight, and I thought of a few behaviors that help me sleep, and a few that don't. Now why you would take sleeping advice from an insomniac I don't know, but here are some observations that you can take or leave.

-- I sleep better when I don't eat past about 6:30 pm.
-- I sleep better when I do yoga every day.
-- I sleep better when I do cardio every day.
-- I sleep better when I'm on serious CR, but there is a limit to that because if I go too low I am almost high and can't sleep much at all, as during my ketogenic diet experiment. On the flip side, I need less sleep when my calories are lower.

Yesterday was a super busy day. Membership meetings at Temple at 7:30 am, 12 noon, 1 pm, 3:30 pm, 5 pm, 7:45 pm. Susie and I did a leaflet at 6:30, and I had a meeting with my organizing staff at 10:15. During Temple membership meetings, we see 700 - 1000 people, and they don't all come at once at the meeting times: they tend to roll in as they get breaks or can drop by, so it's a continuous stream of people. I was on my feet almost the entire day, and when I got home I was dead exhausted and really thought I'd sleep through the night. Tomorrow morning (well, this morning) is Jonathan's class, so that means 6:05 am train. Then I'm giving a pick up class to a co-worker whose blood pressure is up a lot from the stress of the Temple campaign. Yoga for relaxation: I don't think it's going to be what he thinks it's going to be, but the fact is, once you're on number 5 of the 12 sun salutations we do every morning, you've forgotten about whatever was bothering you. Then a full day of work, though luckily not all that long a day.

As I thought about my sleeping problems, my mind drifted into making a list of things that work and don't work for CR, or even for just eating well. While I am not very credible as an authority on how to sleep (beside the basic mechanics: lie down, close eyes, etc.) I do know a lot about what works and what doesn't for CR.

A few highlights. YMMV.

What doesn't work:

-- The punishment mentality: overeating and then trying to eat really low to make up for it. A lot of now-gone CR bloggers tried that. It both doesn't work and reinforces the mentality that this is something you're doing because you feel bad about yourself, not good. If you overeat, just go back to normal the next day, unless you're genuinely not hungry.

-- Replacing fat with carb. This is the single worst thing that I can do in my CR. I mean, other than replacing turkey and mashed cauliflower with 98% fat free canned ravioli, which I haven't done in a long long time.

-- Starting the day without a clear plan and clear goals. I find that I am much more susceptible to the "just one bite" trap if I don't have a very clear plan of what I'm going to eat going into the day. Even if it's just, "I will not eat anything with carbs in it other than low calorie vegetables," that's enough to avoid the biggest monster of all:

-- "Just one bite." The one bites I've had off friends' plates, of appetizers people wanted to share, of meeting food at nurse meetings, etc. have added up. And what's worse about just one bite is that it often turns into more than just one bite. For instance, I can not eat just one bite of a bagel with cream cheese. I've done it once or twice, in 35 years, but for the most part, if I eat one bite of bagel, I'm in it for the whole thing. Same with pizza.

-- "Last Night On Earth," a phenomenon I've named after a U2 song about heroin addiction (I think.) The idea that "Tomorrow I will start being really strict and will continue to be so for the rest of my life so tonight I will eat whatever I want and it will be okay." This may be the second biggest monster, or it may even win out as the biggest monster. Have you met it? I'd rather meet a plush minotaur in my bed in the middle of the night than this one.

-- The "I've already screwed up, so I'll start again tomorrow" monster. A close relative of the above. Often the direct descendant of "Just one bite."

-- The "I feel awful so I'm going to do something that makes me feel even more awful," monster. This is why it's so important to surround yourself with positive people who make you feel good about yourself. When I feel young and beautiful and healthy, my behavior reflects that. There's a fairly good test, for me, of whether or not I'm in a good head space re: body image. It has nothing to do with the mirror or the scale. It is as follows:

One of the workers at the meeting comes onto my twenty-something co-worker (who looks like a super model) and ignores me. I either:

a) feel depressed because I'm not 27 anymore and what if I'm past the point where anyone is going to look at me ever again except for MR who is wonderful and the love of my life but obviously hopelessly deluded by being in love with me all these years and also likes his food with very little salt and his vegetables undercooked which just goes to show that he has weird taste

b) I am simultaneously planning the biggest health care strike in Philadelphia in 20 years and plotting how to raise a few hundred thousand dollars to do a revolutionary study on low carb diets for diabetes patients (not my idea, RDF's, but my love/hate relationship with fundraising always leaves me thinking that given a few minutes I could come up with a hundred thousand dollars, and it's happened before so it's not that off the wall.) and I don't even notice that the worker is hitting on my staff member until I recognize that she really needs to be rescued so I create a distraction.

Obviously, choice B signifies a good space.

A CR friend and loyal reader, Agnes, was asking me about motivation. For me, I am much more motivated when I am intellectually engaged with the subject. That first year of CR is so exciting because you're learning everything for the first time. I have another CR girlfriend who is in first year euphoria, and it's a ton of fun for me to watch her obsess over macronutrient ratios. It's all so fascinating the first year you turn yourself into an experiment, with results both instant and long term. I've felt quite a bit of renewed euphoria starting to study this low carb stuff... it's almost like a chemical high, like you could shred up the papers and put them in some water and then inject them directly into my veins and zing! Better than all the drugs I've never tired, and only positive side effects... unless you are thinking about the fact that my car is now covered in them and my union president is riding with me to Scranton in two days so I'd better clean out the car. I remember how my mother used to say, back before she was as happy as she is now, "I may be depressed, but I can be a depressed person with a clean car."
There is really never a downside to cleaning out the car.

So on to what does work:

-- Have a plan, both for what you're not going to do but more importantly for what you're going to eat. For me, it's something like: pack protein and fat, eat them before eating any carbs, make sure enough veggies are on hand or accessible, have a back up plan if the gang goes out for lunch or dinner.

-- Hang out with people who are positive influences, both re: food and in general. Avoid people who aren't.

-- Recognize the danger of the food environment and plan for it.

-- If you screw up, don't freak out about it, but also don't let yourself off the hook too much.

-- Don't do CR media. Putting myself in a position where I got attacked for my diet, my lifestyle, anything I said about libido either pro or against (you should have seen the attacks I got on the CR Society list for my statements re: that most common myth about CR -- are these people from Victorian England??? I thought we had decided that sex was good???) started such a negative feedback loop in my head re: diet and everything. Maybe you could handle it. I can't. Not now anyhow.

When I look back, I can see the series of events that led me from being very happy in my CR and in general to some sort of existential despair. Most of the events had nothing to do with CR, but were things that happen to many of us at one point in our lives or another. 35 is a funny age. 33 and 34 were kinda awful but so far 35 is my favorite year ever. I strongly recommend it to anyone who hasn't tried it yet. I'd never trade the 25 year old version of me for what I have now. It just occurred to me that the 25 year old version of me who used to sit in her little single girl apartment reading nutrition books would jump up and down with delight if she could see the 35 year old version of me. "We did it!" she'd say scream, alarming the then two year old cat who would take her activity as an invitation to play and start to chase her feet. We're finally starting to *do* something re: diet and public health. Not sure quite what yet or quite how, but no question that the revolution is just around the corner, and I'm not the distant spectator I was for so long. Sure, the macronutrients are turned upside down in a way that would really alarm the 25 year old version of self, but like Madonna (thanks Agnes!) I am constantly re-inventing. And besides, "Don't Tell Me" is a much better song than "Borderline.:

MR on Saturated Fat

I mentioned a few weeks ago that MR responded to RDF's inquiry re: sat fat. I'm finally getting around to posting it... read and draw your own conclusions!

Keep in mind... MR is far from a lipophobe. He advocates a high fat diet, but coming mostly from MUFAs and PUFAs.

Please do be sure to follow the embedded links!

Hi Dr. Feinman,

As relayed by the fair hand of April:

> What does MR say about saturated fat? ... what is the
> evidence. Not a challenge, because I present to medical students my
> side of the picture, the failure of Framingham, Malmo and WHI and,
> most of all, Jakobsen's article showing that replacing saturated fat
> with PUFA, or MUFA or carbs is pretty much of a flip of the coin in
> terms of outcome.... The only answer I
> got was reference to all the health agencies opinions and the fact
> that the Jakobsen paper that I quoted showed PUFA was better than
> SFA.

By "the Jakobsen paper," you mean the AJCN meta-analysis, right? (Let me come back to WHI in a moment). Actually, I too would start there, as even on an abstract-surfer's casual analysis it's sufficient grounds to draw the *broad strokes* of the core conclusion: it shows fairly clearly, from a large number of mostly very high-quality prospective epidemiological studies in Western countries with a range of different dietary patterns, that typical North American and European intakes of *both* saturated fat and carb, on an isocaloric basis, are significant contributors to coronary events and mortality -- even now, when we have statins, metformin, thiazides, et al to control some of the adverse metabolic sequelae of such lifestyles.

> And, for sure, replacing SFA with carbs is, at best, a wash.

Yes -- which constitutes an indictment of both :) . Ie, a pox on both Atkins' and Ornish's houses! This argues for a lower-carb, lower-SFA, higher-PUFA diet -- something like "South Beach" or the Zone.

But let me drill down into those results a bit, as I think there's more to be mined therein:

> I presented that at the CR meeting and my interpretation was
> that there was so much individual variation that the mean didn't > really mean anything.

I agree, and think that we can say a bit more about this. As you know (you alluded to it at the Conference and have said so in more detail elsewhere), we actually know a fair amount about the BASIS for such variation in the population, due to the differential metabolic responses observed in response to a low-carb diet, with leaner, more insulin-sensitive subjects (and, though you didn't say it, younger ones) responding less favorably to a low-carb diet and more favorably to an old-style AHA low-fat (and, specifically, low-SFA, low-cholesterol) pattern. In the "Discussion" in the Jakobsen meta-analysis, they note that "It has been suggested that the association between major types of fat and risk of CHD is modified by sex and age. This study suggests that to prevent CHD, SFAs should be reduced and replaced with PUFAs among all middle-aged and older women and men. However, it cannot be excluded that associations may be stronger in subgroups, but our study only provides a suggestion for these possibilities."

A somewhat stronger case than the study they cite on this point, although indirect to the specific issue of SFA vs carb, comes from a comparison of studies on the outcomes for prospective studies in Europe vs America for mortality outcomes for a low-carb diet score based on intakes of *protein* vs carb:

http://ki.se/content/1/c6/04/99/84/WLH_22_Lagiou%202007.pdf
http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v61/n5/full/1602557a.html
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/19/1991

In the Nurses Health Study, eating a lower-carb, higher-protein diet was associated with a reduced risk of cardiac and total mortality in women, whereas in the 2 European studies, such diets were associated with *higher* risk. Willet's editorial:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117966552/abstract

... notes the dietary differences amongst populations:

**************
We can set aside immediately that the difference in findings were due to fundamental differences in study quality. All three studies were prospective, meaning that the potentially serious biases in case–control studies were avoided; all used dietary assessment methods with documented validity; and all had quite complete ascertainment of outcomes. …

Thus, the apparently contrasting findings are likely to be due to real differences in the study populations, their diets or the methods of analysis. … Women in the Swedish study were substantially younger ... than in the US study ... and leaner ..., and for both of these reasons, the degree of insulin resistance would have been much lower in the Swedish study. One of the most important findings during the last decade has been that the adverse metabolic effects of high-carbohydrate intake are greatly magnified in the presence of underlying insulin resistance. Consistent with this evidence, we have seen that high dietary glycaemic load... has little effect on the risk of coronary heart disease in lean women, but nearly doubles the risk in overweight and obese women. Similarly, high glycaemic load was not associated with the risk of stroke in leaner women, but was significantly associated with risk in overweight and obese women. The types of diets consumed by the Swedish and US women may have contributed to the differences in findings. From many dozens of controlled feeding studies, we know that different types of fat have opposite effects on blood lipids [blah blah ;) ] ...

Similarly, the type of carbohydrate rather than the total amount of carbohydrate is key in relation to the risk of cardiovascular disease. As noted above, high amounts of refined starch and sugar have adverse metabolic effects and increase risk; in contrast, whole grain/high-fibre forms of carbohydrate have beneficial metabolic effects and are related to reduced risks of cardiovascular disease. ... [F]rom other reports we know that the cereal fibre content (the form of fibre most strongly related to lower risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes) is approximately three times higher in Swedish compared to US women [9]. Whilst there is little reason to believe that the type of protein influences the risk of cardiovascular disease [I'd actually disagree on this -- there is substantial evidence of a more protective effect of *vegetable* protein; references available on request ;) -MR], the protein package can include large amounts of cholesterol and saturated fat (in the case of animal proteins) or fibre and beneficial micronutrients (with plant proteins). The available data do not allow a comparison of the sources of proteins in the Swedish and US studies. ***********

Jakobsen et al also note, re: the surprising neutral-to-unfavorable results for MUFA, that "the main source of MUFAs was animal fat, whereby confounding from other dietary components in meat and dairy products cannot be excluded. " Other studies point pretty clearly to a protective effect of olive oil and other less-confounded MUFA sources with a protective effect against mortality and other outcomes.

While it's getting a bit off-topic, and while I imagine you're initially going to think that I am attempting to rouse a long-dead myth, a substantial amount of evidence has emerged just in the last few years for a divergent effect of dietary *cholesterol* (a fellow-traveller with SFA when it comes from animal sources) depending on leanness and insulin sensitivity:

http://www.crsociety.org/archive/read.php?2,189896,189896#msg-189896

(Do follow the embedded links).

What I think we're seeing is exactly the divergence within these populations that you know: that carb is really rather bad for overweight, insulin-sensitive people, such that replacing it even with SFA is relatively harmless -- whereas for lean, insulin-sensitive people, SFA (and dietary cholesterol, its fellow-traveller in omnivorous diets) is likely more *relatively* harmful, because carb is less able to derange the metabolism. We have to remember that any time we look at these studies and see only modest or borderline-significant effects: 66% of the US population is overweight, and half of that majority is obeese; Europe is somewhat better-off, at 49.8% and 13.3% in men and 36.0 & 13.5% in women per MONICA. So the deleterious effects of any nutrient with a differential effect on low-BMI, insulin-sensitive people will tend to be blunted by the much larger number of people for whom such effects are blunted by their "larger" problem.

It also means that the deleterious effects of a rise in SFA intake are at least temporarily outweighed if it is is part of a dietary shift into a lower-carb diet when it is successfully used for weight loss (as opposed to just being a person's self-selected default diet, which of course is what's going on in teh studies in Jakobsen and in the Swedish, Greek, and US Nurses low-carb/high-protein studies). But it's reasonably clear that if you're insulin-sensitive -- which, interestingly, is what one is likely to become after losing weight on a successful low-carb weight-loss diet! -- the effects of SFA become more *relatively* harmful as teh deleterious effects of carb recede.

Moreover, I think we have a fair amount of evidence for a specific (albeit widely exaggerated) benefit of omega-3 fatty acid intake, which unfortunately the Jakobsen meta-analysis couldn't evaluate. I think it's reasonable to expect that a discrimination here would have further emphasized the benefits of these fats.

Overall, I think the epidemiology is consistent with your view that the effects of carb are differential, and that we need to pay attention to that. They're also consistent in particular with the widely-accepted view that there is 'good carb/bad carb' as well as 'good fat/bad fat'. Again, this argues to me that that the thing to do is to lose weight, by whatever means, is a Good Thing, but that the best way to do this -- and, more importantly, the *maintenance* diet for people who are of normal weight and below and who are insulin-sensitive -- is a *relatively* (vs population average) low-carb, low-saturated-fat, high-PUFA (and probably plant-derived MUFA), high-(vegetable)-protein diet, with the carb coming from vegetables and whole grains rather than starchy crap.

Ie, a pretty boringly mainstream viewpoint :) with a bias toward the Zone (or South Beach, if Agatson's recipes and detailed dietary guidance actually lived up to his high-level advice and the diet's reputation).

Now, that's the epidemiology. Interventionally, you mention the lack of reported benefit from a low-fat diet in WHI. I would first note, of course, that I don't advocate for a low-fat diet, but for a low-SFA, moderate- to high-fat diet. But also, I must draw your attention to the fact that the trumpeted "No benefit of a low-fat diet!" headline is based on (wait for it!) an intention-to-treat analysis ;). The intervention group self-reported a 29% fat diet, vs the 20% study goal, and as multiple studies have clearly shown, people systematically underreport almost everything they're eating, but especially fat (because it's easier to see that you've eaten a whole vs a half an apple than that you've added a whole vs a half tablespoon of lard to your frying pan); meanwhile, the controls reduced their fat intake almost as much, and both groups modestly (almost indistinguishably) increased consumption of fruits and vegetables, and neither group significantly changed intake of grains. In biomarkers, despite the fact that lower SFA intake will, pretty unambigiously, lower LDL levels (whatever else it does -- and more on THAT below), LDL decreased only 2.6% more in the low-fat group than in the controls.

And, we don't know *which* fats these people were eating. We not only don't really know if they lowered SFA relative to other fats: we don't know if, as part of following widely-publicized "low fat" advice, they replaced SFA with margarine, which was still trendy through most of the intervention period, going from bad to what I'm sure you already agree was worse; we also don't know if they rendered themselves n3 deficient. I'll say it again: I wouldn't say that there is an evidence base for supporting a merely low-fat diet!

And was there even a REAL (even if tiny!) reduction in even fat intake?? If they fell prey to the "Snackwell effect," not actually LOWERING their total fat or SFA intake, but increasing their intake of simple carb (as we know from CDC and others that the US population as a whole did following the propagation of the low-fat oversimplification by the public health authorities in teh late 70s thru' the early 2000s) the result would be reported as a percentage reduction of SFA when they've actually just added high-GI carb Calories onto already-toxic Standard American Diets ("WHI! The New and Improved SAD -- with Added Metabolic Syndrome!").

So what is GOOD evidence? I'd say the clearest intervention data we have is also the most robust: the Lyon Diet Heart Study:

http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/158/11/1181
http://www.circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/99/6/779

... which as I'm sure you know reported that a dietary intervention with multiple components to the *guidance* , but which in the end based on actual shifts in dietary intake (by self-report and by biomarkers) largely amounted to a modest reduction of SFA in vavor of a higher intake of ALA (and, modestly, MUFA) led to quite astonishing reductions in cardiovascular and total mortality (as well as cancer, although the n was so small as to not make this a strong specific outcome, esp as it was a post-hoc outcome analysis). I know that there were initially methodological criticisms of the study, but in my view the biomarker data rebut a lot of that, and certainly it's the best overall evidence we have for a dietary intervention trial. Similar results, with more rigor, were reported by Singh et al:

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0140673602114723

... despite using mustard oil, which is problematic (inferior n6:n3, may contain inflammatory constituents, erucic acid content seems to have been absolved of previous suspicion still somewhat controversial); unfortunately Dr. Singh's research is now under a substantial cloud of suspicion: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67005-5

I'm sure you can come up with a lot of criticisms on methods or analysis of these studies, but it looks to me to be the best evidence that's available on the subject, and what I give above appears to be the best analysis, based on the results, of its implications in terms of how one should eat for one's health. That is: this is the balance of evidence from prospective epidemiology and clinical trials, and there doesn't to my knowledge seem to be evidence of similar quality (large-scale, well-characterized populations, followed up for sufficient time to expect to see a difference in outcomes) that is equally suggestive of a contrary conclusion.

Notably, the critiques of these broad conclusioins that seem most widely cited by low-carb laypeople in reply (Ravnskov, Taubes, etc) clearly don't meet this standard: they spend most of their efforts bitching about the limitations of what IS available, beating dead horses, and emphasizing *lower* -quality studies while breezing over even better data. They spend, eg, an absurd amount of time criticizing Keys, who of course got the whole Diet-Heart Hypothesis going on EXTREMELY shaky grounds in the first place -- but pointing out the multiple flaws in Seven Countries doesn't take a whit away from the quality of SUBSEQUENT studies of much greater rigor, like the Nurses' Health Study, Health Professionals Follow-up Study, Physicians' Health Study, etc, which they instead ignore entirely or breeze over.

At the same time, these critics spend a lot of time emphasizing studies of much lower quality -- including, ironically, spinning the low-quality Keys data in a different direction (as if that could lead to a more reliable conclusion), and simiilarly making much of other purely cross-sectional, population-level ecological data. Ravnskov, eg, is quite enamored of what he claims is observed in the Masai; it's bad enough that this is rebutting a low-quality ecological study with an even lower-quality, even smaller ecological study (as if such studies were worthy of consideration to begin with!), but to make things worse, he misrepresents the data itself, and ignores available and more plausible explanations even for what he DOES accurately review! Taubes makes many of the same mistakes, and then does things like blame the rise in obesity in the late 20th century on the "fact" that "the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing for two decades", when as noted above their actual intakes of total fat remained static and carb intake progressively increased (which (surprise!) leads to overweight and metabolic syndrome), and then asserts that over the same period, "Our cholesterol levels have been declining [true! -- due to an actual reduction in SFA -- MR], and we have been smoking less [also true -MR], and yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined as would be expected." In fact, as you may know, coronary disease and mortality declined quite remarkably in the late 20th century, DESPITE the rise in obesity, metabolic syndrome, and junk carb intake:

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/343/8/530
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15308430

And all of them engage in much hypothesis-spinning from the biochemistry, which is a fine basis for generating new hypotheses but not for rebutting actual, prospective study outcomes.

At the end of the day, we have to go with what we've got. Until we get a couple of thousand healthy twenty-year-olds locked up in metabolic wards for sixty years or so for a really vigorous diet trial, I think saturated fat AND carbs (especially starchy carbs) stand out as things to reduce in the diet, in exchange for vegetables, fruit, lean protein, and PUFA (and probably MUFA) as things to maintain or increase. And most people should lose weight!

Again, boring ol' me ;) .

(A postscript, with relevance to the wider subject: at the Press Conference, I'd mentioned a meta-analysis finding that the epidemiology couldn't actually support the differential effect of small, dense LDL on cardiovascular risk, as giving additive information to the basic risk profile. It's available here:

http://www.annals.org/content/150/7/474.full

Live long -- live young!

-Michael

Faith

I was just whining to CR-girlfriend Paige that I am feeling a little unmotivated. I'd been doing so well, seeing weight loss on the scale, major improvement in my Pilates practice, feeling more energetic and better over all. But in the last couple of days I'm feeling a little less enthusiastic. Last night I went out with a friend who knows nothing of CR and ended up splitting a cheeseburger and fries. Hadn't done that in ages. It tasted pretty good, especially the dead cow, but of course I felt awful afterward, not guilty just icky. And then I didn't sleep well, and had to get up and run to get my stuff together to go to Scranton, then go to the office for a rather intense two hour meeting, then hit the road for a three hour foggy drive. I was tired, a little stressed, and not feeling like hanging out all day in the cold.

I'm back to not eating breakfast again, so I didn't eat until close to noon when I was driving. I reached into my food bag, packed with bok choi and romaine salad, nonfat organic yogurt, turkey cooked in red wine vinegar with capers, flax oil, and so I thought, two pre-measured bags of almonds and pumpkin seeds. I was going to have my strength-providing bag of nuts and seeds on the journey, but I couldn't find them. They were nowhere in the bag and I thought, how stupid, I made such an effort to carefully pack every morsel of my food and now I forgot something!

So I bought a stick of string cheese, 80 cals of part skim mozzarella, at the Allentown rest stop. Fought an epic battle with the wrapper to open it, ate it, felt okay. Got to my meeting at a Perkins. The sweet nurses I met with insisted on buying lunch, and we all got breakfast. I had an eggwhite omelet with mushrooms, tomatoes, mushrooms, green peppers and onions. Decaf coffee and diet Coke. Tomato slices on the side, obviously no pancakes or toast or potatoes. One of the nurses had wheat toast and a fruit cup. The other had one egg sunny side up and blueberry pancakes.

Meeting was great... a reminder of why I do the work I do.

Then I drove back to the hotel and realized I was starving. And feeling very, very low energy. Had meant to work out but realized it wasn't going to happen. Got out my turkey and salad and ate some of it. Eventually MR wrote and remembered that he'd put my nuts and seeds bags in the bag with my supplements in my suitcase, so I did in fact have them, but by this time I was already full. I did some work, caught up on some emails, wrote a silly blog about lip gloss.

I was just feeling exhausted and unmotivated. The scale was up this morning, of course, and on Monday I had the worst Pilates class ever. My teacher was out of town and we had a sub, whose entire workout seemed to revolve around exercises that I can't do with my tailbone injury, even though it's so much better since Iyengar. I somehow managed to re-injure the tailbone, so sitting hurt for the rest of the day. I sat there thinking I'd have been better off staring into space for an hour, attempting to modify the exercises. Not an inspiring experience.

I was feeling extremely inspired about the projects I'm working on with RDF and Laurie, the director of the Nutrition and Metabolism Society. But a little bit questioning if I could keep up this long term low carb CR thing, plus Pilates and yoga and cardio (been hitting at least half hour on the treadmill per day, and when I do treadmill I go up to 8 or more incline.) I had felt so good when I started CRCR, almost high... okay, definitely high. But now I was lacking focus. That slip with the cheeseburger... the general knawing hunger without a clear object. The lack of energy. General listlessness. Where had my magic CRCR gone?

Then it occurred to me. I hadn't had my fat. The missing nuts and seeds, though located, had not been consumed. No flax or olive oil today. No wonder I was feeling off! Fat is not only the great stabilizer of blood sugar, it is the great stabilizer of mood. And energy levels. Without the once-forbidden macronutrient, I am now a listless little pile of non-energy. There is no stick of part skim mozzarella, no matter how cleverly hidden within overly secure packaging, that can take the place of my little pre-measured bag of nuts and seeds. Even protein and very healthy veggies can not make up for the fat. I need it now: I am not so much addicted as awake. I didn't realize, for all those years, what I was missing. It fixes everything: it conquers sugar cravings, clears the mind of highs and lows, and re-focuses the tastes so that what is good tastes good and what is bad is unattractive.

I get overconfident and think I can live without it, but the results of even a few hours of deprivation are obvious. MR was always right about this. Without adequate fat, it's not just carbs that creep. It's hunger and cravings and a general lack of stability. Fat, albeit in the forms of MUFA and PUFA (the names of my non-existent rats!) is the drug that makes me function at a level that I'd never imagined possible. But it's not a drug: it's a real part of so many foods I'd loved but repressed my taste for because I was taught that they were bad.

I take a leap of faith every time I eat my nuts and seeds. The programming is so deep that I feel like I should skip the fat so that I have more room for carb later. But I should know by now where that road leads. To cravings and temptations to throw it all out the window and eat whatever. To the "I'll start tomorrow" mentality. My beloved, almost magical equilibrium that allows me to be so creative and productive seems to be directly connected to my fat consumption.

Of course, there are limits. Ketogenic got too extreme very quickly. I can't handle the cold, though it would be fun to try in summer! I miss my healthy veggies too much, and I started to feel that if I took another bite of turkey I'd be ill! But the insight that fat consumption comes first, and all follows from that: it defies every rule I've ever learned, but still I've never been half so... on... as when I am on a higher fat diet. (there's a very obscure Carly Simon lyric reference in there that probably none of you will get.)

So, as George Michael says in what is one of his best songs ever: I've gotta have faith. I know from experience that this works, but the sinister voices in my head that say, "You can save calories by skipping your fat," have to be treated as the liars they are. There is so much more at stake than weight: my long term health and longevity depends on me being able to get my calorie levels lower, and I knew from the moment I met RDF that carb restriction was going to be the key. And the secret key to carb restriction is loading up with fat, early in the day, and without skipping doses. I should just think of it as my medication and take it with the fervor with which I used to take anti-anxiety pills, back before I realized that I don't have an anxiety disorder, I just have a bad reaction to sugar and caffeine.

I need it, it's not bad, it's not fattening, it's not fat that makes you fat. Even the links between saturated fat and heart disease are starting to unravel, and there is hope that someday I will eat hard boiled eggs with reckless abandon.

But for the moment, I know that my nuts and seeds and oils are enough. Early in the day, before I eat anything else. Nearly pure fat. The thing I used to think was the enemy.

It's a funny upside down moment when the eggs are sunny side up and the world is upside down. The bad guys are good and the good guys are bad. The bagel is the enemy, the cream cheese could be your friend.

Ummmmmm... cream cheese.

In Case You're Having A Sugar Craving

I am a huge fan of lip gloss. Though I used to wear lip stick when I was younger, I find it looks a little "too much" these days. I wear very little make up at all, as MR strongly prefers me without it and not wearing it gives me an excuse to be a little lazier. So most days I just use a dab of eyeliner and some lip gloss, but I am quite the lip gloss freak.

Recently I was in the grocery store (surprise!) and decided it was time for a shiny new gloss. I especially like the kinds with little sparklies in them, so they shine almost excessively. I picked up Mabelline's Shiny-licious SPF 15 crushed candy flavor. It really tastes like crushed candy! And it's nicely shiny without being too sticky or gooey, which if you're a user of lip gloss, you know is a tough balance to strike.

I was thinking that it would be the perfect sugar free fix for those late afternoon sugar cravings. I don't get them much anymore now that I eat more fat early in the day, but the urge to eat a handfull of candy used to be very strong some days in the afternoon. Now I can just put on some lip gloss!

Other Things Your Mother Should Have Told You

I have often thought of writing a book entitled, "Things My Mother Taught Me That You Sure Wish Yours Had Taught You." Or some more clever variation of that.

One piece of advice that I don't think she ever gave me, but that I wish she had, goes as follows.

Hang out with people who make you feel good about yourself.

and, equally important:

Don't spend time with people who don't.

This seems so obvious, doesn't it, yet think back to times in your life when you were blissfully happy, and note who was around you. Then think back to times in your life when you were less than content, and look around you. Clearly, if we all had this figured out, we'd all have been much more cheerful during those down times.

I discovered this by accident, almost the exact same way I discovered that full-caff coffee gives me anxiety attacks. With the coffee, I started drinking decaf when we ran out of regular and I didn't have time to go by Starbucks for a few days. Then I noticed that my traditional 9 am anxiety wasn't there anymore. After testing a few times, I realized that the anxiety was a direct result of caffeine. I don't have anxiety, or at least I don't anymore: I have a very bad reaction to large doses of caffeine, and the same to sugar.

I think this concept is extremely important when it comes to any attempt to change your diet or improve your health, because in order to succeed, you have to believe that you can succeed. If the voices in your head (I mean that metaphorically, I assure you) are telling you you're fat and ugly, you're much less likely to make the right decision when it comes to what to put in your mouth. You know the drill: the scale is up a quarter of a pound in the morning and you think, "Damn it, I'll never lose weight, I'm going to eat a bagel." Or, my personal favorite, when I eat something I didn't plan to that's less than healthy I'm tempted to say, "Forget it, I'll start tomorrow." I'll-start-tomorrow is the arch-nemesis of positive change.

That's why it's extremely important to surround yourself with people who are a positive influence. This is so mind-numbingly obvious that you may not need to read this entry at all, but like many things that are best hidden when in plain view, I think it deserves to be picked up and and given the credit it deserves.

Once I stopped giving so much time to negative self-talk, I noticed that extremely positive people started appearing, as though by magic. Or, rather, I was more open to positive influences, and also more confident and therefore more likely to reach out to potential new friends.

When I look back at the toxic people I've had in my life, some of them downright radioactive (I'm thinking of someone from long ago, who anyone who knows me now except my mother and Emma would not remember, so don't start trying to guess) I notice that in many subtle ways, they sent me the message that I should give up on my dreams. There's something secure and comforting about those messages, at times, because if you give up on your dreams, then there's a lot less to work for. The bizarre flip side of having had a lot of career success very young was, for me, that it would be very easy to rest on what I've already accomplished and not explore other things in life that make me happy and that I find exciting, like yoga, nutrition and public health stuff, writing, etc. I am not just a happier person when I'm exploring other interests in addition to my job, I'm actually a better organizer. And I'm a better influence on everyone around me. I can be a toxic friend when I'm feeling less than healthy and happy myself -- we all can -- and when we pursue whatever it is that makes us light up like a Christmas tree, then we're more likely to encourage others to do the same.

If you're starting out on a new plan re: diet, exercise, or whatever, try this: list everyone who is an influence in your daily life. Then put a little line through the name of every person on that list whom you think expects you to fail. If even looking at the name fills you with a sense of negativity, put one tiny line through it. Don't worry, you won't kill the person or remove him or her from your life -- this isn't voodoo! But you will send a subtle message to your subconscious that this person's influence or perceived influence is weakened.

Even if you can't weed all the naysayers out of your life, you can minimize their psychic toxicity. Here's the trick: don't think about them. Most of the time, the people who we turn into critics in our heads aren't even thinking about us. Even if they are, we are under no obligation to think about them. Replace the negative voices with positive ones, even if you have to find them outside of your immediate circle.

I did this incredibly well during early CR. I was surrounded by people who had no interest in healthy eating (except for my mom and VLC, which back then stood for Very Little Co-Worker, though now of course it means something else) but I immersed myself in the CR Society list and its archives to the extent that it became almost an imaginary friend. Sure enough, several list friends became real friends: Kenton, Lin, Dean. And of course, the alpha male of the CR Society in its glory days, the one I dragged home to my country, even though it was at the time the land of George Bush and no national health care. His work was the single most powerful factor in my initial conversion to CR and 40 pound weight loss, and led to the development of a host of healthier habits. I had no work/life balance at all before I met MR... now I have something I can quite credibly call a "life" outside of work, and that has even improved my work.

Of course it's not all sunshine and bunnies. Over the winter of my CR discontent... a rather long winter indeed... even the positive voice of MR couldn't seem to break through the haze. The stranglehold of negative voices seemed unbreakable: the horrible harping from the media that seemed to go on for two years straight -- during which I don't know how I would have survived were it not for the positive voices of my CR girlfriends, most notably the ever-supportive Robin and the avenging angel journalist goddess writer, Allswellinhell, and the long term sister from the UK who has been there through good times and bad for both of us.

"You can't talk to the press if you care what they write," says RDF. I wish somebody had told me that *before* I agreed to do the first article! Could have saved me a lot of time and agony!

It probably didn't help that I read and re-read all the negative articles over and over again. Sending myself bad messages instead of picking myself up and doing something useful, like scrubbing the kitchen floor. It's ever so tempting to wallow in the negativity, isn't it?

I don't think people usually mean to be toxic. They just don't realize the consequences their words and actions have, and then we allow our own minds to magnify the toxicity, creating an icky stew of bad feelings that tastes even worse than hemp oil. For instance, Rebecca Traister didn't *mean* to ruin my Thanksgiving in 2006 and set off a string of nasty attacks on my blog that included the random death threat. Eventually we met, and we really quite like each other. (She also had a huge string of bad luck following that article, which I'm sure had nothing whatsoever to do with me but which might give columnists pause next time they decide to write something nasty about us...) But the fact is, if I hadn't thought about it so much, the whole thing probably would have been a lot less hellish.

These days, I feel incredibly good. I was thinking the other day that I feel as happy and optimistic and excited about life as I did at 22, but without all the craziness that comes with being 22. (If any of you out there are 22 year old women, let me assure you, it gets better.)

So far, 35 is my favorite year ever. Iyengar yoga with the most amazing yoga teacher on earth (Jonathan doesn't know about the blog so I can say nice things about him that he would really find irritating if he heard), unprecedented happiness on the home front, and the improbable appearance of the Low Carb Rockstar (not the diet version of the energy drink! That stuff if gross.) and subsequent introduction to all sorts of people who are actually *doing something* about the public health crisis directly caused by diet.

I find that on a daily basis, I am encouraged to dream big. And to act big. In a skinny sort of way. Delusions of grandeur, perhaps, but a hell of a lot more fun than sitting around feeling sorry for yourself.

Lap Rats

While I'm writing entries that contribute nothing whatsoever to the scientific dialogue, using the blog merely as a vehicle to play out my bizarre fantasies, I thought I'd let you in on a discussion MR and I were having re: our next pets.

Well, that's not precisely true, because MR will not let us have next pets. He says he doesn't want to be responsible for any animal other than me, and I'm pretty self-supporting. He was never a pet person, and has suffered the cats quite patiently, all things considered. So after Kieffer dies (which I hope is a long, long way off) he says: no more cats. He says I can have a snake if I want, and I may well get a snake as I adore snakes, but it's not like you can sleep with a snake in the bed or pet its soft fuzzy fur.

I have an idea for the perfect pet. Somewhere out there, someone has genetically engineered rats to be both intelligent and affectionate. Lap rats, if you will.

Graduate students have raised generations of rats who expect to be petted for several hours a day, and who will sit quietly in your lap while you type on the computer. They map the cuddliness of the rats on a Cuddle Matrix, a complicated reporting tool perfectly designed to capture the snuggle factor of the rat. Rats are bred for maximum cuddliness, and also for empathy with humans. For instance, like most cats, these rats can detect when you are sick or sad or for whatever reason need a cuddle, and will initiate cuddles at the appropriate time.

And surprisingly enough, while they love cuddling, they can also sit quietly in their little beds under your desk if you don't feel like paying attention to them. They're so well-behaved that they don't have to be kept in cages. They're liter trained too.

I'm going to find these rats, and purchase two, a boy and a girl, so they can keep each other company. I'm going to brush them and put a bow in the little girl's hair (go ahead and accuse me of raising my rats according to gender stereotypes, see if I care.) They'll love each other and play together.

I even told MR that the boy rat can be his pet and the girl rat can be mine, since the problem with pets is that he's obviously worried that the pets all love me more than they love him. He assures me that this is not the problem, and that he does not want pet rats. But I know that once we have them, he'll love them just as much as I do.

I'm going to name them Mufa and Pufa.

Alas, something tells me that my next pet will probably be a chia-pet. Kieffer had better live a long time.

I promise my next entry will be a serious one. But if you want another really silly entry about rodents, there's this one from 2005 about Chloe, the world's oldest mouse. It has a lot of 2005 in-jokes, but it does contain an insight about high carb diets that I had forgotten, but that really seems to be true. That reminds me that, as MR has pointed out, when I was most successful at CR in the early years I was eating a lower carb diet, about the same as I am now, and that the slinking off of hardcore CR occurred largely when I started replacing fat with carbs. The insight is just as true today as it was in 2005: replacing fat with carbs is bad, but the magic of trading carbs for fat may be just what you were looking for!

And I stand by the thing about the pink bow.

My Nutrition Superstition

I wrote about nutrition superstition the other day, and just to prove that I am not picking on anyone in particular and that I am just as irrational as everyone else, I will tell you my own superstition.

I can't eat anything cute.

Not rabbit. Not duck. Not lamb. Obviously not veal. Not baby spinach. Not baby arugula. Nothing with the word "baby" in it, except for baby carrots which are somehow immune from this rule (I said it wasn't rational, it's not consistent either.)

And here is the craziest part: I can't eat chia seeds. First, I find them gross. But on top of that, I can't stand the thought that a cute little chia-pet will not be born because I ate the seeds. (Did you know that you can buy a Barack Obama chia pet? What a country!)

Even though they would have been a good source of omega 6's.

Now I can eat pumpkin seeds because pumpkins aren't all that cute. But I prefer to eat canned pumpkin than fresh because a) fresh is hard to deal with b) the kind of little sweet pumpkins out of which you get pumpkin pie (sweetened with Splenda of course) pumpkin are cute.

I really like unattractive vegetables like cauliflower. I prefer dino kale to curly kale, not just because I think it's texture is more fun but because it is ugly. I really like the truly bizarre varieties of cauliflower that are totally unappetizing colors like purple and turn eggwhites blue if you make a stir fry out of the two. I love pickled eggs, which are bright pink and absurd looking.

There is nothing cute about Nancy's organic cottage cheese. Shrimp are really ugly unless you have the head, and I don't like the head... in part because the little eyes are too cute. I find it hard to eat eyes, which makes it just as well that I don't eat potatoes anymore.

Even the forbidden hard boiled egg that I think about a ridiculous number of times a day (I know what you're all thinking: "For the love of cruciferous vegetables, woman, just do it!!! Go to Wawa and buy yourself a hard boiled egg! He'll never have to know!") is a rather silly-looking food. Efficient, delicious, easy to travel with, great with just a dash of salt and pepper or with nothing at all, perfect in every way except for the cholesterol and the small amount of saturated fat (paper cited in previous entry has not yet saved me from the anti-sat fat lobbying group that lives in my house.) but still, kinda funny looking if you think about it.

The funny thing is that when I cook for others, I'm all into presentation. I like to serve pretty foods. Stuffed veggies, portabella pizzas, beautiful colorful pumpkin dishes in fall, lovely pastaless lasagna, all manner of attractively presented foods. Even cute little touches like sprigs of rosemary standing up like small trees. But for my own food: a bowl of mashed cauliflower with a Laughing Cow Light cheese stirred in and a teaspoon of flax oil is my current favorite dinner, and my idea of heaven. It's all white and really boring looking. Like a bowl of low carb high nutrient porriage. Like the kind of thing that could be used as a prop in the orphanage scene in Oliver Twist. Reminds me of how my step-brother went through a phase where he would only eat white foods. Kinda the opposite of the no-white-food fad diet.

Perhaps it's because my favorite fashion era was the time of Calvin Klein minimalism. Black suits, which blouses, harsh angular cuts, the kind of thing that looks best on Kate Moss, whom I don't look like no matter how skinny I get. I like to eat very boring looking foods. There's something understated, even classy about food that is just there, no bells and whistles necessary. It's like the put on all your jewelery and then take off one piece rule.

And when foods are pretty, I like to change them into a format such that they're not pretty. Like my broccoli and cheese soup: broccoli is cute little trees, the soup is a big green mush. It's delicious and nutritious but it's a giant green mush.

(The founding president of my union refused to eat anything green and creamy. She also refused to tell us why, but when anyone who has been a nurse for 25+ years tells you something is too gross for her, you don't want to know about it.)

Or my almond or hazelnut pesto. You take nuts, which are not exactly cute but are not unattractive, and food processor them up with lemon, olive oil, a dash of salt and tons of fresh basil (which is also cute until you puree it.) Amazing pesto but not cute.

I once made a beef stroganoff (correct my spelling) with fresh tomatoes that looked I kid you not like dog barf. It was delicious though. My college boyfriend is probably still laughing about it.

My favorite salad topping is nonfat plain yogurt mixed with Trader Joe's salsa verde. It looks so gross.

Microwaved eggwhites are so unappetizing to the uninitiated that Edward couldn't watch me eat them.

Quorn tenders, which I don't eat anymore because I'm focusing on lower carb sources of protein, are just stupid looking.

My favorite low carb source of protein, turkey, is by far the most ridiculous looking of the edible birds.

The list could go on and on but I have to go to Pilates class.

I would like to point out, in my defense, that I have much better taste in men.

Breaking News!!!

This just in!

You have to have a full subscription to the AJCN to read the whole thing, but you can read the abstract here.

And just in case any of you skip the comments, this from RDF:

The abstract pretty much tells the story. The paper itself is somewhat tedious. The bottom line is that the recommendation of American Heart and other agencies to reduce saturated fat to 7 % is without scientific basis. But the details are important. The paper does not say that nobody benefits from reducing saturated fat. It says that you are as likely to INCREASE risk by reducing saturated fat as you are to decrease risk. Also, the previous idea that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat may still be true. (If true, it means that replacing SF with carbohydrate is definitely deleterious). I think it is not that AHA and others did not know that the SF data was bad but rather they thought, as in the punch-line to numerous jokes "maybe it wouldn't help, but it wouldn't hurt" to reduce saturated fat. The current paper shows that this is wrong. It can hurt. And it is as likely to hurt as it is to help. You are at the craps table: if you bet on low saturated fat and you lose, you don't get your chips back things have gotten worse.

I modified figure 2 from the paper to show that in the studies considered (a meta-analysis is an analysis of many already published papers) the outcomes are pretty much unpredictable. I will post someplace and post a comment as to where the figure is.