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So Many Veggies and Protein That You Are Too Full for Starches and Sweets
UncategorizedIf it is a non-starchy vegetable, overeat it. I am talking ten or more servings of non-starchy vegetables per day.
While it is absolutely not required, eating ten or more servings of non-starchy vegetables per day is dramatically easier if you use a blender to make vegetable and fruit smoothies (recipes, recommended blender). Don’t use a juicer. It removes filling fiber and healthy nutrients. Use a blender and mix a lot of any green vegetable with a little bit of strawberries or oranges. Add some vanilla-flavored whey protein powder, cinnamon, and vanilla extract, and the smoothie is quite tasty.
If fresh non-starchy vegetables are not available, frozen ones are fine. Wheat grass and other powdered green “super foods” are convenient but taste bad.
Avoid canned vegetables and canned fruits if at all possible. Focus on fresh or frozen, deeply colored, non-starchy vegetables that grow above ground. When it comes to fruits, focus on berries and citrus. They are the most SANE options.
When it comes to protein, divide your protein intake into evenly throughout the day (What about intermittent fasting?). Fortunately, this is easy. Here is one way to do it.
Total Prep Time = Fifteen minutes
Total Positive Impact = Dramatic
If you enjoy the convenience of protein powders I’ve recommended a couple good options here. Other inexpensive and convenient forms of protein are canned tuna, canned salmon, egg whites, frozen salmon burgers, frozen turkey burgers, fat-free or low-fat cottage cheese, fat-free or low-fat plain Greek yogurt (Why low-fat?), and canned chicken (Going SANE on a budget). When it comes to seafood and meat, canned is fine. I am not a fan of what canning does to the taste of the food, but it is less expensive and more convenient.
Putting these recommendations all together, the first step to eating more—smarter—is as simple as doubling the amount of seafood, nutritious meat, eggs or egg whites (depending on your goals), fat-free or low-fat cottage cheese, or fat-free or low-fat plain Greek yogurt, and tripling the amount of non-starchy vegetables that you would typically eat at each meal. This guarantees you will be too full for starch or sweets while never leaving the table feeling deprived.
When eating a double serving of protein and a triple serving of non-starchy vegetables is not practical, mix a scoop or two of protein powder and some milled flax seeds or chia seeds with water and drink it before the meal. Blend it with some ice if it is convenient.
Of course nobody can to do this all the time, but the more non-starchy vegetables and protein that you eat in place of starches and sweets, the healthier you will be and the more body fat you will burn.
Calorie Quality Factor 3: Nutrition (Part 2)
UncategorizedLooking at Nutrition per calorie (see previous post) is important because:
Like Satiety and Aggression, a food’s Nutrition depends on water, fiber, and protein. Water and fiber have no calories, and protein calories do not “count” as much as carbohydrate or fat calories (more on this in future posts…the short version is that the body burns a significant amount of calories from protein during digestion). Since a food’s Nutrition is found by dividing the number of nutrients by the number of calories, more water, fiber, and protein reduce the relative number of calories in the food and therefore increase its Nutrition.
Viewing Nutrition in terms of water, fiber, and protein gives us a dramatically different view of which foods are nutritious. Consider cereal, bread, or “healthy” whole grain starches. They are all dry and contain little protein, so they are starting out zero for two. Fiber is their only hope.
The companies selling starchy products say we get a great deal of fiber from their whole-grain products, but is that actually true? Well, the four grams of fiber in 250 calories of whole-grain cereal is 100% more fiber than the two grams of fiber in 250 calories of refined-grain cereal, but that is only comparing grains. You have to ask if grains are a good source of Nutrition relative to more water and protein-packed foods we could be eating. So are whole grains good sources of Nutrition relative to non-starches?
Not even close.
Sure, whole grains are better than processed grains, but that is like saying one broken leg is better than two. It does not make either option good. Look at the fiber per calorie in whole grains compared to more water and protein-packed foods:
Fiber Per Calorie in Whole Grains Compared to SANE Foods
Whole grains do have six times more fiber than doughnuts, but non-starchy vegetables have nearly fifty times more fiber. Whole grain toast is better than a doughnut, but that is not saying much considering the other foods we could be eating. For example, if we eat 250 calories worth of non-starchy vegetables, we will get about forty-six grams of fiber. To get the same amount of fiber from whole grains, we would have to eat a whopping 1,917 calories worth of whole grains.
Calories Needed to Get 46 Grams of Clog-Clearing Fiber
Starch is an excellent example of how careful you have to be when trying to judge Nutrition—comparing nutrients per calorie. We could be eating all sorts of whole-grain starches thinking we are at the top of the Nutrition mountain, while we are actually sitting at the bottom getting buried with low-quality calories. A little Nutrition plus a lot of unSatisfying and Aggressive calories is not a happy combination.
Fortunately for us, we do not need to do all sorts of math with Nutrition labels to maximize the Nutrition of our diets. Researchers at Colorado State University did the math for us. They analyzed the Nutrition quality of the most common foods and found that if we maximize the Satiety and minimize the Aggression of our diet—by eating more water-, fiber-, and protein-packed foods—we will get the most Nutrition per calorie automatically.
Nutrition quality also affects the need to burn body fat instead of the need to slow down and burn muscle. When we eat more water-, fiber-, and protein-packed food, we get more Nutrition while avoiding overeating—or overwhelming the body with glucose. Combine more nutrients with less glucose, and we burn body fat without the negative side effects of eating less. After all, our fat metabolism system has more Nutrition than ever before. A surplus of Nutrition is the opposite of starvation.
It’s All About Results – A Pragmatism Primer
UncategorizedBefore we get into the solution to the pressing health issues facing us today, I’d like to share some simple philosophy I find useful to keep in mind. The philosophy of pragmatism.
Pragmatists are results-oriented—they believe something is right or wrong based on its results. People can try anything they want and the true worth of the program is revealed by its results. If it works, it is right. If it fails, it is wrong. Consider Communism, for example. A pragmatist asks how Communism worked out in the real world and lets that settle the argument about its merits.
When it comes to fat loss, the pragmatic view is: “Does the fat-loss program cause you to lose body fat and keep it off forever without compromising the rest of your life? If so, then it is right. If not, then it is wrong.” Unfortunately, this commonsense approach is not common practice. Despite the decades of data and tens of millions of heavy diabetic people that prove traditional weight-loss programs wrong, those people have been brainwashed into thinking that they failed because they didn’t lose any weight, not that the traditional weight-loss programs failed them.
If a program fails, it is the program’s fault. Programs are designed to deliver results. If it failed to deliver results, the program failed, not the person.
Think about software programs. If you cannot figure out how to use a software program, it is not because you failed. It is because the software program failed. Good software is easy to use. That is what makes it good software. It delivers excellent results for you. What good is any software program if it does not serve you?
Similarly, if you cannot stick to a fat-loss program forever, it is not because you are a failure. Good fat-loss programs are easy to use. That is what makes them good. They deliver excellent results for you.
Consider Oprah. She is one of the strongest and smartest women ever. Now look at Oprah’s weight-loss efforts. Thinking pragmatically, thinking about results, what do we know about the weight-loss programs Oprah tried? If they were right, Oprah would be thinner and spend less time and money trying to burn body fat. She is far from a failure at anything. The programs failed her.
If Oprah hires someone to design her house and the house collapses, we would not blame Oprah. And if Oprah hires someone to design a piece of software and she cannot figure it out, the software designer is at fault. So, if Oprah hires someone to design a weight-loss program and she does not lose weight, the program failed—Oprah did not.
Results are all that matter. People do not fail fat-loss programs. Fat-loss programs fail people.
Calorie Quality Factor 4: Efficiency (The “E” in SANE)
UncategorizedA calorie is not a calorie when it comes to how Efficiently our fat metabolism system converts it into body fat. The more inEfficient calories are at being stored as body fat, the better. Keeping the science of SANE eating simple, fiber and protein are entirelyinEfficient.
Explaining the inEfficiency of fiber is easy. Fiber is not digested, and therefore can never be stored as body fat. The body tries and tries to digest fiber, but then after burning a bunch of calories trying to break down and absorb fiber, it gives up and passes fiber through the digestive system. That is why fiber helps keep us regular.
Explaining the inEfficiency of protein is a bit more involved. To start with let’s talk about the calories we burn digesting food. Our body digests fat and carbohydrate Efficiently. However, it takes our body five to ten times more energy to digest protein. In fact, about 30% of the calories we get from protein are burned digesting it. Protein’s inEfficiency doesn’t stop there.
Even after we burn 30% of protein calories during initial digestion, the road from chicken breast to love handles is far from over. Correction: there is no road from chicken breast to love handles. Protein cannot be stored as body fat. However, there is a super-highway shuttling glucose to our fat cells. So when we have excess protein lying around, excess protein is sent to the liver to be converted into glucose.
The process of converting protein into glucose is called gluconeogenesis (gluco = sugar, neo = new, genesis = creation). This processburns another 33% of the original protein calories eaten. Combine the third of protein calories burned during digestion with the third of those remaining calories burned during gluconeogenesis, and you and I are left with a measly 47% of the original protein calories. What started off as 300 calories of juicy protein is reduced to 140 calories of glucose in the bloodstream. But wait, there’s more.
Converting that newly formed glucose into body fat consumes another 25% of the glucose calories. So when everything is said and done, even if we never move a muscle, only 35% of the calories we get from protein can be stored as body fat. You read that correctly. Over two-thirds of calories from protein are burned converting protein into a compound which can be stored as body fat.
If we followed the same digestion process for starch, we would find that 70% of calories from starch can be stored as body fat. In other words, calories from starch are twice as Efficient at becoming body fat as calories from protein.
This does not mean we should eat 100% protein. Yet we can eat more and burn more by eating more protein-packed (and fiber-packed) food. And keeping long-term fat loss simple, the same techniques we are using to increase Satiety, decrease Aggression, and increase Nutrition, also decrease the Efficiency of our calories.
Scientific Fact: Eating Less Is Harmful and Doesn’t Lead To Lasting Fat Loss
UncategorizedWhile researching weight loss, University of Wisconsin researchers R.E. Keesey and M.D. Hirvonen discovered that “metabolism declines by an amount significantly in excess of that expected from the loss in metabolically active tissue. We have observed a drop of 24.6% in daily resting energy expenditure when the body weight of rats was reduced (by caloric restriction) by 14.9%.”
If we want to burn fat and keep it off, the last thing we want to do is disproportionately slow down our body. If we want to improve our health, the last thing we want to do is deprive our body of nutrition. Therefore, if we want to be slimmer and healthier for the rest of our life–very different from merely weighing less in the short term–the last thing we want to do is eat less of our existing diet. We will be better served by eating more–but higher-quality–food, and doing less–but higher-quality (more forceful)–exercise. This protects our metabolism, prevent overeating, provide abundant nutrition, and produce a hormonal environment perfect for burning body fat.
The science is clear. The confusion comes from diet and exercise industry funded marketing and myths. It is a scientific fact that lasting fat loss and improved health is not about eating less of the diet that caused the problem in the first place. It’s about eating more, but of different types of foods. It’s about eating more–but smarter.
A Healthy Body/Mind Automatically Balances Calories
UncategorizedIt’s great to see articles like this that reinforce how a healthy body/mind automatically balances calories in and calories out…and how food quality is key to keeping the brain balancing us out automatically.
“Responsibility for monitoring calorie input and energy output falls to the brain. And the job is not easy, says endocrinologist Michael Schwartz, director of the University of Washington’s Diabetes and Obesity Center of Excellence in Seattle.
To maintain a constant weight, a 160-pound man would need to consume “about 1 million calories over the course of a year,” Schwartz explains — “and expend almost exactly that same million calories.” Only by integrating hosts of chemical signals day and night can the brain manage this energy-budgeting feat, which it has done quite well for most people throughout most of history.
…
Together, these findings suggest that the brain, a longtime master at tracking caloric intake, can be fooled. And when that happens, Swithers observes, weight management suddenly becomes challenging. “Now we have to start counting calories, reading food labels and tracking how many steps we took today,” she says.”
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/345277/title/Tricks_Foods_Play
Why Calorie Counting Fails & How to Burn Fat Without It
UncategorizedWhich of the following statements are true?
a. A pound of feathers weighs the same as a pound of lead.
b. We have to consciously decrease calories in or increase calories out in order to burn fat.
c. All triangles have three sides.
If we believe what we’ve been taught, A, B, and C are all true. However, it may come as a surprise (or not, considering the dramatic rise in obesity) that biologists have known for a long time that B is false. We do not need to consciously eat less or exercise more in order to burn fat.
How’s this possible?
There are at least three major biological missteps with calorie counting:
1. It assumes calories out is fixed.
2. It assumes we can calculate calories out.
3. It assumes fewer calories in or more calories out requires the body to burn fat.
Calories Out is Not Fixed
Calorie counting incorrectly assumes if we burn 2,000 calories per day and cut calories in to 1,500 that we burn 500 calories worth of stored fat.
This is has been proven false in scientific circles for quite some time. Why?
Check-out the full guest post at DietsInReview.com.
The Simple Scientific Cause of the Obesity Epidemic
UncategorizedAs our knowledge of the human body becomes ever more exact, scientists have made remarkable leaps forward in many fields. We have completed the study of the human genome. We can combat horrible diseases such as childhood leukemia with terrific success rates. Yet for one question that many of us would like answered—what foods boost health and help burn fat long-term?—we find all sorts of confusing claims. Since we know so much about how our body works, can’t science tell us the answer?
As it turns out, science already has, and it is surprisingly simple:
The scientifically proven facts of fat loss are intuitive and simple. The confusion comes from bureaucrats acting like biologists and marketers imitating MDs.
Let’s clear up this unnecessary confusion by looking at the history of eating using a scale of one day. Say 12:00am last night was the dawn of our first ancestors, and right now it’s one second before midnight. For 23 hours and 57 minutes (up until 11:57pm) our ancestors stayed healthy and fit, eating vegetables, seafood, meat, eggs, fruit, nuts, and seeds. At 11:57pm, people started farming, became “civilized,” and began eating starch and a small amount of sweets. Two seconds ago, people started eating processed starches and sweets. Only right now—one second before midnight—did people start getting most of their calories from manufactured starch- and sweetener-based food products. That means the diet recommended by the government’s Dietary Guidelines was not possiblefor 99.8% of our history.
It is an unarguable anthropological fact that for the vast majority of their existence, our ancestors did not consume much starch and did not consume any added sweeteners. They did not eat whole grains. They ate no grains. They did not cut back on added sweeteners. They did not know what added sweeteners are. Emory University researcher S.B. Eaton tells us:
This idea is interesting to think about when it comes to our health. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cardiovascular disease are called “diseases of civilization.” They did not become issues until agriculture enabled production of starches and sweets about 12,000 years ago. And they did not reach epidemic status until starches and sweets made up 43% of our diet.
Some people might object: “Back then, people did not live as long as we do now.” That is an excellent point. I felt the same way until I read research revealing three facts about our hunter-gatherer ancestors:
The lowering in the quality of our diet and the lowering in the quality of our health are not coincidences. Could it be possible that we are not designed to digest the food that makes up the majority of our diet?
The Chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health states unequivocally: “The USDA Pyramid is wrong. It was built on shaky scientific ground…[and] has been steadily eroded by new research from all parts of the globe…. At best, [it] offers wishy-washy, scientifically unfounded advice.” Here’s what the Journal of the American College of Cardiovascular Exerciselogy has to say: “The low-fat-high-carbohydrate diet, promulgated [publicized] vigorously by the…food pyramid, may well have played an unintended role in the current epidemics of obesity…diabetes, and metabolic syndromes.” The Co-Founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest chimes in: “Good advice about nutrition conflicts with the interests of many big industries, each of which has more lobbying power than all the public-interest groups combined.”
We are not getting bigger and sicker because we are eating a lot of food. We are becoming hormonally “clogged” and losing our natural ability to burn fat from eating the wrong quality of food. The further the quality of our calories has gotten from the high-quality SANE food we ate for 99.8% of our evolutionary history, the bigger and sicker we have become.
Decades of advanced dietary research have taken place alongside spiking obesity and disease rates. This research recommends a diet much different than any version of the government’s Dietary Guidelines. For example, Dr. Marion Nestle at New York University notes how the scientific community has long criticized the USDA’s Food Guide Pyramid’s failure to “recognize the biochemical equivalency of sugars and starches in the body.” More simply, starch has the same impact on our body as sugar. Why don’t the government’s guidelines reflect this research? Who needs science when a constant barrage of food, fitness, and pharmaceutical industry marketing bullies us into believing that the government’s recommendations are healthy?
A great deal of money is being made from our nutritional confusion. Even worse, the government created these guidelines in much the same way it creates laws: by listening to lobbyists and by making compromises. The history of the USDA guidelines and graphics is nothing short of shocking. We’ll dig into the details starting in the next post.
What a novelist can teach us about weight loss
UncategorizedI recently stumbled upon a beautiful quote by the American novelist and short story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne:
What struck me most about Hawthorne’s words was their profound applicability to the world of weight loss, health, and fitness. Consider a slight paraphrasing:
It may be a stretch, but something about it resonates with me. Would we improve upon the 95% failure rate of traditional “eat less, exercise more” weight loss approaches if we channeled Hawthorne, freed ourselves from the chains of weight loss, sought gradual metabolic healing, and enabled “slim” to land gently upon us?
PS The critical distinction between health, fat loss, and weight loss is covered in more detail in this ebook and this blog post.
Eating Fat Does Not Hurt Cholesterol & It’s Not About Lowering Cholesterol Anyway
UncategorizedAs with other popular misconceptions about how our bodies work, confusion runs rampant about lowering cholesterol and cholesterol in general. Ancel Keys played a key role in creating this problem. Along with his other claims, he needed a scientific sounding explanation for how foods containing fat kill us. Looking at his data, Keys noticed that people eating more foods that contain fat generally had higher total cholesterol. While there was—and still is—no proof that high total cholesterol causes cardiovascular issues, Keys called it the cause of their heart problems.
It’s Not About Lower Total Cholesterol Levels
Even while Keys was touting his new findings, the Federal Register (the official log of the federal government of the U.S.) was on record with the true scientific data at that time:
Likewise, to this day, no studies have proven high total cholesterol causes heart disease. In the American Journal of Medicine T. Gordon reported, “Total cholesterol per se is not a risk factor for coronary heart disease at all.” Dr. Uffe Ravnskov analyzed 26 randomized and controlled trials which were designed to lower total cholesterol and, theoretically, the risk of cardiovascular disease and death. Ravnskov’s analysis put people into two groups:
Across the studies, the total number of heart attack deaths was equal between the groups, and more people died overall in the group who ate less fat and/or took cholesterol-lowering drugs. Ravnskov concluded: “Lowering serum cholesterol concentrations does not reduce mortality and is unlikelyto prevent coronary heart disease.”
Average Outcomes Across the 26 Cholesterol Studies
Cholesterol Myths
For foods that contain fat and cholesterol to be killers, three points must be proven:
None of these things have been proven.
University of California’s J.B. German summarizes the state of cholesterol research:
Eating SANE foods containing fat has never been proven to lead to risky levels of cholesterol. The effect of natural dietary fat on cholesterol has never been proven to cause cardiovascular disease. In fact, studies have shown the opposite. The high-starch, low-fat, and low-protein diet promoted by the government’s guidelines has been proven to worsen the type of cholesterol that decreases the risk of heart disease (HDL cholesterol).
We’ll cover why there is so much confusion about cholesterol in the next post.