First off, I’m mostly over my cravings. I no longer feel like I did when I was quitting smoking. In the first week, I was a bit obsessed with food, and I never felt satiated. Now, I’m feeling much more in balance and less obsessed. If there is a sugary treat in front of me, I do find it hard to resist, but if none is around, I’m not thinking about it. Secondly, I’m feeling much fuller when I eat then I did before I started this. I can eat a serving of spinach and a poached egg and feel very satisfied for several hours. When I eat an average sized meal, I will often feel stuffed. I’m having no trouble feeling satiated by simple vegetables, meat, whole grain bread and brown rice. I’m still having butter on my toast and drinking whole milk, but I don’t need it to feel full.

I have continued to lose weight, almost 10 pounds since I started. I think I would have lost more by now, except that every weekend, I’ve ended up going off the diet for a meal or two and gaining some back. I lose weight all week only to bounce on the weekend from some restaurant meals or a house party. Still, by mid week I seem to be on track again. I anticipate having less trouble with this over the coming weeks, since my Saturday plans will not be including many parties or meals at restaurants.

I would definitely recommend this approach, however, you most likely will have to stay on the plan indefinitely to keep the weight off. I think you would be able to indulge in the occasional treat, but the bulk of your eating would have to remain, whole, unprocessed foods, simply cooked.

This is not a short cut. That’s fine with me. And I think it allows for occasionally eating more indulgent meals. I’m not sure how much I want them though. Yesterday, I had a lovely piece of chicken, some asparagus and some brown rice for dinner. It tasted great.

Unprocessed Food Diet

1. Eat unprocessed, whole foods like meat, eggs, nuts, vegetables, fruit. Buy it fresh when possible, but frozen is fine too.
2. Cook foods simply without adding oil, spices, sugar, salt or anything else.
3. Do not mix foods together.
4. Eat smaller portions than you are used to.
5. Eat as often as you like, and as much as you like overall–no need to count calories.
6. Eat as many of your meals like this as you can, and especially avoid chain restaurant meals and processed foods from the supermarket.

Here are some sample recipes:

• Fill a 1 quart microwavable dish with fresh spinach to the brim. Cover and cook on high 2 1/2 – 3 minutes.
• Grill a piece of chicken or fish until done using only a little unflavored Pam if necessary
• Wash and slice a tomato.
• Clean some mushrooms and boil them for 20 minutes

I think you get the idea.

I have been on the diet for about two weeks now. For the previous two months, my weight bounced around from between 191 to 196 pounds. I didn’t weigh myself on the day I started, but lets assume I was 192 pounds around February 2nd. On February 9, after doing this for about a week off and on, I was 190 pounds. This morning, after the 2nd week, I am 187 pounds (my lowest weight for the week was 186 pounds). This is the first time I’ve cracked 190 pounds since August of last year and I have been exercising and trying to eat well this whole time. So it seems to be working.

It is not necessarily the easiest way to lose weight. While I can fill myself up on these foods, I often do not feel satisfied. I also found myself gorging on a seven layer dip at a party when I was given the chance. I also feel a bit like I’m trying to break an addiction, to what in particular, I don’t know. But I often have the feeling of my belly being full, but my tongue craving some taste or sensation that it’s not getting. This is beginning to diminish, but it’s still there.

While I’m trying to do this as much as possible, I’m also still eating a few of my meals out at restaurants or at functions where my friends might bring some food. I also anticipate that as time goes by and I get closer to my goal, I’ll be able to loosen this up a bit, still eating many of my meals like this, but perhaps adding some seasoning and homemade sauces back into the mix.

UPDATE 2/17: I think I found another way to give me that satiated, satisfied feeling when I’m full but still seem to want more food. Yesterday I drank a glass of organic whole milk. It seemed to do the trick. I am going to try drink a small glass (6 oz) to cap off my hunger after meals and at the end of the day.

UPDATE 2/18: Adding this chart to see progress.
My Weight Chart:

For anyone old enough to remember when a Quarter Pounder was the biggest hamburger available at a fast food restaurant, this won’t really feel like news. We’ve watched the food industry evolve over the last 30 years first hand. Portions have grown, foods have become more indulgent, more flavorful, with more textures. Comfort food is everywhere, and eating it feels great, at least it does for the two minutes it takes to shovel it down our throats. What might seem like news is the extent to which the food industry knows and understands what they are doing. Just as cigarette companies want more people to smoke and people to smoke more, restaurant chains want us to eat more meals out and buy more food when we do go out. And they go to great lengths to reverse engineer precisely the kind of foods that we will crave and overeat. Many more of us are getting fatter than we used to, and it’s because this hyperpalatable food is available nearly everywhere we go.

Is it a good book? I think it has something important to say, but I have a few qualms. Kessler makes his case a little too well in the beginning of the book. I found myself salivating over his descriptions of food items. I craved the appetizers he was describing and felt my tummy rumble. I skipped over about 10 chapters because of it (they are quite short), and still he was describing the techniques the food industry used to make food delectable. I think I may have gained 10 pounds just by reading that part of the book. I would say read just enough of this part of the book to be convinced that he is right and then skip ahead to the chapters on what you can do.

Eventually he starts talking about his solution. He takes a lot of ideas from the world of addiction counseling and has some good strategies to avoiding the worst kinds of foods and dealing with it when you are faced with it. He believes we should embrace the concept of Food Rehab. He does implicitly encourage us to prepare our own food. But here is where I think he kind of ignores an obvious point.

I think we should all be unprocessing our food, or rather we should do as little processing as possible when we cook for ourselves. I’ve heard it said before that it’s healthier to make your own food at home from fresh whole ingredients than it is to buy prepackaged, processed foods. This point has been made many times by many people. But it seems like we can take this much farther. If the food industry makes food into the equivalent of addictive drugs by adding layers of fat, sugar, salt and flavorings to foods, perhaps we should do the opposite.

My new plan

We should start with simple whole foods that are as close to unprocessed as possible: Meat, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruit, legumes and nuts. We should buy them in their completely unprocessed forms. Fresh if possible, frozen in some cases, but certainly without any added flavor, fat, sugar or salt. Then we should prepare these foods as simply as possible without adding any of these things ourselves. Don’t add any oil when you grill that meat. Don’t mix in butter with your brown rice. Put away your salt shaker, all your sauces and spices. And lastly, don’t even combine foods together. Make discrete portions of spinach, grilled chicken and fish, poached eggs and steamed veggies. Eat them separately. Don’t mix them together or add a little sauce of any kind. Don’t do anything to make the food more palatable except cook it. If you have an urge to make something taste better by adding or combining, don’t do it! My theory is that if you confine yourself, as much as you can, to food like this, you will not overeat and you will lose weight.

Now of course, there are some drawbacks here. The ubiquitous nature of these hyperpalatable foods is hard to avoid. They are everywhere, so unless you work at home and are a hermit, you will be exposed to these foods and they will be hard to resist. I know… put a free pizza in front of me and you can kiss it good bye. Kessler has a lot of good ideas of how to deal with some of these issues. And it’s worth reading the book to look over his suggestions.

But some of you might also be screaming, “But Kevin, I can’t eat plain steamed vegetables and poached eggs with no cheese or sauce. That will taste bad!” Well, I hear you. I think that is true to a degree. But I don’t think food tastes bad when it’s prepared like this, it just doesn’t taste awesome! But that is the point, you won’t have cravings for this simple unprocessed food, like you might for chicken nachos dripping with cheese or the latest crazy ice cream combination from Ben and Jerry’s. I have been trying this for the last week and it feels like it’s working. I am feeling a bit of withdrawal at the moment, and I’m still indulging some of my cravings. I had a nice hot cocoa last night, for instance. But I do think I might be finally losing a little weight after months of running four times a week.

For instance, here is what I ate and drank yesterday (except where noted, I added no salt, butter, oil or anything else to the food):

• A few glasses of water
• Coffee (milk and sweetener)
• Steamed asparagus
• Steamed spinach
• Brown rice
• Grilled chicken (twice)
• Two poached eggs
• Cup of flavored yogurt – not in the plan
• Four pieces of whole wheat bread with butter

Now, I did feel hungry through most of the day, or rather I felt a little like an addict who wanted something I wasn’t getting. It reminded me of those first few days of quitting smoking. As I drove home, I thought it would be good to eat some toast with butter. And I think I might keep that as a way to really shut off my hunger. By the way, I’m talking about actual real whole wheat bread, not the brown wonderbread that companies try to pass off as whole wheat. If the bread squishes when you squeeze it and feels soft, it ain’t whole wheat bread in my book. The stuff I’m eating is that sprouted grain Ezekial Bread from Food For Life. Four pieces was definitely too much. It extinguished any feeling of still wanting to eat, and made me feel a little sick actually. My new rule will be this, if I feel unsatisfied after eating, I’ll toast one piece of bread add some butter and wait 20 or 30 minutes, and repeat until I don’t want another piece. This morning I had one piece with some coffee and I still feel full three hours later.

I don’t expect anyone to only eat like this forever. I’ll still be going out to eat with friends, but as much as I can, I want to prepare my own food in this way.

Today I weighed in at 190. My goal weight is somewhere between 165 and 155 (I’ll know when I get there). I’ll try to update this to let you know how it goes.

Harris said researchers looked at 13 trials of six months to three years duration in which pre- and post-BMI measurements were taken.

In studies involving nearly 10,000 children, primarily in elementary schools, none demonstrated a reduction in BMI with those who were assigned to the most phys-ed time, compared to those who didn’t have as much.

“School-based physical activity interventions do not improve BMI although they may have other beneficial health effects,” he said. “There are improvements to bone mineral density, aerobic capacity, reduced blood pressure and increased flexibility,” he added.

Perhaps we should be following the lead of France and giving our kids healthy foods to eat.

At the school, he prepares meals for about 800 students, using all fresh, local ingredients. The introduction of healthy school lunch programs, like this one, is one major reason France has been able to curb childhood obesity rates after two decades on the rise, according to two recent studies.

I have lost some more weight, another 10 pounds since I started. But I was also interested in the effect it would have on cholesterol and triglycerides. I hoped that it would lower my triglycerides, raise my HDL cholesterol and not raise my LDL cholesterol too much. Fortunately, I had my lipid profile done last December so I could compare. Here were the numbers then (the normal range is within brackets[]):

Triglyceride (mg/dl): 112 [40-160]
Cholesterol (mg/dl): 153 [<200]
HDL (mg/dl): 31 [29-67]
LDL (mg/dl): 100 [<130]
TC/HDL ratio: 4.94 [<5]

Not a terrible profile by conventional standards. Everything is within normal ranges. Still, HDL is a little low and the ratio is just within normal range. And even though the triglycerides aren’t bad, there is plenty of room to push that lower.

So after three months of meat, eggs, cheese, veggies and nuts, what is my lipid profile now?

Well, first off, something in there is a red flag with my doctor, who wants to set up an appointment. Why don’t you take a look for yourself (previous numbers in brackets [] ):

Triglyceride (mg/dl): 48 [112]
Cholesterol (mg/dl): 224 [153]
HDL (mg/dl): 56 [31]
LDL (mg/dl): 158 [100]
TC/HDL ratio: 4.00 [4.94]

First the good news, triglycerides are down… way down. And HDL is up. But there is also bad news, my overall cholesterol and LDL increased dramatically. So am I worried? A little. The conventional wisdom is that higher cholesterol is bad. But I’ve also read several things which suggest that high triglycerides are an even greater predictor of heart disease. Also, I remember from Good Calories, Bad Calories that all LDL cholesterol is not the same and that larger, fluffier LDL is not nearly as dangerous as smaller, denser LDL, and that the kinds of foods I’ve been eating should lead to fluffier LDL. If most of the increase in my LDL is due to the size of my LDL cholesterol, rather than the number of them, perhaps it’s further good news.

Quotes like this about triglycerides from www.healingdaily.com encourage me:

It is believed that the triglycerides/HDL ratio is one of the most potent predictors of heart disease. It is generally considered that if this number is below 2 the person is generally at a low risk of heart disease. So, the lower your triglycerides, or the higher your HDL, the smaller this ratio becomes.

However, I’m not sure of the veracity of the info on that site. I have some research ahead of me. I’d love to see some more definitive research on the actual relative risks of LDL, HDL and triglycerides, to see if I want to rearrange my diet to get my overall cholesterol back under 200.

UPDATE: Originally, I had 244 for my total cholesterol, but I got the actual report today and it’s 224, significantly better. That also changes my TC/HDL ration to 4.00. I’m a little happier with these numbers. I have decided to cut down on eggs a little bit, more like 1-2 a day instead of 2-3. And I should really get an exercise program going. That should also have a positive effect on several of these numbers.

These ideas that obesity is the result of eating too much or exercising too little or both is treated as a self-evident truth. People invoke the First Law of Thermodynamics and people who argue otherwise are marginalized as not understanding the First Law.

But what if it’s wrong? What if the causality is all mixed up? What if you eat more because your body is getting fat? What if you don’t feel like exercising because you are already obese? What if simple calorie restriction is not particularly effective in losing weight? It isn’t and yet it’s repeated over and over again, “You are overweight because you overeat,” and “If you just eat less, you will lose weight.”

In this lecture by Gary Taubes, he does a great job of showing the fallacy of the conventional wisdom:

It’s a longish video, about 70 minutes, but it’s a nice introduction to his ideas. If you find it all compelling I highly recommend his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s not a diet book, it’s a science book, and it sets out to demolish some of the conventional paradigms we have about diet, obesity and disease.

UPDATE: Changed the title because we don’t need a new paradigm really, we need an old one. If you watch the video, you will understand what I mean.

It remains to be seen whether the current Atkins school theory of ketosis—the process by which the body resorts to burning its own fat when starved of carbohydrates—will someday seem as quaintly quackish as Kellogg’s theory of colonic autointoxication. What is striking is just how little it takes to set off one of these applecart-toppling nutritional swings in America; a scientific study, a new government guideline, a lone crackpot with a medical degree can alter this nation’s diet overnight. One article in the New York Times Magazine in 2002 almost single-handedly set off the recent spasm of carbophobia in America.

I wonder if Pollan has read Taubes book. I’d be shocked if he hadn’t. To me there is much that they agree on. For instance, I bet they both would agree that we would be more healthy if we ate like our great grandparents did, and that traditional cuisines lead to healthier people than modern processed diets. They both see the large amount of processed carbohydrates like high fructose corn syrup as harmful to those that eat it. Furthermore, Taubes goes to great lengths to establish that cutting carbs to lose weight is not a late 20th century fad. It’s the accumulated wisdom of doctors and patients going back at least two centuries, precisely the kind of cultural wisdom that Pollan so admires in traditional cuisines.

Pollan goes on to dismiss orthodox attempts to study food and nutrition:

So every few decades some new scientific research comes along to challenge the prevailing nutritional orthodoxy; some nutrient that Americans have been happily chomping for decades is suddenly found to be lethal; another nutrient is elevated to the status of health food; the industry throws its weight behind it; and the American way of dietary life undergoes yet another revolution.

This is precisely what happened 30-40 years ago according to Taubes. It’s one of the sources of outrage in his book. Based on rather thin scientific evidence, the hypothesis that saturated fats were the great evil in the American diet became the orthodox, throwing aside the collective wisdom of decades of clinicians who would tell their patients exactly the opposite and see them lose weight.

I think Pollan’s quarrel with Taubes may have more to with personality and approach than substance. It also seems that I’m hardly the first person to see the harmony between Pollan and Taubes. Maybe even Pollan himself realized that he had more to agree with Taubes. After reading this blog post, I might need to read his new book too.

So I was delighted to find that Pollan and Taubes are on the same wave length. The person who exposed the whole fat paradigm as a historical disaster “is a science journalist named Gary Taubes, who for the last decade has been blowing the whistle on the science behind the low-fat campaign,” Pollan writes. “In a devastating series of articles and an important new book called Good Calories, Bad Calories, Taubes has all but demolished the whole lipid hypothesis, demonstrating just how little scientific backing it had from the very beginning.”

A month or two later, frustrated with my inability to lose weight on my own, I looked up Seth’s scientific paper online about what makes food fattening and tried his method. It worked! I started losing weight again.

After a few weeks of sipping sugar water and drinking olive oil, I spent a week in New York for the Del Close Marathon. I was explaining it to a friend and he responded, “Oh you mean the Shangri-la Diet.”

The next day I bought the book and found Seth’s website.

As the months went by and I lost more and more weight, my former prejudice against fats in the diet had been seriously challenged. I was losing weight not by restricting fats (like I had in my 20s), but by adding fats to my diet.

Then I read an interview of Gary Taubes on Seth’s blog. I started reading more about low carb diets.

Finally when I got my Kindle, I read Good Calories, Bad Calories by Taubes. After reading it, I switched to a low carb diet of mostly meat, cheese, eggs and green leafy vegetables, something I had already started to do gradually.

In a discussion on low carb diets on Seth’s website, I saw a reference to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michale Pollan. I downloaded it to my Kindle. I haven’t finished it, but I’m sure it’s going to have a profound affect on how I eat in the future, along with Taubes book. (Pollan chides Taubes in his introduction without mentioning him by name over his 2002 article, “What If It’s All a Big Fat Lie?,” because of what is said about bread. However, their books could easily go hand and hand. For instance, high fructose corn syrup is one of the villains in both books.)

From there, I found eatwild.com, a website with a listing of grass fed beef farms across the United States. Next Saturday, I hope to visit a farm near Springfield. And in June, I’ll be heading to the local farmer’s market in Peoria.

I certainly would not have thought that a book on economics would have so radically changed my eating habits and be responsible for me losing over 50 lbs in little over a year, but in a way, it has. One thing leads to another to another to another.

After five days, I’ve had no real weight loss. After a big meal, I’ve occasionally felt a bit overfull, which probably means I’m eating more than I need to. And on day two I had a small carb crash. But in general I’ve felt good. I haven’t felt very hungry. The food is relatively satisfying and the restrictions haven’t been hard to stay within. I miss the fruits and vegetables a bit, but I’m thinking that I’ll add a few servings of them back eventually.

I’ve also noticed many slight improvements like better oral hygiene, and there is no delicate way to put this… I have no gas. Yep all you vegetarians, I can confirm, it’s the carbs that are making you fart. I’ve had barely a peep the last few days.

Is this too much information? I think it might be, but in order for this experience to be of any use to something reading this, they have to hear the details. With all this fat in my diet I’m experiencing none of following:

• Heartburn
• Gas
• Indigestion
• Constipation
• Abdominal pain or discomfort

In other words, the body seems to process this food easily. This is hardly surprising since humans have been meat eaters for something like 200 million years. But it’s also not very meaningful. It will take a few months like this to figure out if there is much benefit to it.

Lastly, I think that my gallbladder feels a bit better. Of course, I’ve not had an attack, but also, the slight pressure that I’ve often felt on my right side is missing. Again this doesn’t prove much, since I’ve had plenty of good days over the last six months. The real proof will be having another ultrasound in months and finding that the gallbladder looks much better. I’m looking forward to a checkup after 3 or 4 months free of any gallbladder issues and report to my doctor that I achieved it by doing the exact opposite of what he suggested with lots of cholesterol rich foods like eggs and cheese.

Oh and I would not recommend this to someone who is having gallbladder issues. It’s a shot in the dark and I could easily be very wrong. Check back in a few months and I’ll let you know if I’m still feeling better.

The book is dense, bringing together a huge number of scientific studies that date back to the beginning of the the 20th century. His goal seems to be to overwhelm the reader with evidence that many of the assumptions about diet, obesity and disease are wrong. He isn’t content to give you one or two examples of studies that suggest that carbohydrates are the primary factor behind obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and a range of other modern illnesses that were rare before the 20th century. He piles it on, determined to make sure that someone can’t read his book and dismiss it as “some fad diet book.” If you say he is wrong, you better bring your citations with you.

I’ve enjoyed the ride, but I wonder how many readers get bogged down and don’t finish it, or don’t care so much about the reams of evidence that Taubes has compiled and want to skip to his conclusions. One passage near the end that jumped out at me as something that people need to know:

By the mid-1960s, four facts had been established beyond reasonable doubt: (1) carbohydrates are singularly responsible for prompting insulin secretion; (2) insulin is singularly responsible for inducing fat accumulation; (3) dietary carbohydrates are required for excess fat accumulation; and (4) both Type 2 diabetics and the obese have abnormally elevated levels of circulating insulin and a “greatly exaggerated” insulin response to carbohydrates in the diet

He has done a good job. His book is why I’m trying a low carb diet. I’m taking a gamble, even going directly against my doctor’s orders to lower my already low cholesterol, hoping that would help my ailing gallbladder (after all, my first three gallbladder attacks all came after large restaurant meals full of carbs).

I’m going to give it a try. I’ll see how I feel in a month. Will I feel better? Will I lose the 20 pounds I have left to lose? Will I have another gallbladder attack? I’ll let you know.

UPDATE: I blogged too soon. I’m now in the epilogue and he has 7 main points he was trying to communicate in the book. I’ll add them here later.