Diets Work

For decades Americans have been told to eat a low fat diet to lose weight, and enough of them have made enough of an effort to make a difference in overall fat intake. So how is that working out for us? If low fat leads to weight loss, shouldn’t we be getting thinner and healthier?

But we’re not. We are getting fatter and sicker.

There was recently a discussion about diet in a low carb group I belong to on the site Fat Secret, and I thought I would expand on that here. I wrote:

There has never been any evidence that eating fat is the cause of obesity, nor that eliminating fat will lead to weight loss. Yet “authorities” whose trade is the status quo, many of whom make money off bogus low-fat diet programs and products, have repeated the lies so often that they have become “common sense” to many if not most people who have not done any research.

Among the “authorities” is the government, which has a major stake in the profitability of corporate mega-farms that produce wheat, corn, and soybeans. As they have told us to eat more carbs, less protein, and less fat, people have become fatter and sicker. What is now considered a “moderate” carbohydrate intake would have been considered “extremely high” a generation ago. Many people eat a diet that is 80% or even 90% carbs and wonder why they are not getting healthier. Even going back to the macronutrient ratios of the 50s and 60s without losing weight would result in positive lean body mass gains and fat loss for many people.

When I was in college about 10 years ago I saw a presentation about a study the students in the fitness trainer program had done, comparing fat intake and body composition. People who ate more fat were lighter and leaner. Not by a lot, but the connection between eating fat and being fat simply was not there.

I sometimes hang out on yahoo answers. A vegan woman was trying to “prove” that the vegan diet provides plenty of protein, and gave a link to the website of a vegan bodybuilder who (she said) was very muscular. The guy looked ill compared to any reasonably lean meat eater who even occasionally exercises.

The key is not to add fat to the diet. Rather stop restricting fat intake arbitrarily, eliminate low quality starches and sugars, then eat more of what is left. Vegetables, meat, poultry, and seafood, both lean and fatty, full-fat dairy, and occasionally nuts and fresh fruit.

And I could also add that a low fat diet will drive me nuts. Someone claiming to be a qualified medical professional just recommended to me on Twitter, not knowing what I eat, how much I weigh, or what my body composition is, that I should reduce fat and carbs and lose weight. That is medical malpractice, diagnosing and prescribing without any supporting information.

The fact is that my body fat is in the target range for my age. I could get leaner. I could lose more weight and build more muscle, and probably will. But it’s also a fact that a low fat diet will literally drive me nuts and make me binge. Whereas being low in protein makes me crave protein, being low in fat makes me want to eat everything.

We often hear it said that binges are a result of emotional issues and emotional eating. I think they are more often a result of macronutrient imbalances than the experts want us to consider.

I have never read anything about this anywhere, so I don’t know if it is something unique to me. But I have noticed that when I consume 80 grams to 100 grams of protein a day while maintaining a calorie deficit, I will continually lose weight.

Given my exercise program, this may actually be a low protein intake. If I increase my protein intake by 50 grams a day, the scale would show a net gain of a pound a day until such time as I cut back on the protein. (I haven’t actually gone a full week on this regimen, since rapid weight gain is for me a trigger for a strategy change.) Then I would return to losing weight as expected.

If I do this, I do not show any improved performance at the weight peak. Rather it seems to be accompanied by a decrease in performance.

When I do return to my previous weight, I am leaner.

Note that I do not use purchased protein powders or supplements. I eat meat and other animal products for my protein needs.

If this was a technique used by athletes for building muscle mass I would call it “protein cycling”.

Perhaps when I reach my goal weight I might try this for a week and see what happens with it. But until then I think I will try to avoid weight gain, even if it appears to be lean.

If I wasn’t keeping close tabs on my intake and weight, I wouldn’t have noticed this correlation.

Gosh, it’s been a long time since I’ve recorded a journal entry.

Where I am now:

My diet is about 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body mass per day, plus fat and carbs in ideally equal caloric amounts. My target caloric intake is 750-1000 per day. I could survive on a low carb diet (Atkins induction level of 20g net carbs per day) if I was sedentary or only doing walking for exercise, but I need more carbs to do the weight lifting I have myself doing.

I couldn’t survive on a low fat diet. I tried this again, having tried it previously some years back, and I can’t stick to it because it drives me crazy, followed by a high energy binge.

Not eating enough protein results in poor performance and recovery on my weight training (I track everything) and eventually leads to high protein binges.

I may attempt to determine if there is a minimum number of grams of carbs a day I need to eat for maximum performance.

On a protein sparing modified fast with protein intake of about 130 grams per day (and less than 20 grams each of carbs and fat) my weight loss slowed to a halt.

At this point I am about 30 pounds from my initial goal, which is based on a theoretical ideal body weight from an online calculator. This is based on a theoretical sedentary individual of my height and age (at best). I am clearly putting on muscle, and my %bodyfat should be lower and thus my goal weight might be higher. I bought a set of calipers, which shows how to get a rough estimate from a single reading (waist). I was unable to train my boyfriend to get reliable readings for me, so I will have to go with that rough estimate at the present, which would mean my %bodyfat is 29.2% rather than the bmi-based estimate of 33%. I have two bioimpedance devices that display %bodyfat from 35-38%. Those are likely way off.

The calculation worksheet that came with the caliper shows that were I to lose bodyfat only while maintaining my lean body mass to get down to 18%, my weight would be 132 pounds.

So I am in the “desired” range for a woman of my age, but what I want is to be lean (and a size 8). Probably when I reach that size 8 goal the reading will be in the “lean” range, and I should find someone with some experience to get me a more accurate reading.

For my weight training, I only do strength exercises with free weights, dumbbells, etc. I have a weight bench, Olympic bar, hex dumbbells in common sizes, a rack that can be used for bench or squats, and a pullup bar mounted on the wall. No need to ever go to a gym, at least not for a long time.

When you do proper strength exercises, you automatically get shape. Women don’t get bulky like men do. We don’t have the genetics There are only 2 ways a woman might actually get bulky: 1. steroids and 2. not being lean. I do look bulky if I have too much padding over those shapely muscles.

So it’s all N=1. So what? If you haven’t run the same experiment on yourself to find out how protein, carb, and fat intake affects your weight loss, body composition, or performance, you’re working on N=0 right now.

I’m waiting eagerly for your data. Anybody?

Unlike many diet or health writers, I am not irrationally prejudiced against the Atkins diet. Eating according to the the requirements of the induction phase for a few weeks at the beginning is not going to result in a sudden loss of health. It does indeed seem that those who are opposed to the Atkins diet don’t seem to be familiar with it. Many critics seem to think that the Atkins diet forbids a dieter from eating anything but fatty meat, cheese, and dairy products. They ignore, or perhaps they are unaware of the fact that even in the induction phase participants are encouraged to eat lots of fresh vegetables.

It’s a fact that many people who have gone on the Atkins or other low-carb diets have found their health improve. Diabetics do better when they are not eating lots of carbohydrates. Long-term studies attempting to follow people on the Atkins diet have not found the dreaded health effects that were feared.

Anecdotally speaking, I have heard a great many people say that they turned their health around, and changing some sort of low carb diet was a big part of it. I have never heard anyone warn that they honestly tried it and became much sicker. While this is anecdotal, it is interesting.

It has been shown that people who lose weight on the Atkins diet do so by consuming fewer calories. So despite the claims of “fat doesn’t count” and carb-counting being somehow different, like all other diets this follows the laws of physics: consuming fewer calories than you use results in weight loss. The fact is that being permitted to eat fat means people are more satisfied, and eat less.

One objection of mine to the Atkins diet relates to why I did not lose weight on it, which is that I was able to increase my fat intake to the point where the number of calories I was eating meant I was not losing weight. I don’t know how common this is.

But the other objection is that in the end, it is still a diet which people impose on themselves and eventually fall away from. Studies show that in the long run, Atkins works about as well as other diets. In the end, only changes to eating habits will result in permanent weight loss.

Researchers and doctors have suggested that it may harm a person’s kidneys to eat too much protein. A recent study I ran across shows that while those with already damaged kidneys should probably limit their intake of protein, there is no support for the idea that eating a lot of protein, as one might do on an Atkins diet, increases the risk of this happening.

I have heard the Protein Hypothesis used many times, and likely so have you. You may not have been listening, or perhaps you did not recognize it for what it is: a scientifically unsupported assumption on which most of our modern diet is based.

Back in the bad old days, bodybuilders and other macho athletes would look at charts like this one I referenced in in a previous blog entry.

A Calorie Counter

They would multiply their weight by the factor that was supposed to give them the number of grams of protein they should consume each day to support the level of heavy-duty exercise they were performing and to maximize their muscle growth. Then they would pull out a nutrition guide and look up protein foods to see what they needed to eat to reach that goal.

It was often the case that a big, strong guy would eat large portions of meat three times a day, perhaps in addition to lots of other calories he was consuming as fuel. In fact, that was what it took to achieve those high levels of protein intake indicated by the chart.

Nowadays most strength athletes seem to consume lots of commercial protein powder shakes and mixes. But isn’t it also true that it is actually very easy to consume far more protein than any person needs, that even vegans get plenty of protein no matter what they choose to eat, and most Americans typically get 4 times as much protein as they need?

Actually, no. What I have stated above is the basis of what I call The Protein Hypothesis, which I would simplify as follows:

• Most Americans eat up to 4 times as much protein as they need each day;
• It is very easy to consume a diet that is high in protein, and in fact hard not to;
• No matter what a person chooses to eat, even if they are vegan and eat mostly fruit and vegetables, they are getting plenty of protein;
• Animal protein is bad for you, and even non-vegans should avoid it as much as possible;
• The numbers recommended in traditional charts are actually much higher than they should be, and no one needs to consume that much protein;
• Because this is true, there is no reason for anyone to calculate their protein intake.

So even on authority sites, we see discussions of how much protein a sedentary person or an athlete should eat (it is, after all, athletes who are concerned with protein intake because of their need for recovery and building muscle) conclude with the statement that it is really easy to get enough protein as long as we eat lots of [list of moderately low protein foods goes here]. Or just buy protein shakes as supplements.

Do they ever recommend that people keep a food journal and figure out what they are getting? No. They have never worked through their own numbers.

I have never met a single person other than myself who has deliberately calculated their protein intake for even one day.

Do diets ever make this calculation to make sure that people on a highly restricted diet (as most “diets” are) get enough protein? It doesn’t appear that way to me.

In fact there is a lot of research that supports the numbers that are on the chart above. My own experience supports this. Now that I am attempting to eat 100 grams of protein a day, my progress with weight lifting and running has greatly increased, my energy levels are up, and my recovery time is down. I have been following my bench press by keeping track of how many reps I add to similar sets one workout to the next. Numbers on a spreadsheet don’t always jump out at you though.

I tried to convince my boyfriend, who was a doubter. He had been making satisfactory progress on his bench press. He tends to be a light eater, and doesn’t eat large portions of meat. He actually lost about 15 pounds after I went on my diet. But he didn’t want to eat more protein, and thought I was being fanatical about it. So I didn’t push him.

Last Friday he ran 2.3 miles with me, the first time in many years he had run that far. He was very sore for days. And then yesterday’s bench workout was very disappointing to him, as he made no progress over the previous workout. On the (quite reasonable) assumption that necessary repair had dipped his protein levels so low that he had stopped building muscle, he agreed to try to eat more protein for a while.

Just to see what was happening with my totals, I plotted my results since I started lifting about 5 weeks ago, and I was surprised to find that my improvement is clearly up from about 2 weeks after I started craving protein and eating more of it, as you can see from the trend line.

But you know, it’s a few points of data we’re looking at there. It could be less, but it definitely could be more. In fact I am never sore after my workouts, so I take only 2 days off between benching. Taking more days didn’t seem to make a difference, anyway.

I didn’t even have that many data points for him, as he takes more days off between lifting workouts than I do. But his trendline was very different from mine.

We’ll both be eating a lot of meat and vegetables for a while.

But getting back to diets and protein calculations…

I now know that when I was eating low calorie but a normal variety of foods, I was getting less protein than a sedentary woman of my height and weight should have been getting, and I was actually exercising a lot.

Isn’t the reason why most dieters fail because people all of a sudden get mad cravings for something and can’t stop from eating it? So a diet which hasn’t had its protein calculated may well be providing enough protein for basic survival to no one who follows that diet.

Hmm…

Looking back at previous posts, you can see that there is more than one chart claiming to give you a range of protein you should be eating, and that the charts don’t agree. There are also a lot of people out there who will tell you with a high level of confidence that no matter what you eat, you will be getting far more protein than you need.

There are a lot of “diets” out there that have a discussion about how important protein is. They say something vague about how easy it is to fulfill your protein requirement. They might have a confusing paragraph on how to determine what percentage of your diet is protein, fat, and carbs. And then they change the subject.

No menu plan. No specific diet recommendations.

Why is that? I’ll let you in on a little secret. None of these people have done the numbers. It can be confusing when done the old fashioned way, flipping through the pages of a diet guide with a notebook, pencil, and calculator, then doing lots of calculations if you want to determine the percentage of protein you are getting.

But that’s not necessary. All you need do is set your calorie and protein goals, then go to a free diet site like Fat Secret, and record your food intake. If you’re going to be dieting, you should at least occasionally record a day’s intake and see how it gets you to your goal. Learning to measure and weigh your food, record it, and get the calorie values can be an important tool in helping you stay on track to achieving your goal. So many times I have had a question, then gone back, looked at my numbers, which include not just protein, but also calories, carbs, and fat, and was able to see what the problem was.

You can add food to your day’s intake just to see what would happen to your calories, protein, carbs, and fat if you were to eat them. You don’t need to do any calculations yourself. The site does it all for you.

If you join Fat Secret, buddy me. I’m eKatherine there. My profile is public, and you can check to see what I ate today. You can also check to see my exercise, too.

Here again is the protein table I published a few posts ago

Here is another table which give common recommendations:

A Calorie Counter
You can see that the second table recommends a much higher protein intake than the first table. Is one right and the other wrong? How should we know which is right?

Answer: we can’t know. Perhaps the answer lies between the two. But judging from the second table, the desired range could actually be much higher. So you need to listen to your body. If you hear your body telling you to eat more protein, this is something you should not ignore.

Do you feel like you are addicted to some food? Given that the word “addiction” in this situation may not fit the medical or psychiatric meaning of the word, if you are a person who has had these feelings, you know exactly what I mean.

It’s those cravings you get that are never satisfied. No matter how much of the thing you crave you consume, you always want more. If you’ve got it in the house, you’re in danger of eating it until it is gone, every time. You have to think hard when walking past it in the grocery store to keep yourself from buying it. But sometimes you find an excuse and do anyway.

For many years until quite recently I was addicted to cheese. While I had been a binge eater years back, for the most part cheese was the food that really was still in control of me after I overcame my binge eating.

I had gotten over binging on chocolate candy, having found that the craving for chocolate is not satisfied by milk chocolate, which apparently has little of the active ingredient (cocoa solids). It is mostly milk, sugar, and fat. White chocolate contains no cocoa solids at all. But eating the darkest chocolate would satisfy my cravings.

I even went through a phase where I would eat cheese-flavored potato chips and wash them down with Pepsi. You know, I can’t imagine doing it now, but I remember eating half a 5 ounce bag and drinking half a 20 oz. bottle of pepsi to go with it.

But cheese, yes. I had bought cheese and not only cooked with it, melting it in far greater quantities than I could ever have needed, but cutting it straight off the piece and eating it cold. Cheddar cheese, sharp, extra-sharp, medium, and mild. Swiss cheese, especially baby swiss and lorraine. Cream cheese. Brie, yes brie! Even velveeta, which can serve as a base for a cheese sauce with a wonderful texture. Goat cheese, yes!

Ah, memories of melted cheese. Back during my days of gluten consumption, I would wrap brie and sauteed mushrooms in buttered phyllo dough and bake it until it was wonderfully melty. Pizza with a mix of mozzarella, monterey jack, and fresh parmesan. Lasagna with mozzarella, parmesan, and ricotta. So much cheese. And buying sharp cheddar cheese at Sam’s Club in a 5 pound stick, then hacking off 1/2″ slices when I got the urge. Which came often.

If I added up all the cheese I had eaten but (clearly) not needed, and subtracted it from the food that I did eat, it would have been far, far more than the amount of fat I carried with me, even at my heaviest.

So what caused me to crave that cheese and eat it uncontrollably?

The first thing we need to recognize is that it is not always the thing we crave which is what the body needs. There are some deficiencies (iron deficiency, also known as pica) that are well-known for creating cravings entirely unrelated to the deficiency. So a person with an iron deficiency might eat ice, or even clay. Ick, eh? I used to eat ice when I was in high school. I doubt there was a deficiency involved. My mother packed us with vitamin and mineral pills to make sure we were not deficient.

But it is also true that we may not recognize the true nature of our craving. Cravings are an instinct, and for humans instincts are weak and easily culturally-influenced. The craving is a feeling that we may attempt to interpret so we can channel it in a way we believe will satisfy it. But we may choose a food that cannot possibly ever satisfy that craving.

I mentioned binging on chocolate previously. If a person were to crave chocolate and eat a small piece of 90% cocoa solids chocolate, it might very well satisfy that craving entirely. But should that person choose to open a bag of Milky Way or Snickers bars instead, the amount of chocolate contained within is not nearly enough to satisfy the craving, while the sugar and fat will trigger an urge to keep tasting that flavor and feeling that texture in the mouth.

The people who manufacture and market these foods know exactly what they are doing when they market products like this. They are in it to make money, and they really don’t care what happens to you.

Oh, they’d rather you not die from eating their products in large quantities, because you’re a good customer. You are profitable. But it’s all about the money for them.

Now some say that food companies make money from pharmaceutical investments that gives them an incentive to turn more Americans sick and reliant on the drug industry. I’m not saying I believe this is a primary motivation, just that this is interesting.

But getting back to cravings… I had a client who described her craving for protein and chocolate. She would frequently consume large chocolate milkshakes, which contain little protein or chocolate, being mostly carbs. She had been told she was gluten-intolerant, but continued to eat lots of bread products because she kept hearing they are “good for us”. And she was a diabetic. So she was constantly channeling her hunger and cravings into foods that were not only not satisfying them, but actually triggering her health issues and making them worse.

But my cheese addiction… When I started losing weight this past May, I used EFT to help get over my cravings, including my craving for cheese. I began eating less, which means no more between meal snacking, and smaller meals. Of course I wasn’t getting enough calories. And I was fine for a while and no longer craved cheese. Then suddenly I had several episodes of craving and consumed large quantities of meat. What happened?

I decided that all those years I was snacking on cheese I was borderline protein deficient. I craved cheese because it had protein. But it didn’t really have enough protein to keep me satisfied. The calories in cheese are mostly fat. So where if I’d fed myself a large steak or chicken breast, I’d have been satisfied, what happened was I kept being unsatisfied, and kept eating more cheese. And kept getting fatter, and kept feeling out of control.

If you’ve got mad cravings, your body is trying to tell you something.

What foods are good sources of protein, and which ones come with a high calorie cost? Inquiring minds want to know.

There’s a lot of misinformation about protein out there. In particular, there is misinformation about what makes a food a “good” source of protein.

On the one hand, there is a myth out there which says that it is easy to get plenty of protein even if you don’t eat “high protein” foods, that most people eat many times the amount of protein they “need”. There is no science that supports this view. Often it seems that those who are aware of the protein needs of the human body that research has demonstrated to us are afraid to speak out publicly because they don’t want to hurt the feelings of vegans who harbor this belief. As I said before, the myth relies on a misconception that the majority of Americans eat ginormous portions of animal products with each meal, not something that happens much at all nowadays.

In fact, the people I have known in the past who ate giant steaks every night were physical laborers. So maybe there’s something to the idea that physical activity leads to an increased need for protein.

As I said in the previous post, when I kept my calorie intake low and my protein intake proportional, yet increased my exercise (by adding weight training), I madly craved meat. Yet I know in the past where I have eaten a lot of meat for a while and then just not wanted any for weeks.

Do you suppose there’s a connection between what we need and what we crave? I certainly do. Calories, protein, and energy (whether fat or carbs, they are interchangeable to a great extent) are things you can develop a craving for when your body needs more of them.

Among the bizarre methods of increasing my protein intake I have been counseled in the past is to drink orange juice rather than water, because a quart of OJ contains half a gram of protein. Or eat peanut butter.

While peanut butter does contain some protein, both of these actually are quite low in protein in proportion to the calories they contain. So while orange juice might be higher in protein than water, and peanut butter might be higher than chocolate, the number of calories they contain means they would be replacing meat and other animal products in my diet. That quart of orange juice contains 448 calories. If it were to displace 2 large chicken thighs (a close calorie equivalent, and something I was eating at the time in that quantity), that would mean a net protein decrease of 41.24 grams, which makes no sense.

So to account for this differential in protein as related to a food’s calories, I put together a table to show the number of calories a person would need to eat to get a gram of protein from foods that are considered sources of protein. They start with the lowest calorie count, and go down to the point where a person would have to eat a lot of calories of that food to get enough protein.

Note that animal foods start at the top. Way down at the bottom are nuts, which are often said to be a good sources of protein. There is nothing wrong with nuts. They do in fact contain healthy fat, and studies show they are good for your health. But eat them in moderation, not by the pound. A pound of walnuts provides 2960 calories, but only 69.12 grams of protein. That may sound like a lot of protein, but anybody but an active young person is probably going to be putting on weight from all that fat (296 grams = ~10 oz.). Hey, I believe in fat, but that’s a lot of fat. Moderate fat consumption can moderate your hunger. That’s not moderate.

Moderation, guys.

Note: if there is some food you need to know about and it’s not on the chart, find something else similar that is in the chart. If there is nothing remotely similar, leave a comment and I can add it.