Cara's Weightloss Journal

I found a very interesting article yesterday. It was in the February issue of Reader’s Digest. It was an interview with Gary Taubes who wrote the book Why We Get Fat—and What to Do About It last winter.

The article started by confessing that Taubes has been called “a dangerous cherry picker of data—someone who searches through decades of studies to weave together the bits he likes.” But in the past five years, top researchers, after recent compelling studies on obesity and weight loss, are now starting to take his arguments very seriously.

What Taubes has been saying lately is, basically that the theories of “calories in-calories out” and low-fat diets are just about completely backwards from what science has been proving for decades about how to lose weight.

Here’s are a few things he says…

“Over the past 40 years, studies have shown that you can’t get a clinically significant effect from cutting calories.” That the idea of reducing calories and increasing exercise just does one simple thing—make our bodies hungry. In fact, he says the more energy we expend, the hungrier our bodies will get and that recent data proves that “there is no compelling evidence that exercise has an effect on weight”.

He goes further to say that a diet high in fat and low in carbohydrates (more precisely, net carbs) is the absolute key to efficient weight loss. He presented a very interesting analogy: Think of your fat tissue as a wallet and your meals are like going to the ATM. Normally, when we go to an ATM, it’s to get money to put in our wallets to spend and when we run out of money in our wallets we go back to the ATM to get more. Well, he suggests that insulin locks the money [or fat] in your wallet [or your fat tissue], so you’ve got to keep going back to the ATM [your food] to feel satisfied. Your fat cells are getting fatter and fatter, but your body can’t get at the fatty acids that are stored inside them to use as fuel because the insulin levels are so high because of the sugars and carbohydrates we eat. So you get hungry and you eat again.

The key component here is the effect the insulin has on our bodies. Or rather the over abundance of insulin—from carbs and sugar.

He went on to say that a low-fat diet is actually bad for the heart because it’s high in carbohydrates. This kinda makes sense because usually when a company makes a low-fat product, it loses flavor, right? So how do they combat the lack of flavor? They usually add sugar or salt. Have you ever noticed how sweet low-fat mayo tastes?

So what happens is sugar becomes the main cause for weight gain, even if you don’t eat sweets that much. He said that refined carbohydrates (like pasta, potatoes, bread, rice and corn) raise our insulin levels and that scientists have known since the early ’60s that insulin is the primary hormone that regulates your fat tissue. He said that you can go to any endocrinology text book and look up what makes a fat cell fat and it’ll tell you all the ways that insulin does it.

So “insulin is the primary hormone that regulates fat tissue’?

I never knew that.

You should take a minute to read this short article by the Discovery Channel from their “How Stuff Works” website that shows how a fat cell works. It’s very interesting. Especially the last paragraph where it says “a fat cell will grab the fat and store it rather than the carbohydrates because fat is so much easier to store.” Kinda goes along with Taubes’ ATM theory.

So the basic idea is that we need to eat foods that keep our insulin levels low. And foods that are high in fat and low in carbohydrates actually help your body metabolize fat better to keep you leaner.

Check this out. Here’s what Taubes listed as his typical daily menu:

• Breakfast: 2-egg ham-and-cheese omelet, diet cranberry juice and coffee with cream (real cream) and sweetener
• Lunch: salmon salad with 2 cups lettuce and 1 cup veggies with water or diet soda
• Dinner: 8-ounce (yes 8 OUNCES) rib eye steak with blue cheese (my dream meal!), 1 cup cauliflower mashed potatoes (made with butter, cream and bacon) Did he say bacon!? I think I’m in love!
• Dessert: sugar-free gelatin or pudding (made with heavy cream)

Wouldn’t you love to eat rib-eye for dinner again? And bacon?! Real bacon!

So, basically he’s saying don’t eat the foods that make you fat and beyond that, each as much as you want. He said back in “hunter-gatherer” days, we primarily existed off of meat and whatever grains and vegetables we could find.

So, what do you guys think? Does this all sound on the up-n-up?