weigh-2-go.org

A quick add-on to today’s post.

As the nation starts to address obesity as an epidemic and a social issue, here’s a revealing blog post from the fat side.

Does the Obesity Task Force [of Tennessee] Even Have Any Obese People On It?
http://blogs.nashvillescene.com/pitw/2010/03/does_the_obesity_task_force_ev.php

A Page from NAAFA.org.

And here’s an obesity defense group:

NAAFA.org | We Come In All Sizes | The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance
http://www.naafa.org

I got that line from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. It cracked me up.

Just as I was agonizing over the Diet Wars–in which the low-fat gurus battle the low-carb gurus, and neither side has yet emerged victorious–Pollan makes an excellent case that we need not to fight for carbs, fats, vitamins, antioxidants, or any other subset of our nutrition needs. We need to fight for food.

Pollan carefully defines, and defends, food: he means actual plant and animal substances, not processed or refined into foodlike substances. He even suggests that if a product has to make health claims, it is probably not food, but a foodlike substance derived from parts of nutritious substances that came from food.

Foodlike substances shout wildly for our attention.
Now fortified with 10 vitamins and minerals!

No artificial preservatives!

A heart-healthy food!

And the yams, alas, are silent.

In Defense of Food is a couple years old, but the ideas are still cutting edge. One of my next reads will be Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.

I <heart> the Get-It-Done Guy, and in the spirit of the holidays, he has dedicated a podcast episode to weight loss. Here’s an excerpt and link. His podcasts are witty and brilliant. This one has 4 essential tools for getting it done–tools I have used in the past and am following again now.

We all have our fantasy weight. Now that it’s holiday season, we all weigh about twice that. But when we hit our fantasy weight—so our story goes—we will suddenly be a chick-or-dude magnet. Life will be wonderful. We’ll get a raise at work, our house will be spotless, and we’ll own a beautiful white shag carpet that never shows wine stains. … We know what to do: eat fewer calories and be more active. Unfortunately, knowing and doing are two different things. We all know we need more commitment, but we so prefer convenience.

via Get-It-Done Guy : How to Stick to a Weight Loss Plan :: Quick and Dirty Tips ™.

And where the heck have I been? All shall be revealed.

My experiment with simple carbs is done for now, or at least on hiatus. I am reading Potatoes Not Prozac by Kathleen DesMaisons (mentioned in recent posts), which explains how sugar effects the brain in some people, and why sugar-sensitive people (like me) have the symptoms they do.

Years ago, I read Sugar Blues by William Dufty. I still carry around the notion that sugar is an addictive drug, and that food companies are perpetrating a sugar conspiracy. Despite this notion, I still act like a sugar addict. Perhaps that notion is a crutch–the classic “It’s Not Your Fault!” headline grabs me. It is comforting to think that I don’t have a problem but those evil food companies are victimizing me.

DesMaisons is not a conspiracy theorist, but instead focuses on the human body’s reaction to sugar, and the heightened reaction to sugar that some people experience.

I also have a bookmark in  The End of Overeating by David Kessler. Kessler does support my conspiracy notion. Simply stated, sugar sells because people like it. So why wouldn’t food companies sell food with more sugar (and fat and salt)? It’s free-market economics.

Meanwhile, even with all of this information “occupying mindshare,” as the marketing gurus say, I’m living in a la-la land where I get to eat anything I want anyway: pizza, cookies, alcohol, candy, all in the last 4 days. WTF? I am acting like an addict.

In previous posts I have commented on Radiant Recovery’s 7 steps, at www.radiantrecovery.com. Here is a synopsis of the last 3 steps.

Step 5 is challenging: Shift from white foods to brown foods.

• White foods include alcohol, sugar, baked goods made with white flour, and regular pasta.
• Brown foods include brown rice, whole grain bread, and a potato with the skin.

Many people I talk to say they can’t live without pasta. Three years ago, I thought I might be one of them. But pasta is a food I can live without. But bread is a tough habit to break for me.

The difference between white foods and brown foods is the complexity of the carbs. Simple carbs have fewer molecular bonds, break down faster in the bloodstream, and cause a sugar rush. Complex carbs break down more slowly, providing energy in a slower burn.

Step 6: Reduce or eliminate sugars.

This is the step that I jumped to, cold turkey, when I began losing weight 3.5 years ago. The more I read about sugar sensitivity, the more convinced I am that, as a sugar sensitive person, I owe my weight loss success to this step. I also suspect that all the anecdotal evidence about the success of Atkins is due to sugar sensitive people having the same breakthrough.

I’m glad that Dr. DesMaisons recommends that people do whatever works for them–go cold turkey, or eliminate sugar gradually. For me, only cold turkey works.

Step 7: Create a new life.

Wow, this is an important step–one that I skipped and need to come back to. This step involves replacing sugar–and the highs and lows of sugar sensitivity–with other, more fulfilling and rewarding things in life. On the Radiant Recovery web site:

Early Step 7 can be boring

You no longer have the rush of sugar feelings. It takes a while to settle into this new way of living. Over time you learn to create those things that raise “soft” beta endorphin – the kind that flows rather than spikes. Work on building these things into regular life everyday.

All the horror stories we hear about people regaining the weight they lose–could they be due, in part, to not replacing food with something better? This step rings true to me.

“Potatoes Not Prozac” and “The Sugar Addict’s Total Recovery Program” are on my immediate reading list, and I’m going to be investigating this program carefully in the coming weeks.

So my friend P emails me:

…I’m at the 3rd stage on SparkPeople and wondered if you would be interested in doing any of [list of suggestions] together, any time soon…”

And I’m, like, “SparkPeople? Like, what’s that?”

And she writes back: “Ah–I should back up. So, do you know about SparkPeople? Free weight loss site used by millions!”

I guess I’m the last to know–unless, of course, I’m the first to inform you, dear Reader.

The SparkPeople site is very cool. And it has so many features that I can only scratch the surface before my enthusiasm compels me to blog it.

• Personal blogs and forums for members to share their progress, motivation, setbacks, and stories. A more robust and accessible community than the one on WeightWatchers.com, and it’s free.
• A wonderful food tracker, with a database that appears to be about as deep as Weight Watchers, but it tracks many other nutrients (like sodium, saturated fat, fiber and protein)
• Online fitness programs with tools to schedule and track activities.
• A “Reports” page with information such as “Calorie Differential Over Time–You set the dates to see your calories in versus calories out over time.” Cool–can’t wait to have some data for them to analyze.
• News headlines related to health.

SparkPeople is funded by ads. The site is well crafted and professional, and the ads are not in my face.

Today I logged my food on SparkPeople instead of Weight Watchers, just to give it a try. It is possible to log on SparkPeople, and then calculate POINTS from Calories, Fat, and Fiber totals per meal on Weight Watchers. I’ll be giving this a try to see which I like better over time.

In two previous posts I have commented on Radiant Recovery’s 7 steps, at www.radiantrecovery.com. I admit I have not yet read Dr. Kathleen DesMaisons books, or embarked on her program in earnest–but I’m looking at the steps carefully on the web site, and comparing and contrasting to Weight Watchers and some of my own experience.

Step 3 sounds simple: Three meals a day. Yeah, yeah. But specifically, Dr. DesMaisons prescribes:

• The right amount of protein for your body
• A complex carb
• Eat meals a intervals no greater than 6 hours
• Nothing between breakfast and lunch

This is profoundly different from Weight Watchers, which suggests that you snack. (Some may argue that Weight Watchers makes its money selling small portion low point snack foods, so naturally they encourage snacking. I don’t believe WW is purely profit-motivated in their advice to snack–but yes, this case can be made. This article excerpts another blog’s post–all of which merits a discussion on its own.) I’m intrigued to learn why there are no snacks between breakfast and lunch.

Also, as in Step 1, the combination of complex carbs and the “right amount” of protein (calculated by body weight) is important on this plan.

Step 4 is the most intriguing of all to me: Take Vitamins. Have a Potato Before Bed.

First of all, I have always wondered which vitamins and how much are conducive to weight loss and maintenance. Dr. DesMaisons recommends Vitamin C, B-Complex vitamins, and Zinc. She refers to her book Potatoes Not Prozac for the full details. It’s on my reading list.

And that brings us to potatoes. Wow. I refer to you to the Radiant Recovery web site for the dish on potatoes. I’d a never thunk it. I am eager to try potatoes as recommended here and gauge the effect on my mood and sleep pattern. Another experiment to look forward to.

Ironically, potatoes were the food I missed the least when I first lost weight, along with pasta. What a relief to discover that I can live without a food that used to be a “go-to” food for overeating. But it sounds like potatoes, used well, could be beneficial after all. Fascinating stuff.

Last week, I blogged about Dr. Kathleen DesMaisons’s 7 Steps to radiant recovery on RadiantRecovery.com. I wrote:

As for me, I think I am skipping straight to Step 6.

To which Dr. DesMaisons immediately commented,

Whoa!!!!! Wait, no, no, please oh please…

skipping straight to step 6 misses the point of the whole program

…

For the entire exchange, see the original post with comments here.

Dr. DesMaisons’s Radiant Recovery is worth a serious look, especially from me, who has felt the effects of sugar sensitivity. And the good news is, I haven’t really skipped straight to Step 6–I have also followed some of the other steps, even though I made these changes before I was aware of this program. So I’d like to examine these 7 steps here.

Step 1. Eat breakfast with protein.
Complete information: http://www.radiantrecovery.com/1r.htm

The recommendation is a breakfast consisting of one-third of your daily protein (protein grams needed = your weight in pounds / 2), plus a complex carbohydrate.

Personally I have always been a breaksfast easter. Dr. DesMaisons explains why some people avoid breakfast (which I cannot fathom–I love breakfast, even if it is just a yummy protein shake).

She recommends combining the protein with a complex carb, and provides several menu ideas.

Step 2. journal what you eat and how you feel.
Complete information: http://www.radiantrecovery.com/2r.htm

Food journaling is a tried-and-true technique, but adding how you feel, both emotionally and physically, is an inspired idea. How else can we know how food habits correlate with real results to our bodies and minds?

Weight Watchers gives me eTools for the food and activity tracking, but there are no POINTS for feeling blue, energetic, euphoric, or cranky. I’m an avid journaler, but I put feelings in a separate book. Should I combine my journaling systems? Something to think about.

More steps in future posts.

In my Googling about sugar dependency, I found a great web site and recource. Dr. Kathleen DesMaisons has done the research on sugar sensitivity and how to beat it. She has authored several books, including “The Sugar Addict’s Total Recovery Program” and “Potatoes Not Prozac.” I have put these on my reading list.

Here are her 7 Steps to radiant recovery, i.e., stop “the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde Syndrome of sugar sensitivity.

For readers who are intrigued by the power sugar might be having on their lives, this program is a doable and simple system. As for me, I think I am skipping straight to Step 6.

I am curious about the potato.

Oprah, we adore thee.

I was so inspired to hear Oprah on a TV commercial for her show, angrily exclaiming, “I cannot believe I am still talking about weight!” She got back up to 200 pounds when this news item hit, and now she has enlisted her infinite personal resources to get back on track. Go Oprah!

She dedicated today’s show to the topic. I missed the telecast but here’s the link to the web resources. (I’m anxious to post this even before I have a chance to watch it): http://www.oprah.com/dated/oprahshow/oprahshow_20081030_bobgreene.

So now we know how Oprah will return to her best weight. I’ll be looking for why this happened to her, or to anyone. I have my theories.