Insulin and Diet

It is funny how I've taken a lot more interest in my well-being since having Bladder Cancer.  By that I mean looking at diet and trying things out and realising that I was eating and doing all the wrong things and in many ways I've been on a catch up since about 4 years ago when I nearly overdid the diet stuff and make myself ill.  Since then I've looked at exercise and diet to start to address my body's imbalance (as I see it).  I moaned about having no energy and being dog tired and having no strength.  I whined about my lot on many occasions and took to some "healthy" options and started to go down the route suggested by many of the "balanced" diet and plenty of fruit and vegetables so much so that I also decided to get a juicer to stick some heavy duty goodness from fruit and vegetables into my system.  I also used to use a mixture of Flax Seed Oil and Cottage Cheese every day FOCC from the Budwig Protocol too which had some pretty good effects too.

All of these things though resulted in mixed results and it wasn't until I learnt about the Tim Ferriss diet from Steve Kelly that I started to bring together all the bits of research and started to get a bigger picture about overall health and fitness and some of the dangers out there especially some of the links between Cancer and Sugar and indeed some of the damage that sugar can do to the human body.

The article HERE that I highlighted earlier in the week is a straightforward explanation I guess of where I am now.  I still think there are some other things involved but hell - I'm no scientist - I just read lots of stuff like this and take the common sense approach (now).  I got a book called The Insulin Factor and I'm hoping to get Protein Power in a few days which added to the 4 Hour Body and the Atkins Diet books when read together appear to all be saying the same things.

I suppose simply the main points are:

• Humans haven't evolved to be able to metabolise modern "man made" carbohydrates.  Man has been around about 2 million years and yet has only been making things like bread recently perhaps 12,000 years or so.  We just haven't evolved to eat flour, grains and sugars processed the way they are
• Sugar and Fructose give you body a hard time especially because you need Insulin to take the sugars out of blood and do something with it.  Long term exposure messes up you insulin and/or your resistance to insulin - there's lots of things can complicate this - it is a big subject.  The Insulin Factor and the article above should worry you if you eat a lot of sugary things and if you eat a lot of processed foods 
• Carbohydrates were sparse and not plentiful in man's diet, neither were fruits as we know them today.  Things were seasonal, man didn't dig into Florida oranges all year around, or bananas or indeed anything like that.  Occasionally berries and perhaps some honey or a binge out on harder fruit (in the UK).  Modern fruit (nearly all of it) has been produced through man made manipulation of species to make them sweeter and plumper, less fibrous etc.  
• Man lived mainly on meat, fish etc.  Protein was a large part of the diet.  Vegetables were available - leaves and the like too.  
•  Sugar is addictive and turns on something in the body that makes you crave more of it.  You don't need to eat lots of these foods but they give an immediate hit to the body and the body craves more tempting you to overeat. 
• Carbohydrates are cheap and plentiful today as are products containing sugar.  It is easy to gorge on these cheaply.  Carbs release insulin.  Insulin helps your body store stuff for later.  Trouble is, there isn't a later unless you need to call on these reserves.  If you have carbs reguarly, the body doesn't need to call on the reserve and just continues storing.
• Everyone has been "sold" the story that "Fat" makes you fat and that things should be lean and that low fat is the way to go.  Look on a low fat yoghurt and see how much sugar they contain.  Look at most products you buy and see what is in it - you are pretty likely to find wheat powder or potato starch, sugar, fructose and so on.   Even in a stock cube I was horrified to find stuff like this.  It is everywhere
• Many diets work by limiting what you can eat - or starving you.  You feel hungry and it is difficult to keep the diet going as invariably it allows you to have carbs and fruit and sugary things that your body craves for.  You lose weight through burning fat but also, and more worryingly, by losing mass from your muscles.  Protein based diets don't do that, you may even gain some muscle mass when losing the "fat" 

So just a few of the things that should start you wondering what is going on and why are people so much heavier today than a few decades ago.  There is a lot of work out there about this and the one thing I've noticed about this diet is that I actually feel good, I rarely (if ever) feel hungry after I've eaten or between meals.  After a few days I didn't crave foods I liked any more so I've given up bread, potato, rice, pasta, cereal even my beloved soups were found to have sugar and other grain based products.   I've dropped almost all processed foods apart from cheat day (more about that later).  It took a short while to get over not having sweeteners  sugar, honey and other sweet things that lie around the house.  

The diet is predominantly one of Protein and I have vegetables and some slow release carbohydrates in the form of various beans (Red Kidney, Pinto, Black Eye etc).  It isn't that hard for me, I like meat and in many forms and I like fish and so I have plenty to eat.  I was a bit worried about how I cooked this so got a George Foreman grill and griddle combo which means I can have food without too much fat involved in cooking it.  It is easy to cook and I can generally vary my food throughout the week but there is some repetition.  It is totally counter intuitive to what you are told, it doesn't seem possible that you could, for example, have steak and egg three times a day and lose weight.   

Occasionally our ancestors would have binged out on carbs and fruit and also the body can be tricked into doing the exact opposite of losing weight if somehow it thinks it is starving it will re-start storing food as fat even under diet conditions.   Hence, in the Tim Ferriss 4 hour body he suggests one day where you "go wild" and eat sugar and carbs to your heart content.  This spikes the body and stops it entering into a sort of starved mode.  Additionally it allows you to have one day off when you can eat stuff you might crave or miss - for me that's beer and perhaps something sweet, cheese and bread which I don't have at all during the week.  I notice some diets allow lite beers and some allow cheese and some even allow a little bread too.  This is where reading a number of books and making up your own mind must come into it.

I've just ordered Protein Power which I will then compare with Atkins, Time Ferris and The Insulin Factor and will then hope to draw my own conclusions.  I've continued with the FOCC occasionally - I used to have it every day but it is a little filling and I've found it difficult to adapt as I used to water it down with yoghurt or milk and have it with cereal or dried fruit both of which are now firmly off the list from Sunday to Friday - Saturday is fair game though :-)

Having seen the damage that diabetes can cause I'm very wary of it and after having read the internal damage that carbs and sugar can do (don't get me wrong we need some of these not none) I feel that I'm getting my act together on this and making sure that I'm limiting my carbs to a low but useful amount and that I'm ensuring that the protein and carbs I do get are beneficial to get me back to a "normal" weight and also to help me maintain general good health which I am pleased to say I am currently enjoying.