Wobble

I had a bit of a wobble yesterday but not too bad - I just felt a little down but not to a level where I was depressed - I was just a bit quiet and not really feeling great.  I guess having been doing things for a week or more and being out and about I then had a day of catching up and trying to sort things out.  

I spent a bit of time catching up on the adventures of a friend who is in South America reading a month's worth of blog entries and photographs of a trip of a life time.  How wonderful and what a great adventure.  I'm looking forward to getting away myself in a few weeks to Italy for just a week but it could just help me get out of the blues this awful winter and last year's events have left me.

I decided yesterday to reduced my carbs a bit and I have no doubt that in doing so I also added to my feeling a bit blue.  I've maintained that through to today as well by reducing the amount of carbs I'm taking in to those in my vegetables.  I'm out tonight and Flocky Bicep is picking me up on the way through - this time last year I walked as it was about 20 Degrees C warmer but it is bitterly cold out there and a lift will do nicely :-)  I was a little bit lighter last year than I am now but I'm certainly heading back to those heady days when my good clothes fitted me.   When I went to the same event about 6 months ago (twice a year March and October) it was cold and I walked but I was a couple of stone heavier than I am now :-)

I'm waiting now for my book The Protein Factor so I can read that and then compare that to the other books I have including the Insulin Factor, Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution, Tim Ferris 4 Hour Body and Gary Taubes Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It.   Each of these has a slightly different approach to losing weight but more importantly they tend to agree on limiting the production of Insulin or having a Low Glycemic approach.  Whatever you may think about these "fad" diets, this is the only one that I can see that I can easily stick to (4 hour body) that allows me to eat well and many of the things I like, lose weight and importantly not lose muscle in the process and I don't feel hungry.  The results are quite impressive as the weight is coming off all over the place.  Men tend to store their fat above the waist and women below but having said that I can see weight off my hips and thighs and my trousers do up around my waist (not under it) and my watch is almost falling off my wrist too.  

These diets are so counter-intuitive to what perceived wisdom says and to what we are told even by health and Government agencies that you need to ensure that something that sounds a little too good to be true really is.  Some of the things are quite logical and quite obvious and yet seem to have been completely overlooked or discussed when talking about dieting.  These books make great and blindingly obvious cases for why conventional diets don't work as people go back to eating the way they did before dieting and that they are literally starving themselves to lose weight.  The old adage of calories in and calories out also doesn't hold water and that fat in puts fat on to you also doesn't stack up either.

Indeed these books make you question the whole "balanced diet" thing and in a way you need to go back to basics here.  I suppose I'm old enough to remember when vegetables and fruit were actually seasonal.  Our garden never produced apples and pears all year around, neither did our vegetables grow other than seasonally and so how could you possibly have had a balanced diet many years ago?  You ate things when they were available and so you could imagine that at harvest time, man was presented with a complete abundance of fruit and vegetables but what on earth did they eat for the rest of the year?  Cereals and the like are very modern inventions and even more modern are refined sugars used in just about everything these days.  I'd be surprised if I ever touched cereals or fruit juice again after reading the sorts of things that go into them and as for sodas - well I'm horrified by what is in them and what it does to your body.

It can be no coincidence that presently weight problems, almost (but not entirely) a modern phenomenon are to do with a modern diet and the sugar and carb rich mixture they contain.  These switch our bodies into carb craving machines and our bodies store this for the future.   I'm over simplifying it but the Insulin Factor gives an interesting series of reasons that the body craves carbs and why you always feel you want more.

Anyway, more later when I've read and compared the books a bit more.