Back on Track

It takes me a little while to get back to normal following the wobble that is cheat day.  I feel much better this morning and it is interesting to note how lean or slim I actually feel - to me it is more noticeable now especially as my trousers now fit around my waist and not under it!  It's a major improvement but on top of that I feel fit and I feel healthy too.  Which is great.

I read a lot of the book "Protein Power" over the weekend and that together with Gary Taubes, Dr. Atkins, The Insulin Factor and Tim Ferriss; all point out the benefits of a low Insulin diet. Of course I found some detractors from this view too but have a think about it for a while.  The majority of diets limit calories and fat and yet whilst you can point to a number of people who have lost weight from them, unless they continue to diet, as soon as they revert to normal food, they start to put weight on again.  If these diets did what they said there wouldn't be so many cases of obesity and diabetes out there?  These books all make a compelling argument for the balance of our diet to shift away from a carbohydrate based one to a more natural one adopted by our ancestors for well over 2 and a half million years.  Man has been growing his own food for less than 12,000 years and they never featured in the diet until then, we switched to a different lifestyle eating food we weren't genetically designed to eat and much of the problem appears to be that we aren't evolved sufficiently enough to handle such a diet.

In our known existence to date for 0.48% of that time we've been eating diets increasingly high in carbohydrates and rather than eating them when seasonal we've been eating them all years around.  Add to that the increasingly high levels of sugar in our diet and you start to see what is going on.   It isn't just the obvious diabetes and obesity that appear to come from this diet but other chronic diseases too including heart and cancers.  The books make for troubling reading especially when you consider what advice we are given.  I'm very suspect now of anything that is in a package and justifiably so.  I used to consider soup as a healthy option - it makes you satiated quickly and so that has to be good especially in diet situations.  Have a read on any can of soup you care to pick up - I bet that within the first 6 or 8 ingredients you will find sugar.  You'll find some sort of wheat in there too.  Stuff like Fructose in drinks is incredibly common and you find sugars and carbs in just about everything and as soon as you eat or drink these - wallop, up goes your insulin levels to cope with this highly concentrated tsunami of sugar in your blood and the body goes in to overdrive to move it out of the blood into the cells or convert it.  

There are some great analogies in the books.  The one I like is that it like going to an ATM and drawing out money - your wallet acts like a diode - money goes into your wallet but you can't spend it and so you draw out more and your wallet gets fatter but you can't spend it so you draw out even more and so on......  All the time you are easting sugar and carbs you can't release what you have already stored you just add to it.  This is an oversimplification, of course it is, I'm no scientists but the arguments make sense more so in the face that the other stuff we've been told for the last 30 years doesn't seem to have made any difference whatsoever.  You'd have thought that all that healthy eating would have helped many more people?

Of course all this looks too simple, too straightforward and too much like common sense to be true surely we can't have got it that wrong?  They know what Insulin does and the Glycemic Index of foods they've done all the experiments and the maths.  It's just that where 1+1=2 reading this stuff - someone really hasn't added it all together and come up with anything that makes sense.  Surely our grandparents knew all along?  I'm sure they told me that potatoes, rice puddings and bread would put some fat on me.  It's pretty obvious. 

Anyway, to me it is becoming clear how this works and I'm feeling OK and losing weight but not feeling like I'm being starved and neither do I feel hungry at all.  Strangely enough I feel fit, fit enough to do some sprinting and running over the weekend and not find I was out of breath.

I've now got my accounts sorted too so they can be audited this week and with a bit of luck we can move on for another year on those.  I hate accounts....