The Best Present...of Your Life

The Good News

Today is my 41^st birthday. Ever since reading The Lord of the Rings, I’ve been fond of the idea of giving away presents for one’s birthday. This year, I’d like to give you an experience I’ve had for the past six months. I believe it's saved my life. Perhaps it might do the same for you.

On June 20, 2011, I weighed 234 pounds. Today, as of this morning, I weigh 193.5, for a net loss of 40.5 pounds. In the interests of honesty and scientific accuracy, I'll confess that I normally weigh in at night, and 193.5 was this morning's weight. But my goal was to lose 40 pounds in under six months—specifically by my birthday—so if you'll cut me a few hours of slack on the measurement methodology, I'll feel no qualms in declaring victory.

My wife, Knico, is down 43 pounds in the same period. When we hug now, we can feel our ribs pressing together. We can’t remember the last time that happened. It’s funny and invigorating when little things like that strike you. This is about the shape we were in when we got married, before two kids and 15 years of stress and bad habits.

Odds are nearly seven in ten that you’re in the same boat I was in. Sixty-eight percent of Americans are overweight or obese, and the numbers keep getting worse. At the same time, 90% of us believe that we eat healthy diets. Are people deluding themselves about what “overweight” is? You bet. Are people in denial about their true eating habits? Probably.

But there’s another possibility that is rarely explored: What if most of the information we’ve been fed about “healthy” eating for the last 40 years is wrong?

Think about it. From early grade school on, we’re taught the merits of the USDA’s food pyramid. Look at the pyramid’s base, the level we’re supposed to eat six to eleven helpings of per day: bread, cereal, rice, and pasta. This is the foundation and most prevalent component of the American diet (not to mention the Midwest farming economy). Right above this, at two to four servings per day, is fruit. Meanwhile, above this at only two to three daily servings are meats, eggs, and nuts, those “bad” foods that are so rich in obesity-causing fats and artery-clogging cholesterol.

Now, I’ve always been a contrarian sort of guy, and by last June I obviously had a growing weight problem. So one day when I stumbled across two separate sources that said this pyramid was dead wrong, that it practically needed to be turned upside-down, I paid close attention. Why?

Ah, that takes us to...

The Backstory

Few images stick in one’s childhood memory quite like seeing your mom wheeled past you, her skin yellowed from iodine and her body bloated after having been cracked open down the middle and pried apart during bypass surgery like a holiday turkey. Ultimately, it wasn’t the coronary condition that took her down. Nor was it the diabetes or the hypertension. Mom died from cancer. Her final 20 years were a fascinating study for anyone wanting to learn just how many ailments one body can sustain.

My grandfather also had a heart attack in his 50s, followed by a mammary artery bypass. The veins in his legs were shot, and he was never able to walk without pain again. My father is still alive. After two heart attacks, he now has seven stents near his heart forcing open bloodways that had become almost entirely choked by countless thousands of small, unfortunate life choices. He also has Type 2 diabetes and can barely feel his toes. His two brothers and sister now have diabetes, as well.

The trend for me is not encouraging.

In looking back, much of my life has been punctuated by watching the people who raised me die one hospital visit at a time. Now that I'm 41 and my two boys are at the age I was when all of these memories of illness began, I have decided that this is one legacy I do not want them to share. I do not want to be the pot-bellied dad who ends up seeing his grandchildren mostly at his hospital bedside.

It’s easy for anyone to say, "Well, I’m not going to be like that. I'm going to be different." I've sure said it enough times. But my expanding waist and vanishing chin said more than any plumped up promises to the contrary.

Let’s Talk Numbers

At 6' 0", the charts say I should weigh about 175. Personally, I think I would look emaciated at 175. Over a decade ago, I felt pretty good about myself in the 190 to 195 range. Recently, at age 40, I topped out at 234, and the scale readout kept creeping upward. My triglycerides, cholesterol, and blood pressure were above normal even in my mid-30s. The writing was on the wall. I was headed for the same fate as the rest of my family.

Something had to be done...but what?

You know the answer, of course. It’s what we’re all taught: exercise more, eat fewer calories, increase your grains, and load up on fruits and vegetables. Dietary fat is the enemy.

We all know this. It’s what we’ve heard all our lives. There’s only one problem.

Like the food pyramid, it’s wrong. And I have 40 missing pounds to prove it. Not only that, I have several friends who have adopted all or parts of my new dietary regimen in the same time I have. All of them have lost at least 20 pounds. One friend from high school has lost 47. My cousin lost 49 pounds in 17 weeks. None of us went to a meeting or bought any special foods or products. There were no injections. Everything I needed to know I got for free from the library.

Unfortunately, I didn’t exercise much during these six months. In fact, for nearly four weeks, I was laid out in bed with vertigo. But I didn’t need to exercise in order to lose weight. I still ate a fair amount of pizza, burgers, and desserts. Compared to the rigorous starvation of calorie restriction, my diet was a cake walk. I should point out that I use the word “diet” here to mean simply the food I eat on a daily basis, not some temporary plan to hit a goal and then be abandoned. The diet changes I’ve made are meant to be sustainable for the rest of my life.

Three weeks into this process, I had a blood draw and a lipid panel worked up. Prior to starting this new lifestyle, I had the following lipid levels:

Glucose: 93
Cholesterol: 192
Triglycerides: 228

Only three weeks into this diet, with no other changes in my activities, my blood results showed the following:

Glucose: 87
Cholesterol: 153
Triglycerides: 106

No, that’s not a typo—228 to 106 in three weeks, and that’s with feeding my face full of eggs and fatty meat (and piles of vegetables). As a point of comparison, statins such as Lipitor will only reduce triglycerides by about 20% over 18 months, and they come with a host of dangerous side effects. My biggest issues now are increasing my HDL levels with more exercise and improving my daily water intake.

The Breakthrough

There are many ways to diet. Virtually none of them work in the long run. According to the National Association of Physical Activity and Health, “231 million people in the European Union attempted a diet in 2002, but less than four million will succeed in keeping their new, trimmer figures for more than a year.” That's a 98% failure rate.

Most diets encourage you to take in fewer calories through food and burn more calories through exercise. This message is so ingrained that we never question its validity. But fill in the blank: “Wow, I just jogged five miles and really worked up an __________.” Does this seem counterproductive? I’m running to burn calories, but for hours my body is screaming at me to compensate and consume more calories. So perhaps a glass of apple juice (roughly 200 calories) and a whole wheat bagel (300 calories) with a smidge of lowfat cream cheese (50 calories) is all I need to feel better. Exactly how far do I have to run to burn off those 550 extra calories?

If I don’t eat them, I will starve—literally. My body will start consuming both fat and muscle to compensate for the caloric deficit, and I will be hungry...constantly. This is why calorie-based diets almost always fail over the long-term. Yes, you will lose weight for a few weeks, maybe even a few months if you’re really determined. But eventually, the odds overwhelmingly show that you will fail. You can’t fight how your body is built to operate and expect to win.

I found this out the hard way. In 2010, at an all-time high weight of 236, I promised myself that I would drop 20 pounds before my 40th birthday. I dieted for six months, using a phone app to count calories. At the very end, I piled on a last burst of extreme self-denial—and I made it!

After three months, I’d gained 18 pounds back, just as I’d done with every other diet in my life. All of that trouble and suffering for nothing. I felt like a dope. My wife had stopped describing me as thin. I was ashamed to take my shirt off around my children, and I shunned having my picture taken.

Then two little miracles happened courtesy of the Washington County Library.

The first was The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss, a book I’d reserved because I’d enjoyed his  “The 4-Hour Workweek” several months before. Ferriss spends a few chapters discussing what he calls the Slow-Carb diet. The science and research he cites are fascinating, but essentially his plan boils down to five points (borrowed from here):

Rule #1: Avoid “white” carbohydrates. Don’t eat bread, pasta, rice (brown or white), grains, potatoes, breaded fried food, or dairy on your slow-carb days.

Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again. Meals should include protein, legumes, and non-starchy vegetables. Eat as much as you like three to four times per day.

Rule #3: Don’t drink calories. Avoid milk (including soy), sweetened soda (no more than 16oz of diet), and fruit juice. One or two glasses of red wine are permitted.

Rule #4: Don’t eat fruit. Tomatoes and avocados are okay (the latter in moderation).

Rule #5: Take one day off per week. Go nuts and eat lots of calories to keep your metabolic rate (thyroid function, conversion of T4 to T3, leptin) up. Do at least five days of rules 1-4 before following rule 5.

Ferriss is a self-styled rule bender who has no qualms about blowing his own horn and abusing himself to make a point. His tone can seem a bit extreme.

At this time, I was also writing an article about library lending of ebooks. I was testing out the Barnes & Noble NOOK Color, and while I’d been on the Washington County Library2Go site (the library's vehicle for digital content lending), a book called The 6-Week Cure to the Middle-Aged Middle had caught my eye. I’d never read a health book in my life, but hey. I was 40. I clearly had a middle-aged middle. So I stuck it on the NOOK and promptly forgot about it. Then I read Ferriss’s book, remembered this Dr. Eades title, started reading it, and realized that these two guys, coming from radically different approaches and backgrounds, were saying essentially the same thing.

The message was loud and clear: carbs will slowly kill you, and the worst offender of all is sugar. The evidence detailed by these authors paints an increasingly damning picture of carbs, not fat, being a primary culprit in our society’s worst ailments, including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer—all of the main killers in my family.

From these two books, I started reading several more of Eades’s books, including his groundbreaking title, Protein Power. I also highly recommend his blog. It didn’t take me long to find Gary Taubes’s article on sugar in The New York Times or Taubes’s own book, Why We Get Fat. Knico found Mark Sisson’s blog, Mark’s Daily Apple, and his Primal Blueprint series. Once you dig into the low-carb subject and its various offshoots, such as the paleo diet, you discover that there is a huge amount of good information available and a quickly growing body of scientific study showing that most of the conventional “wisdom” we grew up with is little more than a fallacious fabrication that began around 1970. We have been living a lie, and now it’s killing us by the millions.

I won’t drag this out with a long discussion of these resources. Over a few weeks, I modified Ferriss’s rules with some advice from Eades and others, and it’s a mix that works for my wife and me. For example, we’ll eat a handful of berries every other day or so in a protein smoothie. (Berries have a lower sugar load than most other fruits.) We don't eat the same foods every day. Actually, Knico has bought several low-carb cookbooks, and the food, including the desserts, is downright tasty once you stop expecting a mouthful of sugar. Occasionally, we’ll indulge in a little espresso with cream (not milk, since it elicits a higher insulin response). As Ferriss advises, we do air squats around bad “cheat” meals. If you’re interested, you now have the links, or you can email me. But rather than bog us down with more theory, I’m going to show you my own daily log.

My nearly six months of measurements are HERE.

I’m pretty bad with spreadsheets, and I don’t know how to properly format Google’s system in particular, but the data is all there. Red denotes “cheat” days, as per Ferriss’ plan, and I’ve tried to make notes about the cheat foods and other miscellaneous items along the way. If you just want the key points, here they are:

1) Weight loss starts fast and then tapers off as you get closer to your “ideal” weight.
2) Air squats and wall pushes around cheats will cut your upward weight bounces significantly.
3) There will be plateau periods and times when your weight ratchets up for no apparent reason.

Don’t pay too much attention to individual days; focus more on week-to-week measurements. If you’re stuck in a rut, look for trouble spots. My snag tends to be dairy. Ferriss cautions against it for a good reason.

Here’s how this data looks in chart form:

Of course, pounds only tell part of the story. Nobody can see how much you weigh. They can see your measurements, though. Here’s what happened to mine: (Note that variances in tape measurement position will often account for minor fluctuations.)

Measurements
Date	Neck	Belly	Waist	Hips	Thigh
6/21/2011	16.5	42.5	38.5	44.5	25.5
6/27/2011	16.5	41.75	38.5	44.5	25.5
7/7/2011	16.5	40.75	38.5	44	24.5
7/17/2011	15.75	39.5	38.5	43.5	24
7/24/2011	15.5	39.5	37.5	43.5	24
8/1/2011	15.5	39.5	37	43.25	23.75
8/9/2011	15.75	38.75	37.75	43	23.5
8/14/2011	15.75	38.5	37.5	42.75	23.5
8/21/2011	15.5	38.5	37	42.5	23
8/28/2011	15.75	38	37	42	23.5
9/8/2011	15.75	38	37	41.75	23.5
9/19/2011	15.25	38	37	41.5	23
15-Oct	15.25	36.75	37	41.25	23
26-Oct	15.25	37	36.75	41.25	22.75
31-Oct	15	36.5	36.5	41	22.5
8-Nov	15	36.25	36.25	41.25	22
23-Nov	15	36.25	36	40.75	22.5
12-Dec	15	36	35.75	40.5	22.5

You Can Dooo Eeeet!

I can’t count how many times I’ve told people about my dietary change and heard in reply, “Well, I can’t do that.” Really? Could you do bypass surgery instead? I hear they’re fun, especially for your kids.

You can do that. I’m doing it, and I plan on doing it forever. There is no “suffering” or deprivation. If I’m desperate for pizza or a luscious chocolate dessert, I have it—once a week. While I desperately need to start exercising and increase my fitness level, this is not necessary for losing fat. Exercise will help you be healthy; it will not make you thin. Read Eades and Taubes for the many well-researched reasons why.

Let me reiterate how comparatively easy this system is. I lose weight consistently while eating whenever I’m hungry. I eat big meals loaded with delicious food. I can eat a breakfast of ham, three eggs, beans, spinach, tomatoes, and salsa, be hungry two hours later, snack, have a big lunch, chow down another mid-afternoon snack (often peanuts, homemade jerky, or a berry fruit smoothie), and pile on a big dinner, sometimes even followed by another sweet, low-carb snack before bed. And I lose weight. Honestly, the only difficult part of this process was the first three days or so, when I experienced the lightheadedness, hot flashes, and weakness symptoms common with carbohydrate withdrawal. By the end of the first month, most of the sugar and bread cravings had gone away.

All of this works because I watch the carb counts. By and large, I’m eating the food that the human body evolved to consume over two million years of evolution, not the synthetic crapfest we’ve devised over the last few hundred years. I keep within a range of about 80 to 100 grams of carbohydrates each day. (Once I'm satisfied with my weight, I'll simply step up to 100 to 120 grams of carbs per day for maintenance.) I’m not interested in that 20 grams or less Atkins crash course “induction” business. Who needs that kind of punishment? I have a balanced diet that’s low in carbs and relatively high in fat. Does that mean my blood serum cholesterol and triglycerides are shooting to the moon? Obviously not. The lipid panels don’t lie.

Moreover, aside from weight loss and improved blood serum levels, there are plenty of other benefits to a low-carb/low-sugar lifestyle. There is slowly mounting evidence that the principles of this diet will combat and prevent cancer. Low-carb can similarly thwart diabetes. Unlike a low-fat diet, it will reduce the amount of inflammation in your body, which is increasingly thought to be at the heart, if you will, of coronary disease. The huge energy swings that used to plague my afternoons have vanished. Apart from the fact that it takes longer to cook a meal than pull it out of a box, there isn't a single downside to this system.

Mark Sisson (Primal Blueprint) at age 56.
I know: shut up, right?

So...do you need to get healthier? Are you interested yet? I promised myself that I would make this information public when I hit my goal of losing 40 pounds before my 41st birthday. I barely made it, and others doing this along with me have easily surpassed my mark. Forty pounds is nearly twice the weight loss I saw in 2010, achieved in less time and with far less trauma. This is literally the only sustainable, sensible diet system I've ever seen in my life, and the only thing you need to buy is regular groceries.

It works. Consider following my suggested reading links or feel free to send me questions. What you find out just might save your life.