You will notice their is some significant leeway in the
breakdown, and that is quite on purpose. While your attention, rightly
so, should be focused on fat calories, you have some wiggle room on
carbohydrate and protein. Because, as we have said elsewhere, no one diet fits all. Some of you
are meat-lovers and need up to 40% of your calories as protein; some
are carb lovers and have to have their bread and cereals. You can
adjust your eating toward personal preferences. This is why you will be
able to follow this eating plan easier than others: flexibility.
One quick word on "philosophy of eating": there is absolutely
nothing that is a forbidden food in this plan.You can
have anything you want. Unlike some diets, if you absolutely,
positively need some bread, eat some bread. Unlike some diets (and I
still hate that word), if you absolutely, positively have to have a
bowl of ice cream, by Jimminy Cricket, have some ice cream. Pizza
cravings? Have pizza. Chocoholic? Have chocolate. The point is not to
forbid anything but control portion when you break out and eat.
Remember the story of my personal battles with ice
cream? Controlling portions was the solution. When you have ice cream,
eat a controlled, structured amount.
Don't eat ice cream out of those mammoth gallon tubs.
Break it down into reasonable portions. Don't east pizza out of the
box, straight from the delivery man.Take a slice or two, close the box,
and put the pizza on a plate. The pizza slices will visually
appear to be much larger on the plate than just 1/12 of the whole pie.
Playing other mind tricks also can condition you to eat smaller
portions of these treats. Use a parfait bowl for the ice portion, not a
2 quart Tupperware™ bowl. Put those pizza slices on an 8" plate instead
of a 12" dinner plate. Your eyes will see just how big fast food pizza
delivery slices are. Use a smaller salad ford instead of a dinner fork
- better still, get a cocktail fork to eat with. Teaspoon bites of your
ice cream, rather that scooping it out with a tablespoon. Like sweet
tea? Fill the glass 2/3 full with ice before you drink. You get the
picture. [My patients can hear me crying out the familiar "This is not
a Mars landing here!"] It's the little adaptations and habits that make
for success.
Let's do some math now. Suppose we have calculated your
RMR and, with your activity factor multiplied, your daily energy
requirement for a break even weight is 2750 calories per day. We - you
and your doctor - set a weight loss goal of 2 pounds per week at the
start of the program. As we have seen, for two pounds of loss per week,
you have to have a calorie deficit of 1000 calories per day. That means
you have two options, initially.
According to our admittedly-simplified view of the
world, either should work. But, for whatever it's worth, we live in the
real world. One approach definitely works better than the
other. By now, you should easily be able to guess which one. If you
guessed option 2, give yourself a gold star with smiley face cluster.
Here's why. If you go with option 1, your body will
rebel. The most complicated, finely-tuned machine in the world knows
all about starving. And 1750 calories suddenly thrown at a body used to
having 3500-4000 calories per day is starvation.Your body doesn't know
you are doing this for its own good and voluntarily. All it knows, it
learned a thousand or 2000 years ago: famine! Crop failure! No food!
And, since your genetics enabled your far distant ancestors millennia
ago to live through times of starvation, it starts to adapt to survive.
One landmark study proved just how serious our bodies are when it comes
to calorie reduction.
In the 1940s, Ancel Keys, a
professor at the University of Minnesota, did a study that will
probably never be duplicated in a laboratory setting. It really doesn't
need to be since it is being duplicated in every day life all across
the country. What keys did was find 40 male volunteers and put them on
a semi-starvation diet, about 1600 calories per day - not too far from
our 1750 calories calculated above. What he found was amazing. He
found, first, that people who go on semi-starvation get really weird,
for lack of a better word. Four just dropped out because they couldn't
tolerate the diet. More so, 3 developed binge-eating disorder, 2 began
to steal food, one suffered significant depression, and 2 actually had
to be hospitalized for psychosis - to be blunt, they went crazy. More
importantly, was what he found in the 28 men who completed the study.
They displayed hunger, weakness, lack of drive and motivation,
decreased ability to feel happiness, osteoporosis, ankle swelling, hair
loss, low blood pressure, poor wound healing, depression and decreased
muscle mass. That last one shouldn't surprise you, as we have discussed
that elsewhere. But, then, you may have
actually experiences the others during one of your previous diet
attempts.The men complained of being nervous, anxious, apathetic,
withdrawn, impatient, self-critical with distorted body images and even
feeling overweight, moody, emotional and depressed.The study subjects
lost 10% of their strength and 50% of their exercise stamina. Over the
course of the 6-month study, the men became, in a word, sick.
Equally alarming is what the men did when they were
allowed to resume eating whatever they wanted. To "stop the diet." On
average, the men regained to their original weights plus
10%. But the weight regain was largely as fat and their
lean body mass recovered much more slowly, if at all. Keys published
his study and other observations in The Biology of Starvation,
still the only work of its kind.You won't find it in the public library
but the closest medical school library should have a copy or be able to
get access to one. Not for a late night read, but it is truly a
remarkable study of what all too many people do to themselves everyday
through over-restrictive dieting.
One of the findings that Keys found that is most
relevant to our discussion is that the RMR of the study subjects
dropped during semi-starvation. This should comes as no surprise to
anyone of you who have tried to starve weight off in the past. You can
starve and lose weight, at least for a short period. But, gradually and
inevitably, your weight loss slows and then comes to a screeching halt.
You eat less and less and you, basically, stop losing weight. This is
because, we learned 1000s of years ago, that when there is a time of
food lack, the only way the body can live through it is to shut down
everything. Your "unnecessary" bodily functions - like hair growth,
skin repair, replacement of dead cells - stop. Muscle and fat tissue -
the two possible sources for additional energy for the body - get
cannibalized. The heart rate slows as does the pressure with which
blood circulates through the body, conserving more energy. Is any of
this starting to sound familiar?
The message is clear. You cannot - try as you will -
starve off weight. It is a biological impossibility. You can cut back
and cut back until you are down to 2 crackers and a diet Pepsi™ and you
will not lose weight. You get discouraged, give up, and resume
your old eating habits. And, as you also probably already know, weight
regain is absolutely no problem. You start to feel better, physically
and psychologically - and swear off dieting forever. Unfortunately, you
are probably even more overweight than when you started and, worse, you
have further ruined your body composition by losing muscle and gaining
more fat. This, my friends, is called weight cycling or "yo-yo
dieting." And it is why most of you are where you are today.
Before we examine option #2, here's a trivia question
for you: Where do the Army's K-rations get their name? Ancel Keys is
the man who developed the packaged meals carried by the U.S. Army
during World War II. Thus, the were nicknamed "K-rations."
Copyright
© 2005
Albright Bariatric Clinic
