It's the Carbs, Stupid!
DECEMBER 01, 2007
It's the Carbs, Stupid!
My weight-loss saga is a long one filled with trials, tribulations, whining, miseries, Big&Tall fat clothes, airline extender belts, mobility problems, blood pressure problems, self-esteem problems--you get the picture. I'll give you the details as the stories in the blog move along. A year and a half ago, I wrote a manuscript titled One Hundred and One Common-Sense Ways to Lose Weight and Keep it Off. Several technically competent people, including a physician and a skilled editor, read it. I was about to self-publish it, but for some reason held off doing so. Now I am glad I waited.
A couple of months ago I came across Gary Taubes's book titled Good Calories. Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007). Reading this book was like, as Ross Perot might have said in his inimitable twang, being knocked alongside the head with a two-by-four. To make a long story short, with details to be filled in later, I had been on a weight plateau for two years. Several years ago, starting at a weight of 305, I lost 40 pounds going to Weight Watchers. Then I had medication problems, diuretic problems, and blood pressure problems and ended up gaining most of it back in water weight. When I started to try and lose again by continuing with Weight Watchers, I went up and down 2, 3, or 5 pounds for two years. I was stalled, like being in a Wyoming snowdrift and unable to either forward or backward.
Then I read Taubes's book. And then the light went on. It's the carbs, stupid! Now I must interject that I love Weight Watchers. However, I've stopped going for awhile to try and get off dead center with something else since I could probably recite every Weight Watchers lesson by heart. When I get things going again, I'll likely go back to WW. I needed something to get my attention, and I received a jolt when I read Good Calories.Bad Calories. Being a faithful WW member, and having collected diet books for decades, I was a converted skeptic of the Atkins diet and still reject some of his suggestions which seem rather extreme. But the one thing that made sense in Taubes's book was the devastating impact of highly refined products like white flour, sugar in all forms, white rice, and other highly-refined food additives on weight and many related health problems. So, about seven weeks ago, I quit drinking two or three cans of sugared soda pop a week, a habit I had gradually gotten back into after not drinking it for years. I cut out toast with my breakfast meals. I skipped cookies and anything else with a lot of sugar and white flour in it. My wife cooked small portions of whole-wheat pasta a couple of times, I ate a little whole wheat bread, not much, and ate only a rare small piece of candy. We cut back on white potatoes in favor of yams and other vegetables. And, amazingly, after being stalled for two years, in seven weeks I dropped 11 pounds.
Obviously no one can say whether either you or any one else could or would achieve the same weight loss by following the same suggestions. What I am saying is that you need to buy and read this book. Reading it will stretch your knowledge of science and human nutrition more than a little. And the conclusions are crystal clear.
The main thing that impresses me so much about this book is that, essentially, Taubes has written a treatise on the methodology of science, on what we can provisionally, at least, accept as valid, and what has been part of our folklore and our standard views on weight loss for decades. Much of what we think we have known and have recited as gospel medical knowledge is based on either flimsy or biased "evidence" or none at all. If you are like I am, you are sick and tired of conflicting views on what will kill us and what won't; on what will work for weight loss and what won't; and whether we can ever really believe anything.
There are many other reasons to read this book. His discussions of the scientific evidence of the linkages between dietary fat and obesity and heart disease are also crucial to understanding what we have been taught for decades. I don't think any of this means that we can ignore common sense about being careful about what we eat. But Taubes is no novice journalist. He is a renowned science writer and spent seven years researching the science of weight loss and nutrition. A reviewer on the back cover of his book states "Gary Taubes's [book] is easily the most important book on diet and health to be published in the last one hundred years."
I will have a lot more to say about Taubes's findings and their impact on my understanding of the science of nutrition and weight loss. I think the book is so important that anyone who has been stuck in a weight rut for however long, whether six months or sixty years, should read this book. Don't gripe about the technical stuff. If you have a reasonable knowledge of basic science you can handle it. Don't pick it up and read a couple of chapters and give up on it. Read the entire book! And if you think you can't, go to the conclusions and let those sink in, recognizing that perhaps no one else has ever put the effort into documenting the science of weight loss that he has. This book will serve as a powerful foundation for the rest of what I will write about in this blog. And, who knows, if you take it to heart, you may not even need to read any thing else.
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