dieting

The Six Day Water Fast

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Ben Marcus, in his mid-forties, felt pain throughout his body. He decided to try something unconvential: a six-day fast consisting of nothing but drinking water. He chronicles his (mis)-adventures in this piece for GQ.

TrueNorth lacks the whorehouse comforts of a spa. There isn’t even a pool, which seems to violate some central tenet of California apartment complexes. It feels more like a scientific-research center. There are daily lectures and cooking demos, and the guest rooms are stocked with DVDs of slightly NSFW health documentaries. Today at the clinic they showed a grim video called The Pleasure Trap, an unflinching lecture on why we eat, and eat, and fucking eat, what isn’t good for us. Salt, sugar, and fat, combined with chemicals in processed foods, trick the brain in the same way as cocaine, and the brain flushes our bodies with dopamine, perhaps the most blissful, and addictive, homemade chemical we have. Once we find a way to trigger it, we kill ourselves to get more. Literally.

That evening, with no dinner to cook, eat, and clean up, I prepare my water smoothie, made of nothing but distilled water, and turn on the Food Network. If I can’t eat food, I’ll watch some. On TV, pre-scandal Paula Deen and her son are making corn dogs, fried okra, croissant-dough muffins with caramelized pecans. These things look gorgeous and obscene, like the invented genitalia of a new species. But after watchingThe Pleasure Trap, it seems wrong to refer to this stuff as food. More like recreational drugs for the mouth, with nasty side effects like diabetes. Still, I’m drooling. I love these recreational drugs. I go to foreign countries just to try exotic versions. I’m a user. I do food.

Just not today, and, if I survive, not for the next five days.

It appears the fast has worked wonders, though I appreciate the cautious outlook that this might have been a short-term victory:

Throughout my stay, a six-day fast has been regarded with amused smiles. Pathetic amateur, they don’t say. One doctor says everyone should do a long fast at least once in their lives. What’s long, I ask. Twenty-one days. Maybe thirty. Now I see the appeal. Once you get over the misery of the first few days, things start to look up and you get this feeling that something profoundly necessary is happening inside you. I’ve lost sixteen pounds, and a deep bend at the knees is surprisingly pain-free. My hands no longer ache. My skin is clear. The whites of my eyes look Photoshopped.

Don’t try this at home, folks. Seriously: from personal experience, even fasting for twelve hours is bound to make you dizzy, and you don’t want to be falling down stairs when you attempt something this bold…

Mark Bittman on a Healthy Fast Food Joint

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

From a good Mark Bittman piece in The New York Times, who shares his vision for an all-healthy fast-food joint:

I’m not talking about token gestures, like McDonald’s fruit-and-yogurt parfait, whose calories are more than 50 percent sugar. And I don’t expect the prices to match those of Taco Bell or McDonald’s, where economies of scale and inexpensive ingredients make meals dirt cheap. What I’d like is a place that serves only good options, where you don’t have to resist the junk food to order well, and where the food is real — by which I mean dishes that generally contain few ingredients and are recognizable to everyone, not just food technologists. It’s a place where something like a black-bean burger piled with vegetables and baked sweet potato fries — and, hell, maybe even a vegan shake — is less than 10 bucks and 800 calories (and way fewer without the shake). If I could order and eat that in 15 minutes, I’d be happy, and I think a lot of others would be, too.

Some statistics:

In recent years, the fast-food industry has started to heed these new demands. Billions of dollars have been invested in more healthful fast-food options, and the financial incentives justify these expenditures. About half of all the money spent on food in the United States is for meals eaten outside the home. And last year McDonald’s earned $5.5 billion in profits on $88 billion in sales. If a competitor offered a more healthful option that was able to capture just a single percent of that market share, it would make $55 million. Chipotle, the best newcomer of the last generation, has beaten that 1 percent handily. Last year, sales approached $3 billion. In the fourth quarter, they grew by 17 percent over the same period in the previous year.

Close to where I live I have discovered one food joint that has tasty food that’s inexpensive: Zoe’s Kitchen. Here’s their menu of entries under 500 calories, for example.

On Mindful Eating

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

I’ve been reading about mindful eating, a technique whereby we slow down as we eat our food. The benefits are many: over time, we’ll eat less than our normal portions, we can lose weight, and so on. The concept of mindful eating has roots in Buddhist teachings, whereby meditation with food is complementary to breathing and sitting techniques. The New York Times profiles mindful eating, noting that it’s not a diet:

[S]uch experiments of the mouth and mind have begun to seep into a secular arena, from the Harvard School of Public Health to the California campus of Google. In the eyes of some experts, what seems like the simplest of acts — eating slowly and genuinely relishing each bite — could be the remedy for a fast-paced Paula Deen Nation in which an endless parade of new diets never seems to slow a stampede toward obesity.

Mindful eating is not a diet, or about giving up anything at all. It’s about experiencing food more intensely — especially the pleasure of it. You can eat a cheeseburger mindfully, if you wish. You might enjoy it a lot more. Or you might decide, halfway through, that your body has had enough. Or that it really needs some salad.

The article closes with the following tips:

WHEN YOU EAT, JUST EAT. Unplug the electronica. For now, at least, focus on the food.

CONSIDER SILENCE. Avoiding chatter for 30 minutes might be impossible in some families, especially with young children, but specialists suggest that greenhorns start with short periods of quiet.

TRY IT WEEKLY. Sometimes there’s no way to avoid wolfing down onion rings in your cubicle. But if you set aside one sit-down meal a week as an experiment in mindfulness, the insights may influence everything else you do.

PLANT A GARDEN, AND COOK. Anything that reconnects you with the process of creating food will magnify your mindfulness.

CHEW PATIENTLY. It’s not easy, but try to slow down, aiming for 25 to 30 chews for each mouthful.

USE FLOWERS AND CANDLES. Put them on the table before dinner. Rituals that create a serene environment help foster what one advocate calls “that moment of gratitude.”

My aim will be to start slowly: trying mindful eating for one day a week, and expanding from there.

On the Placebo Effect and Dieting

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

There’s nothing spectacular in this Wall Street Journal piece on the magic of placebos, but I thought this was an interesting paragraph concerning dieting:

Another study, published earlier this year in the journal Health Psychology, shows how mind-set can affect an individual’s appetite and production of a gut peptide called ghrelin (GREL-in), which is involved in the feeling of satisfaction after eating. Ghrelin levels are supposed to rise when the body needs food and fall proportionally as calories are consumed, telling the brain the body is no longer hungry and doesn’t need to search out more food.

Yet the data show ghrelin levels depended on how many calories participants were told they were consuming, not how many they actually consumed. When told a milkshake they were about to drink had 620 calories and was “indulgent,” the participants’ ghrelin levels fell more—the brain perceived it was satisfied more quickly—than when they were told the shake had 120 calories and was “sensible.”

Hence, the reasoning that the notion of dieting is altering our mindset, and we end up consuming more (since we know we aren’t getting enough food).

This reminds me of how using a bigger fork can help you eat less. Also, smaller plates and contrasting colors can dampen your appetite:

[Participants] were served different-sized plates filled with food. Those who were given larger plates filled their plates with more food than those with smaller plates. Those who were served food on tables with a higher color contrast between the plates and the tablecloth also ate more than those who were served the same amount of food without a noticeable contrast.

The problem with all of these studies is that by becoming conscious of how you’re trying to beat the system, you begin to override the placebo effect. In other words, if you made an effort to eat with a larger fork and using smaller plates, you can’t trick your brain for long: eventually, you’ll just compensate by eating more food (or more frequently). Show me a study where dieting is proved to conclusively work, and I’ll show you a millionaire.

The Fat Trap

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

From the latest issue of New York Times Magazine, a discouraging statement for those of us trying to lose weight:

While researchers have known for decades that the body undergoes various metabolic and hormonal changes while it’s losing weight, the Australian team detected something new. A full year after significant weight loss, these men and women remained in what could be described as a biologically altered state. Their still-plump bodies were acting as if they were starving and were working overtime to regain the pounds they lost. For instance, a gastric hormone called ghrelin, often dubbed the “hunger hormone,” was about 20 percent higher than at the start of the study. Another hormone associated with suppressing hunger, peptide YY, was also abnormally low. Levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and increases metabolism, also remained lower than expected. A cocktail of other hormones associated with hunger and metabolism all remained significantly changed compared to pre-dieting levels. It was almost as if weight loss had put their bodies into a unique metabolic state, a sort of post-dieting syndrome that set them apart from people who hadn’t tried to lose weight in the first place.

“What we see here is a coordinated defense mechanism with multiple components all directed toward making us put on weight,” Proietto says. “This, I think, explains the high failure rate in obesity treatment.”

While the findings from Proietto and colleagues, published this fall in The New England Journal of Medicine, are not conclusive — the study was small and the findings need to be replicated — the research has nonetheless caused a stir in the weight-loss community, adding to a growing body of evidence that challenges conventional thinking about obesity, weight loss and willpower. For years, the advice to the overweight and obese has been that we simply need to eat less and exercise more. While there is truth to this guidance, it fails to take into account that the human body continues to fight against weight loss long after dieting has stopped. This translates into a sobering reality: once we become fat, most of us, despite our best efforts, will probably stay fat.

As with many preliminary studies, the evidence is inconclusive. Yet, if it pans out, dieting and exercise books will have to be re-written.