Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

[Jazi's Mum]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

Hi TMH. I had a good laugh at your DH thinking that there is no sugar in JD and chardonnay!!! Both have calories and those calories are pure carb.

Unfortunately alcohol acts like sugar in the body - it's metabolized by the liver BEFORE anything else. So when your body is busy with the alc, insulin is also busy storing all your other calories as fat!!

It sure is hard to lose weight even with a 'healthy' diet though. Thank goodness I never developed the junk habit. And we don't eat between meals at all actually. Pretty boring eh? Since I've been strict with my low carb eating I've dropped all the water weight but I'm still up 4 lbs of pure FAT!! All around my middle. So that has to come OFF!!
Have a great day. JMum
JMum

[DipGal]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

Happy to announce that my weight loss program - 5:2 fast diet, and no alcohol for almost 2 weeks has been very lucrative.. I've lost about 10 lbs as of this morning.. Great loss, but keep in mind I have 100+ lbs to lose, so I don't expect such a great showing in the future. I am saving up to 1,000 cals a day with no booze.. I was hoping that I didn't overeat too much to compensate!

[ToMyHealth]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

Good for you DipGal! Keep it going! How does your husband feel about your not drinking? Hope he's pleased for you.

I am just having a disorganized day, think my body needs to move so will go for a walk, then start on all the stuff on my mind that needs doing. Need to get some more AF days in as well.

Have a great evening!

TMH
Went back up to 119.2, took 2 days to get back down to 117.2, 5.2# to go
Going to be AF today!

[ToMyHealth]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

F-5 seems a bIt easier these days. Not losing much but clothes fit better. Walked, biked, cleaned yest.

TMH
Scale here says 117.4, 5.4 to go
I had 1 drink yest

[DancingGirl]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

I have a goal of losing some weight too. I'm not worrying so much about the actual pounds, but I am waiting to feel like you, TMH - just if the clothes fit better. Also I want my stomach to stop moving so much when I exercise!!

[DipGal]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

I fell into a bag of potato chips last night, along with a couple of drinks... grrrr..

[ToMyHealth]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

DancG, admit addicted to scale. Prove time and again though weight creeps up and up if I don't use daily. I do not let it make or break my day, however.

DipGal, i broke fast with apple and almonds. Dinner was a cheeseburger with half the bun and salad. I did buy popcorn for evening snack but was more tired than hungry. Went to bed at 8:30. Try again today!

TMH
Wt. 116.6 or 4.6 to go
Yest drank 3, more like 2.5

[ToMyHealth]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

So ready for some AF time again. Did not weigh this morning as had spaghetti last night. Hostess also made garlic bread with lots of garlic salt. Between the wine, dinner & dessert, well ready to eat well again too.

Going out for a run/walk, then proceed to get ready for this afternoon's festivities. Grand Opening of new Fitness Center, 1 hr community meeting, then 2 hr Happy Hour, free appetizers with HH drink prices. Club soda will be my order.

TMH

[DipGal]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

Sounds like a good plan you have TMH! I wish I had a little smidgen of your energy! I hope to be AF, but am feeling a bit down today after a casino/drinking day yesterday.

I have a massage scheduled for this afternoon and plan to come home to a non-AL drink and healthy dinner.

[Jazi's Mum]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

Morning everyone! Here's a blog entry from Fat Head (Tom Naughton) about diet and exercise you all might find interesting.

In a post last week, I wrote about why I believe most New Year’s resolutions to lose weight fail: those resolutions are based on the notion that shedding pounds is a matter of character … i.e., if you just have enough discipline to eat less and spend more time on the treadmill, you’ll lose weight.

As someone who tried simply eating less and spent many hours on a treadmill (I even bought one for my apartment) without getting leaner, I don’t believe losing weight is about character. I believe it’s (mostly) about chemistry, which is why weight-loss plans that rely on changing a fat person’s character are bound to fail.

I’ll have more to say on that later. For now, I just want to share some bits from an old study (1960) that I apparently downloaded some time ago and then forgot to read.

The handful of subjects in the study fell into three categories: 1) naturally thin people, 2) fat people who had previously demonstrated that they could lose weight by restricting calories, and 3) fat people whom the researchers labeled as the “resistant obese.” They wrote this about the “resistant obese”:

All had very small appetites, and none of these subjects lost weight even during observation in the hospital for prolonged periods of time.

By contrast, one of the naturally lean subjects was described as:

… a twenty-five year-old woman who is healthy, but literally unable to gain weight despite an excellent appetite.

The question the researchers wanted to answer was whether fat people and thin people release and burn fatty acids at similar rates if they’re fasting. So they had all the subjects fast from dinner until the next morning, then measured the concentration of free fatty acids in their blood. Then they extended the fast for a full 24 hours and took the same measurement at various intervals.

Here’s what they found: in the morning, the fat people generally had higher levels of fatty acids in their blood than the thin people did. But over the course of fasting for 24 hours, the naturally thin people experienced a sharp rise in the level of fatty acids in their bloodstreams. The fat people who’d previously demonstrated they could lose weight by restricting calories experienced a milder rise in the level of fatty acids in their bloodstreams. The “resistant obese” people experienced almost no rise at all in the level of fatty acids in their bloodstreams.

The researchers noted that in an earlier study, naturally thin subjects who were restricted to a high-fat diet of 1,000 calories per day showed a sharp rise in blood ketones over the next week, while obese subjects on the same diet showed a much lower rise in ketones. Ketones, as you know, are a by-product of burning fat for fuel.

So taken together, here’s what those two studies suggest (at least about the subjects who were studied): when naturally-thin people eat very little or not at all, they release a lot more fatty acids from their fat cells, and they burn those fatty acids for fuel. “Resistant obese” people, on the other hand, don’t release extra fatty acids when they eat less or not at all, and therefore don’t make up for the calorie deficit by tapping and burning their body fat — at least not to nearly the degree the thin people do.

Remember that in describing the “resistant obese” subjects, the researchers noted that they had small appetites and failed to lose weight even under observation in a hospital. In a discussion among several researchers included at the end of the paper, the leader researcher makes this statement:

This phenomenon of people who do not lose weight is really the most tantalizing thing that confronts physicians. There are these people who can live on 600 calories and not lose any weight. On what are they surviving? If we measure their basal metabolism in terms of calories, we get figures in excess of 600 calories per twenty-four hours. It would seem that on this diet they are in a caloric deficit all time, but still are not losing any weight. I am still an admirer of the laws of thermodynamics, but these people seem to be thermodynamic paradoxes.

Small appetites. Couldn’t lose weight even while under observation at a hospital. Didn’t release or burn more fatty acids (not to any significant degree) even while fasting for 24 hours. Able to live on 600 calories per day without losing weight, causing a researcher who worked with them to label them as “thermodynamic paradoxes.”

Meanwhile, the naturally-lean people released lots of fatty acids and burned them for fuel soon after they stopped eating – including that twenty-five year-old woman who couldn’t gain weight in spite of her “excellent” appetite.

Does anyone believe the fat people in this study just needed more discipline and character in order to become thin? Or does this sound like a problem rooted in chemistry?

JMum

[Jazi's Mum]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

Here's the first part of the Character vs Chemistry post from Fat Head. PLease speak up if it's not appreciated to put up such long posts!!

I received an email today from Kahn Academy with the subject line Why New Year’s Resolutions are broken. The explanation (if you can call it that) in the message was that most people break their resolutions by February, so why not commit to completing an online course in January?

Cute. But it did get me thinking about why we break our New Year’s resolutions, especially resolutions to lose weight. I had quite a glorious career as a resolution-breaker back in the day, and I have the paperwork to prove it. From about age 25 all the way up until my daughters and Fat Head came along, I kept a daily journal. That journal is filled with optimistic resolutions committed to paper in January, followed by self-recriminations and occasional self-loathing around April or May. Lather, rinse, and repeat the next year.

Twenty-some years ago, I was on a comedy tour that ran through Iowa and Nebraska. I was also on a New-Year’s-resolution diet. The headliner, who happened to be one of those lean-jock types who’d never been fat a day in his life, rang my room at our hotel in Iowa and asked if I wanted to go out for lunch.

“Thanks, but I can’t do it. I’m on the Slim-Fast diet.”

“Really? You’re living on those little shakes?”

“Yeah, I need to lose 25, maybe 30 pounds.”

“Well, I guess that keeps the food bill down when you’re on the road.”

The show was at a nightclub just off a two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere. As I parked in the nearly-empty lot an hour or so before the show, I wondered what kind of crowd they could possibly draw. The answer was: a great crowd. An awesome crowd. A packed-house crowd that cheered wildly when I finished my set and turned the stage over to the headliner. Man, I thought, they must get everyone who lives within 40 miles to show up for comedy night.

I went to the bar, intending to order a Diet Coke.

“You want a beer?” the bartender asked. “It’s on the house for the comedians.”

“Uh … sure. I’ll have a Miller Lite.” I was on a diet, after all. A light beer couldn’t hurt.

The second one didn’t hurt either. The third tasted awesome – and I don’t even like light beer. But man, was I craving that third one. I craved a fourth one after that, but stopped myself from ordering it. I was on a diet, after all.

I’d been aware of being hungry before my set, but sometime after finishing that third beer, I felt downright ravenous. Chew-the-furniture ravenous. As if reading my mind, the bartender walked over with a pepperoni pizza and set it in front of me.

“Here, you can have this. Somebody screwed up the order in the kitchen. We can’t sell it.”

Just tell him thanks but no thanks, I thought to myself. You’re on a diet. All you’ve had so far are three light beers with 100 calories each. No harm, no foul. You don’t really want this greasy pizza. Nothing tastes as good as thin feels, right?

Wrong. The pizza tasted fantastic – and I don’t usually order pepperoni on my pizzas. As soon as I took the first bite, my brain was screaming for the next one. And the next one. And the next one.

So there I was, stuffing my face with pizza when the headliner finished his set and came to the bar to get a drink. He didn’t say anything about me breaking my Slim-Fast diet. He didn’t have to. I saw him glance down at the pizza and then up at me, and he seemed to grimace just a wee bit. I interpreted his expression as You poor, weak-willed slob – mostly, of course, because that’s what I was thinking about myself.

In other words, I thought my failure to stick to a weight-loss diet (by no means my first or last failure) was caused by a flaw in my character. I was fat because I was mentally weak. I just need more willpower, more determination. I told myself that over and over, year in and year out. My old journals are full of admonishments along the lines of “Why do I keep doing this to myself? How many times am I going to start over on Monday and blow it again by Friday?”

Here’s a specific example from an entry in March 1997:

I worked on the play, then ate an entire pizza while watching King of the Hill and the X-Files. Why? Why do I do this? What gets inside of me and says, “You’re losing weight, you’re working out– it’s time to @#$% that up! Let’s undo all that progress!”

Well, I had the right idea as far as the problem being inside of me. But it wasn’t about character. It was about chemistry. Let’s revisit my comedy road-trip in Iowa and think in terms of what was happening at a biochemical level.

Back in those days, I was still mostly a vegetarian. I’d eat a little chicken or fish now and then when I went out for dinner, but I didn’t eat meat at all at home. (Most of those pizzas I downed were topped with spinach, mushrooms and onions.) I pretty much lived on cereal, fruit, vegetables, rice, pasta and potatoes. In other words, I’d conditioned myself to depend on regular infusions of glucose to provide fuel for my body and brain. And given how slowly I lost weight when I managed to stick with a calorie-restricted diet for a month or two, I obviously wasn’t very efficient at tapping my body fat for fuel.

Slim-Fast is nothing more than a can of liquid sugar with a wee bit of sunflower oil and milk protein tossed in. So whenever I went on a Slim-Fast diet, I was continuing to live on glucose, but far less of it than I was used to. The burst of simple sugar no doubt spiked my glucose, and then my body responded by releasing insulin to beat it back down. I remember often feeling shaky two hours after those Slim-Fast meals – it was low blood sugar, of course, but I couldn’t raise it with another meal or snack because I was on a diet.

When I walked into that nightclub in Iowa, I probably already had low blood sugar, thanks to the Slim-Fast meals. Fortunately for my performance, hearing an emcee announce my name always produced a burst of adrenaline, and adrenaline releases glucose from glycogen stores while simultaneously stimulating the release of fatty acids from adipose tissues. My brain had fuel for the show. But when I was finished with my set and the adrenaline rush was over, my blood sugar was probably falling again.

No wonder those Miller Lites tasted so darned good. Alcohol is fuel. As I topped up the fuel tank, my brain was happy. Unfortunately, alcohol is a quick-burn fuel, and after living on something like 600 calories of Slim-Fast all day, I’m sure I burned through it at a record rate. I not only ran short of fuel again, I was almost certainly shorter on fuel than before. Among its many other effects, alcohol suppresses the liver’s ability to convert glycogen to glucose. So as the alcohol burned away, my brain was starting to experience a full-scale fuel emergency. On a diet consisting mostly of sugar, it’s certainly not as if I was producing ketones to provide an alternate brain fuel.

That’s why I was ravenously hungry when the friendly bartender set a pizza I didn’t order in front of me. That’s why as soon as I looked at it and caught that pizza aroma, my brain was screaming “@#$% YOUR STUPID DIET! FEED ME NOW!”

And so I did. It wasn’t a matter of character. It was a matter of chemistry.

How many times have you (or someone you know) stuck to a calorie-restricted diet for a couple of weeks, had a few drinks at a party, then headed to a Denny’s for a massive meal? The usual explanation – which I bought into for years – is that the alcohol affected the part of the brain that controls discipline and inhibitions, so the dieter’s inner hedonist took over and decided to make a pig of itself. In other words, the alcohol unleashed a character flaw that had previously been manacled by conscious willpower.

Wrong. By suppressing the conversion of glycogen to glucose, the alcohol produced a low-blood-sugar emergency — in a body already on the verge of a fuel shortage because of a restrictive diet. The body and brain then responded with a series of biochemical reactions that triggered a ravenous appetite. The brain wasn’t being a bad boy because its noble half got drunk and fell asleep. It was protecting itself from a dangerous fuel shortage.

That’s also what was happening when I’d semi-starve myself for a week, living on microwave meals consisting of pasta with fat-free marinara sauce, then end up ordering a pizza and eating the whole thing. I couldn’t stick to the low-fat, low-calorie diets I tried over and over because they took me on blood-sugar roller-coaster rides my brain couldn’t tolerate.

I could tolerate a high-calorie, high-carb, low-fat diet and often did … but that diet created other problems which, at the time, also looked like character flaws to me. Gaining a little more weight every year was one. An explosive temper when my glucose was falling and my adrenaline was rising in response was another. Drinking too much was another.

I wrote about the drinking problem when I reviewed Nora Gedgaudas’ excellent book Primal Body, Primal Mind in a post nearly four years ago. Here’s what she wrote about alcoholics in that book:

Alcoholics are utterly dependent upon and regularly seek fast sources of sugar – alcohol being the fastest … the problem in alcoholism, in fact, really isn’t alcohol per se, but severe carbohydrate addiction … Once cravings for carbohydrates and dependence on carbohydrates as the primary source of fuel are eliminated, so are the alcohol cravings. Training the body to depend upon ketones rather than sugar for fuel is key to this equation.

As I recounted in that post, when I stopped living on a diet that had turned me into a sugar-burner and became a fat-burner instead, I also stopped craving alcohol. Sure, I’ll cut loose on vacation, I’ll cut loose on my birthday, but then it stops. During most weeks now, I have two beers on Saturday night when we go out to a local Mexican diner we like, and that’s it. Unlike 20 years ago, drinking those two beers doesn’t trigger a desire for six or eight or ten more. It’s not a matter of discipline; it takes no discipline to turn down something you don’t particularly want. My character didn’t change. My chemistry did.

So coming all the way back around to topic of the post, why do we break our New Year’s resolutions? Why will sales of Lean Cuisine and Weight Watchers meals spike for the next couple of months, then flatten out again? Why was the gym packed when I worked out yesterday but will almost certainly be back to half-empty by April?

Our weight-loss resolutions fail because we keep trying to change our character. But character isn’t creating the problem. Chemistry is. When we try to overpower chemistry with the strength of our character, chemistry will eventually win. And that’s why so many grand plans to shrink our waistlines — from the ones imposed on us by The Anointed in government all the way down to the ones we resolve to impose on ourselves — are doomed to fail.

More on that in a later post.

[ToMyHealth]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

Ok, JMum waiting with baited breath. Does this basically say ditch the carbs? And if we do, we become fat burning machines and lose craving for alcohol? Personally, I don't feel I crave alcohol. I do have a habit and think I crave or need the social part of sitting and relaxing over a drink & conversation. That includes end of day with just dh and me. And more often than not, that drink is an alcoholic one.

I'm switching things up a bit. Have gone off Intermittent Fasting. So enjoyed my Latte with coconut oil this a.m.

Am not being AF but modding fine. Sleeping well.

Hope this Friday is just the start of a great weekend!

TMH

[Jazi's Mum]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

Morning TMH. If only it were that simple - ditch the carbs and we'd stop drinking :H:H

Your insight into your personal drinking patterns is so helpful too. I'm the same way: don't crave the alcohol as such. But I do crave that relaxation I get - me too, sitting with Husband having that cocktail hour drink while we get dinner ready.

Turns out, for me, I'm seeking something else, and using the wrong 'med' to get it.

Thanks for your insights :h

[DipGal]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

Hi gals... it's another one of "those" days. Today is a "fast" day on my 5:2 intermittent fasting plan. Some days the fast day is no problem whatsoever. Other days it is unbearable - like today. I decided to stay home today to get some much needed things done and all I want to do is eat and drink AL. I'm bored (even though I'm busy), I'm lonely and I'm P O 'd.. I've tried to snack with the least amount of damage (low carb items JM), and I haven't had a drink and don't want to cave and go way over my 500 calorie allotment for the day.

I am stressed about DH and his depression and AL abuse.. and I try not to let that get to me, but it does. I've been procrastinating doing some things for my volunteer responsibilities and am beating myself up about that. I try to sit and reason it out (sometimes), and I know what is happening in my addicted brain. The reality is that when the feeling of needing to escape in a drink or in food hits, I just can't let it go!

I really need some tools with WHAT EXACTLY to do when this happens. Distracting myself is not getting through the problem.. it is just - well, distraction. The problem is still there and I am never sure when it is going to get triggered.

Thanks for listening!

[Jazi's Mum]

Where do I concentrate? Lose wt or AF?

DipGal!! Sorry you are having a lousy day. But you do have a lot going on right now, eh? You sound just plain hungry :H

I know you have had some experience with low carb and are trying to eat low-carb snacks but
at 500 calories you are starved!! Can you try something different if the 5/2 thing doesn't seem to fit right now? Like eat every day and not do the intermittent fasting?

One thought might be that going from a full eating plan on 5 days to intermittent fasting on 2 mixes up your metabolism but doesn't give you the steady blood sugar you need right now. Stress and depression just makes all this worse.

Hope tomorrow is a better day. This darned winter has us all down :upset:
JMum