“Man, I didn’t recognize you! Wow! You’ve lost a ton of weight!” exclaimed Jim, my friend and guitar teacher.
I had met Jim at a local restaurant to catch up with each other. I hadn’t made it over to his place for a lesson is in several weeks for several reasons and with the holidays in full swing, we both knew a lesson wouldn’t happen for a while. But, we enjoy each other’s company, conversation, and best of all, we laugh. A lot.
“Yeah, I’ve dropped some fat. About thirty-two pounds or so. ” I replied.
“Wow! So, was that from being sick or what?”
Funny how when you lose weight people often think of it as the result of something being wrong, huh?
“No, it was by design. I needed to lose it and also need to test out my ideas on myself before I let them out to the rest of the world,” I explained.
“Ok, so you have to tell me how you did this. Really. Holy smokes!”
We spent a good part of the evening talking about some of the things I did to drop ~32 lbs. The irony of the night and discussion though was that it took place in a Mexican restaurant!
Here’s the basic formula: 60-70% of fat loss happens in the kitchen.
You just cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet (well, that’s not entirely true – but more on the exceptions another time).
The problem for most people is too much refined carbohydrate in the diet. In fact, when I mentioned this to Jim, he said, “Now, tell me more about refined carbohydrates. I don’t think I know the difference and what it really means.”
Yep. Neither do most people.
A refined carbohydrate has been stripped of most of its nutrients through a machined process that separates the bran and the germ from a whole grain. The result is a much longer food shelf life. Think white rice, pastas, bagels, breads, cereals.
Why does this matter? The refining process concentrates the carbohydrate so once it’s digested it rapidly converts into a truck load of sugar in your body. Your pancreas, in response to rapid rise in blood sugar, pumps out insulin so the sugar can be moved out of the blood into muscle cells where it’s stored as glycogen and if the muscle cells are full, which is most of the time, it gets stored as fat.
The problem is that your body wasn’t built for a daily onslaught of carb conversion and eventually your cells become resistant to insulin. This is how you can develop Type II Diabetes.
And to compound matters, the US Government, several years ago, took the position that the reason this country had such a rise in obesity and diabetes and hypertension and a bunch of other medical problems was because of too much dietary fat; not carbohydrates.
So, the push from the government was that a low fat diet was the way to go.
And, now they realize, many years later, the decision was wrong.
“Fat is not the problem,” says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. “If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases.“
Slow Carbs vs. Fast Carbs
Sugar, converted from refined carbohydrates, is one of the main problems. Spinach and white rice are both carbohydrates. But, spinach is called a “slow carb” and white rice is a “fast carb” in terms of how rapidly the body converts the food into sugar.
So, how did I do it? Well, one thing I did was remove, almost completely, any foods that were white. No breads, pastas, rice, chips, pretzels, etc. I ate a lot of food – ask my wife Elle and she’ll tell you that living with me is like living with a teenager, but I did my best to make sure it was as natural as possible.
Now the hard part about this is that you’ll go through a sugar withdrawal – depending on how much of the refined carbs you’ve been eating. Your brain is used to getting all this sugar (which by the way is what runs your brain). So, when you kick the fast carbs to the curb, you’ll probably feel like crap for a week or more. This is when most people bail and go running back to the open arms of a cheese enchilada and a bucket of chips.
What to Do
Take home point – if you want or need to lose body fat, do three things:
- Follow this blog. You’ll get a ton of great information on how to do things like lose body fat, heal injuries, increase strength without hauling around a ton of iron, and improve your overall fitness (mental, emotional, physical).
- Keep a food journal for two weeks. Most people suggest one but here’s what happens. In the first week, because you’re paying attention to the writing down of info, you also will change what you eat. So, the first week is just getting used to the process. The second week is to get real. Write down every single thing you eat or drink, the quantity and time of day. You’ll need this to figure out where you can attack your fuel supply.
- Start working on changing “fast” carbs to “slow” carbs. Go slow. Pick one or two. So, for example, if you usually have toast and coffee in the morning for breakfast, try “paleo” bread. The carb load is nearly zero. Then, consider adding two scrambled eggs or egg whites. Breakfast, by the way, is a key meal so think about how to make it more slow carb, higher fat and protein.
It can be done. You can transform yourself. I’m not going to say it’s easy although it is relatively simple.
I did it at the age of 54 with all sorts of reasons telling me I shouldn’t or couldn’t.
You can do it too.
