12-03-2015, 12:36 AM
Hi Scotti,
The good news is that it is really quite easy to lose the first chunk of weight!
It all hinges on how willing you are to dismiss orthodox medical nutritional advice.
I can't get away without a little bit of a lengthy explanation...
It goes like this... As we evolved into our modern form over 2 million years, our diet consisted mainly of meat, offal, fats, green leafy vegetables, seeds, nuts and berries, the occasional root, and the fairly rare cache of honey.
Our primary energy source was fats - mostly animal fats. When we eat sufficient fats for our energy needs, we become satisfied and don't need to eat again until it is necessary. Evolution developed our ability not only to consume carbohydrates - starchy roots and sugars (usually honey caches) but also to store excess energy consumed that way as body fat. Furthermore, because such stores of carbs in the wild occurred rarely, our bodies allow us to over eat in excess of our energy needs, and it is much harder to satisfy our appetites using carbs, and such satiation does not last as long as with fats.
When we learned how to develop and harvest grains, the huge advantage of abundant food meant that humans got more time to breed and become civilised.
So carbs became our primary food source. Although the nutrition wasn't as good - human became shorter, their teeth rotted earlier - the advantage in Darwinian terms meant that it did not matter how soon we died after we procreated.
Therefore carbs became our primary food source, and evolution got turned on its head.
It is quite hard to find any mainstream scientists willing to admit that we evolved to eat fats rather than carbs, but think on this: we store excess carbs as fat. Why? Presumably so that in times of short term famine we can live off of our fat.
But the metabolism of fats is completely different to the metabolism of glucose. You need to adapt your body chemistry to burning fat. This process takes a few days, during which time you can experience flu-like symptoms until you adapt.
Meanwhile while you are carb-adapted, you get ravenously hungry. When you eat carbs, your blood sugar levels increase. Any excess glucose gets mopped up by insulin and is eventually converted into fat. In young people this process works well, but in older people, the glucose gets converted quicker due to a phenomenon called "insulin resistance", which eventually causes diabetes. So what happens is you get fatter but also hungrier.
When you are adapted to eating fats, your fat stores act like a reserve fuel tank, and if you don't eat enough to cover your energy needs, your body seamlessly switches over to burning your fat stores - and you don't feel hungry - or at least not ravenously hungry.
That is how it is supposed to work
So to lose weight easily, first you have to become fat-adapted. This means limiting your carbohydrate consumption to between 50g-100g per day. When you start to burn fats for energy, then you are in a metabolic state called "ketosis", and you can test for this with urine sticks called "Ketostix" (Amazon carry them).
For most people, just giving up grain-based foods will immediately cause weight loss.
Stop eating bread, pasta, rice, oats, processed foods containing these products.
Limit your beer to the weekends and only 1 per day. If you drink wine, stick to red. If you get hungry, eat fat-based snacks, like olives, walnuts, macademia nuts, cheese, pork rinds, or meaty snacks like beef jerky.
It really is a lifestyle change, not a diet. Eventually as you move towards your target weight, you find that your weight plateaus.
At this stage you need to use a web-based tool like myfitnesspal.com and plug in everything you eat.
I find that to lose weight, I have to limit my daily intake of calories to about 1000, my carbs to fewer than 50g, and my calories from fat to be 80% of the total.
However, I am 62, 5'8" and 147 lbs, so the calories will be different for you.
There is a lot more detail and recipes for people who want to eat like our ancestors. Google Paleo diet (or Primal = Paleo plus dairy)
You could also google "Tim Noakes" together with "Banting" which will give you lots of pointers.
Finally, to get you started, have a look at the Green list - this contains foods you can eat pretty much what you want from. (there is also an orange and red list too)
http://realmealrevolution.com/real-food-lists
Hope this helps!
B.
The good news is that it is really quite easy to lose the first chunk of weight!
It all hinges on how willing you are to dismiss orthodox medical nutritional advice.
I can't get away without a little bit of a lengthy explanation...
It goes like this... As we evolved into our modern form over 2 million years, our diet consisted mainly of meat, offal, fats, green leafy vegetables, seeds, nuts and berries, the occasional root, and the fairly rare cache of honey.
Our primary energy source was fats - mostly animal fats. When we eat sufficient fats for our energy needs, we become satisfied and don't need to eat again until it is necessary. Evolution developed our ability not only to consume carbohydrates - starchy roots and sugars (usually honey caches) but also to store excess energy consumed that way as body fat. Furthermore, because such stores of carbs in the wild occurred rarely, our bodies allow us to over eat in excess of our energy needs, and it is much harder to satisfy our appetites using carbs, and such satiation does not last as long as with fats.
When we learned how to develop and harvest grains, the huge advantage of abundant food meant that humans got more time to breed and become civilised.
So carbs became our primary food source. Although the nutrition wasn't as good - human became shorter, their teeth rotted earlier - the advantage in Darwinian terms meant that it did not matter how soon we died after we procreated.
Therefore carbs became our primary food source, and evolution got turned on its head.
It is quite hard to find any mainstream scientists willing to admit that we evolved to eat fats rather than carbs, but think on this: we store excess carbs as fat. Why? Presumably so that in times of short term famine we can live off of our fat.
But the metabolism of fats is completely different to the metabolism of glucose. You need to adapt your body chemistry to burning fat. This process takes a few days, during which time you can experience flu-like symptoms until you adapt.
Meanwhile while you are carb-adapted, you get ravenously hungry. When you eat carbs, your blood sugar levels increase. Any excess glucose gets mopped up by insulin and is eventually converted into fat. In young people this process works well, but in older people, the glucose gets converted quicker due to a phenomenon called "insulin resistance", which eventually causes diabetes. So what happens is you get fatter but also hungrier.
When you are adapted to eating fats, your fat stores act like a reserve fuel tank, and if you don't eat enough to cover your energy needs, your body seamlessly switches over to burning your fat stores - and you don't feel hungry - or at least not ravenously hungry.
That is how it is supposed to work
So to lose weight easily, first you have to become fat-adapted. This means limiting your carbohydrate consumption to between 50g-100g per day. When you start to burn fats for energy, then you are in a metabolic state called "ketosis", and you can test for this with urine sticks called "Ketostix" (Amazon carry them).
For most people, just giving up grain-based foods will immediately cause weight loss.
Stop eating bread, pasta, rice, oats, processed foods containing these products.
Limit your beer to the weekends and only 1 per day. If you drink wine, stick to red. If you get hungry, eat fat-based snacks, like olives, walnuts, macademia nuts, cheese, pork rinds, or meaty snacks like beef jerky.
It really is a lifestyle change, not a diet. Eventually as you move towards your target weight, you find that your weight plateaus.
At this stage you need to use a web-based tool like myfitnesspal.com and plug in everything you eat.
I find that to lose weight, I have to limit my daily intake of calories to about 1000, my carbs to fewer than 50g, and my calories from fat to be 80% of the total.
However, I am 62, 5'8" and 147 lbs, so the calories will be different for you.
There is a lot more detail and recipes for people who want to eat like our ancestors. Google Paleo diet (or Primal = Paleo plus dairy)
You could also google "Tim Noakes" together with "Banting" which will give you lots of pointers.
Finally, to get you started, have a look at the Green list - this contains foods you can eat pretty much what you want from. (there is also an orange and red list too)
http://realmealrevolution.com/real-food-lists
Hope this helps!
B.