Good morning everyone!
A quick recap. In part one I introduced myself, and described metabolic syndrome (If you are noticeably overweight around the abdomen, please read the metabolic syndrome part of that diary and it's public service announcement). In part 2 I noted that I fixed almost everything (and lost 40 pounds) simply by counting calories (sort of). In part 3 I described "strategy #1": eating more, but smaller meals, and started to talk about the importance and danger of sugars in the bloodstream.
In this installment, I talk about carbs: good carbs, bad carbs, fiber, etc., and how that relates to sugar, overall health, etc.
The answers to that, and more, on the flip side . . .
WHEE (Weight, Health, Eating and Exercise) is a community support diary for Kossacks ...
WHEE (Weight, Health, Eating and Exercise) is a community support diary for Kossacks who are currently or planning to start losing, gaining or maintaining their weight through diet and exercise or fitness. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are working on your weight or fitness, please -- join us! You can also click the WHEE tag to view all diary posts.
... but I had two problems doing this diary. One, is that I found that most of what I was going to write has already been written in these here WHEE Chronicles (but before I came aboard); secondly, is that after spending two hours on it last night, when I came this morning to publish it, I had lost almost all of my work (note to self: don't keep two different copies of my browser open that point to the same place if I'm editing in one of them . . . )
So, here's a quick summary of what I wrote, and lost, last night:
My common theme, thus far (and you'll see it again and again), has been: my strategies for simply trying to lose weight are almost identical to an overall healthy eating plan.
And so, as I've noted -- the first step in "changing my life's health" was simply to eat less calories (a lot less). I would not be surprised to find that I easily ate three, four, sometimes five or six thousand calories in a day (probably averaging 3500 on a week day) . . . and now I wanted to try to eat 1900 per day or so. How the heck was I going to do that without feeling starving all day? And, note, my 3500+ calories per day was not because I was downing tons of chocolate cake! It was because when I ate breakfast (rarely) I'd easily eat four bowls of cereal. And when my wife later made scrambled eggs for the kids for breakfast, I ate that, too. For lunch: two sandwiches at a minimum and some cookies (or some leftovers from a previous dinner). For dinner: two big fat chicken breasts, gobs of mashed potatoes or rice. Hungry again at night, I might have a fourth meal: perhaps garlic bagels and butter, a "health food" bar or two, a whole bunch of peanuts or cashews, and so forth. And, yes, some snacks in between of chips and guacamole. Etc etc.
So, how would I cut down to 1700-1900 calories per day without starving?
Strategy #1, as noted above (and that I spent most of "part 3" on), was to eat more, but smaller, meals. Only later did I find out all the other health benefits of such a strategy.
Strategy #2, which is most of what this diary is about, is limiting my carb intake at a given meal, and eating carbs, or side dishes, that will slow the conversion from carbs to sugar. If a picture is worth 1000 words, check out this graph:
So, here's what the picture (and/or research) tells me:
- Almost all the carbs you eat, close to 100%, gets converted to sugar within 90 minutes of eating it
- When your sugar level spikes high (the red line), it then nosedives, and you can end up with lower sugar than when you started, which makes you feel lethargic, your brain mushy, and, important to me at the time, makes you hungrier
- Unbeknownst to me at the time, when your sugar level spikes high, all kids of other bad things happens to you, too.
Let me elaborate on two of the points above:
- Glycemic index/load - this is a rating system for how much, and how quickly, the food you eat raises your blood sugar levels. Wee Mama wrote two diaries about this, and I recommend them both, particularly the first one: WHEE: Carbohydrates, glycemic index and glycemic load. (The other article is: WHEE: Carbohydrate myths, tips and surprises - and open thread)
- The danger of spiking your blood sugar levels - now, at first I couldn't understand the following: (a) I needed to reduce my blood sugar; (b) my nutritionist was telling me that even if I ate the same amount of sugar-producing food from one day to the next, by spacing it out, it would lower my blood sugar. How could that be?But now I get it. A very simply (and only approximately accurate) explanation is this: sugar is not supposed to hang out in your blood . . . sugar is supposed to get into your muscles. The blood is only a means to transport the sugar from your intestines to your muscles. When you have too much sugar at once, your muscles can't aborb it all, so your sugar goes to other places, which is not good -- and, actually, over the long haul, it's actually dangerous and can cause all kinds of problems: diabetes, heart attacks, blindness, kidney failure, etc. (OK, it's more complicated than that, and there's insulin needed to get the sugars into the muscles, and etc., but the above suffices for the point I am making, I think).
Carbs and fiber
How many carbs? I've seen opinions all over the map on this. I've even seen some suggest (Wee Mama, e.g.) we don't need any (although I think that's a minority opinion). But my question here is: what's a good number to set as a maximum per meal. My dietician suggested to me that I have 15g-30g for breakfast and lunch, and 30g-45g for dinner. I see that those numbers are lower than other places on the internet (although I had a blood sugar problem, which might be why the numbers recommended to me are so low). Open question -- what's a good cieling on grams of carbs per meal?
As for fiber:
I hope to elaborate on fiber in a future diary, but suffice it to say for now that fiber (which only comes from plants) are good for you in many ways (it helps you feel full, it cleans out nasty stuff, and it's not digestible, can not be converted to sugar, and so it adds no calories). Furthermore, when you compute "carbs per meal" you can discount by the amount of fiber. And so, a serving of black beans might have 23 grams of carbs, but 15 grams of fiber -- so I can pretend it's only 8 grams of carbs. (BTW: I've been told by some, and have seen, that one is only supposed to subtract it if it's 5g of fiber or more - why is that?)
In conclusion . . .
So here's the amazing thing I learned -- all that stuff about eating natural foods, and whole grains, and all that touchy-feely-earthy-granola-crunching stuff? Well, it turns out they're right! Whole grains and complex carbohydrates have lower glycemic loads and are higher in fiber, and so eating them is simultaneously healthy for a myriad of reasons -- but also helps prevent you from getting hungry again too quickly!
Did someone say "eat your veggies"? Well, golly-gee, it turns out that's good for me, too! It's filling, has fiber, and it hardly has any calories. (sarcasm mode on) Yeah, there's probabloy some health benefit, too (sarcasm mode off) -- but simply as a strategy to eat without costing myself calories, veggies work.
And so, once again, I'm lead to the same observation: that my strategies for simply trying to eat less calories seems to be forcing me to eat in an overall healthful way.
Please volunteer to write for WHEE!
Scheduled WHEE diaries:
October 22
Thurs PM - Azdak - Heart Rate Monitors and Calories
October 23
Fri AM - freedapeople
Fri PM - Be Your Own Geneticist: Chapter 2:
Experimentation and Wrong Diagnosis with louisev
October 24
Sat AM - cdkipp - Green Tea and Your Metabolism
Sat PM - Edward Spurlock (Kessler, Ch. 17)
October 25
Sun AM - Turtle Diary
Sun PM - kismet
October 26
Mon AM - NC Dem
Mon PM - ???
October 27
Tues AM - ??
Tues PM - Clio2 (Kessler, Ch. 18)
October 28
Weds AM - ???
Weds PM - Edward Spurlock
October 29
Thrs AM - A DC Wonk
Thrs PM - ???