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| I roasted two free range chickens for my family Friday night. They loved it, and didn't even know they were eating diet food! |
I'm pretty sure a couple of different factors were at play here. One, I wasn't eating nearly enough. I was nearly ravenous after trying to last all day Friday with airplane snacks like boiled eggs and bacon. Two, although I bought a lot of food for my stay, I didn't buy enough to keep it interesting, and I was too busy to eat huge meals. So by the time I saw that cake, my body was telling me to EAT. Next, although cake and other treats are easy to avoid at work, it's a lot harder when you're surrounded by family and you're making memories. Lastly, it wasn't just crappy grocery store cake. It was CAKE, with buttercream icing, and it was good.
One more thing I noticed: after I had one taste of cake, I had some cravings return the next day. It seems like one yo-yo jolt of insulin with the subsequent drop in blood sugar is enough to mess me up for a day or two. All I could think about in the airport was eating ice cream again. I also noticed I woke up feeling groggy and sore again like I used to--I wasn't miserable, and I felt fine after coffee, but I noticed a difference between how I felt waking up after eating junk vs. how I feel waking up after eating primal. The cravings were the main thing that bothered me though. So it might take me a day or two to get back to feeling like I was.
I was proud of myself in the airport on the trip home though -- I saw a place selling cakes and muffins right next to my terminal. I sat there for about 30 minutes trying to not think about it. I knew I was just craving it because I wanted my next fix of insulin. Finally I just said to hell with it and went up to get one, but while I was in line I saw they had Greek salad on the buffet. In that instant I started craving Greek salad instead, so that's what I bought. Lol. That was close!
Anyway, that was my adventure for the weekend! Here's what I was reading on the plane!
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| This book will make your fat cry. |
On the plane I couldn't stop reading Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health by Gary Taubes. This book is extremely complex and it was hard for me to follow a lot of it. But basically this guy looked at every single heart disease and obesity study done since the 20's and compared them all and investigated the reason(s) why we are told such nonsense as to avoid egg yolks and enjoy things "in moderation" but never seem to lose weight longer than temporarily before we gain it back. The first half of the book was all about heart disease and how politics have influenced what we are told and not told about recent studies and their effect on heart disease. The most scary part from that section? Studies have shown that avoiding dietary cholesterol is a pointless pursuit that might lower your risk of avoiding heart disease by only 1%, but no scientist ever told us that, because their attitude (and the attitude of our government) was better safe than sorry. In other words, this is why pointless products like fat free Pam are on the market today being presented as healthy (yuck!). People need to eat good, healthy, nourishing fat!
After about 5 chapters into this extremely technical book, I could tell I was in for it, but it was worth it when I got to the obesity section. This section went into how calorie restricting diets were totally abysmally ineffective for long weight loss in every study, and how carbohydrate restricting diets and diets mimicking what early humans ate were MUCH more effective. It really explained that carbohydrate consumption--not fat consumption--is behind our elevated levels of insulin, and that insulin is the hormone in the body most responsible for creating conditions favorable for fat storage and elevated appetite. Insulin levels in obese patients are much higher than lean individuals, even when they're eating an almost identical amount of daily calories. Some of us just create more insulin, and thus store a greater percentage of our calories as fat--even to the point of not getting enough nutrients in our other organs, causing symptoms like fatigue and lowered daily activity. It also totally dispelled the notion that getting fat is as simple as eating too much. It really challenged everything I thought I knew about how we gain weight. For instance, the pervasive logic in losing weight is "I eat too much, I need to exercise more". Well, yes that might be true, but if your body is creating all these hormones that make you hungrier and more likelier to store fat even if you're eating reasonably well, then it's not always your fault. You can exercise more and eat less, but the original problem with the hormonal response is still there. How do you fix it? Avoid foods that cause you produce insulin. Carbohydrates, sugar, fructose, high fructose corn syrup, all of the above. Basically, don't believe anything you've been told about whole grains being "healthy". If that was the case, how come human kind survived so long without eating them? Every nutrient your body needs is in greater quantities calorie for calorie in meat, fish, nuts, vegetables, and fruit.
Anyway, I guess I learned this weekend how pervasive those foods are and how they mess up your hormonal response to eating. I mean just from that little bit I had, I completely had my symptoms of never ending hunger and cravings return. It's nice to not have those symptoms, so I'll definitely keep eating this way as much as possible, even if I haven't really "graduated" to being totally primal yet. It might have been too much to take on only 11 days into the diet.
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