The entire article is very long and I think the information included within is hard to digest all at once, so I figured that digesting it in pieces – no pun intended… okay, maybe a little – might make it easier to discuss.

The first part I want to talk about is the part that discusses the failure of diets:

The most immediate reason that diets don’t work over the long term is that they promote a loss of the internal signals for hunger and fullness that are necessary for normal eating. This was the finding of a classic study conducted by Janet Polivy and Peter Herman at the University of Toronto, published in 1999. In this experiment, a group of dieters and a group of nondieters were given the task of comparing ice cream flavors. Participants in each group were divided into three subgroups. Before getting the ice cream, the first subgroup was asked to drink two milkshakes, the second subgroup was asked to drink one milkshake, and the third subgroup wasn’t given any milkshakes. Next, the researchers offered the groups three flavors of ice cream and asked the participants to rate the flavors, eating as much ice cream as they desired.

The results revealed that the nondieters ate as you might expect: those who hadn’t consumed any milkshakes ate the most ice cream, those who’d consumed one milkshake ate less ice cream, and those who’d consumed two milkshakes ate the least. The dieters, by contrast, reacted in the opposite way. Those who were offered no milkshakes before the taste test ate small amounts of ice cream, those who drank one shake ate more ice cream, and those who’d consumed two milkshakes ate the most ice cream!

The researchers termed what had happened to the dieters “disinhibition,” which occurs as a result of a “diet-mentality.” The milkshake preload had a different effect on dieters than on nondieters. Nondieters, eating in an unrestrained and normal manner, tend to regulate their food consumption according to internal physical cues of hunger and satiety. Therefore, in the experiment, nondieters regulated the amount of ice cream they ate based on perceived fullness. What could be more obvious and natural?

The dieters, however, reacted in the opposite way — the more milkshakes they consumed, the more ice cream they ate. Why did they lose the capacity to regulate their intake? According to the researchers, this “counterregulation” occurs because a milkshake preload disinhibits a dieter’s usually inhibited or restrained eating, almost like a switch: “I’ve blown it anyway, so I might as well keep eating before I go back on my diet.” This is an almost irresistible incentive to go on eating well past physical fullness.

This passage made me think of the blog post I’d most recently written about deprivation:

If there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s this: the more I try to deny myself access to something, the more desirable that something becomes. Be it cupcakes, cookies, ice cream, brussel sprouts… whatever. If I deny myself access to it for long enough, the more desirable it becomes.I’m willing to bet I’m not the only person wired that way.

Depriving myself of something, in a sense, means that even though I “reeeeeeeeeally want” something, I’m still saying “no.” This isn’t just a simple “I’d like to have it.” This is an “OMG I WANT IT AND THIS ISNT FAIR DAMN IT!” craving. That kind of compulsion is strange and it means that something else may very well be behind the craving – like a sugar addiction, perhaps? – that needs to be addressed.

Isn’t this part of what makes dieting so silly, though? Not only do you not address the real issue (why the craving exists), and not only do you deprive yourself of something you want, in most cases you’re depriving yourself of lots of the things you need. Like, well, food. C’mon – grapefruit is awesome and all… but I couldn’t imagine eating only grapefruit for breakfast and lunch and then having “a sensible dinner.” Substitute grapefruit for an [insert brand name] shake and, well… the same thing applies.

Excerpted from A Few Thoughts on Cravings, Deprivation and Indulging | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

Does this study surprise you? Does it confuse you? Do you share these experiences? Thoughts?

Why Diets Make You Fat: Why Diets Fail is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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1. Why “95% Of Dieters Fail”
2. “Why Even Resolute Dieters Often Fail”
3. Q&A Wednesday: I’m Not Gonna Make It Through Labor Day!

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Post tags: dieting, why diets make you fat

Allow me to explain.

This morning, I happen to read about something called “The Dukan Diet,” which is being referred to as “The French Atkins.” It’s a high protein, low fat, low carb diet that promises “no hunger, no calorie counting, instant weight loss and lifelong weight maintenance.”

Okay.

Let’s look at the diet, as according to the article:

His own diet’s high-protein, low-fat approach is organized into four phases: attack, cruise, consolidation and stabilization. The first encourages dieters to eat as much as they want of nonfatty, protein rich foods, including oat bran (a key component) washed down with oceans of water. The second stage introduces vegetables, but no fruit; the third brings with it two slices of bread, a serving of cheese and fruit and two servings of carbohydrates a day, with two weekly “celebration” meals with wine and dessert (the diet is French, after all); and the final stage six days a week of “anything goes” and one day of reversion to strict protein-only stage one — for the rest of your life.

Okay. I’ve written about how this works, right?

A diet, in general terms, is simply the “list” of foods that you allow yourself to eat during the day. It’s the foods that you limit yourself to – if you were on the cabbage diet, your daily diet consists of boiled cabbage for breakfast and lunch with a regular dinner. Diets are generally named by the food that dominates your day – cereal diet, cookie diet, mashed potato diet. This all seems kind of “duh,” but we’re breaking it down to it’s very core, right? Gotta start somewhere.

Excerpted from The Anatomy of A Diet: Why They Work, and Why The Success Never Lasts | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

I’m also interested in this idea that The Dukan diet is “anti-calorie counting,” because – again, as I’ve already written:

Dieting works because it is an extremely mindless form of calorie counting. If I’ve only allowed myself to choose from this one low-calorie food to eat, I can’t possibly gain weight, right? You don’t have to think about the food you’re eating and whether or not it’ll cause you to gain weight – you KNOW this one food won’t cause you to put on any pounds, you know exactly what you’re going to do. It’s auto-pilot for weight loss.

However – because it usually involves something that you can only manage temporarily, you tend to come off of it – excited to beat the pounds – by celebrating with what? More food you have no business indulging in in the first place!

Excerpted from The Anatomy of A Diet: Why They Work, and Why The Success Never Lasts | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

So… let’s go back to what the diet consists of:

The first encourages dieters to eat as much as they want of nonfatty, protein rich foods, including oat bran (a key component) washed down with oceans of water. The second stage introduces vegetables, but no fruit; the third brings with it two slices of bread, a serving of cheese and fruit and two servings of carbohydrates a day, with two weekly “celebration” meals with wine and dessert (the diet is French, after all); and the final stage six days a week of “anything goes” and one day of reversion to strict protein-only stage one — for the rest of your life.

If you wind up resorting back to “anything goes” with just a touch of “restriction,” what’s going to happen? Oh, wait:

Chloe Château, a young researcher at a French Web site, decided to try Dukan after she came home heavier after spending more than a year in Britain. “When I got off the plane, the first thing my mother said was, ‘Oh, you’ve put on weight,’ ” Ms. Château said. “She didn’t even say ‘Hi’ or ‘I missed you.’ ”

Ms. Château said that she took off 14 pounds in less than three weeks, put some of it back on, and plans to try the diet again, even though she has a kidney ailment and migraines.

For the record, super-high protein diets can be rough on the kidneys for people who already have impaired kidney function… which makes it that much more crazy that she’s willing to go through this via this route just to lose weight.

And really, that brings me to my next statement. All of this talk about weight… what is there to say of health? I mean, a woman willing to further exacerbate her health condition just to lose weight in this trendy fashion? Seriously? It’s worth that much?

What is so alluring about weight loss that we’re willing to risk our health in order to obtain it in such a questionable fashion? What is there that lends credibility to this diet when…

Even before its American introduction, the diet is under attack. “This is just another one of those diets invented by a charismatic individual who makes a lot of promises and has loads of testimonials but is not based on any scientific data whatsoever,” said Frank Sacks, professor in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and chairman of the American Heart Association Nutrition Committee.

France’s governmental National Agency for Food, Environmental and Work Health Safety has identified it as one of 15 imbalanced and potentially risky diets. The British Dietetic Association, the country’s organization of professional dietitians, branded it one of the five worst diets of 2011. “We call it the ‘Do-can’t’ diet,” said Sian Porter, a dietitian and spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association. “Even if you can survive it for the first few days, it’s hard to stick with it. It’s hard on your kidneys. And it’s expensive.”

You can’t simply follow a regimen that doesn’t take into account your own personal needs. You can’t risk your health for a diet that’s only going to slingshot you back into a cycle of yo-yo dieting. You can’t…

I’m just… I’m gonna move on.

I have no idea how a temporary restrictive diet with “stages” can be turned into “lifelong maintenance” when the final stage relies on an “anything goes” philosophy.

And even if “anything goes” does turn into a “mostly fruits and vegetables” mentality with the occasional indulgence… what part of what he’s teaching here would tell you to go to that and, even, stick to that? What does this diet teach you about the foods you could or should be eating during that “anything goes” period? What if you’re an emotional eater who resorts to problem solving in the form of delicately rich french pastries and you “black out” when you’re indulging… that “anything goes” period is going to be a struggle for you.

Why won’t this work? Like I’ve said before:

Because… wait for it… auto-pilot doesn’t work for weight loss! That’s right – you can’t do it. Why? Because waking up one day and deciding that you’re going to go auto-pilot eating nothing but grapefruit for breakfast and lunch can’t change the fact that your auto-pilot used to lead you to McDonalds or Krispy Kreme for breakfast every morning. Auto-pilot, unfortunately, does equate to mindlessness. It’s operating without thinking. “Not thinking” before led us to being unhealthy in the first place. It certainly won’t lead us to “healthy,” and if it does, it certainly wouldn’t do it overnight… or in two-six weeks like other diets.

Excerpted from The Anatomy of A Diet: Why They Work, and Why The Success Never Lasts | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

 

Let me see how I can put this. If you think a “successful diet” consists of simply “losing weight,” you’d be sadly mistaken.

Considering how a “diet” is “in general terms, is simply the “list” of foods that you allow yourself to eat during the day,” a “successful diet” is one that allows you to maintain your weight and nourish your body properly. If a diet consists of you going back to an “anything goes” mentality (oh, with one day of restriction each week), then guess what? You’re going to gain the weight back and – since you thought the Dukan diet, Atkins diet or goodness knows what other diet was “successful” – you’ll inadvertently go right back to that very same diet to start the same sad, silly cycle all over again.

The goal is to develop a balance that allows for indulgence and pleasure – because no element of our lives should be unpleasureable – while allowing for health and weight management. Not yoyo dieting or restrictive slurping of vegetable broth.

The reality is that you lose weight the same way you gain it: the choices you make regarding the food you put in your mouth. There’s no possible way to get around that and no speedy, trendy diet by a French dude is going to change that. He might be charming, but he’ll only say what you want to hear… and may very well not be around when you realize you were sold a pipe dream. Don’t buy into it. Trust me.

The Dukan Diet: A French Version of Atkins Debunked is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. On The French Paradox: “Stop Lying About How The French Live!”
2. “The French Are Getting Fatter, Too.”
3. What’s The Most Ridiculous Diet You’ve Ever Heard Of?

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dieting, dukan diet, france, french paradox, trendy diets, yoyo dieting

Mmmm... burnt toast. Yum.

My relationship with carbs is love-hate. In the form of veggies and fruits, they’re pretty awesome. So that’s love. But in the form of processed foods, packaged with excess sugars and serving as carriers for excess salts and unnatural fats? That’s hate. In fact, I usually have a violent reaction to carbs in their processed form most days.

I know there are people out there who really champion the “high carb/anti-Atkins diet” crusade, and I hear y’all. I do. However, between the slew of fat-free/low fat products on the market and the onslaught of American cooking done merely by processed foods (that are high in carb and “low in fat”)… the “high carb, low fat” diet isn’t working very well for us, is it? At what point do we tell the emperor that he’s a little naked?

Like I mentioned the other day, fats are an integral part of our diet. Many of the vitamins that our bodies use can only be properly taken into the blood stream in conjunction with a small trace of fat. (I mean, really – the average carrot even has a little fat in it.) They’re full of calories that, when not eaten in excess, are burned by your body (it’s the body’s job to burn fat, and it’s quite efficient at doing so.) Carbohydrates serve as a secondary source of energy. Secondary. A diet with enough fat in it will cause the body to simply store the excess carbs, right? Orrrrr maybe a diet with enough carbs in it will store the fat?

Comprehending Calories: The Role of Carbs In Your Diet is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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2. Comprehending Calories: How To Properly Read A Nutrition Label
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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2012. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: atkins, carbohydrates, carbs, dieting, fat, food pyramid, minerals, the lipid hypothesis, vitamins

Tomatoes... mmmm...

It’s ok to throw tomatoes at me. I’ll just make tomato bisque out of ‘em, anyway.

I think it’s appropriate to talk about “cheating” during a week where we’re committed to taking extra steps to eat healthier, cleaner and closer to the source because, honestly, so many of us are struggling with the vast amount of sacrifices we’ve had to make in order to do better.

No, I don’t believe in cheating. Cheating is a concept inherited from the “dieting” mentality… something else that I don’t agree with.

Allow me to explain.

People who take on temporary diets to lose a few pounds, only to revert right back to the habits that caused them to pack on the pounds in the first place… they “cheat” their diets every now and again. They “cheat” and eat the way they used to, because they’ve realized that they took on a diet that was far too restrictive for their natural liking – in a cold turkey kind of way, at that – and regress… without really learning anything from the situation altogether.

I can’t support that for a ton of reasons.

Firstly, it implies – like I mentioned – that you took on something too restrictive and too soon. Why? Are you trying to fit in a dress before the weekend, or are you trying to change things up so that you never have a problem getting in that dress again? Why did you go cold turkey? Don’t we know a gazillion people who’ve tried to cut things (namely smoking) cold turkey, only to regress because it was too much to bear?

Secondly, it implies that we don’t recognize that the habits/food items we used to “cheat” are the ones that got us in this mess in the first place! If I have committed to clean eating, decide to have a “cheat day” when I come home from work and have a TV dinner… y’know, because I’m sooooo tired and need to relax after a long day? C’mon, man! That ain’t gon’ cut it! The TV dinner might not even be that terrible – it’s not the food that’s the problem! It’s the habit. Coming home and not having anything healthy prepped for you to take? Coming home and having the TV dinner in the house in the first place? That’s the kind of stuff that results in you hitting up a fast food joint.

Embrace the fact that you are changing your life. You are not yo-yo dieting. You are not overindulging. You are not leaving yourself open to the risk of unpreparedness. You are definitely not going to gain the weight back.

You certainly aren’t “cheating.”

So… if I’m not cheating, what happens when I slip up?

First of all, it’s not a horrible thing. It’s not a “cheat” – because that implies that “it’s ok because I don’t do it often” – it’s a learning opportunity. Take a long, hard look at what you slipped up on. Take a look at why you felt that you “needed” it so badly. Analyze how you felt directly before and after you ate it. Did it help you feel better? Are you going to be hungry ten minutes from now? Was it empty calories?

Now, think about the future. Is this a good habit to maintain? Do you need to take some extra precautions to prevent this kind of trouble? Did you slip up because cold turkey just isn’t working for you? If you’re mad that you had that TV dinner when you know you’re supposed to be cooking, what extra precautions do you need to take to prevent it from happening again? You need to step your freezer game up, or have lighter dishes on hand. You need to have better snacks nearby to eat while you cook (yes, I do this too.) Embrace a salad instead. You know you’re supposed to do X, instead you do Y… so do what you have to do to make sure that you never forget that X.

I’m not talking about those situations where you just can’t get out of an eating mishap. I was hit with the example of a temperamental boss buying you a little birthday cake – can you really.. really turn down a slice? This isn’t cheating. This is acknowledging that life happens. While you may feel like you need punishment in the form of a supercardio session, this isn’t you indulging for no reason other than “I just wanted it.” Be reasonable in your assessment – if you feel like you’re giving yourself a pass for bad behavior, admit that. It’s a part of learning the lesson that comes with “cheating.”

In short, you don’t “cheat” a lifestyle. There is nothing ok about going against what you know you’re supposed to be doing, and making it “ok” because it’s “only for one day.” That doesn’t cut it. It’s half’ing it.

I hate this cliché (I hate all clichés) but really, this is a lifestyle change. For crying out loud don’t “cheat” it, because you’re only “cheating” yourself. So give yourself the time and patience it takes – the time and patience you deserve – to become accustomed to things you might’ve never tried.. never done.. never imagined. It’s so worth it.

Why I Don’t Believe In “Cheating” On Your Clean Eating is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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1. Q&A Wednesday: Is Clean Eating An Eating Disorder?
2. Easing Into Eating Clean
3. Q&A Wednesday: How Do You Co-Habitate With Clean Eating?

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cheating, clean eating, dieting, Healthy Eating, mentality

Do you treat yourself as well as you treat your friends and family?

That simple question is the basis for a burgeoning new area of psychological research called self-compassion — how kindly people view themselves. People who find it easy to be supportive and understanding to others, it turns out, often score surprisingly low on self-compassion tests, berating themselves for perceived failures like being overweight or not exercising.

The research suggests that giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections may be the first step toward better health. People who score high on tests of self-compassion have less depression and anxiety, and tend to be happier and more optimistic. Preliminary data suggest that self-compassion can even influence how much we eat and may help some people lose weight.

This idea does seem at odds with the advice dispensed by many doctors and self-help books, which suggest that willpower and self-discipline are the keys to better health. But Kristin Neff, a pioneer in the field, says self-compassion is not to be confused with self-indulgence or lower standards.

“I found in my research that the biggest reason people aren’t more self-compassionate is that they are afraid they’ll become self-indulgent,” said Dr. Neff, an associate professor of human development at the University of Texas at Austin. “They believe self-criticism is what keeps them in line. Most people have gotten it wrong because our culture says being hard on yourself is the way to be.”

Imagine your reaction to a child struggling in school or eating too much junk food. Many parents would offer support, like tutoring or making an effort to find healthful foods the child will enjoy. But when adults find themselves in a similar situation — struggling at work, or overeating and gaining weight — many fall into a cycle of self-criticism and negativity. That leaves them feeling even less motivated to change.

“Self-compassion is really conducive to motivation,” Dr. Neff said. “The reason you don’t let your children eat five big tubs of ice cream is because you care about them. With self-compassion, if you care about yourself, you do what’s healthy for you rather than what’s harmful to you.”

I cannot express enough how important this concept of self-compassion truly is. It’s why I say “I don’t diet.” It’s why my plan for developing a strong sense of body image includes thinking of how I’d treat my four year old daughter if I caught her saying the same things about her body that I used to say about mine. It’s why I don’t believe in “cheat meals.”

When it comes to weight loss, self-compassion – instead of negative talk and chastising oneself for lacking “will power” – is the key because self-compassion allows for us to make mistakes and, thereafter, learn lessons from those mistakes. Even in the days when I was eating 7-layer dip for breakfast, I knew I was wrong but I allowed myself to make the mistake and accept what consequences would come from it… and I never ate it again. Not “I never ate it for breakfast again,” but “I never ate it again. Period.”

Self-discipline might be the way to weight loss, but the missing factor in everyone’s understanding of self-discipline is that people who have never had self-discipline have to learn it somehow. It’s not simply “the frontal part of the brain region that fat people have never tapped into.” It is a learned trait… and that learning has to start somewhere that doesn’t include “going cold turkey.”

The article goes on from here:

A 2007 study by researchers at Wake Forest University suggested that even a minor self-compassion intervention could influence eating habits. As part of the study, 84 female college students were asked to take part in what they thought was a food-tasting experiment. At the beginning of the study, the women were asked to eat doughnuts.One group, however, was given a lesson in self-compassion with the food. “I hope you won’t be hard on yourself,” the instructor said. “Everyone in the study eats this stuff, so I don’t think there’s any reason to feel real bad about it.”

Later the women were asked to taste-test candies from large bowls. The researchers found that women who were regular dieters or had guilt feelings about forbidden foods ate less after hearing the instructor’s reassurance. Those not given that message ate more.

The hypothesis is that the women who felt bad about the doughnuts ended up engaging in “emotional” eating. The women who gave themselves permission to enjoy the sweets didn’t overeat. [source]

This is why I don’t believe in “cheating.” If I’m changing my lifestyle, what “good” does it do to create a lifestyle for myself where I have to “cheat” myself (because that’s the only person being cheated, here) in order to be successful? That’s a fail. Period.

I will admit, though, that I think there’s something missing from this entire conversation: people feel an inability to exercise restraint with food because, more often than not, they’re dealing with processed foods that alter their ability to “eat just one.” The fact that I couldn’t control myself when it came to certain foods was something that’d cause me to beat myself up a little bit, too. I can admit that.

See? That’s an example of self-compassion. My admitting that I wouldn’t have been able to control myself or lose my weight if I were still around processed foods? That’s me being compassionate to myself, being sympathetic to my shortcomings… instead of acting like my shortcomings don’t have to be acknowledged because some mystical mental power should exist to save me (and then calling myself an idiot, a loser and a failure for not being able to tap into it.)

I really want to read up on this and come back to it, but I’m especially interested in what everyone has to say about this study. How compassionate are you to yourself? Do you beat yourself up over food woes or missing your workout? Let’s talk!

Self-Compassion: A Key Factor In Weight Loss is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. “Weight Loss Is For People With Low Self-Esteem”
2. A Very Big Piece of My Weight Loss Story
3. Making Foolproof Weight Loss Resolutions For The New Year

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dieting, emotional eating, lifestyle change, mentality, self-compassion, weight loss

…accompanied with the following short story:

It takes several long stares to comprehend that these photos depict rapper 50 Cent, who once looked like this. In the name of his burgeoning acting career, he removed several tattoos and lost 60 lbs. to play a cancer patient.

…50 Cent can expect breathless accolades for his portrayal of a cancer patient in next year’s Things Fall Apart. These photos come from 50 Cent’s official fan site, where a moderator explains,

He dropped from 214 pounds to an astonishing 160 with a liquid diet and three-hour-a-day treadmill walks for nine weeks.

“I was starving.” Now he’s back on tour and says, “I’ve been eating. I’ll be back in shape in no time!”

I didn’t expect anyone to really ask me what I thought about it, but hey. This is a site about weight loss, huh?

Y’know, 50 Cent isn’t the first to go to drastic measures to fulfill the obligations of a role. I can think of celebrities gaining weight (Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull, Jennifer Hudson with Dreamgirls), losing weight (Tom Hanks in Cast Away, Jennifer Hudson… again, supposedly)… and working darn hard to get the rubber band to go back to normal after stretching it to its limits, so to speak.

Frankly, my dear…

I couldn’t care less. I’m certainly not inspired by his “diet” to try it on myself. Why? Because I know three things:

1) These celebrities are paid very well for their time and efforts in taking their bodies to the limits to fulfill the needs of their roles. It’s one thing to select a celebrity for either their star power (the name they’ve built) or their talent regardless of how they look nothing like the character… but to select them and expect them to go that extra distance? Someone is paying serious dough for it. I can’t knock the hustle if 50 Cent felt like the dough was worth the strain on his body that a liquid diet may leave him with – actually, I could, but like my usual statement goes… I’m neither invested in nor affected by his personal decisions.

2) They are monitoring his every-freaking-move while on this thing. Think about it – a full liquid diet and only cardio is meant to deflate the body – it’s supposed to make him look like a cancer patient! A lifestyle meant to emaciate the body that thoroughly, coupled with that money in point one? Means he’s got the best doctors monitoring his every move. And rightfully so. Liquid diets are no joke. He’s being monitored so closely because he needed extreme measures for a temporary effect. As he said, “I’ve been eating – I’ll be back in shape in no time!” He’s basically telling you… that mess was only temporary. And as anyone who reads this site often would know, I’m gonna tell you – healthy, sustainable weight loss is absolutely about a lifestyle change. Not a temporary diet.

3) Look at him. He looks like his role. They nailed it! The body I want is brickhouse-style, and I know how to get it. That certainly doesn’t include looking like I’m battling cancer. Any brickhouse you know that resembles 50 Cent in these photos, well… you’re lying about her being a brickhouse. Ya just are.

In short… unless you’re being paid millions of dollars to go out of your way to change the way your body responds to food and, well, life… I suggest you skip that idea and just look forward to seeing 50 putting this new body to use.

Drastic Celebrity Weight Loss: 50 Cent is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. How Much Is The Weight Loss Industry Worth?
2. Self-Compassion: A Key Factor In Weight Loss
3. Making Foolproof Weight Loss Resolutions For The New Year

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 50 cent, bad ideas, celebrities, dieting, extreme weight loss, liquid diet

1. You may have started off counting your calories, but became so disappointed and surprised that you gave up after a few days;
2. You may have said you don’t want or need to know your average daily calorie count, and decided not to participate;
3. You may have not only started your counting but kept up your counting and still are;
4. Or, you may have started off counting and became so disappointed that you immediately started changing your daily diet to try to meet your daily calorie and weight loss needs.

credit: cogdogblog

As long are you don’t fall under number two, I don’t care where, exactly you fall. The reality is that those numbers you collect – be it from two days or twelve – play a monumental part in our ability to maintain and lose weight.

I’ve written about the hard numbers before, but I’d like to get into a little bit more detail about it, today. If you’ve never read my post about the basics of calorie counting, you might want to check it out.

The facts stand as follows:

• Our bodies burn a set number of calories each day based on our height and weight.
• A body carrying more weight than average is going to require more food than average to maintain that weight.
• A body carrying more weight than average is going to require more food than average to gain weight on top of that weight.
• A body carrying less weight than average will require less food than average to maintain that weight.

To put this into action, let’s use a 27 year old female who weighs 170 at 5’8″ with a sedentary lifestyle as an example.

If we plug those numbers into one of my favorite calculators, it says that she burns approximately 2,173 calories per day. What this means, is that in order for her body to manage all of the functions it needs to handle, it will burn 2,173 calories. The body will pull those calories either from the food she eats, or the fat stores in the body.

In order for her to not gain or lose any weight over a one week time frame, she’d have to eat approximately 2,200 calories. That’s what you call a maintenance count.

In order for her to gain a pound in a week, she’d have to eat an extra 3,500 calories worth of food. (Remember, 1lb = 3,500 calories.) Aside from the weight of the actual food still in her system (that is, if she doesn’t go number two regularly), if she eats, on average, 500 calories over her maintenance count each day, she’ll gain a pound.

In order for her to lose a pound in a week, she’d have to cut 500 calories from her maintenance count. So, if she made sure her average daily calorie count never exceeded approximately 1,700 calories, she would lose a pound of weight (not including the weight of the actual food still in her body, because she should be going number two regularly.)

Note: If she wants to burn two pounds a week, she can step it up in the activity department and burn approximately 500 extra calories a day – either through running or swimming or even walking – and knock out another 3,500 calories in a week. But we’re not talking about exercise just yet – that’s for next week. So for this example, she’s not working out.

So we’ve covered the obvious basics, but here’s where we go wrong.

Say she works her tail off, and gets down to 148, but decides she wants to drop down to 140. Okay, now we’ve got a goal. This is great. She keeps up her same routine – eat healthy every day, weigh herself on Saturday – because obviously it’s working for her.

Except… it stops working for her.

All of a sudden, the weight loss slows down. It’s almost two weeks before she even sees a pound fade away. She starts getting discouraged, and starts to feel like she’s ready to give up.

This is where we go wrong.

When we lose 22lbs like this, we HAVE to go back to start. What did I say at the start?

To put this into action, let’s use a 27 year old female who weighs 170 at 5’8″ with a sedentary lifestyle as an example.

If we plug those numbers into one of my favorite calculators, it says that she burns approximately 2,173 calories per day.

A 20lb weight loss alters how many calories our bodies burn in a given day by over100 calories! A woman who is 5’8″, weighing in at now 148 pounds, doesn’t burn 2,173 calories each day – she burns 2,025! If she’s counting to make sure she eats 1,600 calories each day,that’s only a 425 calorie deficit! That’s not enough to burn a pound every 7 days, it’s enough to burn a pound every 9 days. Meaning there may only be two Saturdays in the month where she sees any progress on the scale, depending upon where those nine-day markers fall.

After each successful stride in your journey, you must reassess your metabolic rate, be it for an athlete or a couch potato. You have to know what your body is doing, and you have to remember that as your size changes, your capabilities change. Remember, being conscious is a MAJOR part of not only losing weight, but keeping it off. My favorite line is “If you never eat it, you don’t have to worry about burning it off.” But you have to know what you’re eating in order to know whether or not you should be eating it, right? That’s why I calorie count!

The Math Behind Weight Loss Plateaus is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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1. Weight Loss… and Your Libido
2. How Much Is The Weight Loss Industry Worth?
3. The Biggest Loser & The Problem With Weight Loss Porn

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Post tags: calorie counting, clean eating, dieting, Healthy Eating, metabolism, nutrition, overeating, weight loss

Um, y’all don’t make pills strong enough for all that. I might be close on the abs… but the rest? C’mon.

The dieting industry has made it a total draw to “get this ‘athletic’ body!!!!! without work!!!!!!!!!! take our pill!!!!! exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” I get it. We always want results with little work. That’s…. cute? It’s cute because it’s naive… and I always associate naive with children. And really, children are always cute.

The reality, here, is that again we’ve allowed industry to romanticize something that – with even a moderate amount of digging beneath the surface, we could learn – simply isn’t true.

Don’t sell me on “this pill could help you achieve an athlete’s body,” and then rush to define “athlete’s body” as this person with almost dangerously low body fat because “society thinks this looks good, even though American society has more body fat than it can stand to admit to itself.” It simply isn’t true.

Enter Howard Schatz.

Within the pages of their 2002 photobook aptly titled Athlete, you will find the following:

I see you, Lisa Leslie!

Do you see what I see?

Let me tell you what I see. I see a multitude of bodies – obviously athletic bodies, lest they be unsuccessful in their sports – in various shapes and sizes. I see bodies that don’t feel required to fit into whatever mold the “un-fit masses” have tried to fit them in. Why? They’re too busy committing themselves to their craft.

From the description of the book:

With a seamless blend of art and precision, Schatz shows us the awesome upper-body power of Olympic wrestling champions, discus throwers, and football players; the lissome graces of high jumpers and rhythmic gymnasts, the shock-absorbing legs of downhill skiers, the sculptural perfection of NFL wide receiver Terrell Owens and sprinter Shawn Crawford; the compact muscularity of gymnasts Tasha Schwikert and Sean Townsend; the Giacometti-like slenderness of marathoners Tegla Loroupe and American marathon champion Deena Drossin; as well as 125 other athletes at the top of their games. In serene portraits and intricately dissected motion photographs, Schatz gives us an unprecedented celebration of the body as divine machine, and manages at the same time to present a collective view of the human spirit at its most intense.

What is my point, here? My point, really, is three-fold.

First, don’t get suckered into defining something as broad as “athlete” – especially when “athlete” can refer to everything from gymnastics to sumo wrestling – by marketing that never even mentions a sport. It’s disrespectful to and discounts those who don’t fit that visual description – it excludes them from their rightfully earned title of “athlete” because they don’t look the way an uninformed public says an “athlete” should look – and doesn’t give them the credit they deserve.

Second, these are extremely – extremely – successful athletes. There are Olympians in this photo set. If they’ve got what you consider to be amazing bodies? Guess what – they’re not taking pills to get them. They’re putting in work. The only people who believe you can get “something” for “nothing” are those who have nothing. In fitness, you have to work. You want that body? Let’s see several hours a week – maybe even several hours a day – of commitment toward achieving it.

Lastly, if you can see how foolish society’s standards are for fitness…. then the logical question must be “where does this standard come from?” If you can’t answer that question immediately, and be satisfied with your answer… perhaps you should question why you hold yourself to such a standard in the first place.

Just a thought.

Scans from Athlete found here.

Click to purchase Athlete.

Y’all can thank Ngozi for this beauty.

Re-Examining – And Re-Defining – The Athlete’s Body is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Body Image: Feeling Like You’re Never Enough
2. Q&A Wednesday: Why Does Body Mass Index (BMI) Matter?
3. How Junk Food Affects The Body, Part 1

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: athlete, culture, dieting, fitness, industry, society

Diet, diet, diet. We’ve all heard the word. We’re sick of the word. We’re even sicker of dieting than we are of the WORD diet.

Having said that, I’m interested – what’s the most ridiculous diet you’ve ever heard of? I’ve got a few, but I want as many people to participate in this one as possible. So share! Post the most ridiculous diet you’ve ever heard in the comments! Let’s laugh together!

What’s The Most Ridiculous Diet You’ve Ever Heard Of? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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3. The Twinkie Diet: What Do You Mean, It Works?!

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Post tags: dieting, Fad Diets

But every now and again, I read something that makes me want to toss my head against my desk – not too hard, but hard enough – because they’re either mistakes I’ve made before… or mistakes I make now (and realize it while reading someone else’s words)… or mistakes I haven’t made and probably would’ve made in the future if I weren’t thinking consciously.

So.. having said that… consider this my collective screaming, shouting, and fussing from a year’s worth of e-mails and comments where y’all just know you are wrong. You know you are. Hopefully you’ll giggle with me a little, and come on out of the woodwork admitting how you know you’re wrong.

1) You put off an activity today, for whatever reason, because you can “just do it tomorrow.”

Say it with me. This… is BS. Let me tell you what happens. You get home. You’re tired. You’re worn out. You’re angry. Whatever. Instead of using your pending workout at something to energize you and destress you, you put it off by saying “Oh, I’ll just tack it on to tomorrow’s workout.” You know what happens now: either you skip tomorrow’s workout as well, or you do finish tomorrow’s workout, forgetting the part you were supposed to tack on.

The problem with this is that it’s an excuse. It’s allowing you to excuse very big parts of your routine – your entire routine for a day – and its a bad habit that you don’t want to develop. Do yourself a favor. If you get the feeling that you want to “put it off until tomorrow,” go anyway… but do at least 1/3 of your workout. Why 1/3? For one, you’re still going. That prevents you from getting into the habit of not going. For two, once you get into the swing of your routine, its highly unlikely that you’ll literally stop at 1/3. You’ll probably keep going… and you’ll probably feel glad that you did.

2) You’re still freaking dieting: you diet, you lose a little weight, you go back to life before the diet, you put the weight back on. Woe is me.

I don’t believe in dieting (or “cheating“). I refuse to live on mashed potatoes for a week straight, grapefruit for a week straight, spongebob squarepants fruit snacks for a week straight.. whatever voodoo mumbo jumbo looney tunes diet is going on out there right now just to lose a measly five pounds. I don’t believe in being miserable.

Dieting is moronic. Yes. I said it. Dieting says that it makes sense to “take a break from your regular bad habits” to go on a temporary severely restricted regimen, lose weight, then go right back to the habits that caused you to gain weight in the first place. How does that make sense?

If your goal is temporary weight loss, then yes, a temporary change makes sense. But last time I checked, no one puts themselves through a ton of dietary trauma just to lose five pounds for five days, right? Right.

I believe in making changes to the habits I created, be they questionable or downright deplorable. If I want to go in on some ice cream? I’ma do it, but there’s a consequence I have to suffer through, and that consequence teaches me the lesson: lay off the ice cream. That lesson is far more powerful than anything a darn diet could teach me. Ever.

3) You think the latest weight loss gadget is your ticket: you’ve got a closet full of ab pulsing belts, shake weights and thigh masters…

…and, for some reason, your abs aren’t ripped, your arms aren’t cut, and your thighs don’t look like Suzanne Somers. This is not coincidence.

Did you know that you can do the same exercise the thigh master shows you how to do… without the thigh master? That’s right. You don’t need the thighmaster to do leg lifts. You don’t need some pedals on a spring board to do sit ups… you can just do sit ups at home. You don’t need to shake an overweight rattle – one that, I presume, was created as an inside joke among perverts – to tone your arms the same way regular ol’ push ups or a one liter of water as a dumbell could.

Stop thinking that you need to spend – or waste, however you see it – money on the latest fad product to help you get it in. You don’t. You can do this with no products, or you can have all the products in the world. If you don’t have the work ethic needed to make this thing happen for you, then you can kiss your goal  – and your money – goodbye. You won’t be seeing it.

4) You’re impatient.

This ain’t The Biggest Loser. (Hell, The Biggest Loser ain’t The Biggest Loser.) But for some reason, you want to lose 30lbs in a week, too. Crappy supermarket checkout line magazines don’t really help with this, but you swear up and down that you’re supposed to “lose 7lbs in 7 days with nooooo effort!!!” and after that first week, when you don’t “lose 7lbs in 7 days with nooooo effort!!!” you want to walk around the house with your lip poked out all mad and angry, ready to give up on weight loss and, ultimately, wellness.

Did you put the weight on in 7 days? Why think that you can lose it that fast? Are you running at cheetah speed for two hours a day? Then no, you’re not going to lose 7lbs in a week. Let that go. There is nothing wrong with 1-2lbs in a week. There is nothing wrong with finding that you’ve lost 5-8lbs in a week, either: if you’ve upped the fiber in your diet and are going potty more, that’ll reflect on the scale… if you made drastic changes to your caloric intake, that’ll reflect as well. But by and large, the average woman worried about a “final 10-15lbs” (she is usually the target of this “lose 30lbs in 10 minutes!” schtick) is not going to actually do it.

This takes patience. It takes learning and relearning your body… which really takes patience. Don’t shortchange yourself by trying to rush through it for a bikini or a little black dress. Not worth it.

5) After reading this, you’re gonna laugh, nod your head and say “Yep,” and not change a single thing.

I’m serious – how many people do you estimate will read this, giggle a little, and then go right back to their Doritos and crystal light? C’mon, man, either you’re in or you’re out. Either you want it, or you don’t. Every decision you make, you need to make with your ultimate wellness in mind. Every step you take needs to be one where you are conscious of you and your needs. It requires that much effort.. and either you’re willing to put in that effort or you’re not. Waddling in the middle isn’t going to get you anywhere, that’s for sure.

So really, prove me wrong – stop buying every silly product that comes out. Stop putting off workouts. Stop with the impatience (and, consequently, undue stress and pressure that comes with it.) Stop with the freaking diets. Just live… healthier. It’s that easy.

5 Reasons Why You Won’t Lose Weight is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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1. “Don’t Lose Any Weight.. I Love A Big Fine Woman!”
2. Admitting The Desire To Lose Weight: Does It Affect Self-Esteem?
3. Why Aren’t Feminists Allowed To Lose Weight?

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 49 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dieting, Fad Diets, Healthy Eating, mentality, motivation, shake weight, skipping workouts, thigh master, weight loss scams

Q: I feel like I do not know what to eat to lose weight, so I skip or lessen my intake. I know this is counterproductive. How do I break this bad thinking/behavior to have a healthy-successful-leaner life?

A: What this sounds like, to me, is a general fear of food because of what it’s done to you. It’s a pretty disordered understanding of eating, because eating is your primary form of nourishment. It’s how you cleanse your body, care for your body, love your body. A fear of the very thing that sustains you because of weight… it actually saddens me. I understand it, but it saddens me.

Did I fear food? I don’t know. If I was conscious when I was eating – as opposed to mindlessly eating like a zombie – then I did feel something about it. I almost felt guilty eating, and felt like I shouldn’t be eating until I lost weight (and considering how much weight I would’ve needed to lose, I might’ve never been able to eat again.) Was that borne of fear of food? Perhaps.

To be honest, I had a lot of disordered understandings when it came to food and really, I’d stand to reason that a lot of women do. Just because, in the interest of marketing a product, we’re always being beaten over the head with messages that we’re imperfect and we accept that it has to do with the food. So, in turn, instead of changing the food we eat, we blame the quantity of food we eat… and that somehow translates into a fear of eating.

It’s strange and doesn’t feel logical to me now, but I get it. And it’s hard to embrace any kind of eating when you fear food because you believe food makes you “fat.” If being “less fat” is the goal, you believe – thanks to marketing and stories of models eating carrots and ice cubes – eating less will get it done.

It’s also a part of the mentality that makes dieting so easy to embrace. We believe that dieting works because dieting helps you “eat less,” especially since those carrot-and-ice-cube-eating-models “eat less” and, well, they’re beautiful.

Damn all that.

I’m human. I like food. I’m wired to like food. I’m also not built to compete with a marketing machine with enough money to chemically engineer food in a way that removes my ability to control myself.

Realizing that was part of what set me free of my fear of food.

I don’t feel fear of food, because I now know that food doesn’t have control over me. I don’t fear food because I now know that food is supposed to be enjoyable – fruits were made sweet to compel us to not only nourish ourselves, but repopulate the Earth with their seeds to grow more fruit. Knowing that makes me comfortable with the idea that I can actually enjoy the flavor of “sweet.” I don’t feel held captive when I’m in the presence of sweets.

So, to put it all bluntly, learning that I could make enjoyable meals with fruits and vegetables (and a little meat) and that these meals resulted in weight loss was so exciting for me that my relationship with food was completely changed. I was too busy trying to learn how to cook and tasting new flavors. Being afraid of food was no longer an issue. I could eat, enjoy life and still maintain my weight.

You kind of have to put faith into it. You just have to. You have to understand that the fruits and vegetables that we grow are the things we’re supposed to eat, and should never be distrusted in a fashion that makes you not want to eat.

And what makes this “counter-productive,” as she called it?

Because stress about the inability to eat is the only source of stress for man, his body became used to the eventual chain of events. His body knows: Lots of stress = lack of food coming in. How did his body react? His body decided to hold on to what it had – by way of diminishing the amount of energy his body could exert all at one time, by way of making sure his body took a very long time to lose weight, by way of making sure it held onto every pound and fat cell it could. This bodily reaction would only further compel man to step up his hunting skills… why? Because he didn’t want to feel that way! He didn’t want his family to feel that way! He had to get his caveman hustle on! When man was finally able to tackle that antelope or whatever-what-have-you, the fats and salts in the meat were sooooo satisfying that they would cure man of the bodily reaction to stress.

Excerpted from Telling A Tale of Stress and Emotional Eating | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

Even though that post talked mainly about stress, the body’s reaction to “there’s no food coming in” is always the same. It results in weight loss becoming more difficult.

What would I suggest? I’d suggest embracing a lifestyle that consists of primarily fruits and vegetables, with whichever meats you prefer served in portions no larger than the size of your hand. Make yourself nice dishes that taste wonderfully, and keep yourself from feeling too hungry. Pace yourself – don’t expect overnight success – and you will do just fine.

Is there anyone else out there who has felt this way? How are you dealing with it? How did you cope with your fear?

Q&A Wednesday: I Don’t Trust Food! I’m Afraid To Eat! is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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1. Can We Really Trust Nutrition Labels?
2. Q&A Wednesday: How Much Fat Is OK In My Food?
3. Q&A Wednesday: I Work In Fast Food And Want To Lose Weight! Help!

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 21 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dieting, disordered eating, disorders, eating disorders, fear of food

However, it still never fails. Whenever someone wants to snark me on my philosophies regarding weight and the body, I am quickly dismissed: “I’m glad that you were one of the successful 5% of people in this country who managed to lose weight and keep it off, but…”

Actually, no, I’m not… because I didn’t lose my weight by dieting, and I for damn sure don’t keep it off that way. I’d sooner be counted among the “95%” who failed.

Don’t get me wrong – like most people, I spent years dieting. I went on liquid diets. I tried “fat burner” pills. I even tried religious fasting, assuming that if the fast would result in successful weight loss, it’d prove to me that there is, in fact, a God. (Kidding… sorta.)

However, through managing and maintaining this blog, I’ve learned the hard way that there are big huge gaping reasons why, as they put it, 95% of all dieting attempts fail.

First, let’s back track to understanding where that percentage came from. From a 1999 article in, my favorite place, the NYTimes:

That statistic has been quoted widely over the last four decades, in Congressional hearings, diet books, research papers and seminars. And it is the reason so many people approach dieting with a sense of hopelessness.

But in fact, obesity researchers say, no one has any idea how many people can lose weight and keep it off. Now, as researchers try to determine how many people have succeeded, they are also studying the success stories for lessons that might inspire others to try.

”That 95 percent figure has become clinical lore,” said Dr. Thomas Wadden, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. There is no basis for it, he said, ”but it’s part of the mythology of obesity.”

Dr. Kelly D. Brownell, the director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, said the number was first suggested in a 1959 clinical study of only 100 people. The finding was repeated so often that it came to be regarded as fact, he said.

[It was] clear that the 95 percent failure rate was so poorly founded. The figure comes not from any kind of random sampling, but from a study of 100 patients treated for obesity at a nutrition clinic at New York Hospital in the 1950′s. In 1959, its authors, Dr. Albert Stunkard and Mavis McLaren-Hume, published a paper in which they concluded, ”Most obese persons will not stay in treatment, most will not lose weight, and of those who do lose weight, most will regain it.”

That conclusion, Dr. Brownell of Yale said, has since become the most frequently quoted statement in obesity literature.

Dr. Stunkard, who is now a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, said the study was ”perfectly respectable” for that period. ”The paper made a big impact because everybody thought obesity was pretty easy to treat,” he said. ”This showed that, for whatever reason, it wasn’t.”

But the study has little relevance to the current understanding of how to control weight, said Dr. Stunkard, who specializes in the treatment of obesity and eating disorders. The 100 patients in the study were ”just given a diet and sent on their way,” he said.

”That was state of the art in 1959,” he added. ”I’ve been sort of surprised that people keep citing it; I know we do better these days.”

The intervening years have brought significant changes to the treatment of obesity, the most important of which, Dr. Stunkard said, has been the introduction of behavior modification techniques.

Since the 1959 study, though, the statistic has been reinforced by most other clinical studies, which also showed people with discouraging results.

”Unless we can prove they’re typical, the data cannot be generalized,” Dr. Brownell said. ”The people we see in clinics tend to be more overweight and have more psychological problems. They are more likely by a factor of two to have binge-eating problems.”

The true failure rate could be much better, or much worse, he said. ”The fact is that we just don’t know.”

That being said, I’m genuinely surprised that the fail rate wasn’t higher. I wholly expect people to fail on diets. Why? Because it is my personal belief that there is almost always something interfering with a person’s ability to eat the way they should, and it ain’t just “not knowing better.”

Lots of people “know better,” they just can’t access what they need. Lots of people “know better,” and are simply emotional eaters. Lots of people “know better,” they just can’t wade through the “diet industry’s” marketing well enough to realize that “dieting” won’t save them from these other very large and very real problems. The only thing that will solve those problems is addressing them head on… something that isn’t encouraged – and is wholly discouraged and totally frowned upon and poo-pooed – because it isn’t as profitable.

There is a monumental difference between changing how you live (and yes, even when you think you cannot, you can) and “dieting.” Dieting doesn’t solve the problem most of us face. While we’re playing, dieting doesn’t even put a band-aid on the problem. Dieting pretends the wound isn’t there by saying “don’t worry about when it burns and oozes goo… just blow on it and it’ll be okay.”

I know that I quoted an article that debunked this foolish 95% figure that keeps being thrown around, but that’s specifically because I feel like it’s original purpose was to debunk the idea of dieting, not the idea of trying to lose weight. Losing weight is the end goal of dieting, but dieting is not the only means of losing weight. It’s merely an [unsuccessful] aspect of it.

So, while I’m pretty certain that there are people who cling to that idea that they can be among the 5% of successful attempts, I’m perfectly comfortable sitting among the ranks of the 95% of dieting failures. Quite frankly, I’m satisfied with the results I got via other healthier, more enjoyable means. Here’s hoping the rest of you ninety-five percenters out there can let go of this dieting thing and say the same.

Why “95% Of Dieters Fail” is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. “Why Even Resolute Dieters Often Fail”
2. Why Diets Make You Fat: Why Diets Fail

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Post tags: dieting

Let’s just also say that I am also honored to know that y’all care what I think about these issues. Don’t ever stop sending me stuff, though. Ever.(Please?)

On to the subject at hand, though.

Meet Professor Mark Haub. He teaches nutrition at Kansas State University. That’s important. Remember that.

Professor Haub decided to go on a diet that consisted of majority junk food… as a means of proving that it is the quantity of the calories one consumes, not the quality. Meaning, it doesn’t matter where your calories come from. What matters is that you cut your portion sizes down. This is important. Remember this, too.

I’m going to [resentfully] quote the article:

His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food.

The premise held up: On his “convenience store diet,” he shed 27 pounds in two months.

For a class project, Haub limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day. A man of Haub’s pre-dieting size usually consumes about 2,600 calories daily. So he followed a basic principle of weight loss: He consumed significantly fewer calories than he burned.

His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds.

But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so.

Haub’s “bad” cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his “good” cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent.

“That’s where the head scratching comes,” Haub said. “What does that mean? Does that mean I’m healthier? Or does it mean how we define health from a biology standpoint, that we’re missing something?”

It means you’re missing something. Trust me. The article goes on, though:

Despite his temporary success, Haub does not recommend replicating his snack-centric diet.

“I’m not geared to say this is a good thing to do,” he said. “I’m stuck in the middle. I guess that’s the frustrating part. I can’t give a concrete answer. There’s not enough information to do that.”

Two-thirds of his total intake came from junk food. He also took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake daily. And he ate vegetables, typically a can of green beans or three to four celery stalks.

Families who live in food deserts have limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables, so they often rely on the kind of food Haub was eating.

“These foods are consumed by lots of people,” he said. “It may be an issue of portion size and moderation rather than total removal. I just think it’s unrealistic to expect people to totally drop these foods for vegetables and fruits. It may be healthy, but not realistic.”

Haub’s body fat dropped from 33.4 to 24.9 percent. This posed the question: What matters more for weight loss, the quantity or quality of calories?

If the body isn’t operating optimally, how long do you think you can last on a diet that doesn’t aid it in achieving that goal?

But wait… there’s more:

His success is probably a result of caloric reduction, said Dawn Jackson Blatner, a dietitian based in Atlanta, Georgia.

“It’s a great reminder for weight loss that calories count,” she said. “Is that the bottom line to being healthy? That’s another story.”

Blatner, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, said she’s not surprised to hear Haub’s health markers improved even when he loaded up on processed snack cakes.

Being overweight is the central problem that leads to complications like high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol, she said.

“When you lose weight, regardless of how you’re doing it — even if it’s with packaged foods, generally you will see these markers improve when weight loss has improved,” she said.

Before jumping on the Ding Dong bandwagon, Blatner warned of health concerns.

“There are things we can’t measure,” said Blatner, questioning how the lack of fruits and vegetables could affect long-term health. “How much does that affect the risk for cancer? We can’t measure how diet changes affect our health.”

I can’t take this any more. All of these people with big giant degrees and alphabet soup behind their names still don’t get it.

I’m going to start from the top. Professor Haub went from eating 2600 calories a day to eating 1800 calories a day. Let’s take a look at Professor Haub’s sample daily diet:

• Espresso, Double: 6 calories; 0 grams of fat
• Hostess Twinkies Golden Sponge Cake: 150 calories; 5 grams of fat; 19g sugar; 220mg sodium
• Centrum Advanced Formula From A To Zinc: 0 calories; 0 grams of fat
• Little Debbie Star Crunch: 150 calories; 6 grams of fat; 11.9g sugar; 70mg sodium
• Hostess Twinkies Golden Sponge Cake: 150 calories; 5 grams of fat; 19g sugar; 220mg sodium
• Diet Mountain Dew: 0 calories; 0 grams of fat; 0g sugar; 35mg sodium
• Doritos Cool Ranch: 75 calories; 4 grams of fat; .5g sugar; 85mg sodium
• Kellogg’s Corn Pops: 220 calories; 0 grams of fat; 12g sugar; 110mg sodium
• whole milk: 150 calories; 8 grams of fat; 12g sugar; 125mg sodium
• baby carrots: 18 calories; 0 grams of fat
• Duncan Hines Family Style Brownie Chewy Fudge: 270 calories; 14 grams of fat; 32g sugar; 115mg sodium
• Little Debbie Zebra Cake: 160 calories; 8 grams of fat; 31g sugar; 170mg sodium
• Muscle Milk Protein Shake: 240 calories; 9 grams of fat; 6g sugar; 580mg sodium 

Totals: 1,589 calories and 59 grams of fat (143.4g of sugar, 1730mg of sodium)

The sugar and sodium totals are mine – CNN didn’t provide those. Remember that, too.

Let’s look closely at Professor Haub’s “results” from his diet:

• He lost 27lbs in 2mos.
• His body mass index (BMI) decreased from 28.8 to 24.9, .1 below the “overweight” classification, considered “normal.”
• His LDL cholesterol (cleverly referred to as bad cholesterol) dropped 20%, while his HDL (the good cholesterol) was elevated by 20%.
• His body fat percentage dropped from 33.4% to 24.9%.

I have questions.

First, I know that he said he worked out regularly and ate healthily before he began this “diet,” but he also said that he also worked out during the diet, as well. Did he find himself properly fueled for his regular activity? Did he ever increase or decrease the length of his workouts? Did he find himself growing more and more tired throughout the day as the diet continued? Did he ever hit “the wall” earlier on in his workouts than before?

(And, really, I am familiar with how people overreport their “healthfulness” and underreport their healthy living shortcomings… so I don’t expect honest answers, let alone answers period to my question.)

Secondly, why would a nutritionist [professor] be confused about cholesterol levels decreasing when meat is cut from one’s daily intake? Assuming he wasn’t a vegetarian, the fat consumed from his “twinkie diet” would be considerably less than that consumed from animal and animal by-products… so if you’ve cut meat and all you’re ingesting (as far as animal by-products go) is whole milk, then yes. Your cholesterol will decrease. Mentioning these results without clarifying that point seems dishonest and while I don’t know whether Professor Haub or the journo is to blame for that, it needs to be said.

Thirdly, I want to be clear. Can diets create weight loss? Yes! A big giant man who is used to taking in 2600 calories each day, who cuts his caloric intake by 800 calories, is going to lose weight. Let me be clear. Deprivation works.

That’s not what’s in question, here.

I’ve said this before and it [clearly] bears repeating:

Why does dieting work? Dieting works because it is an extremely mindless form of calorie counting. If I’ve only allowed myself to choose from this one low-calorie food to eat, I can’t possibly gain weight, right? You don’t have to think about the food you’re eating and whether or not it’ll cause you to gain weight – you KNOW this one food won’t cause you to put on any pounds, you know exactly what you’re going to do. It’s auto-pilot for weight loss.

However – because it usually involves something that you can only manage temporarily, you tend to come off of it – excited to beat the pounds – by celebrating with what? More food you have no business indulging in in the first place!

Why does the weight ALWAYS come back? Because… wait for it… auto-pilot doesn’t work for weight loss! That’s right – you can’t do it. Why? Because waking up one day and deciding that you’re going to go auto-pilot eating nothing but grapefruit for breakfast and lunch can’t change the fact that your auto-pilot used to lead you to McDonalds or Krispy Kreme for breakfast every morning. Auto-pilot, unfortunately, does equate to mindlessness. It’s operating without thinking. “Not thinking” before led us to being unhealthy in the first place. It certainly won’t lead us to “healthy,” and if it does, it certainly wouldn’t do it overnight… or in two-six weeks like other diets.

Without a relatively rare medical condition, you cannot put the weight on if you aren’t putting harmful things in your mouth. It simply does not work that way. Dieting might help you drop a few pounds, but if your eating habits are in check you couldn’t put it on in the first place… and you couldn’t run the risk of gaining it back once you “come off” of your diet. It solves the immediate visual problem – if only momentarily- however you’re not addressing the thing that not only ensures that you’ll always have the weight, but in some cases also ensures that you’re doing some damage to your insides, as well.

Excerpted from: The Anatomy of A Diet: Why They Work, and Why The Success Never Lasts

The issue is not – nor has it ever been – whether or not a diet can work. If “work” is defined as “causing you to lose weight,” then yes, they “work.” The issue is sustainability. The issue is whether or not you’ve taken on a diet that cannot be turned into a lifestyle. Whether or not you’ve properly addressed any issues you may have with emotional eating (which will directly affect ones ability to control their portions, something this diet apparently makes a huge deal out of), whether or not you’ve handled any psychological issues that may prevent you from reaching your goals (because, as with most diets, you will hit a brick wall where you have to change again in order to keep losing) and whether or not you’re doing yourself a disservice internally will all play ginormous parts in one’s success in a diet.

You didn’t think I was going to do all this dieting talk without talking about health, right? “But his cholesterol… his blood pressure… his body fat percentage… they all lowered!” So what? Let me tell you something. The chemical makeup of his diet is… nauseating. To quote Maya Naura, RD:

In order to lose weight, our liver essentially turns fat stores into energy and is burned off. When we consume, breathe in, be in, or live in ’toxic’ material, that same one and only liver neutralizes the toxic material and it is removed from the body. Keep in mind diet coke is ‘seen’ by your body as a toxic substance. It’s not food, it’s not water, so what the heck is it? An unusable, toxic substance. Our liver is very clever in prioritizing it’s duties. We can’t live with toxic material overloading the body so the liver needs to neutralize it, putting weight loss to the side. And the better news? If toxin removal pathways aren’t functioning properly, which most aren’t, that toxic substance ends up stored in fat cells… so much for counting calories. [source]

So… my unscientific opinion is that a privileged male living on a tenured professor’s salary probably has been eating well enough for long enough that these effects haven’t hit him yet, but they would. Without question. A middle (upper?) class man coming down off of a healthy lifestyle to “eat like the poor” is much different from people who, unfortunately, have to live this reality.

And that’s my next point. Studies like this won’t affect privileged and monied college professors who can afford to jovially come up off their pathetic little twinkie diet. This will affect the people who have to live this diet, as well as the public’s perception of those people… that even though they’re poor and aren’t getting enough food, they’re still obese because they’re eating too much food. So, not only should the poor not have access to certain foods, they should also stop eating as much as they do now, and we need to stop harassing grocery conglomerates about setting up shop and offering these people actual food that isn’t all chemicals.

I cannot explain how alarmingly important that is: “even though they’re poor and aren’t getting enough food, they’re still obese because they’re eating too much of the food they actually have access to, now.” It’s right back to “fat people are fat because they have no self-control.”

A person living off of a processed food diet faces the following:

If you watched the clip above, you already know. Our processed foods are broken down to their most basic parts, mixed in with preservatives (which help, you know, preserve the final product), flavor additives, water, flour, various forms of salt, then manipulated to be whatever they want to sell us. The same ground up chicken carcass (which is what is in that photo) can be chicken patties, chicken nuggets, chicken fingers, “diced chicken,” the chicken in your chicken pot pie, the chicken in your soup… whatever. Just look for “mechanically separated [animal] parts.” You won’t have to look too hard.

Once it’s broken down to create this… goo… chemicals are used to hold it in place to form whatever shape it’s going to take. Once it meets your saliva and enters your body, it breaks right back down to the goo… with no fiber inside to help push it out. It essentially deflates inside of your system, making it easier to consume more calories because you’re “not full yet.” Couple all of this with the fact that it takes approximately 20 minutes for your brain to get the signal from your digestive system that you’re “full,” and you start to see why a food that breaks down this quickly is a recipe for disaster – a breaded chicken breast on wheat bread breaks down much more slowly than a chicken patty sandwich on white bread, takes longer to chew (buying you time until that 20 minute mark… see what that 30 bites was important?), takes longer to digest (thus leaving you feeling fulfilled longer), and keeps you from overindulging. You’re getting that “full” feeling for less calories. You’re not scarfing it down because it’s breaking down faster than it can fill you up… only to find that “all-of-a-sudden-I-feel-like-I-ate-too-much” feeling arrive.

A privileged, well-off professor… who – it is likely – has never experienced these issues before his stupid twinkie experiment, probably doesn’t have a hard time understanding “I eat this much. I stop. That’s it. No more.” 10 weeks may not be long enough for his body to get sucked into this cycle. Maybe years of “eating healthily” has rendered him immune to these harmful effects.

I’m just gonna come out and say it. This is why I find nutritionists useless, pointless and downright annoying. Taking the nutrients out of the context of the food, the foods out of the context of the diet, the diet out of the context of the lifestyle and the lifestyle out of the context of duration does nothing to further nutrition science. It does nothing to further our understanding of how food impacts our health. What sense does it make for a rich white dude in the suburbs with (assumedly very little stress) to adopt the lifestyle of the impoverished who might fear their lights being turned off?

How much sense does it make that he would release his findings to places like CNN, for goodness sake, when all he can do is scratch his behind and say “Derrr, I don’t really know why any of this happened… I just know that it happened?” Why does he not know the consequences of his releasing his findings? Why wouldn’t he wait until he had more concrete answers? How salacious and attention getting for him (and his University, don’t get it twisted) to release these findings, knowing there’d be hoards of people excited that they, too, might cut 800 calories from their daily intake, still work out, eat sugary crap food and still lose weight? Nothing to mention of whether people are even in the position to cut 800 calories from their diet (a girl who weight 120lbs, antsy to lose a last 5lbs isn’t in a position to cut 800 calories AND still work out.) Nothing to mention of whether or not people would be satisfied after eating a twinkie for a meal. (Did the article say whether or not HE was satisfied after eating that amount?) Nothing to mention whether or not there would be additional ramifications of his little diet. He doesn’t know… and I’m not sure whether or not it’s because he doesn’t care, but I’m positive it’s because he’s not concerned with that.

Before I go… there are two parts of the CNN article I want to address directly:

Blatner, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, said she’s not surprised to hear Haub’s health markers improved even when he loaded up on processed snack cakes.

Being overweight is the central problem that leads to complications like high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol, she said.

“When you lose weight, regardless of how you’re doing it — even if it’s with packaged foods, generally you will see these markers improve when weight loss has improved,” she said.

So… excess fat causes high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol levels? Or… is it that the foods that cause high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol levels also cause excess fat?

One sentence makes the weight the problem. The other sentence makes the weight an additional consequence of the actual problem… which is poor food choices. I bet almost no one will catch that, though.

Meanwhile, twinkie sales have gone up 30%, and Kansas State University will probably be opening up a new science and nutrition lab in about three years: Hostess Hall.

The Twinkie Diet: What Do You Mean, It Works?! is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. What’s The Most Ridiculous Diet You’ve Ever Heard Of?
2. Diet Drinks Bad For Your Heart?
3. The Anatomy of A Diet: Why They Work, and Why The Success Never Lasts

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 28 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: american dietetic association, dieting, fast weight loss, kansas state university, nutritionists, twinkie diet

The Cabbage Diet. The Grapefruit Diet. The Cookie Diet. The Cereal Diet. The Mayo Clinic Diet. The Tea Diet. The Seaweed and Coral Diet (better known as The Spongebob Diet… I just made it up, but I bet I could make some money off of it, huh?)

Now, after my post on the Drive-Thru Diet, I’d like to think that my attitude on diets is relatively clear – I strongly believe they’re a band-aid on a bullet wound. They don’t address the core issue (getting the bullet out), they don’t prevent the problem from getting worse (as in, an infection), and they don’t really help you get better… they just help you stop looking at the problem, really.

However, I do realize that because you can get immediate results, it’s easy to opt for a diet. A little discomfort but minimal effort, no need for exercise, quick and easy weight loss. It seems pretty ideal, I guess. We’re just always dumbfounded when the weight manages to pile itself back on. Dumbfounded, and heavier.

So let’s break down the anatomy of the quick weight loss diet, shall we?

What is a diet?

A diet, in general terms, is simply the “list” of foods that you allow yourself to eat during the day. It’s the foods that you limit yourself to – if you were on the cabbage diet, your daily diet consists of boiled cabbage for breakfast and lunch with a regular dinner. Diets are generally named by the food that dominates your day – cereal diet, cookie diet, mashed potato diet. This all seems kind of “duh,” but we’re breaking it down to it’s very core, right? Gotta start somewhere.

Why is dieting so popular?

Dieting is popular because the notion, quite frankly, is that it works. Limiting yourself to only one food that you KNOW you enjoy, eating it all day every day, and losing weight while you’re at it? It’s a painless way to take care of a problem that already makes us uncomfortable to address or even discuss. Not only that, but in some circles, it’s considered common practice and even “trendy” to be on the current “popular” diet.

Taking it a step further, there is money to be made off of pushing diets. The Mayo Clinic Diet required you to purchase a book. All information about the Cookie Diet led to a website that required you to purchase (and, essentially, live off of) one particular brand of cookie. Most diets that tend to gain media steam behind them do so because someone’s pushing it. Why? You have to invest money to make money.. so pay for the diet to get a little exposure, watch that exposure bring you a lot more money.

Why does dieting work?

Dieting works because it is an extremely mindless form of calorie counting. If I’ve only allowed myself to choose from this one low-calorie food to eat, I can’t possibly gain weight, right? You don’t have to think about the food you’re eating and whether or not it’ll cause you to gain weight – you KNOW this one food won’t cause you to put on any pounds, you know exactly what you’re going to do. It’s auto-pilot for weight loss.

However – because it usually involves something that you can only manage temporarily, you tend to come off of it – excited to beat the pounds – by celebrating with what? More food you have no business indulging in in the first place!

Why does the weight ALWAYS come back?

Because… wait for it… auto-pilot doesn’t work for weight loss! That’s right – you can’t do it. Why? Because waking up one day and deciding that you’re going to go auto-pilot eating nothing but grapefruit for breakfast and lunch can’t change the fact that your auto-pilot used to lead you to McDonalds or Krispy Kreme for breakfast every morning. Auto-pilot, unfortunately, does equate to mindlessness. It’s operating without thinking. “Not thinking” before led us to being unhealthy in the first place. It certainly won’t lead us to “healthy,” and if it does, it certainly wouldn’t do it overnight… or in two-six weeks like other diets.

Without a relatively rare medical condition, you cannot put the weight on if you aren’t putting harmful things in your mouth. It simply does not work that way. Dieting might help you drop a few pounds, but if your eating habits are in check you couldn’t put it on in the first place… and you couldn’t run the risk of gaining it back once you “come off” of your diet. It solves the immediate visual problem – if only momentarily- however you’re not addressing the thing that not only ensures that you’ll always have the weight, but in some cases also ensures that you’re doing some damage to your insides, as well.

How can I successfully lose weight?

You have to look at your lifestyle and gauge what you’re doing that is causing you to keep the weight on. Addressing that will not only cause the weight you’ve put on to fall off, but it will prevent the weight from returning. Sure, you can exercise to help keep it off, but thepurpose of exercise is to preserve your body’s range of motion. Weight loss is only an additional benefit to it.

The best way to protect and preserve our bodies is to be conscious of what we’re putting into it. Although it should be a recurring theme by now, a lifetime of bad habits cannot be corrected or rectified by one to six weeks of sacrifice. When you can be real and honest with yourself about the problem, then you can be real and honest with yourself about a practical long-term solution. And that includes, bypassing the trendy fad diets!

Are you a serial dieter? Have you had success with a diet? Share your stories below – I’d love to hear ‘em!

The Anatomy of A Diet: Why They Work, and Why The Success Never Lasts is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Understanding Calorie Counting: Preparing Yourself For Success
2. What Does A Success Story Look Like To You?
3. Why Don’t Obesity Programs Work For Young Black Girls?

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Post tags: dieting, diets, Fad Diets, mentality

A restaurant lists the calorie counts for its patrons... I love it!

Every so often, I get into this debate with people who reject the concept of “calorie counting” outright. And while I’m the type of person who believes in understanding someone’s viewpoint before I make a decision about it either way (because there is a difference between understanding someone and accepting their opinion as right), I’m not going to make it easy, either.

The very first series I wrote on this site was about my experiences with calorie counting, and it’s a process that’s very near and dear to my heart. Before I explain my experiences with calorie counting and my own personal stance, I think it’s fair to explain the concept of intuitive eating. I think, as you read along, you’ll discover what my real thoughts about intuitive eating actually are.

I know, I know… no one loves wikipedia. I’m quoting it anyway:

Intuitive eating is a nutrition philosophy based on the premise that becoming more attuned to the body’s natural hunger signals is a more effective way to attain a healthy weight; rather than keeping track of the amounts of energy and fats in foods. It’s a process that is intended to create a healthy relationship with food, mind, and body. Intuitive Eating, just like the many books available today, goes by many names, including non-dieting or the non-diet approach, normal eating, wisdom eating, conscious eating and more.

I think that’s a pretty solid definition.

I think I’ve said enough on this site that implies that I am anti-dieting. I don’t believe in restrictive rules that I can’t abide by, thus resulting in my incessant need to “cheat.” I don’t believe in the “health obsessed, yet still unhealthy culture” in our country today.. that takes advantage of people’s confusion about weight loss and wellness. I don’t believe in society’s need to idolize sickly looking women (and by sickly looking, I mean not fit, just thin-for-the-sake-of-being-thin). I don’t believe in perpetuating the idea that you have to buy every book or every trendy fad fitness toy to be healthy… especially when all it’s gonna do is collect dust until you donate it to Goodwill. I just… I reject most of what popular culture tells me about wellness, food and weight loss. That part of the intuitive eating philosophy, I accept and advocate.

I’m also big about developing healthy relationships with food. I support conscious consuming. I don’t support using food to self-medicate. Or hiding food. Or using food for any reason other than fueling the body and enjoying the experience. A lot of us don’t even realize that we have unhealthy relationships with food because we’re not even conscious of what we’re doing when we do it. We just.. consume.. feel better.. and move on to the next issue. Wash, rinse, repeat.

However, people who support intuitive eating also have this tendency to reject calorie counting as a faction of that “health obsessed, yet still unhealthy” culture that we have. Weight loss programs abound, that restrict you to a certain amount of calories, as if calories are the key indicator of weight loss success or failure. (Countless posts here will tell you.. they’re not.) Without proper focus, it can absolutely become obsessive. Supporters also believe it puts too high of a priority on calories… as if a calorie is a calories is a calorie, and it doesn’t matter where they come from so long as you’re under X number.

I don’t necessarily disagree with any of that. I think they are great philosophies. I also think they’re thoughtless, slightly privileged and a little disconnected from the reality that calorie counting can provide… because while I am an intuitive eater now, I got here through calorie counting. And because of that, because these people want to pit the two against one another, instead of using calorie counting as a means of maturing into intuitive eating, calorie counting wins out for me.

When I first realized that my problem was not only how much I was eating but what I was eating, I struggled a bit and had to start from scratch. For me, this meant that I completely dropped processed foods and – because I was missing the processed dishes I was eating – had to learn how to cook. Some people take the insulting stance of “you should know that eating a cupcake is not healthy,” but it’s not that you should know it is unhealthy.. it’s about knowing just how unhealthy it is.

I developed a love of cooking, because I realized just how much fun it could be to experiment and actually succeed with a well-put-together dish. And with every dish, I learned what each ingredient contributed to the dish. It taught me to be mindful of just how much fat I was adding to a dish (by way of oil, butter, cream, avocado, nuts, whatever) while still seeking to create a flavorful dish. I learned that I needed to be mindful of a “tipping point” in my dishes: sure, I can recreate the flavors in my favorite restaurant pasta dish… but did I really want the size? Did I really need the size?

I calorie counted everything in my baking, and learned where I could pare down the sugar and excess fat while still enjoying myself. And in baked goods where I learned just how calorie-heavy they were… I learned that I couldn’t eat them often – or at all, for that matter.

While I was doing all of this calorie counting, something was happening to me that I didn’t recognize at first, but I’m eternally grateful for after the fact. All of this experimenting with real ingredients as opposed to processed foods allowed me to redevelop my own sense of being full. That’s right – a lifestyle that relied on food that originated from dust and, within my insides, turned back into dust and failed to fill me… thus compelling me to eat more and consume more calories… altered my ability to eat intuitively. It worked against my intuition, and caused me to disconnect from it. It caused me to lose my ability to connect to myself and my body. I suspect I’m not the only person that has ever had that problem.

Being a calorie counter – as well as an amateur cook – allowed me to learn how different foods make me feel inside. I learned how foods with a lot of fat are much higher in calories and are supposed to fill you up quicker. I learned why there’s a difference in how I feel after eating my cheesecake vs someone else’s cheesecake… which taught me to stop eating someone else’s cheesecake. I learned.. I learned… I learned so much from my experience with counting calories that, if I had just bypassed it for the sake of “trying to become an intuitive eater,” I wholeheartedly believe I’d still be flailing about and clueless, almost 110lbs ago.

Why can’t we have both? Is the risk associated with calorie counting soooooo great that we cannot instead focus our energies on developing a healthy program that nurtures calorie counters into people who become more conscious of the contents of their dishes and better able to listen to their bodies? Why is wellness always all or nothing, especially when overlooking the middle usually results in a lot of people being left in the dust? And, let’s face it – some people want to lose weight. Is there something so wrong with that? They should be allowed to understand their bodies and how to better control the weight those bodies carry. (Or do we fear that allowing healthful discussion about “how to lose weight” implies that people need to lose weight? Isn’t it easier to just work to fix that mentality?)

In closing, I offer up a polite suggestion. Instead of railing against calorie counting… take the stance that, for those of us who don’t come from some grand understanding of “you’re an idiot if you don’t know that a cupcake isn’t healthy,” it is a way to learn just how unhealthy some things are. Understand that it helps us quantify just how bad our decisions are and can be if we aren’t conscious and careful. Understand that it helps us realize that each food we put into our bodies should serve multiple purposes – not just “be yummy” – because our bodies have needs… and our bodies try to tell us what they need, if we’re able to listen. You can’t make it from the first floor to the second without walking up a few steps… and for me, calorie counting was those steps.

So.. if I have to choose? Calorie counting. All day.

The Calorie Counting vs. Intuitive Eating Debate is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Understanding Calorie Counting: What is it? Calorie Counting Defined
2. Understanding Calorie Counting: Creating Your Calorie Goal and Being Honest About It
3. Understanding Calorie Counting: Preparing Yourself For Success

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 25 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: calorie counting, cheating, dieting, food relationships, Healthy Eating, intuitive eating, mentality, stress, using food to self-medicate, weight loss, wellness

And just then, the record (or CD …or MP3) skipped.

I get it. People who believe that the primary concern is calories… will drink a diet pop because the calorie count is low. (In fact, in some cases, it’s literally zero calories.) But clean eaters know better. Clean eaters know a few things about this mentality:

First, if you’re going to enjoy a zero calorie drink, it had better be water.

Secondly, a drink that has color and sweet sugary taste, but zero calories? That’s a highly processed product. No bueno.

Next, if it has no vitamins or minerals in it, it’s not worth my time ingesting it. Getting the most bang for our nutritional buck, here.

Lastly, if it has high fruc–

Uh, not so fast, Erika! Diet soft drinks don’t have high fructose corn syrup in them!

No, you’re absolutely right. It doesn’t have HFCS in it. It has aspartame in it. Ooooh, that’s so much better.

I’m not even going to go in on this. Someone already did:

“When aspartame was put before the FDA for approval, it was denied eight times. G.D. Searle, founder of aspartame, tried to get FDA approval in 1973. Clearly, he wasn’t bothered by reports from neuroscientist Dr. John Olney and researcher Ann Reynolds (hired by Searle himself) that aspartame was dangerous. Dr. Martha Freeman, a scientist from the FDA division of Metabolic and Endocrine Drug Products, declared, “The information submitted for review is inadequate to permit a scientific evaluation of clinical safety.” Freeman recommended that until the safety of aspartame was proven, marketing the product should not be permitted. Alas, her recommendations were ignored. Somehow, in 1974, Searle got approval to use aspartame in dry foods. However, it wasn’t smooth sailing from there. In 1975, the FDA put together a task force to review Searle’s testing methods. Task force team leader Phillip Brodsky said he “had never seen anything as bad as Searle’s testing” and called the test’s results “manipulated.” Before aspartame actually made it into dry foods, Olney and attorney and consumer advocate Jim Turner filed objections against the approval.

“In 1977, the FDA asked the U.S. attorney’s office to start grand jury proceedings against Searle for “knowingly misrepresenting findings and concealing material facts and making false statements in aspartame safety tests.” Shortly after, the U.S. attorney leading the investigation against Searle was offered a job by the law firm that was representing Searle. Later that same year, he resigned as U.S. attorney and withdrew from the case, delaying the grand jury’s investigation. This caused the statute of limitations on the charges to run out, and the investigation was dropped. And he accepted the job with Searle’s law firm. Stunning.

“In 1980, a review by the Public Board of Inquiry set up by the FDA determined that aspartame should not be approved. The board said it had not been presented with proof of reasonable certainty that aspartame is safe for use as a food additive.” In 1981, new FDA Commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes was appointed. Despite the fact that three out of six scientists advised against approval, Hayes decided to overrule the scientific review panel and allow aspartame into limited dry goods. In 1983, he got it approved for beverages, even though the National Soft Drink Association urged the FDA to delay approval until further testing could be done. That same year, Hayes left the FDA amid charges of impropriety. The Internal Department of Health and Human services was investigating Hayes for accepting gratuities from FDA-regulated companies. He went to work as a consultant for Searle’s public relations firm. Interesting. The FDA finally urged Congress to prosecute Searle for giving the government false or incomplete test results on aspartame. However, the two government attorneys assigned to the case decided not to prosecute. Later, they went to work for the law firm that represented Searle. Fascinating. Despite recognizing ninety-two different symptoms that result from ingesting aspartame, the FDA approved it for use, without restriction in 1996. Brilliant.

[...]

“Nutrasweet and Equal contain aspartame. When ingested, one of aspartame’s ingredients, methyl alcohol, converts into formaldehyde, a deadly neurotoxin. In addition to aspartame, Equal contains the amino acid phenylalanine. Phenylalanine occurs naturally in the brain. But high levels can increase the chance of seizures and lead to depression and schizophrenia. There is no lesser of the two evils. NutraSweet and Equal are both evil. Sweet and Low is no saint, either. It is an artificial sweetener that contains saccharin, a coal-tar compound.” [source]

I’m going to focus on three major issues, here.

For starters, this should lay to rest that philosophy of “If it were so bad for you, then the FDA wouldn’t have approved it.” The amount of trust we give our government officials would make sense if those positions weren’t held by people with their own humanity to contend with. Look at the instances of people who were bought off, paid off, pushed aside, ignored all to get this product approved.

Secondly, I’m a huge advocate of knowing what you’re eating – both the positive and negative information – before you eat it. If you didn’t know all of this about aspartame before you decided to make it a staple in your diet, is it time to reassess whether or not it belongs in your diet?

Thirdly, this is the issue with processed foods. They make use of chemicals used for other purposes in nature in order to create flavors and tastes in a fashion that would be much more costly if the actual foods themselves were used to make the product! You are introducing chemicals into your system… period.

“[Aspartame is a low-calorie sweetener made by joining two amino acids with an alcohol. It is approximately 180 times sweeter than sugar.] Some researchers claim to have linked aspartame to brain tumors and lymphoma, but the FDA insists that the sweetener is safe for humans. A list of complaints submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services includes headaches, dizziness, diarrhea, memory loss and mood changes. The Center for Science in the Public Interest states that children should avoid drinks sweetened with aspartame.” [source]

Think about it – a chemical was created to cause the brain to react to it in the same way as sugar. Many people – many people - claim they experience withdrawals when they take a break from products containing aspartame. The only other instance I can think of where a person is willfully introducing a mind-altering chemical into their system… definitely causes withdrawal symptoms when people break from it. I’m sure you’re familiar with heroin… cocaine… meth… I could go on, but I’m sure you get the point.

And since I’m ticking everyone off? Let’s talk about Splenda.

Knowing what we know about the 40-some-odd years of aspartame’s existence, splenda (made of sucralose), has an equally young past. One more quote:

Because we’re having so much fun, lets bash the shit out of Splenda, one of the newer sweeteners. Splenda is made by chlorinated sugar, changing its molecular structure. The finished product is called sucralose. The makers of this poison tout its lack of calories and claim it’s safe for diabetics. The FDA calls sucralose 98 percent pure. The other 2 percent contains small amounts of heavy metals, methanol, and arsenic. Well gee, at least it doesn’t have any calories. So what if it has a little arsenic? Sucralose has been found to cause diarrhea; organ, genetic, immune system, and reproductive damage; swelling of the liver and kidneys: and a decrease in fetal body weight. What a splendid product! [source]

Really, I’m over it. All those little diet dishes that are “sweet” thanks to this stuff? I’m over those, too. I have a family history of cancer… what do I look like putting known cancer-causing agents (also known as carcinogens) in my body? No thanks.

These sweeteners are not food. They are chemicals meant to trick your body into thinking they are something they aren’t. I don’t know how many different times, in how many different ways I can say this, but it goes as follows:

I don’t care how many miles you run each day, how many pounds of weight you lift or how chiseled your muscles are. You cannot live a fully healthy life if you ingest chemicals to survive. You are cheating your insides – screw what you look like on the outside – if you don’t care for them as much as you care for your abs, your booty, your legs or whatever else you adore. Period.

Believe it or not, I don’t share this stuff with the intention of telling anyone to give it up. We all (hopefully) have reasons for making the decisions we make. My point in sharing this information is so that we can, again, make educated decisions about the food choices we make. Clean eating is simple. Easy. The foods are of the Earth, I’m of the Earth, this is a win. When we introduce outside substances to our diet, our bodies deserve the twenty minutes it might take to hit up your favorite wellness-promoting website and do a search. It’s seriously not that hard.

I will say this, though: I’m a firm believer in the philosophy that says “those who know better, constantly strive to do better.” Just a thought.

The Case Against Diet Soda (And Aspartame… And Splenda.. And….) is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The Case Against Agave Nectar
2. No Food Stamps For Soft Drinks? Cracking Down On Soda Pop
3. The Case Against… Juice?

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 48 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: aspartame, clean eating, dieting, equal, Fad Diets, FDA, government, Healthy Eating, high fructose corn syrup, nutrition, processed foods, soft drinks, splenda, sucralose, sugar, sweeteners, sweetnlow

Q: Is it better to change my diet and lose weight THEN work out, or do them both at the same time?

My personal opinion is to slowly accommodate both at the same time. Make one modification at a time, see how it feels in your life and change it accordingly, then slowly add to or modify the other. So for example, if you begin with walking, see how you can fit that into your life. Then, spend time slowly converting to brown rice and finding ways to enjoy it. Then venture out into weight training.

The goal is to avoid overwhelming yourself, because this is about a sustainable lifestyle commitment.. not “losing 5lbs to fit into that dress.” ‘Cause even if it was just five pounds, you’d still need to make some changes in your current lifestyle to make sure that you don’t put on or keep those five pounds again. Make sense?

Q: How effective is oatmeal in a diet? Does it make you gain weight?

First, to clarify. When I, personally, talk about oatmeal, I’m not referring to those packets with the “fruit” and sweet flavors. I’m talking about plain oatmeal, possibly with cinnamon or a little vanilla extract.

Anything in unnecessary excess will make you gain weight. That said… because oatmeal is usually replacing something much more sugary, much more fatty, much less healthy… adding it to the diet for breakfast will absolutely serve as a tool for weight loss. A half cup of regular slow cooked oats is something like 150 calories? Shoot, go for it.

Q: How do you control cravings for sweets?

I find that I had a much more difficult time controlling my cravings when I was eating processed foods. I mean, my baking is awesome (humble much?) but because it doesn’t have the chemicals that you’d find in most processed foods – chemicals that are engineered to make it difficult to resist those foods – I’m able to better control my cravings for sugar. Shoot, I have a much harder time with salt than I do anything else! (And for that, I keep cashews and sunflower seeds on deck!)

So for starters, I’d learn to appreciate your own baking ability. If you can’t do that, seek out less addictive means of getting your sweetness – fruits! They have the natural ability to sweeten your tongue, along with the natural combination of nutrients to help you feel satisfied without quite the same negative affect on the body.

Q: What’s better – weight training or cardio?

In short? Both! Get some of both of ‘em!

Q&A Wednesday: Oatmeal, Sweets & Workouts! Oh my! is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Q&A Wednesday: Are They Jealous?
2. Q&A Wednesday: What Do I Do When I’ve Eaten Too Much?
3. Q&A Wednesday: Harder To Lose As We Age?

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2010. | Permalink | 18 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cravings, dieting, working out