It just occurred to me that I haven’t written anything on my diet recently here. That’s because I’ve not been as great about following it, but I have been keeping carbohydrate intake relatively low, and as a result my weight has pretty much held steady for the last year, which is a victory itself.

When I do eat poorly too much sugar and too many refined foods, I feel depressed, tired, and sick. When I cut that stuff out, my mood improves and so does my energy level. Stress makes it more difficult to stay on the diet; awareness makes it easier. Too much awareness actually makes it more difficult.

I say this because the holier-than-thou, pseudo-religious, extremely arrogant attitude of people towards people who don’t share their food beliefs was a real incentive to fall off the wagon, and that goes for the low-carb crowd as much as it does the low-fat crowd.

Everyone is trying to find their way right now in the face of a polluted well of scientific data, and calling people who cook cupcakes drug pushers (for example) doesn’t help.

Anyway, so the plan now is to be on the diet and try not to worry a lot about the politics.

Cecil Adams takes a look at the notion that eating bacon is as dangerous as smoking cigarettes. Even using conventional ideas about nutrition, it’s not even close.

Kara Curtis talks to NPR about the shame of being fat. I bring this up because Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam recommended “public shaming” again as a way to treat the nation’s obesity epidemic.

“Hey, fatty! Pull that doughnut out of your pie hole! You look like a pig, and you are costing me, and every other taxpayer, billions of dollars in unnecessary health care each year!”

How do you like my new public service ad campaign, designed to stigmatize the overweight and the obese in the same way smokers have been made to feel the knout of social opprobrium for the past quarter-century? Weight of Public Opinion

Alex Beam calls this approach “new,” but it’s the same approach they used in my schoolyard over thirty years ago. Didn’t work then. And it won’t work now. What it will do is make people even more sick.

Continue reading “The shame of fat” »

Much of Europe was decimated in 1944 and Allied troops still in the European theater were expected to face starvation conditions. Ancel Keys, the father of the low-fat diet, wondered what the physical and psychological effect of extended starvation might be.

So he got ahold of thirty-two volunteers and subjected them to a 1,570 calorie diet of bread, potatoes, cereals, turnips, and cabbage — with only a little meat and dairy thrown in.
Continue reading “Encouraging Disordered Eating” »

James McWilliams says free-range meat is little improvement over factory-farmed meat, insisting that people should eat neither. His reasons that although meat animals raised in a free-range environment live happier, longer lives, this actually means their killing is less humane, not more:

Continue reading “Free-range meat” »

Paleo blogger Melissa McEwen takes a look at Healthy at Any Size, which I take it is one of the central tomes of the fat acceptance movement. Her conclusions: intellectually and morally speaking, Linda Bacon is right; the dietary advice leaves something to be desired.

She basically says enjoy your food, don’t feel guilty, but increase fiber intake dramatically and lower your meat/saturated fat intake. First part is good, but the rest is what happens when you drink only half the government-sponsored health recommendation Kool-Aid [ * * * ] It seems odd that she says the government scare-mongering about OMGFATPEOPLERUININGTHECOUNTRY is wrong, but their fat recommendations are right…hmmm.

The “Healthy at Any Size” approach generally strikes me as a good one, if perhaps a little enthusiastic. The acceptable weights ranges strike me as too narrow, an attitude that both Atkins and Paleo communities tend to share. My own goal weight will still leave me almost in the “obese” category. BMI advocates are recommending that we weigh in at the low end of the “normal” range which would put me between 140-157 lbs.
Continue reading “Healthy at a large size” »

This morning is “pick on Yglesias morning.” Again addressing the issue of obesity, Matt points to the chart below which shows that, yes, Americans are fatter than many other developed nations. But there are a lot of developed nations where obesity is increasing at similar rates.

Yglesias observes: “It’s clear that some local food cultures are healthier than others, but that’s not the same as saying that they’re immune to the underlying forces.” And that’s true. as far as it goes.

Continue reading “Everyone’s getting fatter” »

Matt Yglesias notes that while, yes, some “fast food meals” contain massive numbers of calories, it is possible to eat a healthy, 2,000 calorie diet from McDonald’s.

Consider the person, for example, who has an Egg McMuffin for Breakfast, a Big Mac and small fries for lunch, and a Big N’ Tasty With Cheese and medium fries for dinner. That comes out to 1960 calories. According to the Mayo Clinic a 5′9″ 30 year-old man who eats 2000 calories a day can maintain a healthy weight of 150 pounds with a physically inactive lifestyle. Medium Size Me

Which perfectly illustrates the problem with simply counting calories.

This would only work if the human body were like a kind of garbage furnace. But we eat food for more than just its caloric value, and what we choose to eat can have profound effects on our health.

Low carb evangelist and author Dana Carpender asks how her readers tell people they are low carb, so here’s my take.

A lot of people around me know I’m eating a low-carb diet. My co-workers read my blog occasionally, and I’ve talked about it on Facebook as well. There’s also the small matter of me eating cheese and meat at my desk almost every lunch time — people tend to notice that pattern.

When I first started eating this way, I was concerned about people thinking me strange or irresponsible for eating a low-carb diet. As I mentioned before it was very important for my self-image not to eat like a stereotypical fat man. But when you eat the hamburger patty but throw out the bun, low-fat fans are going to think you’re insane.

I got over that by realizing that, at over three hundred pounds, people already thought me fat, lazy, and irresponsible. Eating strangely was not going to make the difference. So now it doesn’t bother me to eat low-carb in public.

What I don’t do is hassle wait staff with low-carb requests: can I get that without the bun? How many grams of carbohydrate are in the dressing? Etc. For one thing my diet is moderately low carb — I don’t obsess, the way Dana does, about eating watermelon.

Dana also says this about sugar:

Continue reading “Low Carb in your face” »

I hovered around 295 for much of August, now I’m hovering around 290. My weight loss slowed quite a bit over the last month and a half as I relaxed a bit on my diet because of birthdays and vacations and such. But as long as I’m losing weight I’m not terribly concerned about the speed.

I do have strange moments where I’ll catch sight of myself in a mirror and mistake myself for someone else. Hey, that cat looks familiar. No, wait, that cat is me.

290 means I’ve lost twenty-three pounds; that still doesn’t seem like much to me given that my goal is to lose around 100; but it does make a big difference.