Thursday, June 27, 2013

Day 46: A Little About Diets



It was a beautiful morning for jogging.  The moon lit everything up with its warm glow, there was a slight breeze, and despite the rain the humidity felt a little low.  I didn’t want to stop jogging but had to in order to go to work.  Isn’t that how it always is, work getting in the way.

While I was jogging I was thinking.  With all the exercise I have been doing I have not really lost much weight at all.  I know it all goes back to diet. Calories are a zero sum game.  If you burn what you take in and a little more you get weight loss no matter what you eat. 

I read an article a while ago and had to look it back up because I couldn’t remember all the details.  There is a guy named Mark Haub, he is a professor of human nutrition at Kansas. He theorized that weight loss was pure calorie counting. That is what mattered the most, not what you ate. 

He limited himself to 1800 calories.  His diet was Twinkies, Nutty Bars, Powdered Donuts, and Doritos, along with sugary cereal and cookies.  You would expect this man to die after a month but a crazy thing happened on the way to proving a crazy theory: He lost weight.

His bad cholesterol (LDL) dropped 20 percent.  By consuming garbage his body fat dropped from 33.4% to 24.9%.  Buy like any good nutritionist he felt guilty about eating pure junk in front of his kids so he did eat vegetables and health food with his family, still you can’t argue with his results. 

Now I’m going to theorize since I am a scientist a fact that we established quite a few blogs back if you haven’t read them.  What Haub really taught us was that we really don’t know what the body needs and uses as fuel.

When I tell people that for three months about once a week I ate a half a pound of bacon for breakfast and lost weight while lowing my cholesterol they look at me like I’m crazy.  It’s true I have the blood work to back it up. 

Let me give you one more example.  I worked with this crazy older guy once.  How crazy, you ask, well he chewed nicotine gum, not because he wanted to quit smoking (he had never smoked in his life) but because he like the gum and the nicotine helped him focus. 

This guy, at several points in his career, ran hospitals.  His problem was his cholesterol. His doctor told him he was a walking heart attack so he went on a diet.  A low-fat high fiber diet eating all the right rabbit food and his cholesterol got worse even on cholesterol medication. 

Next he tried South Beach and had the same effect.  Out of desperation he tried Atkins.  In several months with almost no exercise he lost over 50 pounds and bottomed out his cholesterol.  He ate bacon and fried eggs every morning.  Lunch was three or four hot dogs and cheese.  You get the picture.

Bottom line when it comes to diets I don’t believe any of the experts.  We are all different and what works for some of us will not work for all.  That’s all I got for today.

Daily Recap:
Matt: 36 Min AM Jog
Kelly: 1 Hour spin class y’all!

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