I lost 26 pounds

… now does that sound like a scam headline or what?  All it needs is the obligatory, “using this one weird trick.”

But I did not use any trick.  I followed a procedure that required some discipline. And I may have benefited from a specific physiology consequent to my ethnicity.

The headline makes a true statement, and the remainder of this post purports to explain how I did it.  But the headline remains somewhat of a scam, because its implicit promise—that you too can lose 26 pounds by doing what I did—is probably false.  Unless you have my kind of gallbladder.

My weight loss is genuine—from 152 pounds to 126, at height 5’ 7” to be specific—and occurred gradually over fifteen months, so is not some temporary response to a crash diet. And it has been sustained for months and months.

But you are unlikely to match my specs:

1. A sixty-something, who gained this weight, an average of about 8 ounces per year, over three decades. I was at the top of the “normal” BMI range when I started altering my diet and ended not very close to the bottom of that range, down perhaps two-thirds of the way to the bottom of “normal” BMI. That’s not huge.
2. Scots-Irish on the paternal side (typical R1 variant), and Mediterranean farmer on the maternal side (H5 mitochondria, in 23andme.com parlance).
3. Sedentary desk worker
4. Skinny teenager—at 18, BMI at or below the normal boundary
5. And—very important—first time dieter. My metabolism has no practice responding to calorie reduction by slowing down.  I took steps to make sure that slowdown didn’t occur (exercise); but check with me in 2-3 years. Maybe the loss will slowly be reversed, alas.
6. Also important: I have an active gall bladder, prone to creating stones if not fed enough fat.

How I did it

If we are a match in terms of physiological and genetic specs—and I can’t be confident that I captured the crucial specs—for your information, here’s what I did.

1. No snacks ever. (I had a terrible multi-decade habit of taking sugar/starch snacks, daily, at about 9-10 pm). It’s possible that all the other changes I made are irrelevant before this one powerful behavioral alteration.  I do not believe you can lose weight if you snack. So, first rule: no snacks.
2. Cut sugar way way down. As a heuristic, apply the salt standard to your sugar consumption: 2.6 grams per day. I mostly bust this standard (10 blueberries and 5 raspberries for breakfast, and 2 squares of very dark chocolate after lunch, probably amounts to 4-5 grams of sugar).  So take this as an aspirational goal.  In any case: no dessert ever (excepting holidays, and for God’s sake don’t insult your Aunt’s apple pie by refusing to eat any of it). Bottom line: on a day to day basis, try not to bust the sugar standard by any more than most Americans bust the salt standard.
   1. BTW, this means no juice ever: no orange juice, no delicious strawberry-banana all-natural oo la la, nada, zilch. If you are serious about losing weight.
3. No grain flour—especially no finely pulverized wheat flour. No wheat pasta, no bread, no pizza crust, no pancakes. Small amounts of rice once or twice a week—after your weight loss has got some traction. Potatoes likewise.  Else, eat bean pasta, bean chips, low carb tortillas (mostly oat fiber), yada yada.
   1. I just scrape the toppings off the pizza (after beefing up what’s on the store-bought version)
   2. It’s hard to scrape the toppings off a sandwich. That’s where the low carb tortillas and the bean chips come in
4. Take no notice of and do not attempt to control / reduce carbs in any intact vegetable. Have all the vegetables, legumes, and beans you want. I believe these to be irrelevant to weight loss.

Objections

The typical response to such a Spartan regime is “the ordinary person will never sustain it.  And if you do have that kind of discipline, you would have succeeded in losing weight on almost any conceivable diet.”

Mebbe so. But I’ve left out all the fun stuff.  I’m able to follow those four rules because:

1. I eat whole fat yogurt every breakfast, and cheese at each of the other two meals. All kinds of delicious cheese, from Brie to Cheddar to Havarti to Swiss to Gouda to Camembert, and more.
2. I eat eggs multiple times per week, and sausage, bacon, prosciutto, and salami two or three times per week
3. I eat fish, chicken, beef, lamb, and pork in rotation, and in various preparations, for dinner.
4. I have nuts many breakfasts, nuts instead of lunch sometimes, and pistachios after dinner as my “dessert” almost every day

So in practice, this has been a high fat, low carb diet.  But I don’t know that the fat is a good in its own right; it’s simply a means of achieving satiety so that snacking can be avoided and to make sure I don’t miss or crave the bulk associated with grains. Think antipasti without the pasta, stir fry without the rice, sandwich fillings without the bread, pizza without the crust.

And driving carb consumption toward zero is also not a goal. But when you avoid grain flour, and minimize sugar, carb consumption levels topping out at 20 to 50 grams per day readily occur.

And I lost 26 pounds in fifteen months following this bacon and brie, sausage and cheddar, ham and eggs diet.  While drinking red wine at dinner, daily.

However, enduring, even celebrating bouts of hunger every day, just as I was ready to start my exercise in the afternoon, may have been important to my success.  Feel the burn! Turns out, hunger became so much easier to bear when grain flour carbs had been banished. Feel hungry, lift weights.  Or trot up a hill. Kick that metabolism up, just in case it tries to slow down in response to any inadvertent calorie restriction.

Last, note that a vegetarian could not follow my regime; a person with hypertension could not follow it (too much salt); plus, this diet is not in the least kosher; plus, a person with cardiac issues would have to think long and hard about the saturated fat.

But if you have none of these issues, but you do have my kind of gall bladder—not so hard!

Wrap a piece of salami around a slice of cheddar, enclose a green bean, serve with a bean chip, and think of me.

Dip into some carnitas using a bean chip.  First melt a few ounces of cheese on top. Add salsa to taste.

Roll up some smoked turkey, cheese, and guacamole into a low carb tortilla, and add salsa—that’s lunch!

And two squares of 88% dark chocolate with coffee after lunch—mmm, good.

PS: to the best of my knowledge, there are no scientific studies to support my explanation of why I lost weight. Take it for what it’s worth.

In addition, I believe ethnic heritage remains the unexplored factor in diet success. Not sure what can be generalized from my personal odyssey.

In this connection: All university studies of which I am aware speak of “subjects (human).” Unless, if woke, they will speak of “experimental participants.”  In both cases the presumption, laudable in political contexts, is that we are all just human.  Full stop. No ethnic differentiation.  No account of what the participants’ ancestors had to eat.

Big problem.

Alas, the university located in Ohio taps mostly German and Northwest European ancestries, most of whose remote ancestors either survived on wheat and dairy, or died.  The New England university taps a range of French, Polish, Italian and Irish ancestries, many of whom were herders or farmed diverse grains.  The Florida university taps a range of Hispanic and African ancestries mixed in with Anglo-Saxons, with accordingly diverse ancestral diets. But all compete equally in the field of “scientific knowledge of human diets.”  All enroll “human subjects.”

All university studies use small samples of these unlabeled “humans.”  Is it any wonder that nutritional science is a mess?  Unless, of course, you believe that the human gut has no history.

PPS: think of carbohydrates, fat, and protein as the scientific equivalent of earth, wind, fire and water. In other words, nutritional science remains in a pre-Mendeleev state. Any account of what you should eat that dwells at the level of these “macro-nutrients” should be granted the same scientific credibility as one that speaks of “balancing the humours.”  

“No cane sugar” is a meaningful rule.  It names a food not to eat. “Eat a low carb diet” is not a meaningful rule. It lumps hundreds of foods together under the label of a macro-nutrient. Beans have lots of carbs. Cane sugar has lots of carbs. Carrots have lots of carbs. Wonder Bread has lots of carbs. Lumping together these very different foods serves no purpose.  Eat the carrots, eat the beans.  Avoid the sugary drinks and avoid the refined wheat flour.

My advice: Speak the language of food. Minimize discussion of nutrients. Name ingredients and specify their form: wheat flour, cane sugar. Laud foods by name: asparagus, artichoke, avocado. Don’t say, “eat your vegetables.”

And remember: I titled this blog “essays, opinion and advice.”