Fasting
For ten years I experimented with fasting. For four years, starting in 2004, I only ate every other day. On the days that I did eat, I did not hold back and ate what I wanted.
Then I would start to fast at about 8 that evening. I would eat nothing the next day and break the fast at about 8 in the morning of the day after that. So I would go about 36 hours without eating anything. After that, I would allow myself free rein for about 12 hours. Then I would start another 36 hour fast.
After 2008, I fasted twice a week, usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays. At the end of 2013, I started to drift out of the habit of going without food for a day at a time. In 2014 I resumed eating at least something every day.
Sometimes I would go a few days with only one meal. But for the most part, I rejoined the mainstream and ate at least two meals a day.
One thing that going without food did was make me very aware of the emotions and physical sensations connected to eating. I discovered that fasting wasn’t that hard. I noticed that on the fasting days the desire to eat would peak around 4:00 p.m. but disappear entirely after 8:00 p.m.
Going about my day on an empty stomach I felt more alert than on the eating days. The word that comes to mind when I think of the physical sensations is clean. Freed from the burden of processing food, my body felt lighter and more flexible. The desire to move around was much greater than on the days I ate.
I have never felt better than the mornings when I woke up after 36 hours without food. My body would feel like it was 18 again and I had lots of energy. I loved going for a run or to the gym on those days before ending the fast by eating breakfast. Sometimes I felt so good I was reluctant to eat because eating always brought me back down to earth.
I also discovered how important eating is as a purely social activity. A huge amount of our time and interactions with others have to do with eating. Eating is also a great source of pleasure in itself. These were the factors that caused me to end my experiment. But just sitting here remembering the benefits I experienced, tempts me to resume it.
As you might guess, fasting was very effective at keeping me lean. When I gave it up I was confronted with the challenge of keeping my weight under control while eating every day. This forced me to start paying close attention to what I eat and how much I weigh.
For example, the human body is very adaptable. It easily and completely adjusted to the alternate day schedule. It picked up the rhythm and stuck with it so loyally that I felt uneasy even thinking about eating on the fasting day.
I discovered that the body is a superb calorie counter. It is very sensitive to bad food, too much food, and eating while in the wrong state of mind. I became very familiar with the signals it sends out when I am eating too much or a food is having a bad effect on me. I realized that if I feel crummy after eating, something is wrong and needs to be corrected.
The body provides us with lots of information about our eating habits. It sends out a variety of signals that, if we pay attention to them, can save us from ourselves. The default mode of modern life is to tune out these signals so that we are completely unaware of them. In the rare instances when they become so strong we can’t help but notice them, our default response is to disregard them.
The Immobile Obese
Periodically there are news stories of massively obese people who weigh more than a thousand pounds. Special means are needed to take them to the hospital when their condition leads to complications requiring in-patient treatment. Typically these people live their lives entirely in a bed.
They are immobile. So they depend on caregivers for most everything. In one segment I saw, they laid out what the heavy person ate in one day. The spread looked like it was for a party. Not only was considerable effort needed to bring that volume of food to the bedridden person, a lot of money was going into buying it.
The overweight person certainly bears some responsibility for their own condition. But their enablers are far more important. I could not help but think that all these food fetchers had to do was bring only water for a while and the problem would be solved soon enough.
Think back to the days when humans had to chase and kill their meals. Could a situation like this ever arise? Not likely.
Back then, the calories expended in the chase could easily exceed those consumed in the meal. But today, it is easy to take in many more calories than we have to expend in obtaining what we eat. All it takes is a few steps to the car and the store. If a meal is not ready to eat then perhaps a few more calories must be expended in cooking it. And. of course, some effort is required to get the food into our mouths.
While the caloric cost of these trivial efforts is small, they are work nonetheless. When we overeat, we are not that different from the bed-bound obese. It’s a question only of degree. We too are making an effort to be overweight. And this effort often is directly contrary to our intentions.
What’s Missing ?
Much has been written about weight-control. The issue has been heavily researched. A multi-billion dollar industry has arisen selling every conceivable remedy. This essay is a tiny drop in a very big ocean.
We’ve read a thousand times that we should eat vegetables and exercise more. These two suggestions are good advice. In fact, there are many solid recommendations we have all seen many times. So why aren’t we making more progress?
We just can’t get ourselves to do what our minds say we must. Why is that? Why can’t we get ourselves to do what we know we should?
We watch as our hand reaches into the potato chip bag over and over, even though we feel the negative feedback our body broadcasts as we plow through the big chips then turn our efforts to the smaller ones. The body senses the salt overload and sends unpleasant sensations warning us to stop. But we press onward through to the salty cornflake-sized fragments at the bottom of the bag and only stop when the last crunchy shard is resting uncomfortably in our stomach.
We feel crummy after this experience. But we don’t learn from it. At least not for long. We may avoid potato chip bags for a day or two but we will soon find ourselves in the same situation again. Not everyone does this with potato chips. But almost all of us has had a similar experience with some food.
Our daily lives are full of this kind of mad self-torment. Over and over we find ourselves with abdominal discomfort and other unpleasant sensations. Yet we blow right past these warning flags our bodies wave in a vain effort to make us stop.
The answer lies not in action, but inaction. Our bodies tell us what we are doing is a mistake. We just have to stop it. Yet we override natural tendencies that could protect us from ourselves. And the irony is that we have to work pretty hard to do it.
So what is missing ? Why do we do this ? How can we unlearn this harmful behavior ?
The missing ingredient is awareness of the negative feedback our body sends out when we abuse food. The signals are there. But we tune them out.
If we can be more attentive to the body’s own signals, we can dial down the effort that makes us fat and sick. We can abandon behavior that is unnatural and unpleasant. All we have to do is pay attention.
Now, thanks to Steve Jobs, we have a wonderful tool to help us pay attention. The smartphone’s camera and memory make it easy to focus on exactly what we are eating and how it is affecting us. With just a smartphone and a bathroom scale anyone can see their own habits clearly.
The Diary
The first step is to watch. Thanks to the smartphone it’s easy. Just take a picture of everything you eat and everything you drink. That’s it.
I have been doing it for a while and it takes about five minutes a day. I have had no problem keeping the habit going. It requires very little effort.
Everything means just that, everything. You need to take a snapshot of everything headed for your stomach. No exceptions. Undocumented eating is your enemy. Don’t eat anything you have not photographed.
These pictures are not for Facebook. They are for you. You don’t need to share them with anyone. You are the only person who needs to see them. This is just between you and you.
It takes a while to get this habit going. If you forget, don’t beat yourself up about it. If you remember in time, take a picture of the empty plate. If all else fails, write down what you ate and take a picture of the list. The important thing is to stick with it despite the inevitable slips.
Keep at it and the photos will start to accumulate. Right away you will be more conscious of your eating. Just the act of photographing what you eat will focus your attention on what is going on between you and food.
Do not be discouraged by what you see in the pictures. Do not judge the person who is eating that way. Your role is to be an objective observer and not a critic.
Once you have gone four days in a row where you have taken a photo of everything you ate it’s time to start taking a picture of your scale. Weigh yourself and take a picture of the reading every day. You want the conditions to be consistent.
So weigh yourself as close to the same time every day as you can. Doing it at the beginning of the day is simplest. If you want to do it after going to the bathroom, that’s fine. If you want to do it straight out of bed, that’s ok too. Just be sure all of your weigh-ins are the same in that regard. Naked is simplest but it’s ok to have something on when you weigh yourself provided you are wearing the same thing every day when you check your weight.
I think digital scales are easier to work with than scales with a dial. On the dial scale the needle may jump around as you try to take its picture. You may end up with 3 pictures, each of a different weight. Digital scales don’t have this problem.
You may find taking snapshots of your scale easier than photographing your food. You only need to do it once each day. So it’s easier to remember. But if you run into trouble, relax and use the same methods that you used to train yourself to take pictures of what you eat. Whatever you do, don’t stop altogether. Keep it going. Again, the photographic evidence of what is happening will start to accumulate.
Once these two habits are up and running, you will have a food and weight diary. The weight and the food consumption will be neatly and indisputably documented by date. You will be able to look back and see exactly what you have been doing.
The last step is to begin predicting what you will weigh the next day. After you have eaten the last morsel of the day and before you go to bed, ask yourself what you expect your weight will be at the following day’s weigh-in. Write it down on a piece of paper and take a picture of the number.
Do it every day.
Your prediction will be the last photo of each day. This is the third habit. Without your knowing it, the photography and weighing you have already done have taught you something about how your food choices influence the number on your scale.
Some of this knowledge is unconscious. You will have an intuitive feeling as to what the next day’s number will be. Respect it.
It’s fine to add up the calories in your head if you want to. But the intuitive knowing is what you want to perfect. Your body has had this knowledge all along. The picture-taking and guesstimation is just a way to clear a path so you can be aware of it.
You don’t need to count calories. Every day your body is precisely measuring what you are taking in. Thinking about it will never equal getting to know the physical feelings that the food you have eaten produces.
Once these habits are entrenched in your routines you can start to use this new knowledge to make a food budget for yourself. From the experience you have accumulated you will know how much you can eat if you want to lose, maintain or increase your weight.
Remember, the object at this stage is not to change anything. The point of the diary and the predictions is simply to watch yourself and see what is happening. Every day compare your prediction with the actual number on the scale at the next weigh-in.
Just stick to the plan of documenting what you eat, what you weigh every day, and what you think you will weigh the next day. Keep it going and you will begin to know yourself much better than you did before.
No doubt what you see will be about what you expected. But the view of it will be clearer. You should start to see some patterns.
Be careful about trying to change anything at this point. The behavior you are observing has a lot of momentum behind it. It’s ok to wait until later before attempting to alter it. But if you do try, keep the goals modest. Don’t be discouraged if the results are disappointing.
Patience at this stage is critical. There is no quick fix. Even if you do succeed in making a massive change, unless you go through the process of building and maintaining new habits, there is a very high risk you will relapse and the progress you have made will evaporate. So set small goals. It is better to make a small change you can maintain than to make big changes only to have things snap back to what they were or, worse yet, to rebound off a change to a worse point than where you started.
Just keep photographing your weigh-in, what you eat, and what you predict the next day’s weight will be. Your only mission at this point is to cement the habit of doing these things. If you want to try eating slightly less each day, it’s certainly ok. For now, though, the goal is just to see, objectively, what you are doing, to get familiar with how it feels and to learn the differences between the days followed by a higher, steady or lower number.
My Relationship with the Potato Chip
My earliest memory of potato chips is of the cans they came in. My parents were not wealthy and bought foods in bulk. I must have been in second or third grade and the cans seemed enormous. Childhood memories of size can be distorted. But this one is accurate.
The cans really were big. The company was Charles Chips. I found one of their cans, now a collectible antique, on Etsy. The seller said it is 13.5 inches high and has a diameter of 12.25 inches. That’s more than six gallons of potato chips.
The Charles Chips of that day delivered. A route man would regularly bring a new can. I can see the cornflake-sized bits that were left at the bottom just before the new can came. But I cannot recall there ever being a stale chip. So we must have been working our way through those bins at quick pace.
I don’t have any memories of anyone else making withdrawals from this hoard. I’m sure I didn’t empty these cans alone. But I know I ate a lot of potato chips during that phase of my life.
No one had a second thought about a boy eating a lot of potato chips. Their power was well known. There was even a 1952 blues tune about them. But no one saw anything bad in it.
The idea of food coming in six gallon cans was, I think, a feature of the idea of abundance that came after the depression ended and the great improvement in living standards that followed World War II. The size of that effort provided a model for scaling up lots of things, including agriculture. Mechanization and chemical tinkering produced larger harvests at lower costs.
The privation of the depression was still an active memory for grandparents. Supermarkets were organized to let everyone know we were in a new age of plenty. The piles of fruits and shelves lined with competing brands of peanut butter were there to reassure as well as sell.
Whereas before hunger was something Americans met face-to-face now it was an abstraction featuring poor starving children in places very far away. We were told to think of our counterparts suffering in those places and clean our plates. I wondered how this might be helpful to them but that wasn’t the point. That instruction was the rear guard action fought by the “waste not, want not” ethic of the past on its way to irrelevance.
This was an achievement. There were still people who didn’t eat well. But food stamps and welfare meant it was not food but starving people that were scarce.
Hunger had been banished. There was a hidden cost, however, that people didn’t notice. Flavor and nutritional content were largely forgotten in the march to abundance.
Wonderbread, a staple that those who had experienced hunger were happy to have, is now an embarrassment. It is a perfect example of what was sacrificed in the transition to abundance. The nutrients and flavor of bread were left behind. It filled you up but that was it.
There is a Netflix show called “Chef’s table.” It is a documentary series about creativity in restaurant kitchens. The age of abundance made this self-indulgence possible.
The very first chef in the series tells how he spoke with a plant breeder about perhaps coming up with a more flavorful squash. The breeder was delighted to work the problem. No one had ever asked him to use his talents to improve flavor. And probably he doesn’t get many requests to boost nutrients either.
The quality of the soil has declined as abundance has increased. The level of nutrients in the soil is much lower than before modern agriculture and this nutrient poverty affects the foods we grow as well. Now that virtually everyone in America is fed enough to get fat, it’s time to focus on nutrients as well as calories. And a little attention to flavor would be nice too.
Thanksgiving and Stuffing
Thanksgiving is the uniquely American holiday. Air fares jump and the roads clog with families coming together to celebrate it. It has always been my favorite holiday.
You may have noticed that the marquee event of Thanksgiving is a big meal. The operative word is stuff. We stuff the turkey and we stuff ourselves. Eating until we can’t manage another bite is at the center of the ritual.
I hate to blame my favorite holiday, but I’m afraid Thanksgiving is responsible for America’s adoption of feeling stuffed as the national satiety signal. Being physically uncomfortable from a bulging stomach is our cue to stop eating. In fact, stopping before that point can leave us anxious that we haven’t eaten enough.
Another American habit rooted in this holiday is seconds. A Thanksgiving dinner where we don’t empty our plates and then fill them again with second helpings would seem odd. And we carry this habit over to daily life as well.
The body tries to tell us it doesn’t enjoy being stuffed with seconds. Sitting may be uncomfortable after such a meal. If we go to bed too soon, we may experience acid reflux where the stomach contents and the organ’s digestive chemicals back up into the esophagus causing misery and the need for over-the-counter remedies.
We need to adopt a new, national satiety signal. America needs to relax. We are not on the verge of starvation and don’t need to store up fat for the winter. Stopping when our stomachs are not completely full is ok.
The SetPoint and its Band
All kinds of things have to be just right for the human body to continue living. From its overall temperature to the acidity of its blood, conditions within the body have to be kept within a certain range. The process of keeping all of these values under control is called homeostasis.
Temperature is the example we all know. When we are well, the body is very successful in keeping our temperature close to 98.6 Fahrenheit (aka 37 degrees centigrade). But there are lots of other variables that also have to be maintained.
Things may bounce around within a narrow band but they rarely slip outside of it. The body’s sensors constantly monitor them. When they stray toward the boundaries of their appointed band, processes are turned on and off to push the numbers back where they belong.
Again, temperature is the one we know best. We don’t have to think about it at all. It’s automatic. When we warm up too much we sweat and when we cool down too much we shiver. It doesn’t matter whether we want to sweat or shiver, the response switches on whether we like it or not.
The target value is called the set point. For temperature, 98.6 F is the set point. This number will vary slightly by time of day, activity, the temperature of the surrounding space, and how we are dressed. Its band is relatively narrow, about half a degree. Anything beyond that is likely a sign of illness.
Suppose you go for a run when it’s 30 degrees out. You may be shivering when you start because the wind is pushing your temperature below 98.6. But after 20 minutes, the exertion has increased your temperature above the setpoint and you will have started sweating to lower it.
Body weight works the same way. When body mass slips below the setpoint, we feel we should eat something. Back when we still had to chase our food, hunger would stimulate us to pick some berries or sharpen a stick and go spear something. A full stomach would encourage a siesta.
For the prosperous modern human, however, the chase is no longer required. Food is never far away and little effort is needed to put it on our plates. The setpoint still works and weight fluctuates in a band around it. If weight starts to drift lower, an urge to have a second helping of something surfaces. If weight starts to drift higher, the desire to eat subsides and we may skip a portion that we might otherwise take.
The problem is the setpoint for weight is not fixed like the set point for temperature. It can drift up or down. Sadly, for us this adjustment mechanism has become skewed to the upside. We are a little bored, so food becomes a form of entertainment. We may be sad or anxious and eat to soothe these feelings. We don’t move much and eat high-calorie foods. The processes still work but, over time, setpoint creep can move the band higher.
The minute we try to follow a diet plan that involves a reduction in what we eat, the set point fights back. The mechanism turns on powerful urges to make up for the missing calories. It can even cause us to overcompensate and, after brief initial success, we find the number on the scale is higher than when we started.
To achieve lasting weight reduction, we have to get the set point to move to a new level. Whipping it into line does not work well. The effort has to be more of a steady, gentle nudging.
Portions Chosen by Others
A few years ago, I had my kitchen remodeled and ate in restaurants for the better part of a month. I was surprised to see my weight decrease. There was little mystery in why. I was being served fixed portions. When I ate the last morsel and the waiter cleared the plate, that was it. Like a kindergartner who gets a small ration before nap time, the decision regarding how much I was to eat was out of my hands.
The bigger the distance between the executive decision about how much to eat and the actual act of eating, the more likely it is the decision will stand and not be overridden. In the kindergarten case, the decision is made far away from the action. In the restaurant, the management and the chef decided for me how much I would be eating if I ordered a particular plate.
I could expand it by ordering sides or a dessert but even in those cases, the portion was fixed. No bulging potato chip bag beckoned. My options for overeating were limited because I had not selected an “all you can eat” restaurant or a place that specialized in super-sized portions. They gave me my allotted quantities and that was the end of it.
When the remodel is done and life returns to its usual groove the executive decision moves back to its usual perch just a few feet away from the spot where food gets shoveled and scarfed despite the best intentions. Open containers and ready spoons make breaching the flimsy barricades set out by the executive decision too easy. But well-tended habits can keep things under control.
The habit is to put a generous but not excessive portion on the plate then put the food sources away. The simple act of placing additional work in the way of second helpings may not always succeed. But it can help. When paired with a rule that you will wait five minutes after finishing before even considering another helping this can help.
The portion should be big enough to leave you full but not stuffed. It is better to err on the high side. As you eat, enjoy the experience and pay attention to how you feel. Be alert for the point where you notice the serving was too much.
Plating Matters
A large plate invites a larger portion than a small plate. Using smaller plates is an easy way to skew portion size lower. I have completely given up eating off of the standard “dinner plate.” Surprisingly small differences in portion size can change the numbers that will appear on your scale the next day.
The Marginal Portion
For convenience I call the quantity necessary to see a change on the scale the marginal portion. It is the quantity of food that is necessary to change your weight at the next day’s weigh-in by the smallest unit your scale registers. Subtract it and your weight will be lower. Add it and your weight will be higher.
The scale I use is only accurate to half a pound and that’s good enough. Getting more precise isn’t particularly helpful. Obsessing about small numbers will distract from the work of getting familiar with the body’s signals. So don’t waste money on a super-accurate scale.
Trying to figure this out with your intellectual as if it were a math problem is hard. Every food has its own impact. Measuring the quantity and looking up the calories in a table is tedious and shifts attention away from the body’s signals. So I don’t recommend doing a lot of that kind of calculating.
Simply observing over time you will pick up on what happens. Soon you will know intuitively how much of a particular food it takes to affect your weight. The knowledge will be in the form of a feeling rather than a thought.
All you have to do is watch carefully and you will eventually know all you need to about how different foods and different portions affect you.
Feeding Oneself
When we eat at home we do all the jobs that in a restaurant are done by the menu planner, chef, and wait staff. We also play the role of the guest. The planner decides what goes in each dish. The chef prepares the food. The wait staff take our orders and deliver the dishes to our table.
When it’s just us, we mix these roles and the result is a stuffed guest. The problem is the guest has a tendency to choose unbalanced food combinations. The guest heavily samples the cooking while in the kitchen preparing it. In the place of a waiter bringing dishes the guest puts the pot on the table and ladles second and third servings onto the plate, stopping only when the pressure of the food already eaten becomes uncomfortable.
The more separation we can put between these roles, the better our chances of keeping the process within reasonable bounds. The more distance there is between the roles of meal planner and food-eater, the less manic the guest will be. If we plan the meal on Monday and only eat it on Thursday, the less opportunity there is for a feeding frenzy to affect what goes on the plate.
If we prepare the food, serve the plates and then put the remaining contents of the pot in the refrigerator, we have limited the guest’s ability to overeat by providing a fixed serving just like we get in a restaurant. We perform the waiter’s function of delivering only what the meal planner conceived. We can, of course, jump up, grab an extra ration of cookies and consume them in a frenzied state. But breaking up the roles and putting space between them makes this harder.
If we have such a lapse it’s not the end of the world. We can try again the next day, and the next and at some point the balance of power will shift and the binging behavior will become more and more unpleasant. Firming up the boundaries between the roles will help.
Thinking about the meal is best done from a distance. The ideal would be to plan seven days of menus, think through what will be needed for each, and buy the ingredients the day we are going to cook it. For most of us this is way more organized than we are likely to ever be. But even if we are picking something up on the way home, we can still use the distance from the immediate moment of eating to make more deliberate choices.
In preparing the food we have a tendency to make more than we need. There is a fear of running short and there not being any second helpings. We can work on erring on the side of too little rather than too much. We can keep some apples in the crisper and use them to fill any aching void that opens up because the portions don’t fill us completely.
Setting the table and plating the food before taking the first bite is a civilized act. In doing it we respect the part of ourselves that is the guest. It places an interval between the cooking and the eating. It gives us a chance to slow down and calm the frenzy. Making this step a regular ritual performed with reverence rather than simply attacking the food with the desperately shaking hands of an addict reaching for their favorite substance will change the overall experience and make it easier to stop when the right moment arrives.
Set out the entire meal at one time. Repeated trips back to the kitchen for each dish open the door to eating more than originally planned. If it is necessary to reheat a dish in the microwave while you are eating, that’s ok as long as you start with the full meal laid out in one place and don’t add anything.
The irony of our warped relationship with food is that it diminishes the pleasure of eating. This is just one special case of how modern life as it is lived in the United States promotes anxiety and feeling hurried. These emotions bring with them muscle tensions and scattered attention that prevent us from experiencing the basic pleasures of life.
Being Hungry
In years gone by, Americans experienced real hunger. In many cases that hunger was part of long-term malnutrition caused by hardship. We came to view hunger with horror and dread.
Then came abundance. Cheap food piled high replaced the thin rations of yesteryear. God forbid that any of us should go to bed hungry.
But the human body was designed to go without food on a regular basis. Missing a meal is not the end of the world. Nor is going a full day with nothing to eat going to do any harm to a healthy person.
Actually, fasting has a lot of benefits. The digestive system gets a rest. And, like a factory with no orders to fill, when the food runs out the body focuses on maintenance.
And no, a hungry body will not collapse if it doesn’t lie around waiting for a slice of pizza to revive it. Think about it. Did our ancestors react to hunger by lying around? No, they went in search of food. They hustled for their next meal.
Actually, the feeling of being hungry has a clean taste. If you go a full day with no food you will notice some periods of discomfort. You might get a headache for a while. But you will feel like our predecessors felt. Your muscles will itch to get out and do something.
Being hungry is ok. A reasonably healthy person is not going to die if they miss a meal. An overweight person could actually do what nature planned and get by on their fat stores for quite a while provided they have adequate water and electrolytes.
So limiting yourself to two meals per day with no snacks in between will be just fine. Giving your digestive system time to do its job and fully process one meal before shoving a new one into a still full stomach is actually a good idea. But you have to get familiar with the feelings that go with that and not panic when your stomach says it’s empty.
Nutrient Hunger
Food gives us two things we need to stay alive. The first is energy. The second thing we need are the building blocks the body requires to make muscle and blood and skin and bones. The modern American diet is generally energy-rich and nutrient-poor.
What I learned from fasting is that nutrients satisfy hunger differently from energy-dense foods like sugar. I remember quite clearly the day I realized this. I had just come in from a morning run on a very cold day. I hadn’t eaten for 36 hours.
I had made a chicken soup with a lot of vegetables. It was the most nutrient-dense thing I knew how to make. I heated some up and opened a drawer to pull out a spoon.
As soon as the spoon touched the soup I momentarily lost conscious control over my hand. My hungry body took over completely and I became a spectator. My hand brought two or three spoonfuls to my mouth before my inner hungry animal released its grip and I was once again in control. It was a very primal feeling.
The soup was satisfying in a very different way from a donut. After eating it I felt very calm. I cannot remember ever feeling calm after eating a pastry.
Dr. Joel Fuhrman has written extensively about fasting and nutrition. It was his 1998 book Fasting and Eating for Health that reassured me alternate-day eating would do no harm. He has come up with his own food pyramid. I have no doubt he is right in what he says about the benefits of his “Nutrarian” approach.
There is a lot of research that backs his vegetable-heavy recommendations. I have experimented with a lot of different food combinations and definitely feel better when vegetables predominate. This includes my mental state. I was quite surprised when I noticed that my mood was brighter after eating kale several days in a row.
Dr. Fuhrman’s recommendations are a little too austere for me to adopt them all. But his point about micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals and organic compounds found in plants is indisputably correct. Any lasting weight solution will require an adjustment to the mix of plant and animal foods.
Sugar
A quick search on the internet will provide all you need to know about refined sugar. In my reading about it, one comment kept coming up. If sugar were evaluated as if it were a new food additive, it would not be allowed. Its effects are too harmful.
When human beings were evolving, they did not encounter refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup. These are relatively recent achievements. So the availability of this pleasant-tasting product is something new our bodies were never designed to handle.
It is a testament to the resilience of our bodies that we can function at all with the high load of sugar that comes with a modern, western diet. Eating sugar does not make everyone sick. People are different. The amount consumed varies from person to person and individuals can react differently to sugar.
One thing is clear. Eating a lot of sugar will not make you healthy. The only rational choice is to keep sugar intake low.
The question then becomes what to do about sugar in your diet. The answer is obvious. We need to make refined sugar a rare treat.
The easy part is to exile the sugar bowl from your table. The standard diner setup with salt, pepper, and a sugar bowl on every table is not helpful. So don’t replicate it at home.
The real difficulty is with added sugar. Our recipes and processed foods are loaded with it. In the case of recipes, I try to omit the sugar entirely if I can. Sometimes the chemistry of the recipe requires sugar and omitting it will lead to an unsatisfactory result. Perhaps it is best to find something else to make that doesn’t require a big dose of sugar.
In many cases, it is possible to substitute apples or raisins. How much this helps in terms of your metabolism is not entirely clear since they have to be ground up to get the particle size small enough so they can integrate with the other ingredients. However, it does help psychologically in building an aversion to the white powder. You want to get to the point where the idea of dumping sugar into anything you are going to eat makes you feel uneasy. Using this workaround helps in reinforcing the new habit of avoiding refined sugar.
Compounds like saccharin and aspartame that fool the senses into thinking we are consuming sugar seem to be safe if you use them sparingly. I mean like sparingly as in one packet a week and not several a day. You need to move your sugar expectation from frequent to rare.
I like iced tea in the summer. My mother taught me to make it Southern-style, a half-gallon at a time, with a huge scoop of sugar. When I think about it today I cringe.
I never make iced tea in quantity anymore and only drink it in restaurants. I order it unsweetened and then use saccharin to approximate the taste of what I drank as a teenager. I prefer saccharin to aspartame because one time I drank a lot of aspartame-sweetened diet sodas on a road trip and noticed they were giving me a headache. Saccharin has been around longer and the animal experiments that led it to being required to have a warning label have been eclipsed by human epidemiological studies that do not support the conclusion it is a human carcinogen. Another sugar substitute is Stevia, which can be bought in liquid form and works well with coffee and tea.
The details of the compromises you make matter less than the overall picture. The top priority needs to be giving up daily habits that prevent you from attaining goals. Secondly, thinking about sweet foods, not as something to have with every meal or even every day, but as special treats to be eaten only occasionally and in small quantities is an important part of building new habits.
Food Budget
Once you have tracked your eating and weight for a while, you will have a good feel for where your set point is. You will have an equally good feel for what your marginal portion is. You will have an intuitive sense of what will bring you up to the setpoint and what will push you past it or allow you to fall a little below it.
It’s no use trying to chop your maintenance budget in half to get quick results. You will almost certainly end up with a rebound that leaves you worse off than when you started. You don’t want to jerk your balance point. You want to gently nudge it downward with steady pressure.
You want to get familiar with the feeling of one marginal portion less than maintenance. The difference is subtle but, even if you are not consciously paying attention, the food diary will teach you how it feels. The photographic record will make this happen, even if you don’t think a lot about it. Your body already knows and the picture taking is enough to make you consciously aware of that knowledge.
You will also develop a feel for the tradeoffs you can make to keep your eating within your budget. For example, you may have bacon at breakfast. Bacon is a really heavy food. So you will probably need to make up for that morning pleasure by not eating as much of something else in the evening.
Bacon is another example of a food that should be a rare treat. Many people find the taste extremely pleasant. But from a health standpoint, bacon has a lot of minuses, starting with the way pork is produced in the US. It is so packed with calories that it can gobble up a big part of your food budget, crowding out other things you also like. Eating bacon daily will diminish your enjoyment of it. Having it as an infrequent treat instead will increase that pleasure.
How it Sits
In addition to the appearance, aroma, taste, and texture of food, I think we should add one more thing in judging it. That is how it sits in the stomach. Some foods rest easy and leave a pleasant feeling of fullness that lasts for hours.
Others leave us feeling uncomfortable. Food that brings on an upset stomach is likely a bad idea no matter how well it scores on the other measures. It may be it was a perfectly good thing to eat and we just overdid it. But some foods create discomfort because the digestive tract struggles to handle them.
If a food consistently sits uneasily your stomach after you eat it, you probably should consider giving it up or drastically decreasing how much of it you eat. Try cutting your standard portion of it in half. If the upset still arrives on schedule try eliminating it entirely. Watch to see if the upset feeling vanishes along with it. With the vast array of food choices we have, there is no need to eat anything that leaves us with a belly ache.
