Progress Report!

So,

it has been two weeks.  I've been following as best I can, so it's time for an update and some clarifications.  My body measurements are:

Body fat:

• 17% (down from 19.3)

Weight:

• 79kg/12st6lbs/174lbs (down from 83kg/13st1lb/183lbs)

Waist: 

• 93cms/36 and a bit inches (down from 98cms/38 inches)

Some clarifications:

I said no calories from drink, yet I have been having cream in some coffee and tea, and I have had the occasional glass of red.  I'm trying not to get any other calories from drink, but tea and coffee is a step too far for me.  I just wouldn't be able to manage!  I don't feel like I need the caffeine high, I don't ever feel any effects from caffeine when I have it or when I have extended periods without.  It's just that I like the drinks.  They are also a very social thing, and when I'm meeting people and clients I think as a trainer sitting there with a cup of green tea is a bit of a social disconnect and gives people the impression of being a bit OTT.  Don't get me wrong it's the better thing to have and I do actually like it.  Half of my hot drink intake is very virtuous indeed, I've just chosen to stick with some tea and coffee intake.  I have the cream with them instead of milk as the sugar content is lower and therefore any potential insulin response is lower too, also it tastes nicer in my opinion.  Secondly, red wine.  I'm actually following Tim Ferris advice from the 4 Hour Body fairly blindly here.  He has done a lot of self experimentation and found the red wine didn't detriment his diet.  I'm not going mad with it, but if I find myself in a social situation I'm now choosing that over beers, spirits and white wine.

Final point:

All of this has been done with no exercise.  This has been on purpose to see what would happen and how I would feel.  I often hear the saying "it's 80% diet" being bandied about when it comes to weight loss, and I have to say I probably agree.  Doesn't matter how active you are if you're not controlling your blood sugar and your insulin activity.  That being said, being active is fun and it stops a raft of other problems, so I'm not diminishing its importance.

I am about to restart exercise and will be keeping an exercise journal that will mirror this nutrition blog.  It can be found at garethunderhill.blogspot.co.uk.  I hope to see you over there!

Day 5: Breakfast

Bacon, Fried Egg and Baked Beans, and a cup of tea.


Sticking to the recommendation from Tim Ferriss in 4 Hour Body, I'm still starting my cheat day with a good portion of protein.  The bacon is the same as I had before; smoked from a local organic farm, a fried egg from a friend's chickens and bog standard Heinz baked beans.  Most looking forward to some fruit and dairy today!

The Diet: What, Why and How

So, what am I actually doing?  What are the rules and what can I eat?


As mentioned before, the key to this is actually just being more conscious of what we eat.  "Flash Dieting" is the process of stopping and considering what you're going to put in your mouth.  There's nothing quite like sharing it with the world to make you stop and reconsider!  The "what gets measured gets managed" cliché is what I'm leveraging here.  If you want to find out more about this the 4 Hour Body book and blog by Tim Ferriss is a great resource, and there's also a very interesting community called Quantified Self.


However, the devil is in the detail as they say, and most people want some basic instructions.  As I mentioned before the main battleground is that of refined carbohydrates and sugars.  My aim is to reduce these down to as little as possible, similar to an Atkins or Paleo diet approach and as recommended in books such as The Diet Delusion by Gary Taubes, Body by Science by Dr. Doug McGuff.  I'm taking some of the advice from 4 Hour Body as well as the amount of self-experimentation Tim has done is spectacular and pretty inspiring!


So here's my rules:

• No "white" carbs
• No grains
• No fruit
• No dairy
• No calories via drink
• One "cheat" day per week

"What's left?" I hear you ask...  My diet is primarily made up of:

• Meat and fish
• Lentils, beans and pulses
• Vegetables
• Nuts and seeds
• Herbs and spices
• Water, teas and coffee

"Why would you do that!?!"

Well, the aim is hormonal control.  Most people have heard of insulin and associate it with diabetes.  This hormone regulates blood sugar levels, and in short, when it needs to it will convert excess sugars to fat.  At the same time, it will lock down fat metabolism.  This means that when you are active (even in the gym on the cross-trainer in your "fat burning" zone!!) you will not use fat as an energy source as the body is trying to use up the excess sugar to power your activity.  If your aim is to lose weight, it simply won't happen with insulin active in your system!

The other things about this approach mean that your energy levels and vitality will be better regulated during the day, which is something most of us struggle with.  It breaks the cycle of eating refined carbs, feeling tired and hungry, eating more refined carbs and caffeine as a pick-me-up, so on and so forth.  This puts a lot of strain on your endocrine system and therefore your health.  Speaking of health, the ability to reduce your risk of diabetes, obesity and subsequent heart disease can only be a good thing, right?  Also, when you consider most people's food allergies they are related to higher concentration of sugars in processed foods.  Gluten intolerance?  Think refined white grains.  Lactose intolerance? Think pasteurised dairy products (people often find they can tolerate raw dairy, because the heating process used in pasteurisation degrades the milk proteins and increases the availability of the milk sugar "lactose").

In order to control insulin response it is worth considering two measures; glycaemic index/load (GI/GL) and Insulin Index (II).  These measures are of the speed with which foods affect blood sugar levels and the speed of insulin response respectively.  White carbs and grains are out due to their high GI/GL scores, whilst dairy is out because despite not scoring too highly on GI it is disproportionately high on the II scale.  Calories via drink are out as by the very nature of them being in liquid form they are easy to digest, and therefore are as above.  This applies to fruit juice particularly, which many people consider to be healthy.  The fact is that by juicing the fruit you remove all the fibre and leave mainly the fruit sugar fructose in particularly high concentrations.

Fructose is particularly bad for you as it is metabolised in much the same way as alcohol.  This puts tremendous strain on the liver, and some research suggests it can be responsible for liver cirrhosis just like alcohol.

Cheat day:

This is important!  Mainly for your sanity.  I don't know about you, but if I were to say I'm never going to eat a cake, bread or pancakes ever again, I'd be setting myself up to fail.  Never going to happen.  Having a cheat day once a week allows you to be good the majority of the time, but not deprive yourself of your favourite naughties entirely.  It also prevents your body going into a starvation mode and slowing your metabolism down.  This concept comes from the 4 Hour Body, which goes into more detail about it and is a great all round resource.  I agree with it entirely.  I will implement it, but possibly be a little more flexible.  If I have a particular social event on a day that isn't my designated cheat day, I'll swap it.  This isn't license to end up with 2, 3 or 4 cheat days a week on particularly social weeks though.  Stick to the plan as best you can and prioritise.  I'm not a fan of being precious or evangelical in a social setting, so do the best you can, and offset losses.  If it's unavoidable to have two cheat days in a week, then the following week don't have any.

That's the plan, let's see how it goes!  Questions and suggestions are welcome as always.

My thoughts on food

I've read about and studied nutrition over many years as part of my degree and work.  Up until recently I've found that what I learned either had little practical application or fell into the common sense category.  I could tell you a fair amount about the biochemistry of food metabolism, but for whatever reason it had never made me modify my eating habits for the better.  With hindsight, I have a nagging suspicion that I never truly believed in all that I was being taught.  I've read several books of late that have sparked my interest, ignited my passion and make total sense to me on every level.  These books are:

• The Great Cholesterol Con by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick
• The Diet Delusion (UK)/Good Calories, Bad Calories (US) by Gary Taubes
• The 4 Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss

Some fairly sensationalist titles in there, but they are great reads; can get a little heavy, but only in parts, and all have been impeccably researched.  What they all have in common is the fact that they are derisory of the nutritional and medical advice that is mainstream at present, and of the system that has embodied it.

To cut a long story short, they emphasise the of psychology of eating and our relationship with food, and most importantly they discuss sugar.  I am utterly convinced, as are they, that sugar is the worst thing in our diet, not fat.  It is sugar that has been manipulated and increased most through the recent years of food processing, and it is sugar that is making us all fat.

All that being said, I love sugar in all its wonderful forms!  That's partly why I know it's so true.  Think about it, when you crave something what is it you crave?  It's certainly not a juicy steak or tuna mayo despite the fact that I love both those things.  For me it's usually cakes, biscuits or bread; foods that are highly processed and very high in easily digestible carbohydrates, or sugars for short.

This is the battleground for my healthy eating project.  I aim to be more conscious of what I eat and to commit to that behaviour in the long-term, hence the flash diet project.  I also aim to reduce my intake of processed foods and refined carbohydrates.  I will be following the dietary advice laid out in the books by Gary Taubes and Tim Ferriss.  I've had a go at this before, and was pleasantly surprised both by the results and the ease of continuation.  I can't honestly tell you when or why I drifted from it, I think it may have been Christmas, but that is why I need to tackle the psychology.

Wish me luck!  And share your stories, thoughts and questions with me.  The more the merrier as far as I'm concerned!

My starting place

As mentioned, I'll be updating my body measurements so that you (and I) can see how effective my behaviour change has been.  If you are thinking of doing this yourself, I recommend at the very least taking photos and circumferences.  If you can, take a measure of body fat percentage as well.  You can obviously save all this and track it yourself, you can do a blog like this, or bodybuilding.com has a fantastic tracking service called BodySpace.  Don't be put off by the name of the website, there are plenty of people on the site just looking for body transformation, be that increasing muscle or far more commonly, just losing weight.  It is a fantastic and large community and allows you to post photos, body stats, log goals and workouts and host a personal blog.  You can either click this link to be taken to the site or view my profile on it.


I am 32 years old and 5ft 10in.  I am averagely active, but that has just started going up again.


Here's my starting scores:

• Body Fat %: 19.3
• Weight: 83kg or 13st 1lb or 183lbs
• Waist: 96cm or 38"
• Chest: 103cm or 40.5"
• Upper Arms: 33cm or 13"
• Thighs: 62cm or 24"

My goals are:

• Body Fat %: 10
• Waist: 32"

The beginning

This is the start of my experimentation with "flash dieting".  I have been reading through various resources (which I will share later), and have seen it said that taking a photo of your food can be a more effective diet intervention than keeping a food journal.  There are two reasons for this; the first is that it's just less hassle and the second is that it is a process that takes place prior to the food being eaten.  This in itself makes the act of eating more conscious and therefore makes you consider the pros and cons of the box of Krispy Kremes you're about to devour before you actually do it!


I will be posting pictures of all the food to pass my lips as well as fortnightly body measurements in order to show my progress.  The point of this is primarily to help me keep on the straight and narrow, but also to be able to share my experiences and findings with others in order to be able to help them.  It should be said that I am a personal trainer and sport scientist, and that I am aiming to follow a specific diet and exercise regime.  The details of all my research, findings and thoughts can be found at my other blog called "The Rehabilitation of a Personal Trainer", which should hopefully be associated with this one!


It should also be said that despite being "in the industry", I'm the same as the next person.  I love food, both good and bad, I am constantly striving to be better at this and many other things and often feel I'm not managing that particularly well!  Knowing what you should be doing and actually doing it are two entirely different things.  I'm a Dad of three, trying to set up a new business and trying to finish off a masters degree, and when I struggle for energy it seems I eat like shit, despite knowing this is the worst thing for me.  I eat for pleasure, not for fuel, and I need to address the psychology of my eating behaviours.


Any comments, questions, things you think I should look at or flash diets that you are doing yourself, please let me know in the comments!  I look forward to sharing my journey with you....