Day 18: Breakfast

Scrambled eggs and roast gammon joint.

I'm almost entirely sure I took a photo of this, but cannot now find it uploaded at all.  I made the eggs in my parents microwave, and I realised how much better eggs are from the pan.  If you habitually use the microwave, I urge you to start making things in the pan and see how much better they taste.  This is true of many things, the things that come to mind most are scrambled eggs, porridge, and baked beans!  If you pushed me though there are probably several other things I can think of too.  Yes, it's more of a pain in the arse to wash up, but this has the added bonus of making you decide if you do really want that food!  We actually took the decision to give our microwave away to charity for health reasons.  I'm not 100% sure it's bad for your health, but I have read things either way; not so much from peer-reviewed scientific journals, but anecdotally from health literature.  When you couple the nicer tasting food with the potential risk it just made sense to us and I'm not sure we'll look back.

What was interesting about my visit to my parents was the fact that they have taken an interest in this project and that it is modifying their behaviour, even if it is only slightly.  To paint a picture, my parents are not the healthiest.  Both are sedentary, both used to be heavy smokers (Dad has now given up for a year), both have persistent niggling and serious health issues, and both have a relatively poor diet, due to my Mum's disinterest in cooking and their mutual interest in processed junk food!  I may well keep you posted with any progress on the parents front, they've certainly sat up and taken notice at the results, so we'll see!

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 14: Dinner

North African Squash & Chickpea Stew.

This is the start of a new idea for this project of mine.  I'm going to start sharing recipes I'm using and where I've got them from.  I'm a bit of a gadget geek and use technology a lot in my life to help me be productive and stay organised.  I decided I needed a bit of inspiration and we have a lot of cookery books in our house, most of which are under used.  The problem I find with cookery books is it's a lot of effort for general cooking to scour them for recipes that you want, can make with the ingredients you have and that won't take half a day to prepare.  I have started to photograph the recipe pages that work for this diet and that appeal to me.  I'll share them on here with you and they will be tagged recipes.  If it starts to get overwhelming in choice I'll start to add more specific tags.  For myself I'm using Evernote, which is a digital notebook of sorts.  I use it a lot!  I'm setting up a recipe notebook with specific tags for the type of food and ingredients so that I can search it by what I fancy or the ingredient that I want to use.  The other great thing about it is that it can store all sorts of formats; you can write notes, take pictures, record audio, or clip a web page.  I highly recommend doing it if you want to be successful at this (and many other things too!).

Day 12: Lunch

Braised oxtail, steamed carrots and broccoli.

Back to the diet....

This oxtail was fantastic.  Just braising/stewing in a pot of stock or even water makes this melt in the mouth tender and absolutely delicious.  It is such a cheap cut of meat, but when cooked right is great.  It's very fatty, so you will end up discarding some, not sure health reasons, but for the fact that a big lump of boiled fat just isn't that palatable.  So good and so cheap that we'll definitely be revisiting this.  It also struck us that this is so tender that, if like us you struggle to get your young children to eat meats because they just can't chew it easily, this might present a real solution.

Day 11: Dinner

Roast lamb, new potatoes, broccoli, carrots, Yorkshire puddings, and stock.  Accompanied by a glass of red wine.

Out at my father-in-laws for a big family dinner.  I decided at the start of this project that I wouldn't be precious about it.  Nobody like that person who is a pain in the arse to feed and makes a point of letting everyone else know what's wrong with there diet!  That and the fact that Yorkshire puddings are one of my favourite things ever - my willpower couldn't take it!

Today was another day without lunch.  I'd been helping my father-in-law on a big clear up project and had been doing heavy lifting on a field in the middle of nowhere all day, truly brutal work.  I had drunk 3-4 litres of water and still felt slightly dehydrated as it had been a hot day, and I had taken a couple of handfuls of mixed nuts to try to keep me going, which it did just fine.

With dinner, I toyed with being good, but eventually gave in!  Although the rest of my day hadn't been a cheat at all, I decided I would make this my treat day and go all out, hence potatoes, Yorkshire puddings and fruit salad for pudding.  After that there was also some vanilla ice cream that wasn't pictured.  All in all very enjoyable!

Day 7: Late night snack

Cup of Teapigs liquorice and peppermint tea, and a handful of mixed nuts.

I have to admit to not knowing much about liquorice other than the fact you used to get it as a sweet that came with sherbet and looked like a pencil!  It is apparently the root that is used and the plant is a legume and is related to peas and beans, not fennel or star anise as you might think from the taste.  Anyway, this tea is caffeine free and is absolutely delicious!  It tastes good enough to be a hot chocolate replacement, but is not naughty in the slightest.  My wife has been talking it up for a while, and what a find!

Day 7: Out for Coffee

Americano with cream at Costa.


Was taken for a quick coffee in Costa by a client after her session today.  Steered clear of lattes and cappucinos, and asked for a coffee with cream.  Obviously not a popular request as she tried to top my coffee up with squirty cream!  It also always strikes me how big the servings have got now, I had a medium and it came in a soup bowl basically, whilst a large pretty much resembles a bucket!  Is this a symptom of Starbucks coming in and bringing with it American sizing?  It is just too much!  If I had have gone for a medium latte I would have consumed just over 202 kcals and just under 14.8 grams of sugar, as it was I had just over 104 kcals and only 2.3 grams of sugar.  Even more interesting though, and this is for everyone who tries to be virtuous with a skinny version of their favourite drink, is that if I had chosen a skinny latte I would have consumed 114 kcals and 16.4 grams of sugar.  When you think back to what I mentioned about the importance of insulin control to weight loss, then you can see why skinny drink variety not only doesn't help but actually worsens the scenario by increasing the glycaemic index and load of the drink.


Personally, I'm a big fan of visiting independent traders and finding a new experience, with the possibility of finding a real gem with amazing food and/or drink.  The excitement of the new experience is great, but admittedly it's tempered by the risk of finding an absolute dive with appalling food.  Living in a town like mine I also appreciate the fact that it is not just a carbon copy of every other town in the land, with chains dominating the high street.  Don't get me wrong, I don't actually have a bone to pick with many of the chains and I can also see the appeal, but if you value variety and the ability to develop a relationship with someone local who puts their life passion into their business venture, then you have to put your money where your mouth is and support them so they don't die out!  It is a risk, it doesn't offer the comforting consistency of a trusted national chain, but to my mind I think the rewards infinitely outweigh the risks.


That being said, I have to commend Costa on how good their nutritional website is, where I pulled the above data from.  It is very transparent, very easy to use and enables and encourages customers to take more control of their diet.  To my mind, that is a very good thing.

Day 5: Drink - a lesson to be learned

This Is Water orange and lemon drink.


I was on my way into London for a friends engagement drinks, and decided to take a long walk from the train station to the venue.  It lasted about 40-50mins and it was quite a balmy afternoon in London.  I was a bit rushed as I wasn't sure where I was going and had cut it quite tight if I were to get lost.  On passing a Tesco's Local I nipped in to get a drink.  As it was a cheat day, I really fancied something refreshing and fruity.  I didn't go for any of the fruit juices as I could only see the cheap concentrated varieties, but in a moment of rushing and despite knowing better I picked this up as it looked good.  I paid for it and set off on my journey again.  Whilst drinking, I thought I'd read the nutrition label to see the calories I was taking in via this cheat drink.  160kcals roughly, isn't actually too bad, but I was really disappointed to see that sugar was added to the mix.  


It just goes to show, don't judge a product by it's packaging!  They know what they are doing and package a product to directly influence you in your decision making process.  Premium packaging often doesn't mean premium product and they will obviously always sell you the upside.  Although it tasted very nice, it's not something I'll be buying again.

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!