No More Mister Fat Guy (Redux)

 

Food Fights With Myself

 

Okay, I recently was told by someone here at work who shall remain nameless that my blog has a bit of rust on it. Considering the last time I wrote about something was when David Sedaris visited the Colonial, whenever that was….sometime early fall, I suppose?, I guess he or she has a point. (Not that I got a lot of e-mails asking where I went?)

 

In any event, to kill a few birds with one stone, I thought I’d follow up on my No More Mister Fat Guy blog of June 17, wherein (for those who don’t remember it offhand) I basically talked about how happy I was to see the scale say less than 185 that very morning back in June for the first time in a long while. And then after saying a few more things on the subject, about body types, and wanting to write more about this (which you now know I did not do) I ended by saying 180 here I come. In my defense, I was planning on following up this blog, sooner rather than later, to say that indeed 180 here I am. But, alas, it’s more like 188 there I go? Who wants to follow a blog about physical transformation through diet and exercise when it leads instead to weight gain and sloth? And maybe more to the point, who wants to write THAT blog?

 

But I’ve been doing some reading of late that has given me a bit of encouragement. And I’m learning that what makes us (okay, let’s just stick to me, since I don’t even know you)….what makes ME fat is insulin. And what creates insulin or insulin response, for those who want to be more technical, is eating too many carbohydrates, specifically bad carbohydrates, the kind with refined sugar: white bread, pasta, cake, but even some fruits, too. Apparently even bananas have a glycemic index that’s pretty high, which would explain all the fat monkeys out there? And, of course, lots and lots of processed foods, which is most of the food we tend to eat.

 

Anyway. There are a few high fat, low carb diets out there. You've probably heard of a few of them: Atkins, the Zone, South Beach, Sugar Busters, etc., that all pretty much say the same thing and rely on the same theory/science. There’s also a very interesting, perhaps more objective?, book out there called GOOD CALORIES, BAD CALLORIES by Gary Taubes that I recommend though I should warn you, it’s fairly extensive. No light breezy reading is this. Taubes, who got a lot of heat when he wrote a Sunday New York Times Magazine cover story on the same topic, blames the low-fat diet hoax on a variety of historical and scientific events that all sort of converged to create a perfect storm of diet misinformation that in his opinion has led to the recent rise in obesity and type 2 diabetes that started to really take off in the 1980s due to this sea change of low fat, high carbohydrate ruling the day. Interesting stuff.

 

All a long preamble to say, I suppose, that here is my second launch of this No More Mister Fat Guy blog. Given that I still have a BMI (Body Mass Index) of 26, over and above the healthier range of 18-24.9, I’m now officially, legitimately overweight, and so I’m going to reset my food intake button and eat a higher fat, lower carb diet and see what happens. In fact, I’ve already begun to do so. And after just a weekend of this experiment, I’m down from 188 to 185 (fyi, I'm a shade under six feet tall), which is pretty much where I started back in June. Here’s hoping my progress to come will warrant another post or two or even three before six more months go by. [December 14, 2009]