FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL (4 page)

Chapter Five

THE FOOD PYRAMID SCHEME

First of all, when I say grains, what am I talking about? Wheat, corn and rice. And not just in their pure form, but in any product where they’re used. Bread, pasta and crackers are just a few of the grain-based foods that are generally thought of as being good for you. They’re also the basis of a million other products that we instinctively know aren’t good for us, like pop-tarts, corn chips and kid’s breakfast cereals.

And those are just the products that are obvious about it. There are a ton of others that are a lot sneakier.

Grains are used as fillers in most processed foods, like ready-to-eat microwaveable meals and frozen entrees. Even more insidious is when they’re converted into sugar. Ever wonder what high fructose corn syrup or maltodextrine is? It’s corn that’s been chemically altered to turn it into a sweetener. You’ll find it in candy bars and pasta sauce and most other processed foods.

And when they can’t get us to chew it any more, they get us to drink it.

The sugar in soda? In most cases, it’s high fructose corn syrup. Remember those sports drinks we were talking about? Check the labels. I bet you find high fructose corn syrup in a majority of them.

But what’s really so bad about sugar and grain? Why is a calorie from them different from any other calorie?

It’s different because your body processes it differently. Since the dawn of man, we were designed to handle protein, fat and natural carbohydrates because that’s what was naturally around us. That’s what the cavemen ate to survive. What they didn’t eat was the crap we have now—processed carbs and sugar. In fact, you want to know why we’re born with a sweet tooth?

To save our lives.

Poisonous plants usually have a bitter taste in contrast to the sweet-ish taste of the ones that aren’t deadly. Our natural sweet tooth was designed to be a line of defense to steer us away from the plants that could kill us. But nowadays, if you were to turn a caveman loose in a grocery store, he’d think he was in heaven and eat himself into a diabetic coma without ever realizing he was actually swallowing poison.

After a couple hundred thousand years of our bodies processing the foods they were designed to process, the last two decades have seen us flood our bodies with carbs and sugar. Will we eventually evolve to be able to deal with that stuff? Maybe, in another hundred thousand years or so. But, for right now, we have a problem. We’re getting fat.

You want to know what I blame for this?

The food pyramid!

You’ve seen this ridiculous thing. Since the early nineties, the USDA has been telling us that the foundation for any nutritious diet is grain, which they show as the base of the pyramid. The whole thing is nothing but a pyramid scheme. They’ve been asking us to buy into this bullshit high-carb lifestyle for decades but it’s now finally collapsing under the weight of all the Americans who’ve gotten fat as a result!

But that can’t be true, you say. Because if it is, that means the government is wrong.

Guess what? They know they are. That’s why they recently redid the pyramid and removed some of the grain that they want you to eat. But not enough. Not even close. And there’s a reason for that. We’re supposed to have checks and balances in this country, right? Would you like to know who checks on the USDA?

The USDA.

That’s right, they answer only to themselves. There’s no balance there, but there sure are plenty of checks—being written to farmers. Since the Great Depression, the US has been paying farmers to grow grain to keep the economy going, because back then it was agriculturally based. But all these years later, we’re still doing it, which means we’re producing huge amounts of grain. We don’t want to let it go to waste, so we’ve found ways to use it in every corner of our lives. Our food, our beverages, even our gas tanks.

The truth is, it was all pretty harmless when it was just a little extra corn and bread. Our bodies could handle it. But, over time, it’s ended up in everything. Like the Kardashians. And now that we’re flooded with that garbage in such unprecedented quantities, our bodies don’t know what to do with it and so we convert it to fat and store it.

That’s the simple answer. The more complicated one involves how sugar and grain is immediately converted to glucose once it hits your bloodstream, which triggers the release of insulin, which begins the process of storing the glucose as fat in your cells.

If that sentence bored you when you read it, don’t feel alone. It bored me to write it. But if you’re interested in learning more, there are plenty of great books out there by scientists and doctors that go into this in detail.
Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It
by Gary Taubes is good. So is
The Art And Science Of Low Carbohydrate Living
by Dr. Stephen Phinney, along with
Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease
by Dr. Robert H. Lustig.

What’s important to understand is that sugars and grains enter your body and are stored as fat. You don’t want that.

But they give me energy, you might say.

For a few minutes, yeah, until you crash. You can get all the short-term energy you need from the unprocessed sugar in the fiber of natural fruits and vegetables. The fiber slows down its absorption into your bloodstream, preventing that nasty glucose-insulin spike, giving you all the short-term energy benefits but not the fat-storing downside.

And if that wasn’t enough reason to hate sugar and grains, they screw you in another way. Hunger. The second they enter your body, your blood sugar spikes, which makes you feel great. You know the feeling. You’ve been there. It’s like a drug. But that spike is followed by a crash and it leaves you jonesing for more.

In other words, you get hungry.

So you eat more carbs. Chips, another slice of pizza, one more scoop of ice cream. This triggers another spike, followed by another crash. It’s a vicious cycle, not unlike a cigarette or heroin addiction. And each time this happens, you’re taking your body on an insulin roller coaster and storing more and more fat.

Speaking of fat, what happens when we eat fat? Does it make us more fat? Seems like it would if we believe the theory that “you are what you eat.” But we know that’s not true. Eating a chicken doesn’t make you grow feathers. That reminds me of another Vinnie-ism.

The biggest problem with fat is that it’s called fat
.

Just like being out in the cold doesn’t give you a cold, eating fat doesn’t make you fat. We’ve taken the word fat and demonized it to the point that it sounds as bad as the other F-word. Come on, give fat a break! It’s not fat’s fault it’s called fat! So what is it then?

Energy.

At least that’s how our body recognizes it. In fact, let’s pretend for a second that we call fat something different. Let’s change the word “fat” to “energy.” Then, when we’re enjoying an avocado or a nice steak or a cheese platter, we wouldn’t think of these foods as being fattening, we’d think of them as being “energizing.”

Fat is actually our body’s preferred long-term energy source. Not only that, because it doesn’t trigger the insulin whiplash that sugars and grains do, you don’t have spikes and crashes, which means you don’t stay hungry all the time. In fact, it’s not unusual for people eating a high fat lifestyle to completely lose their sugar cravings and miss a meal.

In fact, you want to demonize something. How about this? Teflon! Before Teflon was invented, we cooked foods in regular pans with butter, oil and lard. You heard me, lard! And you know what that did? Besides keeping the food from sticking to your pan, it added flavor and something even more crucial—more fat, AKA more energy.

Plus, it made you feel sated.

Let’s say you had some egg whites for breakfast, cooked in a non-stick Teflon coated pan that required absolutely no fat. You remember what it tasted like? Crap. Did it fill you up? No. You were still hungry afterwards, which made you want to eat more food. By 9 a.m. you were thinking about the vending machine at work and by 10 you were digesting a Snickers to tide you over till lunch.

Thanks, Teflon.

So let’s talk protein. How does protein fit into this whole scheme if fat is what we use for long-term energy? Protein is what we use to rebuild our bodies after normal daily wear and tear breaks us down. Every cell in the human body is built on protein. Your hair, your organs, your muscles, even your baby blues. We need it to live, and the best way to get it is naturally in the form of meat, poultry, fish, eggs and dairy products.

So if fat is used for long-term energy and carbohydrates from fruits and vegetables are used for short-term energy and protein is used to rebuild our cells, what is sugar and grain used for?

Getting us fat.

If you don’t eat them, the only thing you have to lose is weight. If you simply stay away from sugar and grains, the weight will come flying off. Hey, Vinnie, you might be asking, if I can’t eat sugar and grains, what’s left?

Everything else.

You know how you’ve been avoiding steak and cheese to try and stay thin? Not any more. Ever pass by someone’s house in the morning, smell bacon cooking and get pissed off because you’ve had Cheerios for a million days in a row? Guess what’s back on your diet? Bacon.

What about those egg whites you were cooking in the Teflon pan? Are you crazy? Not only have you been giving up the yolk, the most nutritional part of the egg, you’ve been giving up the best tasting part. What a tragedy!

Fish, pork, steak, Italian sausage—all sausage for that matter—eat to your heart’s content. And, from the plant world, what about all the delicious stuff you stayed away from because they were high-fat foods with lots of calories? Olives, avocados, coconuts. Enjoy!

You like heavy cream in your coffee? Dump it in!

And guess how much you can have of this stuff? As much as you want. When you start eating properly, when you rid yourself of those insulin swings, you’ll lose the feeling of being a bottomless pit that can never be sated. You’ll regulate the amount you eat naturally and you’ll find yourself feeling full much quicker.

Don’t believe me? Ask yourself this question. How many fat carnivores are there out in the wild? Answer: none.

You know what animals are fat?

Cows, pigs, domesticated creatures that are fed diets of grain. Hell, cows need four stomachs just to be able to digest the stuff. And while we’re on the subject of domesticated creatures, look at dogs. Of all the different kinds of wild canines in the world—wolves, coyotes—it’s only domesticated dogs that end up with a weight problem. Why? Because their kibble is full of corn, wheat, rice and other fillers.

So with all this talk of the 3 B’s—bacon, beef and butter—you’re probably thinking to yourself, what about cholesterol? Won’t mine go through the roof? We’ve certainly been brainwashed to think so. It wasn’t that long ago that people even knew what a cholesterol level was. And then, suddenly, we all became armchair experts, waxing poetic about good HDL and bad LDL. And how did we become such experts? The drug companies who make the statins gave us this info in sixty-second commercials.

But let’s look at the facts from people who aren’t trying to sell us something.

According to a new study conducted by The National Institutes of Health and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, people following low-carb diets reduced their LDL (or bad cholesterol) in greater amounts than low-fat dieters. In fact, Dr. Gary Foster, PhD of Temple University’s center for Obesity Research and Education, said that the notion that the low carb approach to weight loss was bad for the heart is “largely unfounded.”

Here’s what you have to understand—I don’t have a dog in this race. I’m not trying to sell you something. Look at the cover of this book. Is it called
The Vinnie Diet
? No. I’m just a guy who’s been helping people get fit for well into my third decade and I can tell you from experience that this works. And I’m not the only one saying this. There are scores of doctors and PhDs backing me up. One of my mottos is:

Quick to study, slow to change
.

I don’t follow fads, I follow results. Vidal Sassoon had an ad campaign back in the eighties, “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” I have a different saying in my business. If you don’t look good, I go broke. And, although I’ve never been broke, it doesn’t look like fun. So it’s in my best interest to keep my clients lean, mean and, most of all, healthy. Because another one of my mottos is:

Clients can’t write me checks when they’re dead
.

I tell you all this because it works. I’ve seen it in action over and over, with celebrity clients, kids, executives, socialites, housewives, everyone. Doesn’t matter who they are, every
body
works the same way and yours will, too.

Still not convinced? Try it for a few weeks. What do you have to lose except weight? If I’m wrong, which I’m not, you can always go back to your rice cakes and tofurkey and inedible Ezekiel bread. As for me, I’ll be at Ruth’s Chris with a New York strip and a side of creamed spinach.

After I teach my clients this new way of eating, they often decide to game the system. They see that they’re losing pounds and inches quicker than they ever have in their lives and they get to thinking they can do it even faster if they remove a few more calories by only eating lean protein and cutting out the fats.

Egg whites only … skinny lattes … non-fat yogurt … boiled chicken …

This is a recipe for disaster, because when you cut the fat out of your diet, you also cut out the very thing that keeps you sated and gives you energy.

You don’t need to game the system.

We’ve been conditioned to think that diets are supposed to make us suffer, but you don’t need to suffer. As a matter of fact, if you’re suffering, you’re doing something wrong.

Look, it’s really this simple: if you’re always hungry you won’t lose weight long term. Forget counting calories, forget watching your portion size, forget trying to eat low fat. Just do these two simple things.