Living Low Carb (32 page)
Authors: Jonny Bowden
The exercise program is on much more solid ground than the nutritional advice. The Curves workout incorporates strength training, cardiovascular training, and stretching in a simple 30-minute routine that you do 3 times a week. Though there are Curves gyms all over the country where exercise leaders take you through the workout, the book provides a pretty darn good at-home version. The only equipment you need is an exercise tube, which is like a rubber rope with a handle on each end.
The workout is quite good: after a 3-minute abdominal warm-up, you alternate a strength exercise with a cardio interval. There are 8 such combinations, and each component is done for 40 seconds. For example, you do as many reps of the chest press as you can do in 40 seconds; then you do an “aerobic recovery” of 40 seconds (this is anything that keeps your heart rate up—jogging in place, for example). You then move on to the second strength exercise (leg extension) and the second aerobic recovery interval. Continue until you’ve done all 8 strength exercises (each followed by its “aerobic recovery”) and then do the whole circuit of 8 once again. You follow this with a cool-down and a few flexibility exercises, and you’re done. Thirty minutes out the door. As the British say, “Not too shabby!”
The rest of the book is devoted to meal plans, shopping lists, recipes, and some basic discussion of various health conditions.
Curves as a Lifestyle: Who It Works for, Who Should Look Elsewhere
The program makes no bones about targeting busy women who want to get healthier and more fit, lose some weight, but not necessarily look like a model (honorable goals for sure!). The studies are pretty clear that thirty minutes of exercise three times a week—no matter how good the workout (and the Curves workout is good)—is probably not enough to make a real dent in your weight; but, in combination with a good eating program, it’s certainly a huge step in the right direction. The fact that it is so doable is a tremendous plus, and if you really watch your food, you may get great results. If you’re metabolically resistant, the low-carb plan may not be strict enough for you. On the other hand, the flexibility of the program is bound to appeal to many.
JONNY’S LOW DOWN
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I approached this book wanting to like it. I’d heard great things about Curves, and liked the “real women have curves” ethic of encouraging women to get fit, become happy with their bodies, and lose the aspiration to look like rail-thin models. I also liked what I had heard about the thirty-minute intense circuittraining workouts. And at first glance, the choice between two programs—one a low-carb program and one a “calorie-sensitive” program—sounded interesting
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So I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, it was hard to do. This is a textbook example of what happens when a businessperson writes a book on nutrition and fitness. It’s so filled with god-awful voodoo nutrition and snake-oil salesmanship that by page 23, I was downright angry. Want an example? The author talks about turning on “starvation hormones.” I’ve been working with the top nutritionists and endocrinologists in the field for 15 years, and I’ve never heard the term “starvation hormones.” Wanna know why? ’Cause they don’t exist. The author claims that you can return to eating “normally” once you achieve your weight goal, “normally” being defined as 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day. Hello? This statement pretty much belongs in the same category of thinking as the “flat earth” theory. It’s utterly ridiculous and very disingenuous. Virtually every study (including the highly respected National Weight Control Registry) has shown that caloric levels for weight maintenance for women are around 1,400 to 1,800 calories. In my experience, most women—members of the women’s Olympic volleyball team and Laila Ali being possible exceptions—would get fat eating 3,000 calories a day
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The author also makes a statement right in the beginning that called his “expertise” into question. Here’s what he says about other programs, from Atkins to Zone to Weight Watchers. Ready? “These diets require you to make a lifelong commitment. I don’t think this is realistic or fair—a diet should be temporary. It should not become a way of life.” Yet if there’s a single thing that every diet author agrees on—from those advocating the lowest low-carb to those promoting the lowest low-fat plan—it’s that to stay successful, you have to make lifestyle changes, and that these lifestyle changes have to be forever. Of course eating differently has to become a way of life. That’s what the maintenance phases of all the plans are about. And the irony is that a page or so later, the author says, “The Curves program is designed with the knowledge that you are going to cheat.” How can you cheat if there’s no program to follow
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The book is not all bad, however. The exercise program is great, and very doable. There’s some decent info about protein and cutting junk carbs, though nothing original. I can’t get past some of the scientifically silly ideas like eating all the calories you want, or not “counting” certain foods, or the advice to go back to “eating normally—2,500 to 3,000 calories a day.” But many women have been helped a lot by the Curves philosophy of balance and the way its centers welcome and embrace women of all sizes and get them started on a very decent fitness program. And the idea of metabolic healing—though much better articulated by Diana Schwarzbein, and with much greater scientific credibility—is a good one
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WHAT IT IS IN A NUTSHELL
A very easy to follow low carb plan somewhat resembling Phase One of Atkins. Extremely effective and refreshingly uncomplicated
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The first thing you notice about “Fat to Skinny” is that it doesn’t look like a diet book. From the glossy paper to the personal photos to the font choices and the illustrations, everything about this says “personal journey”—and that’s exactly what “Fat to Skinny” is.
Which is the first of its many strengths.
See, no matter how much we may understand a concept like “low-carb” intellectually, nothing speaks to us like a real-life story, and Fat to Skinny is just such a story. The book begins with a startling set of photos of the author, Doug Varrieur. In the first, he is obese—260 pounds at age thirty-five—and in the second he is lean and fit and enviably muscular: 160 pounds at age fifty! And he’s maintained that 100 pound loss for five years.
It gets your attention.
Doug’s own personal story is one that thousands of readers will relate to, and it’s a compelling one. By age seventeen his nickname was “Porky.” By age twenty, his waist size was 38 and he was fighting a battle to keep it there. He lost. By age thirty his waist had gone to 44-46 and his weight had ballooned into 265 territory.
During this time he tried most of the traditional low-fat diets prescribed by the medical “authorities,” diets nearly everyone has tried at one point or another. Did they work? See above paragraph.
The thing that makes this book really special is that it’s not filled with a lot of biochemistry or technical stuff of any kind. Yet he manages to get the central point across very well: fat storage is driven by the hormone insulin, carbohydrates drive up insulin, high levels of insulin insure that you continue to store fat, while at the same time “locking” the doors to the fat cells so that they can’t open up and provide fuel (fat!) for the muscles.
I’ve written and lectured about how insulin controls fat storage in the body, and read probably hundreds of explanations of it from different authors, but I’ve never seen any better, clearer or more concise than Doug’s:
“Insulin is the gatekeeper for your cells. Each of your cells is a little furnace waiting for fuel to burn, but the fuel can’t get in without the gatekeeper opening the gate.”
You can see where he’s going with this.
It’s not the entire class of foods known as carbohydrates that are the problem here. The worst offender is pure sugar, but the rest aren’t far behind. Rice, bread, pasta, cereal, and fruit juice all turn into pure glucose (sugar) in the body almost as fast as you can swallow a tablespoon of pure table sugar. These foods—called “high-glycemic”—are exactly the ones you need to get rid of on this rather simple (but extraordinarily effective) plan.
Varrieur makes one of the best and clearest cases I’ve yet seen for why sugar is the true demon in the American diet (it’s certainly not fat, as we’ve been taught). His description of how starchy carbs turn into sugar is one of the best I’ve seen, but even better are the charts showing the amount of sugar in popular foods not generally thought to be “sugar” foods (like pizza, for example).
Varrieur also does a really interesting little exercise where he analyzes the sugar content from a fairly typical day on the Standard American Diet. Taken together, even with your “healthy” low-fat breakfast of dietitianendorsed foods, you’ve just consumed 109 teaspoons of sugar for the day, or a whopping 2 ¼ cups of the stuff!
Now there’s stuff to quibble with in the book. “If you’re fat and want to burn fat,” Doug writes, “you need to keep your total intake to no more than 5 teaspoons of sugar from all sources per day. This means your total carbohydrate intake must be no more than 20 grams of total net carbohydrates for the entire day.”
Well.
Sure, this is standard Phase One Atkins. You’re limited to 20 grams of carbs (during the Atkins “Induction” stage), and you’re aiming for a state known as nutritional ketosis. Ketosis, as I’ve written elsewhere in this book (see pages 53–56) happens when your body isn’t taking in enough dietary carbs to provide immediate energy.
Problem is that we now know you don’t have to be “in ketosis” to lose weight. And we also know that many people—not all, mind you, but probably most—do not need to lower their carb intake quite so drastically to get results.
Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed the admonition to eat no more than 20 grams of “net” carbs a day. Net carbs is a term that was first coined by the Atkins folks to differentiate between carbs that have an impact on blood sugar and carbs that don’t. Varrieur, following the tradition started by Atkins, suggests you basically disregard these carbs when computing your daily allotment. You simply subtract the number of grams of fiber and/or the number of grams of sugar alcohols from the total number of carbs listed on the label. The remainder is called “net carbs” and these are the only ones you should be paying attention to, the only carbs that impact your blood sugar.
So when Varrieur (or Atkins, for that matter) says to have 20 grams or less of carbs a day, he’s talking about net carbs, not total carbs.
Another real cool thing about this book is the very excellent (and muchneeded) clarification of the difference between hunger and cravings. “Are you eating because it’s your lunch break?” he asks, “or are you eating because you’re hungry?” He speaks of the “false hunger” that occurs when you walk by a food court and smell the Cinnabons and all of a sudden “think” you’re hungry.
“The best way to determine when you’re truly hungry is to experience hunger in your own body and learn from the signals,” says Varrieur. He suggests a three-day test during which you eat only one meal a day: breakfast. (And you don’t even eat that until you’re hungry!) The breakfast should be 2 eggs, 3 strips of bacon or ham, and 2 pieces of GG Bran Crisp-Bread with two tablespoons of peanut butter mixture (featured in the book). “Write down the time you ate, and then head back into your day,” he suggests. “When you start to feel hunger, analyze it. Is it hunger or habit? Did you start thinking of food and that’s what made you feel hungry, or were you interrupted by your body telling you you’re hungry?”
Good stuff. Varrieur suggests that a good way to determine if a feeling is real hunger (or just a “craving”) is to see if the feeling passes in 15 minutes. If it’s a craving, and you drink a large glass of water or two and wait fifteen minutes, it should be gone. If it’s real hunger, it will come back fairly quickly. This three-day experiment also gives you some useful information about how much food it actually takes to satisfy your needs. He believes it is also very useful in planning out a day-to-day eating schedule that works for you. For example, if you ate your breakfast at 8:30 AM on the “test day” and didn’t get hungry again until 11, you’d have learned that your body gets hungry an hour or so before the noon lunch break, and you can deal with this in the future by eating a small amount at 11.
The book is loaded with terrific recipes, and comes with some of the best charts I’ve ever seen telling you the exact sugar (and net carb) content of dozens of different foods.