Living Low Carb (53 page)
Authors: Jonny Bowden
YOU: On a Diet
is a book about your body and how it works—and (only incidentally) about how to lose weight. It’s hardly a low-carb diet book, but it is packed with such good information and it’s so comprehensive and accessible that I felt it had to be included in this chapter.
The Introduction comes out swinging, and the target is the bad (or let’s say woefully incomplete) information most of us have been fed about weight loss all our lives—starting with the idea that the “secret” of weight-loss success is simply to eat less and sweat more. “Straightforward enough,” say the authors, “[b]ut if it really worked that way, our bodies wouldn’t be large enough to be spotted by Google Earth.” No, say the authors, most diets have it all wrong.
“When it comes to dieting, trying to whip fat with [the] weapon of willpower is the food equivalent of holding your breath under water,” say the authors. “You can do it for a while, but no matter how psyched up you get, at some point your body—your biology—forces you to the surface gasping for air.” Hearing this from such an esteemed source has got to be welcome validation for the thousands of people who have failed miserably on diets and feel there’s got to be a better way.
We could debate the pros and cons of willpower, and—believe it or not—there’s a lot to be said on both sides of the argument. (One psychologist, Deirdre Barrett, PhD, made a brilliant and unconventional case for the willpower argument in her excellent book
Waistland: The (R)evolutionary Science Behind Our Weight and Fitness Crisis
. But I digress.) Oz and Roizen’s philosophy is that the “secret” of dieting is to work
smart, not hard
. They argue that if you “look under the hood” and really understand the systems that make our bodies fat, as well as the ones that “slam the brakes on those dangerous cookie-and-cake collisions that take place every day,” you’ll be harnessing your body’s natural biological forces (like appetite-control hormones) to assist you, working
with
your body rather than fighting it—and be better able to create a lean and healthy you.
YOU: On a Diet
is the textbook on your body you wish you’d had when you took high-school biology. Take
chapter 2
, “The Biology of Fat,” for instance: it’s got a terrific section called “The Anatomy of Appetite” that literally explains—with terrific illustrations and friendly and amusing examples—how the brain works to create satiety. You’ll learn which biochemicals stimulate the brain to increase metabolism and reduce appetite (and which ones have the opposite effect). Or consider
chapter 3
, “Eater’s Digest,” which takes you on a tour of what happens in your digestive “highway”—how your body breaks down nutrients, and how and why different kinds of foods have different metabolic effects.
There are also terrific explanations of common problems shared by many people who struggle with weight, such as thyroid issues and GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease). Subjects like inflammation, toxicity, and the appetite-affecting hormone leptin, which are the central issues in books like
The Fat Resistance Diet, The UltraSimple Diet
, and
The Rosedale Diet
are covered here as well, in easy-to-understand language. And there’s a good section on the role of stress in health and weight.
And what about the diet itself? Well, it’s hardly revolutionary, but it is easy to follow. You’ll eat standard “healthful” fare like oatmeal, salad, soups, whole grains, nut butters, salmon, and chicken. There are sample menus, eating plans, and a lot of options for snacks (and even a dessert every two days). There’s even a section called “When You Need the Fast-Food Fix” that helps you do damage control in restaurants like McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza. All in all, a very “guy-friendly” program that can get you healthy (or at least healthi
er
), one that doesn’t leave you feeling like the only hope is to move to a Yoga Ashram and eat macrobiotic food all day.
Is there stuff in here to quibble with? You bet. You’ll find a fair amount of residual prejudice against meat, a lot of unquestioning cheerleading for “whole grains,” even a recommendation for Cheerios as a breakfast option. But there’s so much “gold in them thar hills” that I’m reluctant to dwell too much on these minor points of variance with my own views. Basically this book is a winner, even if the recommended diet is not exactly the perfect “hunter–gatherer” fare.
YOU: On a Diet as a Lifestyle: Who It Works for, Who Should Look Elsewhere
This is a terrific book that would make a great addition to the library of any person interested in how the body works. It’s fun, it’s filled with terrific illustrations, pop-culture and sports examples, and analogies, and it’s eminently readable.
If you’re a generally healthy person who wants to make some relatively easy changes, understand why you’re making them, and manage your waistline, this is an easy plan to follow. Like
Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less
(see page 165), it comes with the added bonus of being written by an impeccable, highly respected source, so you can feel confident of being on solid ground and you’ll never have to “defend” yourself for being on a “fad” diet or for bucking the dietary establishment. And for the information alone—which ranges from explanations of GERD to stress to hormones to appetite—it’s worth the price of admission.
But I don’t think it adequately addresses the needs of people who are truly metabolically resistant or carb-intolerant. People with a lot of weight to lose—especially those who have had an impossible time of it with conventional diets—may not find what they need here in terms of an overall weight-loss plan. If you’re insulin-resistant, have serious issues with blood sugar, are carb-addicted, or can’t lose weight with conventional programs (even ones like this, which don’t demonize fat), you should probably look elsewhere.
JONNY ’ S LOWDOWN
This is a very “different” kind of diet book—both in its focus on detailed information about how your body handles food, and in its focus on the whole person.
Oz and Roizen are clearly from the philosophical school that believes knowledge is power—if you could clearly see what smoking does inside your body and understood in depth the damage it does to every cell and every system, it would be easier to throw away your cigarettes. And if you could clearly understand why some foods stimulate fat storage, zap energy, and create cravings, you’d naturally gravitate toward the healthful choices that do just the opposite. Maybe, maybe not. Certainly we wish it would work that way.
The book is really a terrific little desk encyclopedia for those who are interested in what goes on inside our bodies in general, and particularly in the fate of the food we eat and what happens to it once it passes our lips. There are terrific sections on the role of stress, as well as sections on mental and emotional health and their contribution to fat gain (and loss). And a very decent section on exercise, as well as an appendix full of easy-to-make recipes.
Buy the book (or one of the others in the series like YOU: The Owner’s Manual) just for the fabulous information on how the body works. But if you’ve struggled with weight loss for what seems like forever, and if you have a lot of weight to lose, you’ll probably get better (and faster) results with a more structured (and lower-carb) program.
WHAT IT IS IN A NUTSHELL
An eating plan consisting of 40% carbohydrates, 30% protein, and 30% fat. Zone orthodoxy calls for eating five times a day—three meals and two snacks, each of which should contain the 40/30/30 distribution.
About the Zone
Tell Barry Sears, creator of the Zone, that his eating plan is a high-protein diet, and you’re likely to be met with either an icy stare or a frustrated sigh, depending on his mood. Most often, you’ll get a resigned explanation that you sense (correctly) he’s given a thousand times. “The Zone,” he says patiently, “is
not
a high-protein diet: it is a protein-
adequate
diet. The amount of protein recommended on the Zone is very similar to what Americans are currently consuming. The amount of fruits and vegetables that are recommended on the Zone diet is nearly three times the amount recommended by the U.S. government, even though the amount of total carbohydrates is lower.”
He’s got a point. This just might be the most misunderstood and falsely maligned popular dietary approach of all time, considering the fact that it has probably had the most influence on changing the dietary tenor of the times, especially in altering the prevailing attitude about fat as the demon behind obesity and disease. Let’s go over just what the Zone is and what it isn’t.
The Zone is not a high-protein diet
, despite the fact that critics—who seem never to have read the book—continue to refer to it as such, especially in popular magazines. The amount of protein on the Zone diet could hardly be considered high (except by the intransigent right wing of the dietary establishment, the American Dietetic Association). On a 1,500-calorie diet, 30% protein—the amount recommended by Sears—works out to 112 grams of protein (roughly 16 ounces) a day. That’s about 4 ounces per meal and 2 ounces per snack for the average man, nowhere near an excessive amount.
The Zone is also not a low-carb diet.
Do the math—you’re always eating slightly more carbohydrates at every meal than you are eating protein or fat. In fact, 40% of your meal is carbohydrates, yielding, with the same 1,500-calorie intake, 150 grams of carbs a day. Just for comparison, Atkins only allows 20 grams per day on the induction phase of his program. The Zone allows more than seven times that amount. The Zone diet gets most of its carbohydrates from fruits and vegetables and uses the starchy carbohydrates—breads, pastas, rice, cereal, and the like—sparingly: almost, says Sears, “as condiments.”
The Zone was never meant solely as a weight-loss diet.
It was designed to reduce heart disease through the control of inflammation, and its success and popularity surprised Sears as much as anyone. The fact that so many people lose weight and feel terrific on it—and that it has been adopted by a number of celebrities—put it in the public arena and made Sears either a hero or a monster, depending on what academic pundit you listen to.
The Theory Behind the Zone: A Short Lesson in Nutritional Endocrinology
Think of your body and its organs, glands, hormones, and other chemical compounds as one huge biological Internet, where messages (sometimes conflicting ones) are constantly being sent out, received, interpreted, misinterpreted, and acted upon. Hormones are particularly potent messengers; when you receive a message from a hormone in your biological e-mailbox, you pay attention. Insulin is a hormone—a major one. It’s secreted by the pancreas in response to the increased blood sugar that you get after you ingest food (particularly carbohydrates). Insulin is intimately tied to levels of blood sugar. If you eat a Snickers bar, your blood sugar rises and the pancreas says, “
Uh-oh, dude ate a Snickers; let’s get to work
.” It secretes some insulin. The job of that insulin is to bring the blood sugar back down into the normal range. It does this by “escorting” the sugar out of the bloodstream and into the cells. According to Sears, excess insulin is the culprit behind skyrocketing rates of obesity, a premise he shares with all low-carb diet writers.
There are two basic ways to raise insulin levels. One is to eat too many carbohydrates. The other is to eat too much food. Americans do both.
The word “zone” in the title actually refers to an
optimal range
of insulin levels. The diet claims to keep insulin levels from rising too high by replacing some of the carbs in the typical American diet with fat (which has no effect on insulin) and protein (which has some effect, but not as much as carbs). The balance among carbs, protein, and fat at each meal and snack is designed to prevent blood-sugar levels (or insulin levels) from going too high (or too low). This, combined with the fact that the diet is not too high in calories, is responsible for the weight-loss effects of the diet.