Giaguara said:
I find it very interesting that 2 decades ago the thing that made you fat were the calories, one decade ago it was the fat, and now they are trying to make you believe that it is the carbs that make you fat.
Most of that information came from WWII studies on weight and diet around the world. At the time they were more or less doing a pin the tail on the donkey, and didn't have enough money to research all the leads they could have found. The major outlier in their study that they were unable to account for was the Mediterranean region where they have a high-fat, high-fiber diet and far less occurrence of obesity and associated health problems. Recent research has basically pointed that it is
fiber that helps them keep the weight off by slowing the processing of fats and carbohydrates in food. By slowing their processing, you slow the raise in blood sugar that accompanies their presence and prevent a wide-spread condition called Insulin Resistance (Pre-Diabetes).
When you eat something, whatever energy is in the food is processed into usable forms. Sugars are the first and fastest to be converted to glucose, followed by starches and fats. If you eat something that is very sugary then you are basically dumping a lot of sugar into your blood stream all at once which causes the pancreas to produce a huge amount of insulin. All the cells of your body gobble the glucose (blood sugar) up and the insulin goes away. The brain signals there is little sugar available and you get that hungry feeling again. And you reach for another sugar-fat bar. And we start again... Eventually going through enough of these cycles your cells start to ignore the insulin signals (because they have too much sugar already) and it just flows around your blood stream. You pancreas reacts by producing even more insulin and you can see where this is leading.
Now if instead you eat an Apple (fruit, which contains sugar and fiber; not the company) the situation is a bit different. In that apple it's harder for your digestive system to get at the sugar because of the fiber, and it is also a good bet that it takes you more effort to eat an apple than a candy bar. As such your blood sugar level doesn't raise nearly as quickly and you don't get that hungry feeling again 5 minutes later. Thus your pancreas produces a reasonable amount of insulin, your body absorbs the sugar slowly and you aren't hungry again for a reasonable amount of time (say an hour or two - this is just an apple we're talking about here
).
In the "low-fat" craze all of the food we eat was converted from being high in fat-calories (which take longer to process) to high in sugar calories (which are nearly instant to process, given the way these foods are often prepared). As such we made it
easier for us to feel hungry all the time. But fat is not the enemy! And really neither is sugar. There are no enemies in our food (even cholesterol is being given a second look). There is very little of our food that doesn't get processed into glucose, amino acids, vitamins and minerals (fat cells convert glucose into fat). As such the real effort is to keep ourselves from eating all the time, and the high-sugar foods that we as a society have found ourselves eating in the name of weight loss don't help that at all.
If you really want to get the weight off, it will take patience (sorry, no get slim quick schemes), determination and discipline. Train yourself to ask for the half portions at restaurants, avoid those candy bars and eat your broccoli like mom used to say
. If you need help, there are lots of programs out there - go to the book store and read at least the intro chapter and decide if you like what they are saying and you can actually do the plans they outline. I personally couldn't stand the thought of doing Atkins - I don't like meat
that much. I ended up on South Beach, and 2 1/2 months later I'm nearly 25 pounds less massive. I'm amazed too
. I planned on 50 pounds by the end of the year but if things keep going this well I may increase that. But food science hasn't had enough attention given to make all of the research out there packageable into nice neat "public knowledge" segments. If you want to find out what is the latest, your going to have to get messy. But the pay off is that waistline you've always wanted but never felt you could have.
