Eat Carbs and The Weight Just Falls Off

Because of the confusion about carbohydrates – carbs – I thought I’d try a little experiment to see what happened.

I call it the wholemeal bread diet. I’m not recommending this I’m just telling you what I did because I wanted to test this out.

I’ve consistently lost hundreds of grams of weight every week since I started it and it rubbishes the idea that you have to give up carbs to lose weight.

Here’s what I did:

• Three meals per day with a snack in between each meal.
• Good quality, but readily available sliced wholemeal bread.
• No butter, mayonnaise or any other spreads on my bread.
• Two hard-boiled eggs (with one yolk removed) for breakfast, chicken, sardines, etc. for lunch and evening meal.
• Canned fish is in brine, chicken is skin off.
• Fruit – several per day (I’d recommend vegetables too) either as is or as a smoothie.
• Porridge and two more hard-boiled egg whites as my post-workout meal.
• I measured how much chicken or other meat I put in to sandwiches – e.g. 60g chicken.
• My snacks are peanut butter or marmite half-sandwiches. I usually wake up in the night hungry (have done for years) and that snack is a half marmalade sandwich.
• I have one piece of chocolate (7g, 46 kcals) after lunch most days. I take just the one piece and then leave the packet in the cupboard.
• I avoid processed foods.
• I still have fish and chips on Friday, but try not to eat all the batter and chips. I also have the occasional muffin or pastry – but occasionally.
• At least 30 minutes walking each day.
• No adverse effect to my energy levels.
• My trousers are feeling looser now.
• Most of the calories are coming from the bread. There’s not much fat and that comes mostly from the fish, eggs or meat. The protein is a healthy amount (remember, there is protein in the bread, peanut butter, etc. not just in the meat, fish and eggs).

Notes:

• Bread is not the perfect source of carbs, but it is dead easy to make a sandwich instead of reaching for something less healthy and sliced bread comes ready measured.
• Sandwiches without any butter, mayo or spread tend to fall apart so it can be messy to eat so sometimes better to make an open sandwich e.g. sardines on toast and eat with a knife and fork.
• The peanut butter I use is pure peanuts with nothing added (no salt, sugar or other oils).
• Marmite has a surprisingly high amount of protein, but has such a strong taste I have to spread it thinly. A lot of taste makes for a high impact snack taste-wise without being high calorie. You can add herbs and spices to food to make them tasty without adding many additional calories.
• Chips, yes, I like them too, but sometimes when you actually taste them mid-chew some chips are not very tasty and I think “why am I eating these” – I have had chips that I couldn’t stop eating …  once … a long time ago. Don’t eat out of habit eat a treat if it really is good. If I have a muffin I sit down and enjoy it.
• A 30 minute walk every day will burn 180 Kcals – that’s 180 g weight loss per week in that alone.
• A strip of four squares of chocolate would be about 180 kcals and, if eaten every day, would lead to 180 g extra weight each week.
• A few hundred grams lost per week is a good figure and is not so much that the body goes into panic mode and tries to store extra fat.
• I let go of the notion that I should feel full after a meal and old ideas of what a plate of food looks like. If I’m not hungry then I’ve had enough and bear in mind it can take 20 or more minutes for the ‘hungry indicator’ to turn off after a meal. If I’m still hungry then I make myself another half sandwich.
• I weigh myself each morning, but I add the reading to a chart and read the 7-day moving average as my true weight. Body weight can rise and fall hundreds of grams daily so a single spot reading will never give a true picture.

I think the key is to think about what we’re eating, plan what to eat – be realistic about food that is easy to prepare and be realistic about portion sizes.

A variation I’d recommend would probably include more variety in vegetables and sources of good, slow carbohydrate.

It’s also key to take responsibility and recognise that what we eat and what we do will affect our weight – it’s not magic, it’s not controlled by some external force – it’s simply calories in versus calories out and that’s something, on a conscious level, that we can control.

For many people it’s the unconscious level  that poses more of a challenge and I don’t underestimate. I will write more about that in future blog posts. 

Photo credit - Apologies to Allinson for pinching their photograph, but I hope they treat it is 'homage' - I like their bread and eat a lot of it.

How Much Does It Take To Burn Off Calories?

I’m sure you’ve heard of calories – and you may track how many of them you eat, but how meaningful are they? I mean what is a calorie?

There’s been a suggestion that food should be labelled with how much activity would be required to burn it off.

For example: a slice of cake may be 300 calories or 50 minutes brisk walking.

I think this is a really good idea because “calories” to most of us is just a word. Although some of us may know exactly how many calories there are in certain foods we eat (chocolate digestive has 87 depending on brand) considerably fewer of us would know what that really means.

We don’t use calories to measure anything else so they seem abstract.

If you knew that a biscuit was a 15 minute brisk walk that would probably be more meaningful to you.

That tempting triangular chocolatey crunchy Tiffin in Costa would be 511 calories and would take 85 minutes to walk off! It does make you think twice.

How about other exercise? OK – how about race cycling – that would burn 13 calories each minute so the Tiffin would be burnt off in 40 minutes.

I don’t know about you, but 40 minutes of race cycling definitely makes me think twice.

The astute amongst you may have spotted that I've been writing calories incorrectly. I have. Actually the units we casually talk about as "calories" are kilo-calories – that makes them seem even more remote from our understanding – so each calorie is actually tiny and that Tiffin is 511 kcals or 511,000 true calories.

Brisk walking seems like a good measurement to use and burns about 6 kcals per minute. Brisk walking is something that is easy to incorporate in to daily life.

Leisurely cycling would burn about 6.5 kcals per minute whereas race cycling is really fast burning at about 13 kcals per minute, but probably too intense for many people.

Light jogging would be 8.5 kcals per minute and more people would be able to do this.


These figures are based on a 65 kg individual – how much you would burn would be different in reality, but the principal is still true.

The suggestion about food labelling was made by the Royal Society of Public Health writing in the British Medical Journal. Here’s a link to the BBC News item about it - Call for exercise advice on food labels

Carbs - The Good, The Bad And The Other

Carbs - They're Not All The Same

There’s lots of confusion about carbs and the papers don’t help with stories about carbs this and carbs that as if they’re all the same.

They’re not.

The Good – Carbohydrates are the body’s main source of energy so we need them. In fact, most of our calories should come from carbs, but from good complex, unrefined slow-to-digest carbs. These include wholemeal bread, wholemeal pasta, brown rice, oats, etc. These are good for us, help to keep our energy levels up and keep our blood sugar levels stable.

The Bad – However, the world we live in today is awash with bad carbs – white bread, white pasta, white rice and sugar. They’re all carbohydrates that have been refined to make them more appealing, but the process takes all the goodness away, much of the flavour and leaves behind simple sugar and starch that causes our energy levels to rise sharply and then fall just as sharply – and, unfortunately, leaves us wanting more.

The Other - Ultra low carb diets that you’ve probably heard of only work if you keep your carb intake really low – that doesn’t mean carbs are bad just bad for this particular diet.

Although carbohydrates are our bodies' preferred source of energy the body has a plan B – if there’s not enough carbohydrate in the diet the body will start digesting what else it can. Whether this is a good approach or not is hotly debated and I’m not going to wade in to that. What I will tell you is that if you’re on one of those diets you need to do it properly or not at all. You must read the books and follow the instructions.

If you’re not on an ultra low carb diet then get a good helping of good carbs with each meal and snack.

If you’re interested in reading more take a look at these excellent books by Tim Shaw.

The Truth About The Fat Burning Zone

If you've used one of the cardio-vascular (CV) fitness machines in the gym like cycles, treadmills, cross trainers, etc. you've probably seen a programme called Fat Burning or something similar on it – if you’re trying to reduce you may have used one of those programmes.

The fat burning zone is fairly moderate exercise and at this level of effort you burn a higher proportion of fat than carbohydrate.

Sounds good doesn't it?

However, if you've done this and seen how many calories you've burnt you may have been disappointed – particularly when you work out how much weight you've lost or snacks you've burnt off as a result.

Let me show you another way of looking at this.

Moderate effort may burn mostly fat, but it doesn't burn much of it and that is what you really need to be trying to do if you want to lose weight.

You’re burning calories all day long, even while you’re asleep, and most of that will be at the low rate that’s best for burning fat. When you get in to the gym you’d be better advised to put maximum effort in so that you can burn more calories.

If you burn off 2,000 calories each day, but only eat 1,700 you’re going to lose weight, but if you burn of 2,100 calories you’ll lose even more. It’s as simple as that. Exercising hard (for your age and ability) is good for the heart, the lungs and the circulation and you’ll get more of that nice buzz afterwards too.

What you may not know is that after an intense workout you will burn more calories for hours afterwards – it’s not just about the calories you burn off while you’re actually doing the exercise.

There are several ways to make cardiovascular exercise more interesting too with intervals and fartlek, but more of that another time.

For now, think about exercising harder than the fat burning zone – you’ll feel and be better for it.

If you’d like to know more get in touch and I can tell you more about it.

The Truth About Weight

From early years we've thought of ourselves in terms of our weight and now as adults many of us are trying to manage our weight or simply lose weight.

Stop! This is a mistake!

Think for a moment about what weight actually is. It’s how much of a dent you make in the carpet. Now if you’re punching holes in the lino with your stilettoes then this might be relevant, but for most of us what we weigh isn't what matters.

What matters to us is how we look, how we feel and how healthy we are – so we need to focus on measuring those.

Standing on the scales is so easy, but just because it’s easy to measure doesn't mean it’s what we should focus on. Running a tape measure around the waist is easy too.

You need to measure what you value because you will value what you measure.

We feel good when our trousers are not so tight and we can use the next hole in our belt. It feels good to walk in to a shop and buy clothes the size you used to get in to.

However, there is a serious side to this. When you’re focused on losing weight you lose focus on how you’re achieving it.

You could lose weight by losing part of your body, but you wouldn't want that – that sounds nasty like losing a limb or an internal organ, but actually aggressive dieting really can mean losing muscle and bone density along with the fat and that is not good.

One alternative is to find out what your body fat percentage is. That’s how much of your weight is actually fat. There are small electronic gadgets that can measure this – some scales for home use or in gyms can measure this too. From this you can make sure you’re not losing too much of you that’s not fat.

It’s also better to focus on the body fat percentage rather than Body Mass Index (BMI) which is rather a blunt instrument on a personal level.

I’ll write more about this again, but for now think about what matters to you and don’t fall for just talking about how much you weigh.

Do What You Can, With What You Have, Where You Are

"Do What You Can, With What You Have, Where You Are" is often attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States. It’s a useful approach to various areas of life – including health, wellbeing and fitness.

It’s easy to fall in to thinking that I’ll get fit when I have more time, when the evenings get lighter, if I lived nearer to a gym, etc. This can suck us in to thinking we could do so much better when, when and if. When, in reality, we could start right away and be making progress today.

Start by thinking that you can and then you just need to figure out how.

Thinking about what you eat can start today and certainly next time you go food shopping.

Being more active can simply be getting off the bus a stop further away, walking the long way round, using the stairs instead of the lift. Even little changes add up over time.

You don’t need fancy equipment and some people prefer to exercise in the privacy of their homes.

How easily you can exercise at home was nicely demonstrated by Michael Mosley in the BBC TV series Trust Me I’m A Doctor where he showed a number of exercises that can easily be added to the daily routine. Take a look.

How to get stronger muscles in just a few weeks without going to the gym!

Please note that this shows a quick demo and, given the opportunity, there are a few points about his technique I would want to correct.

Get in touch and I can help you get started.