Tuesday, July 3, 2012

An Average Day - And More Anecdotal Evidence


Red fruits milkshake
Ina Todoran via Compfight
I had a conversation with a good friend yesterday about diet.

She has had to adopt a very-high-fat diet over the last twelve weeks because of an intense medical treatment she is on.

A big part of her treatment is a drug that must be consumed with 20g of fat. She had to take this particular medication three times a day (7:00AM, 3:00PM and 11:00PM). Finding 20g of fat in one place that she could tolerate was hard. About the only thing she could keep down was a smoothie she had every day (sometimes three times a day), or a cracker loaded down with butter.

She also had to take other medication with food at various different times during the day (Noon and 7:00PM).  The medication taken at this time also needed food intake but did not require high fat servings.  She consumed these pills with such items as salad or meat. During this treatment she could ot tolerate any type of bread at all.

Anecdotally, In the past 4 months since she's been on this calorie rich, fat rich, carbohydrate poor diet she's lost about 20lbs from her pre-treatment weight, and 30lbs from her highest weight at the beginning of the course of drug therapy - when she could stomach a greater variety of food.

This led me to yet another high-fat/low-carb story I've heard (first hand) about losing weight - without ever intending to lose weight. It is an incidental side effect of this whole high-fat process.

I'm now doubly convinced that everything we've been told about how to lose weight is wrong. Neither my friend nor I can exercise at this point, so burning all those excess calories isn't an option (as all the weight loss people would have you believe).

I'm now down to my high school weight of 148lbs. I seem to be quite steady.

Just for kicks, I wrote down everything I would eat in a typical day:


The surprising thing is the total number of calories consumed is about right for a man my size (almost 2000), and the amount of fat that  used  to make me cringe (133g - are you kidding!!). I'd like to get the sugar/carbs down even lower, but most sources are consumed with lots of fat as well, so the insulin load (the whole reason I'm doing this) is blunted - so I'm not too worried about it.

So take this to your dietician and ask him/her to explain. Either you don't exercise enough, eat too many calories,  or their whole idea of what makes you fat is wrong.





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