What a good start to the New Year’s efforts to loose the Christmas flab! This morning saw me break the 1/2 stone (7 lbs / 3 kg) loss mark, since I started being good again on Tuesday 3rd Jan, which is 11 days ago at the time of writing.

What’s even better is that includes a cheat day last Saturday, and as it’s Saturday again today, that’s another cheat day. Excellent! To be clear here, that’s done without food restriction, without hunger, without low fat diet bars or shakes, and I’ve been eating 3+ times per day.

It’s one of the things that in some ways makes me wonder if it’s a good thing: eating mostly Paleo food, in Zone proportions, is such an effective way of losing weight, it can make you complacent. This happened to me last year, and after amazing losses over the first 3 weeks, I hit the dreaded plateaux. Fortunately it’s easy to over come that, but all that’s dealt with in my food diary from last year, which you can get on the How I Lost My Pot Belly post from last week, which includes details on handling cheat days.

It’s also the reason I have the weight to lose in the first place. Knowing that I can easily drop the pounds, with minimal effort, means that I don’t really care about not having what I want at Christmas. Whereas others may still be restrained, not wanting to balloon come Janurary, I know I can tuck into whatever I like (chocolate is my weakness, I must have eaten several large Toblerones all by myself!) and drop the excess without concern. To be honest, it’s probably not as healthy as just being good at Christmas… but where’s the fun in that!

Whilst it is a shocking affront to my delicate English sensibilities to post pictures of myself in my pants onto the net, in the circumstances, it seems like the right thing to do. For your reference, these series of photos were taken 3 months apart each, and so chart what’s possible over a 6 month period.

So if you’ve over indulged this Christmas, or are simply over weight and want to lose that beer belly or pot belly (or whatever it’s made of) I’m going to show you how I did it, step by step. You see many diet sites and books tell you what to eat and why, and give examples of stuff you could eat, but I took this a stage further by putting together a complete food diary that spans nearly 3 months:

• I carefully recorded everything I ate and drank.
• I took high resolution photos of every meal.
• I recorded every workout I did (not as many as you’d think).
• I weighed myself every day and compiled a detailed spreadsheet of stats.

It wasn’t the weight that I wasn’t happy with, it was how I looked

For reasons I won’t bore you with, I managed to pile on a load of weight in 2010 and ended the year weighing more than I had done in years and was not at all happy about it. However it wasn’t the weight that I wasn’t happy with, it was how I looked. Absolute weight for me is unimportant, but how you feel about yourself affects your personal confidence levels, which in turn affects every part of your life. Losing that belly had a big impact on my general feeling of well being and hence my outlook on life. What’s more, it’s not too hard, when you know how.

Now if you’ve been to this blog before, you’ll know I sporadically post about diet and exercise and have seen some major changes in my life. I could repeat all that here, but that would make this post ridiculously long so I’m not going to do that, instead I’m just going to highlight the salient points as I believe them, their explanations will have to wait for another day:

1. Almost everything you’ve been told about main stream dieting is wrong.
2. Fat is not the bad guy and for most people, calorie counting is an unsustainable answer.
3. Control your carbohydrate intake and you’ll control your weight.
4. The quality of your food is important.
5. The macro-nutrient balance of your food is important (that’s protein, carbs and fat).

Given the above, I eat what could be described as a “90% Paleo diet, in Zone proportions, + Dairy”. If you know what Paleo and Zone mean, you’re on the right track.  If you don’t, here’s a couple of quick definitions:

The Paleo Diet – don’t eat any food that was invented in the last 10,000 years!

The Zone Diet – balance your blood sugar levels (and hence your hormone levels like insulin) by eating a balance of protein, carbohydrates and fat, at *every* meal.

Dairy – Liquid stuff that comes from cows, duh!    I include dairy here as many pure Paleo eaters don’t believe in dairy products, I’m not one of them. I believe we were made to drink nothing but milk for the first 6+ months of our life, so I see no problem with dairy products.

Or you could use the CrossFit’s Diet definition, which is: “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar.” 

The most common question I get asked is: What do you eat for breakfast then?

When I qualify all that by telling people I don’t eat bread or pasta or cereal or potatoes or rice, or any other primarily starchy carbohydrate, the most common question I get asked is: What do you eat for breakfast then? This is what I wanted to show people by putting together a 3 month food diary.  Exactly what you can eat and still lose weight at a respectable rate.

Note this is not some unsustainable crash diet.  It’s not a “30 day challenge” or some similar typically unsustainable approach to weight loss.  In fact my food diary includes a cheat day every 7 days, when I could and did eat what I wanted. How do you fancy things like:

• All butter popcorn
• Prawn crackers
• Piles of fruit and double cream
• Bags of cinema pick & mix sweets
• Chinese take aways
• Nandos platters
• Sticky toffee pudding
• … I could go on

I was very sceptical of the cheat day idea when I first came across it

I was very sceptical of the cheat day idea when I first came across it, but in fact there’s some credence to the argument that a sustained reduction of energy intake alters your base metabolism  to compensate, so sporadic cheat days keeps your metabolism high. (I don’t like the word “metabolism” as I think it’s over used and regularly abused, but I’ll use it herefor the purposes of brevity.)

Certainly I found that it didn’t affect my weight loss when averaged over a week and it’s always nice to look forward to your cheat day as a reward for all your hard work in the week. It also gets over the psychological barrier of thinking: “What, you mean I can never eat XYZ food again?!?” if you can, at the next weekly cheat day. So in summary then I’m prepared to share:

• Nearly 3 months worth of food diary.
• Every single thing I ate and drank, every day.
• High resolution pictures of the meals.
• Full commentary on what and why I ate what I ate it
• How much weight was lost each day as a result.
• Details of every workout I did and what times I got and weights I used.
• How I completely removed my pot belly in just a few months

I’m going to be sending this out by email, so to get it you just need to pop your name and email address in below and day 1 will be sent to you in minutes:

Further to my very popular recent article on why calorie counting is flawed, I just received this link by email from a friend, which exposes the fact that the calorie values on food are all wrong, because they’re based on the raw ingredients of food. Whereas in fact as soon as you cook / process food, the available energy is increased, so the calorific value should increase too. (It also contains disturbing stories about eating raw monkey meat and a video of mice eating live albatrosses!)

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calorie-counts-are-wrong-cooked-food-provides-a-lot-more-energy/

Here’s the short video if you’re feeling gruesome:

What’s surprising to me about that article is that it’s surprising to the author! I thought it was common knowledge that energy from cooked / processed food was more easily accessible than uncooked / unprocessed food. That’s part of what the Glycemic Index charts are all about.

I do include “processed” whereas his article is more about cooked, because even raw foods have an increased GI from processing, for example oranges’ glycemic index (44) is 18% higher when it’s processed into orange juice (52), see the GI chart on the Southbeach Diet Site. That’s why any kind of fruit juice is bad from a weightloss perspective, due to the breaking down of the plant cell walls during juicing. It’s far better (and a whole lot more satisfying I’d say) to eat the fruit just as nature intended.

Either way, it’s all more fuel to the fire that counting calories is a simply flawed approach to diet and weightloss. Even Weight Watchers have recently ditched their calorie based points system, admitting that they’ve been getting it wrong for decades!

Diet programs on TV depress me. They depress me because 90% of them continue to trot out the same old advice, which can be summed up as:

Weight Change =

Calories In – Calories Burned

That statement was disproved 55 years ago

Oh I wish it were so. I wish that you could reduce the complex processes in the stomach to such a basic and simple equation, fit for the headline science that rules most people’s lives these days. I watch these programs and hear so called food experts saying: “A Calorie, is a calorie, is a calorie. Eat less, exercise more, and you’ll lose weight.” And indeed, at least the second part of that sentence is sometimes true, for some people, some of the time. But it belies the reality of human physiology and sets people up to fail, principally due to the hunger they will feel on such a calorie restrictive diet will mean they won’t stay on it for long, but also because a calorie, is not a calorie, is not a calorie! Our body doesn’t treat all calories the same, because proteins, carbohydrates and fats are fundamentally different and our bodies react to them differently.

Before I show that that statement was disproved 55 years ago, this is what Wikipedia says about 1 of the 3 phases of digestion:

Gastric phase – This phase takes 3 to 4 hours. It is stimulated by distension of the stomach, presence of food in stomach and decrease in pH. Distention activates long and myenteric reflexes. This activates the release of acetylcholine which stimulates the release of more gastric juices. As protein enters the stomach, it binds to hydrogen ions, which raises the pH of the stomach. Inhibition of gastrin and gastric acid secretion is lifted. This triggers G cells to release gastrin, which in turn stimulates parietal cells to secrete gastric acid. Gastric acid is about 0.5% hydrochloric acid (HCl), which lowers the pH to the desired pH of 1-3. Acid release is also triggered by acetylcholine and histamine.

Calories are calculated by burning food and see how much it heats up a beaker of water.

That process is really just the basic mechanics of digestion and doesn’t address the work of the enzymes that break down the food, or the absorption process, or the hormonal response the body has to the receiving the food’s constituent nutrients. Do you know how scientists reduce all that to a simple calorific value? Calories are calculated by burning food and see how much it heats up a beaker of water. How that has any relation to what really happens in our body is beyond me. Take a look at this video of the process:

The problem is, your stomach doesn’t burn food!

Because fat releases more energy when burned than carbohydrates, it heats water up more and so has more calories. Hence if you believe the equation at the start, fat must be worse for you than carbs. This is the basis for the “fat bad, carbs good” argument that has dominated modern dietary advice for decades. The problem is, your stomach doesn’t burn food! And therein lies the nub of the problem. Do we know for sure that our bodies react differently to fat calories, than carb calories, or protein calories? Oh yes, we’ve known this since 1956 (and before really).

You see in 1956 there was an experiment done, published on 28th July 1956 in The Lancet (the world’s leading general medical journal) by Kekwick and Pawan, in London, to test exactly this. It was called: CALORIE INTAKE IN RELATION TO BODY-WEIGHT CHANGES IN THE OBESE. They did 2 experiments, each over about a month, under hospital conditions.

For both experiments, water intake and salt intake was controlled for to keep total intake at the same level for each patient on each diet (3 litres of water and 10g of sodium chloride per day if you’re interested), further water retention / loss was measured and accounted for to get a real view of actual (non-water) weight loss. They also accounted for water retention due to the menstrual cycles of the female patients (which they found was significant)!

Experiment 1: Reducing Calories, Proportions Maintained

In this first experiment, Kekwick and Pawan put 6 obese people on 2,000, 1,500, 1,000, and 500 calorie diets each (after a period of stabilisation) for 7-9 days each. Not unsurprisingly, as the calories dropped, so did their weight. All diets maintained the same proportions of Protein (20%), Carbs (47%) and Fat (33%) (the 3 macro nutrients).

Experiment 2: 1,000 Calories, Proportions Changed

To prove that the proportion of Protein, Carbs and Fat is unimportant whilst calories are maintained at a set level, a second experiment was done. This time 14 obese patients were all placed in turn on 3 diets (again after a period of weight stabilisation), each diet was just 1,000 calories but the proportions were changed to rotate through 90% fat, 90% protein and 90% carbohydrates (and a control diet of normal proportions). This should prove that a calorie, is a calorie, is not a Calorie, irrespective of source, yes? Clearly the result should be that all would lose weight, and do so at the same rate, irrespective of macro nutrient make-up. Wrong! Quoting directly from The Lancet, the authors said:

“So different were the rates of weight-loss on these isocaloric diets that the composition of the diet appeared to outweigh in importance the intake of calories.”

This is their actual results, showing the differing weight loss rates for each patient on each diet (the graph is sort of upside down, in that bars above the line indicate weight LOSS, and bars below the line indicate weight GAIN):

Not only do we see that each of the four 1,000 calorie diets results in a different weightloss rate, what’s most astonishing is that over half the patients on the 90% carbohydrate diet actually put weight on. That’s an OMG moment ever I’ve seen one! If you’re on a high carb, low fat, low protein diet, your calorie restriction skills had better be awesome if you want to lose weight, certainly this shows you need to virtually starving yourself to death in order to lose weight.

Experiment 3: Increasing Calories, Proportions Changed

Kekwick and Pawan then came up with a 3rd experiment to confirm their findings, but this time rather than reducing calories form a normal diet, they increased them. After first finding a baseline stable weight on a 2,000 calories diet (all either gained or increased weight on a 2,000 diet over 7 days), they then increased the calories by 30% to 2,600 calories per day, but changed the proportion to high fat, high protein levels. Again in their words:

“It was demonstrated that these patients on the whole could maintain or gain weight on 2000 calories but except in one instance, lost weight consistently on a 2600 daily calorie intake.”

Let’s just be clear what’s being said here. Increasing calories by 30% triggered weight loss, just by changing the proportions of the macro-nutrients. That’s huge! That’s not to say that caloric restriction doesn’t work, it obviously does. The issue is that caloric restriction requires considerable willpower to maintain and for most people is not a long term diet solution. Remember that if you use diet as a temporary weightloss tool, and then return to your usual diet, your weight will also return to it’s usual pre-diet levels. To illustrate this point, I’ll again quote directly from the Kekwick and Pawan study (gotta love the 1950′s terminology here):

“In such a study the difficulties are formidable. The first and main hazard was that many of these patients had inadequate personalities. At worst they would cheat and lie, obtaining food from visitors, from trolleys touring the wards, and from neighbouring patients. (Some required almost complete isolation.)”

Summary

The point of this post was to prove that a carbohydrate calorie is not the same as a protein calorie, which is not the same as a fat calorie, and the Kekwick & Pawan study conclusively proves that. Yet here we are in in the present day, and still the mainstream dietary advice is to cut calories to lose weight. It’s shocking that 55 years on, and we still haven’t taken on board fundamental research like this. Slowly I see evidence that the world is changing though, so I remain hopeful. I still maintain that history will record the 20th century as the dark ages of dietary advice, responsible for millions, if not billions, of premature deaths.

I have far too many books in diet. Actually that’s not true. I have a lot of books on diet and health and wellness and sleeping and fish oil and such things, but there’s always room for more books! And this new book by Dr William Davis, MD: Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health ticks all the right boxes.

First off, it’s by a life long cardiologist. Someone who has spent their career fixing people’s heart disease.

Dr Davis had many heart disease risk factors himself and followed the standard advice: eat low fat and whole grains, banish meat, increase vegetable oils and take up jogging. Imagine his surprise when he gained 14kg (30 lbs), his good HDL cholesterol when down, his bad triglycerides went up, and he became diabetic.

For many people this would have been a death sentence, but fortunately the good Doctor had the sense to recognise that what your Doctor’s tell you is wrong and throw out the bad advice. He cut out all grains (wheat, barley, oats, corn etc) and quickly reversed the above trend. Even curing his diabetes! This is what he had to say about it:

“Cutting wheat products in my diet, in particular, proved the dietary turning point that reduced my appetite, accelerated weight loss, and just helped me feel clearer, more energetic and happier than I’d felt in years,”

Will society wake up to this simple diabetes cure?

Dr Davis now refers to the “low fat, high carb” period thus: “We’ve lived through 40 years of a failed experiment” I’d go further than that and say that history will record the 20th century as the dark ages of dietary advice. Not only have millions died an early death because of it, the repercussions of eating a high grain, high carb diet could well bring down the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, just by being overwhelmed by diabetes patients alone. The question is, will society wake up to the simple diabetes cure Dr Davis found before this happens?

It’s not just wheat that’s the culprit, although it’s probably it’s ubiquity that makes it the worst grain. Interestingly Dr Davis rounds on the plethora of gluten free products that are full of all sorts of other grains: corn starch, potato starch, rice starch etc, which are just as bad. The fact is, we’re just not designed to eat these foods.

Give up wheat for a 2 week experiment

I have personally persuaded several ill people to give up wheat for 2 weeks, to see if it would clear up their Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) symptoms, and without exception the experience has utterly changed their lives for the better. If you ever feel lethargic, bloated, have bad wind, diarrhoea, craps, reflux etc, then you owe it to yourself to try a 2 week experiment that could change your life.

Getting back to the book, this is definitely going on my (ever growing!) book list, even though I already know most of what it’s going to say. Good information doesn’t displace good information. It looks like my other dietary books will have some company soon!

A few weeks ago a friend asked me If I had an opinion on a story he’d seen about low cholesterol being linked to high suicide rates. As it happens I DID have an opinion on this, none of it complimentary about low cholesterol diets or Statins, the cholesterol lowering drugs.

But it got me thinking, you see I don’t believe the “Dietary Cholesterol Hypothesis” which simply states that cholesterol levels in your blood are raised by eating a diet that’s high in cholesterol. Such a simple theory is so easy to understand, it’s almost obviously true, it’s just a shame it’s not.

So here’s the thing, by all accounts I’ve been eating a diet very high in cholesterol and saturated fat. We’re talking steak, fatty mince meat (ground beef), pork of all forms including roasts with crackling, and bacon, oh yes plenty of bacon! Add to that cholesterol laden eggs, hard cheese, full fat soft cream cheese, sausages, fatty lamb (both leg and shoulder) and whole (full fat) milk, not to mention glorious double cream! You can almost hear my arteries hardening.

But wait, there’s more, we’re not talking eating this kind of once a day for my evening meal, but for lunch too. Oh, and breakfast, let’s not forget breakfast. Plus I typically have 1 or 2 snacks a day as well, which is more of the same (e.g. includes a block cheese, or a sausage, or hunk of meat).

I’ve been this way, 5 times a day for 4 years now, having a high cholesterol and saturated fat laden meal for breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack, dinner and an evening snack before bed… perhaps I should just book myself straight into hospital now for that heart bypass and not waste my poor GPs time. It’s just a shame that I’m the thinnest and healthiest I’ve ever been.

But like I said, I don’t believe in the dietary cholesterol theory. So much so, that my daughter now eats just like I do and when my friend asked me about low cholesterol issues, I resolved to get myself tested to prove that I was right, so I did and the results are back. First, here are my cholesterol levels as they were back in 2000 when I was not quite 30, just for comparison:

• HDL = 1.6 mmol/L or 62 mg/dl. This is meant to be the good cholesterol and by current thinking, should be more than 1.0
• LDL = 1.7 mmol/L or 66 mg/dl. This is the so called “bad” cholesterol and should be between 2.2 and 4.9
• TG = 1.2 mmol/L or 106 mg/dl. Triglycerides are apparently very bad, and should be less than 1.8
• Resting heart rate was 84 beats per minute, with the normal range being 60-80

Barry Sear’s excellent book Toxic Fat on p76 suggests that a very good indicator of what he calls Toxic Fat Syndrome (otherwise known as Syndrome X or “Why current Western children might be the first generation in centuries to live shorter lives than their parents”) is to divide TG by HDL. If this ratio is more than 4.0 you’re in trouble, obviously the lower the better. My TG/HDL was 106/62 = 1.7

So you can see that back in 2000 I wasn’t doing too badly and everything was in the right range, except resting heart rate which was on the high side and bizarrely LDL cholesterol was a little low! I was starting to put weight on though on my fairly typical western diet of cereal for breakfast, sandwiches and crisps for lunch, and typically meat and 2 veg type dinner (or pasta, pizza, curry, Chinese etc), with an occasional desert.

Fast forward to 2007 and I was quite over weight, was 30% body fat with a 43″ (128 cm) waist and my combined cholesterol had risen to 4.3 (sorry, no break down figures). CrossFit got me exercising and onto the Zone Diet and then with heavy Paleo Diet influences + dairy. I lost 2.5st (35lbs / 16kg), half my body fat (15%) and 10 inches (25cm) off my waist. But I realised I hadn’t got my blood worked up since starting my new way of eating and so I did.

I must confess to some trepidation. What if it came back terribly high? What would that mean for my health and my family and daughter’s health?!? What if I’d been wrong all this time and was eating myself to death, however enjoyable it was doing so? But I’m an engineer at heart and data matters. So without further ado, here are my results after 4 years of my high cholesterol food five times a day:

• HDL = 2.4 mmol/L or 93 mg/dl (a 50% increase)
• LDL = 2.1 mmol/L or 81 mg/dl (a 24% increase)
• TG = 0.8 mmol/L or 71 mg/dl (a 33% decrease)
• TG/HDL = 0.76 (a 56% reduction)
• Resting heart rate = 62 beats per minute (26% reduction)
• Blood Pressure = 125 / 77 (at 38 years old)

EDIT July: I’ve added the US mg/dl numbers to the above stats and as I’ve realised that cholesterol conversion is not linear with the triglyceride conversion, I’ve recalculated Barry Sear’s ratios.

Well that looks pretty good to me. Experts don’t seem to agree on whether there should be a lower LDL figure it seems, but my test from 10 years ago said it was too low, so a small increase seems ok. It’s well below ideal max range though. But I’m not used to interpreting cholesterol test results every day, so here are some examples of what they had to say at the Doctor’s:

• “The good HDL cholesterol is very high. That’s one of the best results I’ve ever seen.”
• “Excellent.”
• “Triglycerides are very low, that’s very good.”
• “Keep up the good work, whatever you are doing is obviously working.“

Wow! Even I was seriously impressed with how much gushing was going on. I have to say, it’s a real vindication of everything I’ve learnt over the last 4 years about diet, and of course exercise, and proof positive that I’m doing the right thing, not only for myself but also my wife and daughter (and everyone who’s had to put up with my bleating over the last 4 years!).

What is perhaps most interesting, is that last year I really went off the rails and put a load of weight on. My head was not in a good place at all. This year I’ve sorted myself out and in 3 months have lost the weight I put on last year. So I might have thought that my bloods would be worse. It just goes to show, it’s not too late to sort yourself out. But perhaps that’s a story for another day.

If you want to read up on why the dietary cholesterol hypothesis is a load of old bolox, this is the very easy to read and entertaining book I recommend: The Great Cholesterol Con by Dr Malcolm Kendrick (unusually for this field, he’s an English Doctor!)

If you’ve not seen it yet, you may like to comment on my How to cook a Blue Steak which has attracted a lot of polarised views!

There’s been so much debate however, I thought it was time I put up a video showing how I cook my blue steaks. Note that I don’t say that this is *the* way, or the best way, but this is just how I cook my blue steaks. (Sorry for the sizzling sound when the steaks go on the pan!) Enjoy:

 
 
If you like your meat (which you do or you wouldn’t be here!) checkout some of these meat related t-shirts, mugs, water bottles, mouse mats etc. Very funny and well worth the crack:

I decided in the New Year to lose the weight I’d stupidly allowed myself to put on last year, and get back to a more manageable weight. I set an arbitrary target of 12st7 (175lbs / 80kg) to achieve in 2 months. Well the end of Feb arrived and I’d hit the dreaded weight loss plateaux.

So I reset my expectations and set a new target of the end of March to achieve my goal. I’m pleased to say I’ve hit and sustained 175 lbs with a week spare. I’ll post up in the coming week some more details about inch loss and physique change (possibly with more revealing before and after pictures if you can handle the horror), but for now, you’ll have to make do with a pretty graph:

I’ve kept a food diary of the last 3 months, recording pretty much everything I ate, including with photos. That might prove interesting reading, so I’ll see what comes out of that.

Curses! February has not gone quite according to plan, take a look:

It was all going swimmingly well and I’d been losing about 2lb per week throughout January, until about the 7th Feb, then I hit the dreaded plateaux that so many dieters encounter, and in fact I hit the exact same thing at the same point back in 2008. So what happened?

It’s a fairly typical scenario:

• things are going well so you feel that the odd like cheat won’t hurt
• portion sizes increase a bit
• snacks between meals get a bit bigger
• cheat day gets blurred a bit with the preceding and following days
• you go out a few times during the week and have some things you wouldn’t normally.

And so it is. In many ways, I blame the Zone diet for being too good! It almost encourages you to cheat, because losing weight becomes so easy when the weight just falls off, you’re eating good and tasty food and you’re rarely hungry.

Looking at it another way, I’ve just switched to maintenance mode 6 lbs too soon. In February I’ve:

• eaten out at restaurants
• had takeaways
• been to the pub
• drunk a bottle or 2 of wine at home
• had chocolate on more days than I can remember (oops, there goes the New Year’s resolutions!)
• been to the cinema and eaten far too much pick & mix!
• drunk full fat milk every day, several glasses of
• had cheese almost every day (I love cheese!)
• every Saturday has been cheat day
• had popcorn several times
• had sticky toffee
• eaten fatty foods like sausages, lamb, chorizo, peanut butter, coconut cream, crisps and cheese dips, roast pork, meat balls, double cream
• the list goes on…

And yet… I’ve still lost weight in February, and whilst I’ve hit a plateaux, I’m not putting any weight on. Which is pretty amazing considering the list above!

EDIT: if it doesn’t translate into American, this is “Pick & Mix”:

So really I need to decide: am I happy with my weight and the balance of food that I am eating (yes to both by the way), or do I renew my efforts to get to the 12st7 (175lbs / 80kg) I originally had in mind? Remember it was an arbitrary target. I have already lost 2.5 inches off my waist and 5.25 inches altogether, although another inch or 2 off my waist wouldn’t hurt.

I think on balance I would prefer to lose that last 6 lbs, I just now need to think over what time scale?

I have just finished the latest book in Barry Sears’ Zone Diet series: Toxic Fat. I’ve read most of Dr Sears’ many books that he’s written over the last 15 years of his research and whilst all containing good advice, some have not been great.

His first book Enter the Zone was a cracking book in terms of content, but was a terrible read for the layman. To be fair, I think he targeted the book at the medical profession as it contained a lot of in depth medical detail, but it was a tough read for someone without any such training.

What I’ve found most interesting in reading his books is how he’s adapted his approach over the years, not only based on his progressing research, but also in an attempt to make his material more accessible. Certainly Toxic Fat is the best example to date of this. In fact I think already it’s my favourite book by Dr Sears, as it brings together all the elements of his research and presents them in a succinct way that easily read and understood.

The initial chapters of the book deal each with a separate topic and Barry talks about fat deposits in the body as stores for Arachadonic Acid, which he is now casting in the same light as a cancer, as it exhibits many of the characteristics of cancers. He deals neatly with diet and supplements (mostly fish oil) in a way that’s easily understood and not overloading. What I particularly like are the examples given, with actual amounts and the dosages of fish oil are explained. How much fish oil to take is a very common question which Toxic Fat answers well. Though if you really want the low down on fish oil, I’d recommend Barry Sears’ Omega Rx Zone: The Miracle of the New High-Dose Fish Oil as a revolutionary book on the subject of fish oil.

If more detail is your thing, then there’s plenty to be had in the Appendices with in depth breakdowns of the physiology involved with everything that Barry Sears teaches. Of interest to many will be the sample menu plans for eating in the Zone Diet, which are accessible and easy to follow.

Altogether Toxic Fat is Barry’s best book in my opinion, and if you were only to get one Zone Diet book, this is the one I would recommend.