On the 3rd March, Tony Blauer himself is flying into London to give a Be Your Own Bodyguard 1 day seminar at Crossfit Central London. I’ll be there, along with many of the other Personal Defence Readiness (PDR) Coaches from around the UK and Ireland.

If you’ve never seen Tony teach his very unique brand of personal safety, I highly recommend you get your butt down to London in a month’s time and check it out. It’s no exaggeration to say that it will change for the better, the way you think about your safety for the rest of your life. People who attend the PDR Personal Safety courses that I run report a massive increase in confidence (double for women, +50% for men). How much better will it be to hear it from Tony Blauer directly?

It promises to be a very good course, get on down if you can possibly make it. I hope to see you there. Register here

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:

It gets my goat that politicians still haven’t answered the most basic of planning questions: how many people should this country contain? I firmly believe that until you decide how many people you want in the country, you can’t possibly have a sensible conversation about anything to do with the country’s infrastructure. If you don’t know how many people there are going to be, how can you decide for example:

• How many hospitals we need?
• How many teachers there should be?
• How many roads to build and how wide they should be?
• How many power stations we need to build?
• How many people should we let into the country every year?
• How much to invest in the train system?

I could go on… For so many years talk of over population has been a taboo subject, for the simple reason that if you accept the fact that there may be too many people, then you must accept that the logical conclusion is to somehow control the population, and that’s something that most people instinctively rail against. Only the Optimum Population Trust (rebranded as Population Matters) seems to be talking about it openly.

Slowly however the tide is starting to turn. Tools like the BBC’s What’s You Number tool that calculates what person you are in the world. I’m around the 3.8Bn out of 7Bn mark, which means that since I was born, the world’s population has nearly doubled… that’s staggering, and not in a good way! That’s why a few years ago I wrote a rather ranty post about why IVF should be banned I realise posts like that are never going to make me any more friends, but that’s the kind of thinking that stops people talking about what needs to be talked about.

So it was a refreshing change to see a serious engineer and scientist (despite what you might remember of him from the Great Egg Race) as Professor Heinz Wolff starting to talk about the difficult issues over population brings. This is what he said (my emphasis):

“But the critical subject we have to face worldwide is overpopulation. We have to be schizophrenic about the benefits of medicine and health. Overpopulation is down, to some extent, to the fact that even elementary medicine – anit-malaria treatments, anit-parasites, clean water – all reduce death rates.

“Somebody at some stage has to have the courage to ask questions about issues such as how we react to famine? To do this you have to think the unthinkable, which you can only do in your own mind because this often gives rise to opinions that would put you in a great deal of trouble – even with one’s own conscience.”

Whilst I accept it’s only hinting, I’ll take it. I firmly believe that over population, and hence population control, will become the defining political issue of our life time.

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!

If you’re a regular to my blog (there are several thousand of you) you will have seen me sporadically post about my shoulder injury. I won’t bore you with the sordid details again, as I’ve already done into details about my SLAP tear, MRI + Arthrogram scan, and how I did it doing CrossFit’s butterfly pullups.

Just to bring things up to the current day, I was booked in to have my surgery, a biceps tenodesis, this Thursday the 8th December. However the consultant suggested that I may want to think twice. I’ve since been to a Physiotherapist who told me that should wouldn’t recommend surgery; I’ve spoken to a 2nd shoulder Consultant over the phone who told me not to have the surgery, and I’ve exchanged emails with a 3rd shoulder Consultant who also said that I shouldn’t have the surgery. Guess what… I’m not having the surgery!! This is what they were going to do (in summary, cut off my biceps tendon from my shoulder, drill a hole in my Humerus (upper arm bone) and stuff it in there):

To summarise all their advice, the common theme is this: shoulder surgeries are not to be taken lightly. They carry not insignificant risks of failure (of various forms) in addition to possible long term problems like pain, stiffness and weakness. So the advice boils down to this: if you think you can live with your shoulder as it is, don’t have the op, and if there’s any suggestion that your shoulder is improving, like mine is, don’t have the op.

To be clear, when I first injured my shoulder back in February, I couldn’t even scratch my head with my left hand and it did not make much improvement for several months. Once I’d stopped sulking however (lol!) and started going back down the gym, focusing on what I could do instead of what I couldn’t do, things started to improve rapidly. Fast forward to November and I was doing the following, all without pain:

- Shoulder press: 5 x 45kg
- Snatch: 40kg
- Clean & Jerk: 60kg
- Pull ups (kipping): sets of 5, slowly
- Hand stands: multiple reps, holding for 10 seconds
- Front squat: 5 x 100kg

In fact the only thing that hurt, and then just a bit, was wall balls. But I managed to manage this by using a lighter ball and favouring my right arm on the catch (the bit where it hurt). I’ve yet to try things like Thrusters and Push Press etc. In fact I’d already decided not to have the op at this point.

It was only when I hurt my shoulder again (a PDR Self Defence session with a fellow PDR Coach Chris Worrall) that made me think twice about the op again. This time however, after just 2 weeks my shoulder felt as good as had taken 6 months previously. Cracking a rib wasn’t part of the bargain mind, but that’s another story!

So it’s left like this: I’m to get my butt back down the gym and see what I can do, or rather what my shoulder can do. Time will tell if this is the way it’s to stay forever.

My apologies if you were unable to access this site in the last 24 hours, getting this rather sparse error message:

As you can see it’s fixed now; who knew a GigeByte a day wouldn’t be enough! Only last month I posted that this site had tipped over 25,000 unique monthly visitors for the first time. Well it seems that November blew that out of the water with a massive 40% increase to nearly 35,000!!

The reason was bonfire night, as my Remember, Remember, the 5th of November Poem post got 8,073 visitors, which is obviously a seasonal spike (see the bump in the graph above). Not only does that post give the full poem, including the bit about burning the Pope in a tub of tar(!) but it also has a healthy and sometimes fervent discussion about censorship and at what age it’s appropriate to teach children real, unfettered history. It’s worth a read if you have 5 minutes.

Anyway, I’ve increased the bandwidth by 50% so we should be good for a while to come, and now I have to fire off a support ticket to my host to find out why I didn’t get an email warning me that I was getting close to my bandwidth limit, grrrr…

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.

Below are 2 videos of CrossFit Founder Greg Glassman giving a lecture at Tony Blauer’s Combatives Camp in Las Vegas earlier this year. I could listen to Coach G talking all day, but I particularly like his answer to the common question:

“Which diet should I do, Paleo or Zone?”

To which he said:

“That’s like being asked out for dinner and replying with: ‘Which do you want me to do, get the right restaurant or turn up on time?’”

Hoho. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll enjoy them:

Edit: November’s final number (including a dip because I exceeded my bandwidth limit) was 33,212, a 35% increase on 25,000!

For the first time since I started this ‘ckle blog some 4 yearish years ago, it has racked up over 25,000 unique visitors over the last 30 days! “Unique” means that each visitor is only counted once, no matter how many times they come back over the month, as opposed to “Visits”. Oh and that doesn’t include me either, I deliberately filter my own IP address out of the stats.

It seems only yesterday that I first tipped over the 1,000 visitors a day mark. Ah ok, not yesterday, but just 3 months ago. Whereas now, 1,000 visitors per day is a regular occurrence, take a look:

Google Analytics Screenshot

Trying to imagine 25 thousand people is pretty tricky, but when you scale that up to 300,000 people per year visiting this blog, that’s pretty astonishing, quite humbling and somewhat of a responsibility all at the same time.

I think I need to go lie down in a dark room somewhere…