“The cardiologist's diet: If it tastes good, spit it out.” - Author unknown
Prelude: March
was so named to honour and commemorate Mars, the Roman god of war. This month is
my time to get ready for a battle ahead … and there’s nothing sweet about
preparing for it … quite literally in the context of this next mission – or “omission”
rather.
The main objective, the ultimate one really, is fighting to
get back the runner’s form that I used to have. It was my reflection of my Bond-self: the pinnacle of the best
physical shape that I feel I’ve ever been in. Not only that, it was part in
parcel of becoming my best mentally as well (focus, clarity, calmness, taming
anxiety, ability to sleep/being restful). I started skiing more intensively last
month to strengthen my legs, loosen my joints, but most importantly, to
recondition my lungs and increase their efficiency. Now I’m looking forward to
start running again, and to regain that capacity for it. The problem with the
month of March for this region is of course the weather being so erratically
inclement and schizophrenic outside a lot of the time, and it wavers wildly
into many extremes: from giant dumps of snow, harsh regressions to cold snaps
some days, followed by thawing that makes icy patches; all are most
unfavourable for presenting risks for wiping out and falls, and getting joint
damage or worse. I can’t set myself up for any risk of internal bleeding
anymore either. Before I could start running a few odd years ago, I did a lot
of passive weight loss through other solutions before I even hit the trails and
track, as to avoid putting extra stress on my hips and knees and risking injury
before I actually started running. I thought I should pull the same trick this
time around, hoping that a few extra years of age since last time won’t be a
hindrance. There is the Ketogenic Diet which I could have enacted, which is
super strict and forbidding for sugar and carb consumption, but that is more
ideal for bodybuilders who are bulking up with muscle as well as shredding fat.
It is not a great help to anyone trying to build up activity endurance. Some
carbohydrates are a definite must for that unfortunately. So, the method I used
for this was the Slow-Carb Diet1.
Of all reduction diets I tried, the Slow-Carb method worked
most splendidly for me to shed off weight. I can’t remember the exact amount of
mass I lost, but I did go down two pants sizes within four weeks. It was
undeniable that cutting out excess sugar and carbs did the trick, with a
strategically placed cheat day* to boast my metabolism to keep the momentum of
it going. Cheat days also coincide with my most intense days for cardio
exercise and working out with other exercise, so there is some balance struck
there. To be crudely accurate, it made excess fat drop away from me like shit
from a tall cow. However, the fact that I didn’t/couldn’t continue the
Slow-Carb Plan just indicates that it wasn’t so easy for me to stick to and
maintain. I found that giving up sugar and starch is an extremely tough action
to commit to, especially when trying to be mindful of maintaining a modest food
budget. While cleaning out closets back in January, I found my old notes and spreadsheet
charts for the introductory fitness plan that set me on the right course before
I could take off running that eventually led to me on a course to my personal
physical best several years ago. Hence, along with the carb omission challenge,
I’m also actively reverting to the Craig Plan to strengthen both muscle and
joints. No, not the stupid Jenny Craig
diet plan; I’m talking about the Daniel
Craig fitness plan. All for the same reasons for when it was first executed
several years ago: same height/same age motivators, minimal need for a gym or special
equipment for some exercises, and minimal effective dosage advantage (see link:
My Celebrity Fitness Role Model). It’s
a body form that’s not too bulky, and yet not too lean, plus it just looks like
good utilitarian piece of equipment that can endure, take a beating, and spring
back and recover well afterward considering its particular count of years,
which is really the most practical thing I should be aiming for given my recent
history of health/injury issues**.
For myself, excess sugar and carbs is the most consumed,
potentially addictive substance, of all my vices, even though I’m not want
you’d typically call a “sweets person” compared to others. Sugar (and refined
carbohydrates) is far worse than alcohol in some respects in that people of all
ages have freer access to sugar and refined carbohydrates than to alcohol, and
it is so pervasive and hidden in so much of our processed food that we eat it
unwittingly all the time. It is why I needed more time to research and plan (with
a greatly revised grocery list) for this challenge than I did with giving up
alcohol last month (Abstention Project 2: February – Temperance). In terms of
the count of diagnoses, excess sugar is actually the bigger culprit for so many
more metabolic diseases than those caused by excess alcohol.
Mission: A month
of eliminating all refined carbohydrates from my dietary regimen. This includes
sugars, (white) starches, and high glycemic index carbohydrates, which means
not eating food or products containing the following ingredients:
·
All-purpose and other highly refined flours
·
Sugar (white, brown, and all forms of it in
between)
·
Honey
·
Maple Syrup
·
Molasses
·
Fructose (which includes most fruits and berries)
·
Dextrose
·
Maltose
·
Sucrose
·
Malto-dextrose
·
Lactose (Milk)
·
Pasta and noodles
·
Rice and rice flour products
·
Potatoes
·
Beets
·
Corn Products (including popcorn, cornstarch,
and corn syrup)
·
Sweetened alcoholic beverages
·
Bacon, ham, and other sugar (dextrose)-cured
deli meats
·
Meat Jerky
·
Gravad Lax, Imitation Crab and Lobster, and
other sugar-cured fish products (also full of Sorbitol)
·
Processed snack foods, candy, and other confectionary
items
·
Pop, kvass, and any other sweetened carbonated
drinks (all forms, including diet sodas)
·
Anything else canned and preserved in syrups
·
Artificial sweeteners of all kinds (Aspartame,
Sorbitol, etc.)
Exceptions:
·
The Slow-Carb diet allows for some strategically
placed cheat days within the program: 1 out of every seven to be exact, where
you can go wild and eat anything you want, including some sugary starchy food.
It actually does something to rev up the metabolism, so you burn up even more
weight as a bonus. I opt to make my cheat days for Saturday, and March this
year is great because it has five Saturdays in it. However, I think I’ll only exploit
the privilege for only four Saturdays. I reserve March 10th (a care-free
night to spend with someone special, to celebrate her return home), March 17th
(St. Patrick’s Day, when I’d love to indulge in a pint or two of Guinness), and
March 24th (a dinner theatre night, with the chance to enjoy some
birthday cake with my Mom), and of course Easter weekend is just paved
with to many sugar-laden landmines to avoid.
·
The only drinkable calories I will be using for
this foray is one small glass (150 mL) of unsweetened grapefruit juice, daily
in the morning. Its purpose is for stimulating some helpful liver enzymes***.
Reasons, Facts, and
Figures:
·
Fact 1: Data from the dietary history (according
to US statistics) has shown that humans have on average eaten 4 lbs of sugar
per person per year starting in the 1700s, rising steadily in annual
consumption right up until this decade, which averages about 180 lbs per person
per year. That’s a 4400% increase between the amounts of 1700 and of today.
·
Fact 2: Drinking one can of pop each day for a
year puts an additional 22.68 Kg (50 lbs) of consumed sugar into one’s body
annually.
·
Fact 3: If the current trend in sugar/carb
consumption continues, the cost for treating diabetes alone could possibly
defund all our healthcare dollars by the year 2026 (only eight years from now!).
·
Fact 4: Once a cancer cell develops, the best
way to make that thing grow and spread is to feed it with a diet high in sugar.
Substitution
Materials, Activities, and Alternate Behaviours:
·
Swapping out potatoes, rice, pasta, and bread
with pulses and legumes (lentils and beans). Yes, there are carbs in them
(complex ones though), and the protein and fibre content in them makes using
them worthwhile.
·
More vegetables of all kinds, except starch-rich
root vegetables.
·
Going nuts - as in real nuts (almonds, pecans,
cashews, et al. – all unsalted) for snack food
·
Automate meal plans, and keep meal options
limited to a just few simple selections
·
Cache away all sugar, flour, bread, pastry to
the bottom of my deep freeze; knowing that if I ever crave them, there is a lot
of extra bother ahead to access them.
·
No drinking my calories (water, tea, black coffee).
Drinking alcohol is permissible, but limited to weekends, more wine/less beer)
·
Most awesome tool for this project: I found a
greatly discounted vegetable spiralizer to make zoodles (zucchini noodles) to
substitute for my grain pasta.
Feedback Mechanisms:
·
The bathroom scale and a measuring tape
·
Looser clothing
·
Jarv Elite™ Bluetooth Smart Band Fitness
Tracker
·
The My Fitness Pal App, to gain a fuller idea of
carb and sugar content when I’m composing recipes at home.
·
Improved endurance with my other exercise, and
other physical activity
Progress:
·
Mar 1st – Mar 7th – So
far, the process has been committed to. Getting up to eat breakfast in a timely
manner (and one absolutely needs 30 gm of protein for the first meal of the
day) was the hardest habit to change. I’ve been so sleep deprived for most of
the winter, that forcing myself to commit to the task of preparing breakfast
seemed to be a great strain. However, after feeling the punishment that a body goes
through without doing it through a drastic drop in blood sugar, I’ve been more
diligent to see it through. Headaches occurred; thankfully not to the point of
migraine level. The biggest hurdle to overcome is finding food at work that isn’t
contra to the plan. The super dump of snow that happened on Mar 5th
thwarted a plan to try a little outdoor running, and ironically, there was too
much snow to go skiing. The trails were perfect, but the parking lot to the
course I use couldn’t be accessed without a 4x4 vehicle with winter tires. The
seething anger I had for that day alone probably amped up my metabolism a great
deal. I compensated with my exercise through shoveling and moving the
ridiculous amount of accumulated snow.
·
Mar 8th- Mar 14th – I kept
to the plan in an orthodox manner, eating and drinking nothing with added
sugar, or other carbs. My cheat day wasn’t even that much of a stray from the
plan. Breakfast had just bacon and some sugar in the coffee, Lunch was Dim Sum in
which I avoided the breaded and filled buns, and supper was homemade pizza(s)
and some wine. As much as I could have devoured an entire one of the two I
made, my appetite was shifted to other non-edible things. I did an amplified
body core workout Saturday and then amped up skiing a bit for the day after,
reaching a new personal record for skiing since the embolisms (emboli) occurred.
·
Mar 15th – Mar 21st – Measurements
and fittings on the 15th showed that I’m down by one pants’ size
since the beginning of the month. There was too much thawing happening to allow
for skiing. So, the plan switched over to try to run now that I shed some
poundage. However, dealing with icy patches is still a treacherous affair, even
without slipping and falling. After such a long lapse, my first two trials of
4km (Thursday) and then 6 km (Friday) have been harsh to say the least. My legs
have been seizing up rather quickly given that there is no simple flow or
continuity (like skiing has) throughout the course when given instances of
being forced to react instantly to gear down the pace and breaking momentum while
trying to establish better footing when switching surface to surface contact,
(ice to concrete to pavement to ice, etc.). It might have been to do easier
years ago, but this switching up is especially (and evidently) taxing to stubborn
old muscle memory. I was very sore and cramped on St. Patrick’s Day (Mar 17th).
Thankfully it was a cheat day, and thence comes the amazing healing properties
of beer. Of all the remedies (aside from proper rehydration) that ever helped
me avoid brutal cramping after workouts, beer is the chief among them. It seems
to go deep into my muscles and helps to nourish and loosen them up better. The
sweet coaxing from my “sleep” coach helped to make me recover better too. Another
thing to note about this cheat day was that I really had no strong craving for
sugar itself. I thought I might really go wild, but my only carb fixes for that
day was an English muffin (refined flour, probably sacrilegious to eat on an
Irish holiday), Gruyere cheese shavings in an omelet (mild lactose) with
bangers (mild, with dextrose), and a peach with skyr for breakfast (fructose,
low lactose), rice noodles for lunch, a couple pieces of leftover pizza from
last week, and two beers). I relished more in the fact that there was just an
easement of not having to actively review the carb/sugar content of whatever it
was that I was eating than being tuned into being really obsessed to consume
anything sweet or starchy. Sunday was too beautiful to avoid a run outside;
conditions were perfect. My legs were still a bit crampy, but a 5 km commitment
was made. I stuck to an automated plan for the rest of the week. My pants are
beginning to sag badly and are practically falling off me. I’ll have to either
dye my hair and pretend to be a teenager, or tighten up the belts and
drawstrings
·
Mar 22nd – Mar 31st –
Well, the last 10-day stretch is here, sort off. The runs outside have been
postponed due to another wallop from a spring snow storm. I’m relegated to use
a treadmill now (I hate bloody treadmills, I need to feel myself moving through
space), or compensate with more weight training. The one in my building is on
the fritz again, and I’ll have to pay admission to use some other one
elsewhere. I may just return to skiing if the trails aren’t slushy. I am noticing
that I really don’t have a big craving for anything thought of as sugary per se
as I had expected. Or it seems at least that this progressive move of being
weaned from it has indeed put a waning to such cravings. But I do get
hankerings for things like bread and deli meat most strongly out of all the
things on the taboo list. My cheat day breakfast was an exquisite plating of
English muffins layered with homemade gravad lax****, crowned with poached
eggs. Sugar somehow has an inflated potency in taste for me now. When I use
sugar in my coffee***** on my cheat days, the regular dosage that I used to do
now seems far too intense for sweetness, and I’ve cut back my addition of sugar
to my weekend coffee by two thirds. I’m also discovering things that are delights
to have as snacks that are fulfilling, even decadent, which don’t necessitate
carb intake. Fresh oysters (sea oysters, not prairie oysters!), for example,
now that they are in season and cheap(er) and now that I’ve learned how to
shuck them properly, kissed with a squeeze of lemon. I’ll have something like
that over a bag of chips any day. The temperature has plummeted drastically
since the last Wednesday of the month; and is expected to not get above
freezing until the first week of April has passed. Running far in the cold has
been brutal for the lungs for these final days of the month (-20 wind chill on
Thursday afternoon’s trial), especially when they were just starting to become
acclimated to warmer temperatures. Friday`s run almost resulted in a serious
wipe out on ice that put a cramp in my leg. The last day of the month was a
cheat day, and a great day to reunite with faces from my past that have I’ve
lapsed too long with seeing. I’m thankful that my old friends are doing well
and are looking healthy. Celebrating Easter was a welcome reprieve too.
Violations (Penalties): The penalty is simply just a
straight up addition of mileage or exercise I needed to perform to practically rid
myself of those extra consumed calories from the accidental, or incidental,
intake of refined starch/sugar.
Final Words: The
result for the month was a loss of 7.26 kg (16.1 lbs). I don’t believe that it was
as much as that last time I did this seven years ago, but I’ll blame some aging
for that. I still have a way to go to get into optimal form: by a loss of that
mass, plus even a little more. April will begin just as cold and miserable as
March is ending. I`ll be extending this challenge into the next month as well,
barring a few vacation days early in the month where I`ll be a little more
indulgent with feasting to celebrate another reunion of sorts. The worse thing
to deal with was the loss of bread and noodles/pasta in my diet. I’m quite
dependent on sandwiches it seems. The bonus is though that I realize that I
didn’t have a lot of taboo foods around the house to begin with, and whatever I
needed to sustain this challenge was minimal. On a scale of 1 to 10 though, I
rank it on a high in terms of difficulty it terms of performance and commitment
(8.5). I only faltered once, and it was on Good Friday, near the end of the
month (I sampled some cinnamon buns). One thing that I experienced through the
middle two weeks of the month was an accentuated lack of energy. I consulted
with a co-worker who is also an expert on planning these types of reduction
diets, and his feedback from what I shared with him was that I`ve been eating
too little. Hopefully, I`ll be able to amp up the mileage and strength building
throughout next month; the goal being to make a personal best for either the 5
or 10 km race for the Saskatchewan Marathon in May, sticking to the programs to
make the River Run Marathon later in the summer. The greater ambition though,
not linked with a formal race, is to collect bridge crossings again. This time,
Saskatoon has more bridges than ever, and I have yet to map out what exactly
that distance is for crossing all seven (eight later this year) pedestrian accessible
bridge decks in this city.
Bibliography and
Resources:
1. Ferriss, Timothy.
(2010). The 4-Hour Body. New York: Crown Archetype
*- The added advantage of this system with this one cheat
day per week is that it helps banish a sense of deprivation. If I have a
craving for something, all I have to do to note it on my cheat day list and
save it as a possible menu idea for Saturday.
**- Daniel Craig’s own list and history of injuries he sustained
just for preparing and filming for the role of James Bond is very extensive,
and the timelines he had to recover from them were impressively shorter than
one would expect.
***- Grapefruit juice is a notoriously powerful and tricky
substance of the world of pharmaceuticals: there is a myriad of medications
that contraindicate with it, even with modest consumption. One needs to be
careful with it while on prescription medication.
****- Last week, I learned and discovered from my DNA test
that a larger component of my genome that I thought was stemmed from heritage
in the Britain Isles is actually Scandinavian (25%). The flippant joking remark
I made in my last Christmas blog entry in 2017, is actually true! I learned how
to make gravid lax long before I knew this about my genome, and perhaps it
explains why I have a craving for such stuff once in a while.
*****- I separate my coffee drinking activity to drinking it
just black while I’m at work; using sugar and cream on days when I’m not. A
personal crotchet I use to be mindful of separating business from pleasure; not
related to any diet plan. 