To get to the answer to the question straight away: it might.

This was brought up in a study reported on Msnbc.com, part of which states:

…new research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.

“There’s a line of research showing that when people can pat themselves on the back for their moral behavior, they can become self-righteous,” says author Kendall Eskine, assistant professor of the department of psychological sciences at Loyola University in New Orleans [ed: also known as 'Captain Obvious' by his friends]. “I’ve noticed a lot of organic foods are marketed with moral terminology, like Honest Tea, and wondered if you exposed people to organic food, if it would make them pat themselves on the back for their moral and environmental choices. I wondered if they would be more altruistic or not.”

You can see where this is going. They administered tests to a number of people that sounds kind of arbitrary to me (go read it yourself if you’re interested) and concluded:

“There’s something about being exposed to organic food that made them feel better about themselves,” says Eskine. “And that made them kind of jerks a little bit, I guess.”

Why does eating better make us act worse? Eskine says it probably has to do with what he calls “moral licensing.”

“People may feel like they’ve done their good deed,” he says. “That they have permission, or license, to act unethically later on. It’s like when you go to the gym and run a few miles and you feel good about yourself, so you eat a candy bar.”

It think our researcher here is right – and wrong.

I like this notion of ‘moral licensing’, but it doesn’t just occur in people who eat organic food.

An asshole is created any time a person’s behavior or circumstance permit them to fall victim to the delusion that they are better than someone else, or are somehow qualified to be a moral ‘decider’ for others.

It’s easy to see how eating organic, with its high cost and the sheer amount of trouble involved, would engender in people the desire for a greater payback than the quality of the food they by. Self-righteousness comes free with every organic product – if you choose to take it.

By extension, ANY DIET can come with a dose of self-righteousness that can be applied to people on diets that differ, or people who don’t diet at all.

I’m going to hit the local farmer’s market this morning and see what my farmers got growing. I’ll pass on the self-righteousness.

Of course, the problem with being an asshole is not knowing you’re being one. It happens all the time. That’s why I invite anyone who reads my blog to point out any ‘pot calling the kettle black’ behavior on my part.

Lastly, I love the response one person has to this self-righteousness in others as reported in the article:

“At my local grocery, I sometimes catch organic eyes gazing into my grocery cart and scowling,” says Sue Frause, a 61-year-old freelance writer/photographer from Whidbey Island. “So I’ll often toss in really bad foods just to get them even more riled up.”

Sigmund Freud was a cokehead in a time when it wasn’t a big deal. The notion of doing drugs at the time was not a counterculture phenomenon – it was something that was considered more a bad habit at most. Freud was a doctor in Vienna and possessing an active imagination, as well as a coked-up personality, invented psychoanalysis as a means to make a living.

It was quite popular with the well-heeled Viennese women of the day, and this quack became quite famous. It wasn’t all a waste of time: Freud invented the notion of ‘ego’, which is something that we probably should have had if he hadn’t invented it.

The problem, as I see it, was that as interesting as some of his theories were, it wasn’t science. A doctor listened patiently while women complained – and they felt better. That’s not science. While Freud provided an air of science to the proceedings with his amusing theories, it was nothing of the sort.

Very early on there was dissention: Carl Jung was one of his students but soon parted ways. He was best known for his notion of the ‘collective unconscious’ – a common underpinning that all humans supposedly had. Later on, Abraham Maslow came along with his ‘hierarchy of needs’ which is insightful – but again, it isn’t science, but more a sort of observational philosophy.

This observational philosophy permeated psychology well until the late 20th century, at least in my 4am unsourced and highly subjective narrative here, but early in the 20th century, there was a response to what was being viewed at the time as a mish-mash of theories of the mind that were fun, but really weren’t actionable science.

The result was a new school pf psychology called behaviorism.

Behaviorists purposely didn’t care what went on inside the mind. They cared what the organism did as the result of stimuli. My take on it was if you give a rat a small rat yummy every time he steps on a little lever, he’ll learn to click the lever to get rat yummies.

Yeah, sure – boring compared to imagining the rat having penis envy or the Electra complex, but it was observable, measurable, and certainly seemed more like science than all that other stuff.

In my horrible overview of the history of psychology here, behaviorist considered the workings of that little rat mind a ‘black box’. This is important because it begins to get to the point of this post – which I’m sure you’re still wondering about. In a quote I found on the Internet (the link promptly didn’t work the next day), I found this description, which I like and will use:

A metaphor of black box is usually described to explain the behaviorist approach about learning, i.e. the learner is a black box and nothing is known about what goes on inside. Knowing what’s inside the black box is not essential for determining how behavior is governed by its environmental antecedents and consequences. The behaviorists believe that the psychology as a science to develop a reliable and useful theory of learning have to use observable, reliable data as evidence.

I like that. It’s sciency. It’s also history: behaviorism, like Freud, has been put in the garbage heap of history for the most part. Psychology has moved on to more subtle means of understanding the human mind and more practical therapies for changing behavior than the nonsense that was the foundation of psychoanalysis or the crude observations of behaviorism.

The behaviorists served their purpose. They brought psychology back from pseudoscience to science again, and while it was discarded as too simple and replaced with a more effective combination of cognitive therapy and medication, it was a great launching point to a real science of psychology.

I was thinking that perhaps the example of the behaviorists ought to be applied to nutrition.

In my ninth year of doing low carb, I still don’t know why it works for me. Theories abound, and on other sites on the Internet, fierce and vicious debates surround the mechanisms by which some people lose weight on low carb. Gary Taubs is vilified. Atkins is called ‘Fatkins’. Even Jimmy Moore, the decent human being that writes livinlavidalowcarb.com, is viciously attacked. Every time I read these debates, my head hurts.

The truth is – we really don’t know. To paraphrase Michel Pollan: Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650 – interesting potential, but I’m not sure I’d want to have an operation then.

I suppose I feel a bit like those behaviorists in the early 20th century looking for refuge in some real, actionable science rather than these ‘I’m smart – he’s an idiot’ debates between Atkinistas, Paleos, Vegetarians, Vegans, and so on.

How about this:

• People try low carb – and it works for them. They feel better. Their blood work improves. They lose some weight.
• Some people try low carb and it doesn’t work for them. They don’t lose weight and or don’t feel good. They try something else.
• Some people try ANY diet and it works for them. Then it doesn’t. They try something else then.
• And none of us prance around feeling smarter or superior to other people who hold a different opinion or seek to try a different approach than ours. Instead, we compare notes – what works, what doesn’t. We respectfully disagree if we need to, and we encourage one another to find our own roads to optimal health through empirical research on ourselves.

Just because some study says such and such doesn’t mean that embracing or avoiding a certain behavior or food will have the same effect on you – it does mean that there might be some merit in trying it and see what happens. It also doesn’t give anyone the right to engage in name-calling.

Now – none of this is for those of us who play it safe, and follow the guidelines set out by the medical authorities currently in vogue. If we choose to take personal responsibility and consciously ignore their advice, we must also bear the risks.

And for those of us willing to do this, a call for civility. A vegan and a low carber have more in common with each other than we do with someone eating the Standard American Diet. Stop making a way of eating into a religion with notions of good and evil, saints and heretics.

Maybe there’s multiple paths to optimal health, and maybe those of us searching for new ways deserve each other’s respect for at least trying.

I violate the laws of physics

The above chart is pretty much the entire month of April as per my daily honest as humanly possible calorie-counting, my exercise tally, and my activity total based upon my little exercise spy – my Fitbit. This chart comes from the Fitbit website.

There’s a little bit of a problem with this chart. It shows how many calories I burned in the dark green (and somewhat steady) line. The more erratic line is my food intake. You should also notice that I’ve burned 83,000 calories but only eaten 66,000 calories – that’s 80% of the calories I supposedly needed to maintain my weight.

That’s great! If we believe in food calories, then I shouldn’t even have to go near a scale: I subtract how many calories I ate from how many I burned (83,109-66,133=16,976). I then take those 16,976 calories and divide that by how many calories are in a pound: 3,500.

And thus, I know that I have lost 4.85 pounds. That’s great – except I didn’t. My average weight hasn’t changed a bit.

I’m continuing to count calories because I find it interesting to prove just how pointless it is. If calories have a direct cause and effect relationship with a person’s weight – I haven’t seen it.

I do believe that the total grams of food consumed, as well as the proportions, should have some relationship, but I’ll be dipped if I can see what it is just yet – and if you were to say it’s because I can’t keep to any fixed eating pattern for even a week at a time – you’re right.

Sunday, April 29, 2012 – 208.2

I was 208.2 when I weighed myself at the usual time, then by midmorning I was 206. Those potato rolls I had last night soaked up fluids like a sponge, and the water weight would disappear if I minded my Ps and Qs and avoided carbs.

I went and exercised early. Instead of 3 sets of 10 I did 2 sets of 15 – for no particular reason at all.

My wife and I took a ride to the store when I came back – she wanted to bake more and needed butter. I wanted to make chili and wanted to get some jalapeno peppers. We came back with some cooked bacon as well, and I made my chili while my wife baked, and I had 3 strips of backed with some sliced tomato. A BLT is an awesome thing, and I was halfway there – and in case you’ve never tried it, bacon, lettuce, mayo and tomato without the bread but just wrapped in a lettuce leaf, has almost all the goodness of the sandwich – a great low carb trick if you’re jonesin’ for a BLT.

The low carb tricks for the day ended when the baked goods started coming out of the oven. I indulged in corn bread along with a very spicy low carb chili I made. Quite good. More baked goods and crab-stuffed mushrooms were had, and while I enjoyed my bacchanalian feast, I resolved to ‘get down to business’ for the last 2 weeks. Yeah, right.

Total grams for the day: 514 (18.1oz). Total calories: 2,724. Fat: 114g, Net carbs: 235g, Protein: 165g (22/45/32%)

Monday, April 30, 2012 – 207.2

As I’ve mentioned previously, I have a little ritual where every week I fold a little booklet out of a sheet of paper and write my goals for the week. Last week I just wrote ‘set better goals’ which was a cop-out. Perhaps *I* am little sick of myself at present – and sick of my own good-natured acceptance of my blase attitude toward failure. Am I stringing myself along? Am I taking advantage of my own good nature?

On this morning, when contemplating my goals, I wrote ‘I will be under 200 by May 5′. This is absurd, of course – readers who have been following this magnum opus of weight loss failure know how this will turn out – as do I.

As I thought about how stupid it is to set an unrealistic goal, I also thought of a comment that I made: I never go hungry.

There are different types of hunger. I thought I’d experiment with it. Why not?

I had a yogurt in work about mid morning, then I had a bit more than a cup of the hot chili from yesterday. Later in the day I gnoshed on half a cucumber with salt.

I didn’t eat again until 9pm, and I watched my hunger in between and how it felt.

The hunger felt scary, as if some part of me thought it would never get fed again. The hunger also passed for a time – a few hours. When the hunger came back, it was more shrewd and negotiated with me, convincing me that 700 calories is way too low – and that pizza you picked up for the kids isn’t that bad.

I had 3 slices and a small glass of milk. My wife, either reading my mind or reading my blog, said: “you’re lowering yourself for that?”

It was a good question, perfectly timed. I considered it: yes – this was worth it. This was good pizza, locally made, not Big Corporate pizza.

Total grams for the day: 354 (12.5oz). Total calories: 1,959. Fat: 87g, Net carbs: 131g, Protein: 136g (25/37/38%)

Tuesday, May 1, 2012 – 205.0

The beginning of a month is like any other day, really, but it can also be a great demarcation point, breaking the past from the future. I can say that I have been blessed in that I have shown – in the months I have been recording this as well as all the months I wasn’t recording this yet was doing more or less the same – that I have successfully reset my weight point from 265 and with only the slightest bit of discipline on occasion, can maintain my weight at an average of 206.

I wasn’t recording how I ate and did this for 6 months. Now I have 11 weeks of one hell of a decadent weight loss maintenance log as proof that – yes – you *can* lose weight, keep it off, and still eat 10 Lindt chocolate balls in one sitting. No bulimia involved. No periods of starvation. No mental anguish. All rather pleasant.

While you may question the wisdom of eating 10 Lindt chocolate balls, it is nice to know that a thinner life does not prevent one from this type of indulgence.

Diet food.

There’s only two tiny problems that elude me at present:

1. I don’t quite know how I manage to eat what I do and maintain my weight loss
2. I *still* want to lose more

Wednesday, May 2, 2012 – 205.0

Oops. After eating all that food yesterday – it sure felt like a lot – I’m the same weight. I must have broken the laws of physics again for those ‘calories-in-calories out’ people. Sorry.

On the way to work I picked up roast beef and grass-fed butter. I had that for breakfast, along with butter in my coffee.

During the day I read this tidbit in an article in Msnbc.com on mad cow disease discovered in a dairy cow last week:

The USDA still allows chickens to consume the remains of cattle. Chicken litter, containing urine and feces, is fed to cows. That could theoretically transmit the infection to cattle.

…So let me get this straight. They feed chicken dead cows. Then they feed chickenshit to live cows.

Is this why the ‘regular’ ground beef is so cheap compared to the grass-fed or organic versions?

Anyway, I didn’t flinch as I ate the grocery store roast beef. Maybe I should have.

Afternoon was more beef and butter, a yogurt, and a can of oysters. I didn’t get any exercise – it was too rainy to walk so I  didn’t and I skipped the gym as I went yesterday.

In the evening I went a bit off the rails, having my last tin of tuna bought on our vacation in December. This stuff comes with its own mayo and sweet peppers and is yummy, though this one in particular tasted like it reacted with the can – a bit metallic. I followed with two hot dogs in lettuce leafs with mozzarella cheese, then maybe a bit too much dark chocolate. I also wasted time on a taste of my wife’s cornbread and her home-made bread. A bit later were a few almond cookies. I’ve indulged worse, but really, the carbs I had for the most part just weren’t worth it.

Total grams for the day: 365 (12.9oz). Total calories: 2,548. Fat: 189g, Net carbs: 75g, Protein: 101g (52/21/27%)

Thursday, May 3, 2012 – 203.8

Unfortunately, at this point in the week, the same pattern began to emerge – good during the day, not-so-good at night. I could really take most any other day here and enter it here. The calories were over 3000 and the carbs probably around 150. This repeated Friday and Saturday as well.

Conclusion

So I’ve decided to end the daily tally early. It’s becoming a distraction – and more than a little repetitive.

And it certainly has not provided the results I set out to acheive.

I think this experiment has led to a number of interesting conclusions. I want to go through the data and sum some of them up. I’ll do that in the near future.

Don’t think for a minute that I’ve given up on my weight loss goal. That’s not going anywhere.

Some of us thought it was Wall Street destroying Amreica. Some thought it was illegal immigrants. Others thought it was moral decay.

All wrong – its fat people doing it.

Fat people, according to this article in Reuters, are a drain on the economy. Let me cherry pick a few of the high points in this insightful article:

• U.S. hospitals are ripping out wall-mounted toilets and replacing them with floor models to better support obese patients.
• The Federal Transit Administration wants buses to be tested for the impact of heavier riders on steering and braking.
• Cars are burning nearly a billion gallons of gasoline more a year than if passengers weighed what they did in 1960.
•  the obese are absent from work more often than people of healthy weight.
• Even when poor health doesn’t keep obese workers home, it can cut into productivity, as they grapple with pain or shortness of breath or other obstacles to working all-out.

Sadly, we fat folks disappoint the public health researchers because, unlike smokers, we don’t die off as quickly, reducing the societal burden.

It must be self-satisfying to thin folks to be able to blame our frigging GASOLINE CONSUMPTION on fat people instead of the fact that they all want to drive gas-guzzling SUVs. And of course, businesses are concerned that they won’t be able to work you to death as fast if you’re obese.

What I want to know now is which candidate – Romney or Obama – are going to do something about these fat people.

I started this week pretty much where I started every week doing this public performance of diet-flailing: 208.

I was still in the range I’ve been in for 8 months. What changed was not my weight, obviously.

And maybe that was OK. Maybe this wasn’t about the struggle to take off a few pounds. Maybe this was about the ability to struggle without despair. To enjoy the struggle. To keep trying without getting wrapped up in my obsession.

What the hell does that mean?

I just finished an important book: The Obesity Myth by James Campos. A law professor and a former fat guy, he wrote a case for the prosecution. The defendant is the title of the book: the obesity myth – the notion that we are a nation of fat sedentary and unhealthy individuals, and if we only stepped away from the table occasionally and got some exercise, we’d all be thin.

This book is out of print. Not because it’s a bad book: it’s an interesting read, and one that I think everyone who is on a diet or considering going on one should read.

It’s out of print because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. It calls out the entire diet industry as perpetrating a fraud on people, defining ideal weight as something unattainable to the vast majority of Americans, painting even the slightly overweight as suffering from the same health issues as those people grossly overweight and unfit, and condemning millions of people to a life of shame, self-hatred, damaged health, and counterintuitive, weight gain through perpetual useless dieting.

It’s one Hell of an indictment. In fact, it can be described as an old friend of mine would say: ‘Like a turd in a punchbowl.’

No wonder it’s out of print. Nobody wants to read this. An entire industry has been created around the myth that being fat has a direct correlation to being unhealthy, but professor Campos makes clear that there is little health difference between a fat person who eats healthy and exercises and a thin person who eats healthy and exercises, while there is a BIG difference between that healthy fat person and a thin person who eats junk and is sedentary.

There’s a lot of people who want to believe this myth – including its victims: us fat people.

If you are reading this, you’re probably fat and want to be thin – that is: if you haven’t abandoned these posts because I have ‘failed’ in my weight loss – and who wants to see that?

If you are ‘fat’ and still reading, let me ask you: are you really fat? Or is it that you don’t meet a cultural ideal, an airbrushed magazine cover of what ‘healthy’ looks like?

Assuredly there will be more on this from me. I’ve done a lot of reading in this area. These diet deniers write wonderful, insightful books that quickly go out of print, but given the wonderful ability to buy second-hand books over the Internet – I have a few of them.

I am also not just having my head turned by some recent idea I’ve been exposed to – which does occur with me, to be honest. No – there’s a thread throughout this blog that I do not condone weight-loss-at-any-price – despair and self-hatred are verboten. The ability to enjoy food and not being hungry are paramount. The occasional overindulgence encouraged. That’s why low carb is so freaking awesome. Give up pasta for bacon? Sure! Sign me up! If I gotta make a choice there, it’s an easy one.

Sunday, April 22, 2012 – 208.2

Anywho – to the mundanity of daily eats.

Five thousand calories the previous day leave a man a bit unhungry in the AM…I broke my fast around 12:30 with some prosciutto, followed by some of the grocery store roaster. I then experimented with a coconut milk ice cream. I tried it with a little stevia, but I really don’t like stevia, and having more or less ruined it at the outset, I regressed to childhood and threw whatever in: cinnamon, cocoa powder, cayenne pepper. My wife and older daughter tried it. “Interesting.” was the guarded response from both.

I think it sucked, actually – for me, stevia ruins the flavor even more so than cayenne pepper in ice cream would.

It might have been better with no sweetener at all, or been that one rare use for splenda.

My wife and I cooked in the afternoon. I made some grass-fed burgers and grocery store spicy Italian sausages on the grill,  and had 2 of the burgers and ultimately 2 of the sausages. My wife, now officially off her 6-week Ultramind diet, made a brioche as an experiment. I had some – it was quite good though she was disappointed it didn’t rise all that much. It went well with some butter. We played cards – ‘progressive rummy’ – a card game we learned at our friends house the previous night. My wife won and I was the big loser. Then we went to bed.

Total grams for the day: 283 (10oz). Total calories: 1,750. Fat: 113g, Net carbs: 34g, Protein: 136g (40/12/48%)

Monday, April 23, 2012 – 208.2

The most notable aspect of this day was my mood – it was in the shitter. OK, it was a Monday, it was rainy, and I needed to start putting together a big, complicated project that felt akin to starting to clean a garage or basement: where the hell to begin? This isn’t an unusual feeling to have in similar past situations, so I chalked it up to ‘situational stress’ and figured I’ll get a head of steam on this eventually and I just need to weather the emotions.

Eats during the day were a combo of leftover sausage and hamburger as well as yogurt and 1/2 of a very large cucumber with salt.

I skipped exercise on the way home – and I didn’t go out of a walk because of the weather. I was conflicted about this, of course: I’m was in a crappy mood and when like this it’s best to get the most mileage out of little things by turning them into big things. That’s what a good funk is good for – right?

At home with the kids, however, I felt better. I had a burger with some cheese and a small piece of the brioche from the other day – there was only a little piece left – it wasn’t restraint that prevented me from eating more.

When my wife came home she brought a key lime pie and I had a piece. It was pretty good – not great, however. We’re the carbs worth it? In this case, probably no.

Total grams for the day: 303 (10.7oz). Total calories: 1,761. Fat: 97g, Net carbs: 68g, Protein: 138g (32/22/46%)

Tuesday, April 24, 2012 – 204.0

Today sucked less than yesterday, which I attribute as to making some good progress on the project in work. I walked at work, though 2/3rds of what I usually do. I had just a yogurt and 3 of the spicy Italian sausages I cooked up on the weekend – that was it for the day. In the evening I went and exercised. Because there was a guy on one of the machines I used, I upped my reps to 20 from 10 – and was surprised to see I could actually do it. Perhaps the rest in between had helped?

At home I cooked up some ground beef I got over the weekend on the grill and had 2 burgers with ketchup. I also had a small piece of the kid’s leftover pizza – my thinking here, oddly, was a fallback to when I lost 30 pounds last year: a portioned indulgence, eaten with fat. It wasn’t all that much. I had jumped on the scale in the evening and I was down to 201.6 – why is the weight suddenly dropping off me now? Despite all this documenting, I’ll be damned if I know.

A few strange items: the past 2 nights I’ve had these long involved dreams, something I don’t usually have. I also was wondering if I am subconsciously fixating on my BMI being under 30. While I know this is in many ways a worthless number, it was a milestone for me to get under 30 – and under 30, right under 30 – is where I’ve been for months.

I decided to change my height in my weight tracking program. I mad myself an inch shorter. Now my BMI is over 30. Let’s see if I do what I usually do when I see that: get the number under 30. I know: weird.

Total grams for the day: 239 (8.4oz). Total calories: 1,761. Fat: 94g, Net carbs: 26g, Protein: 119g (39/11/50%)

Wednesday, April 25, 2012 – 202.2

On Monday I was 208.2. By Tuesday night I was 201.6. Whatever the reason for the precipitous drop (magic key lime pie, perhaps?), it usually swings up at this point.

Certainly my hunger did.

Something I rarely mention is that I *never* starve myself. Never on low carb have I allowed myself to suffer from hunger. I’ve managed it – eating some and waiting a bit, or attempting portion control, but if my hunger continued, I ate – and I measured my success on what I ate, not how much.

This was a day I could not control the hunger.

I started with an Atkins shake for breakfast in the car. I had also forgotten my ear buds in work the day before and was forced to listen to staticy radio for my entire hour commute – and I listened to the news. Bad idea. The news does NOTHING good for me, especially as I’m in a bit of a funk, most likely little to do with the diet and more to do with stress at work and cold and cloudy weather.

At work I had a yogurt and was good most of the morning, then had one of the hamburgers I cooked and 1/2 cucumber.

I grabbed a Dunkin Donuts coffee for lunch as a treat for myself. I looked up the nutrition facts on this – not an easy thing to do. They aren’t even listed on the Dunkin Donuts site. I eventually figured out there was approximately 145 calories in the thing as they use light cream – I’ve been overestimating on this for a while now. Counting calories suck.

Later in the afternoon I had a can of baby clams in the lunchroom. A colleague was walking by, and apparently having pegged me for a ‘health nut’, asked: “What are the health benefits of clams?”

“I like them.” I said.

“Oh.”

On the way home I had a mean case of the hungries. Bad, because I was having food fantasies. Always a bad sign. Sandwiches and McDonald’s danced in my head. The volcano needed to be fed virgins to appease the Gods. It was big.

I mollified myself by through what I considered a negotiated settlement with the hunger volcano. No virgins for you – how about we go down-market? I bought 2 ‘snack-size’ bags of BBQ-flavored pork rinds, with a dusting of everybody’s favorite possible neurotoxin, MSG.

Hoping this would appease the hunger, I crunched these things on the way home, with bits of neon orange toxic BBQ-flavored dust landing on my jacket. It wasn’t a pretty sight, I’m sure. I munched my way through 2 bags, and followed with an Atkins shake as a chaser.

It wasn’t until the Atkins shake that the hunger subsided – perhaps I should have started the appeasement with that?

At home I was exhausted, and took a nap until my wife came come from work and woke me up. Everyone went to the kitchen at this point and I availed myself of an abandoned Wendy’s chicken sandwich that gets a ‘meh’ rating from me on quality. Next up was 1/2 slice of bread with some cheese, a few bites of the once-fashionable-but-now-forgotten key lime pie, and a small glass of milk, then back to bed.

Total grams for the day: 470 (16.6oz). Total calories: 2,710. Fat: 158g, Net carbs: 89g, Protein: 223g (34/19/47%)

Thursday, April 26, 2012 – 203.8

Considering how much I ate yesterday, the scale was kind. As I mentioned the other day, I did mess about with the bullshit BMI number calculation by making myself an inch shorter, and now the BMI reads over 30 – let’s see if I react to that on some unconscious level. We’re complicated beings – I wouldn’t put it past me to be so irrational that it matters.

What was particularly notable about this day was the total lack of hunger during the day: a shake in the am, a yogurt, mid morning, and a cucumber in the afternoon – that’s it. Took a walk, but didn’t lift.

In the evening I got the kids pizza and had some myself – considering I was so low in food for the day – and like pizza – I had 2 slices, then cleaned up the kid’s leftover, putting some butter on the crust.

Mood was so-so and inconsistent. I was more cranky than depressed – which is better. Anger is a much better emotion than despair – anger has energy and, if properly channeled, can be productive. Despair just sits there – waiting. Still overcast and chilly.

Total grams for the day: 241 (8.5oz). Total calories: 1,377. Fat: 241g, Net carbs: 74g, Protein: 100g (31/41/28%)

Friday, April 27, 2012 – 203.4

I was all over the map on this day in terms of mood. In general, I’d say it was OK – but there were ups and downs, believe me. I had my shake and my yogurt – both are convenience foods, and as much as I dislike drinking the chemical concoction that is the shake, it sure is handy and does prevent me from gobbling down much worse…at least sometimes.

I thought I would cut my walk short on this day, but I found myself doing the full three circuits around the building where I work. Sunny though cold and blustery, I see sunshine as medicinal, and whether it’s true or not, it makes me feel better to walk in it. I was appreciably less cranky in the afternoon.

Before leaving work I had a can of oysters, and in the car another shake. I picked up McDonald’s for the kids, which was a bad idea for the kids and a bad idea for myself.

Considering how little I actually ate during the day, I thought a few fries wouldn’t be a big deal. This lead to a few more. Then a few more. I had bought an extra chicken sandwich and ate that as well.

At home, the fast food set off the hunger trigger and I vacuumed up a number of items that certainly weren’t on the acceptable foods list: leftover pasta, some sandwich my wife had leftover from her day at work, some Lindt chocolate balls, some brown rice, and even a little jelly on some bread. The jelly was some sort of Swedish preserves we got on our last day trip to Ikea, the Swedish furniture store. The place is a trip – so clever in so many ways. Very experimental in their notion of something as mundane as selling furniture you have to put together yourself. They even sell food  from Sweden and have a mini grocery store.

The jelly I had – ‘cloudberry’, if I recall, had some strange aftertaste – apparently, living near the Arctic circle make you think any berry tastes good. I think not.

I felt sick after my little overindulgence – and pretty tired as well – and went to bed.

Total grams for the day: 601 (21oz). Total calories: 3,391. Fat: 181g, Net carbs: 240g, Protein: 180g (30/40/30%)

Saturday, April 28, 2012 – 204.0

Very interesting that the food consumed seemed to have little effect on my weight. 0.6 pounds is far less than I would have expected.

Being Saturday I slept in and got up around 6 and drank black coffee. At 11am I had a can of tuna with mayonnaise. In recording this, I noted that this was the first time in nearly a month that I had mayonnaise. I used to eat it all the time. I have been trying to stay with animal fats and olive and coconut oil and avoid the other oils – I suppose I’ve done well here.

I also had an ounce of provolone cheese.

We went to an arts festival in the afternoon and I had street vendor paella. Being the town arts festival, this was no ordinary street vendor but the best restaurant in town making the stuff in a giant pan on the street. No wonder the line was 70 deep. It took a while, but just about the time we were at the front of the line, they brought a giant fresh pan of scallops, sausage, octopus, chicken & rice to the head of the line. The man in front of us said: “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

I had to agree. In the restaurant, you can’t get a piece of bread and butter for $6 – but that was how much the paella cost.

To be honest, however, I was not in the mood for the crowds and the vendors. I would have really preferred a quiet day. I think I’m a bit depressed.

Oddly, I’m not depressed about my lack of weight loss, nor my ‘cheating’, nor anything to do with the diet. Really, I’ve been doing this for so long that I am aware that there are times that are just not right for weight loss for whatever reason. This I accept. I don’t give up – I just fail gracefully and try again. As I’ve mentioned a number of times in this chronicle, I am maintaining my weight loss of some-odd 60 pounds from 9 years ago – and doing so eating carbs – plenty of them.

From a weight maintenance perspective, I’ve got nothing to complain about.

From an exercise perspective, while I have tapered off to only a few days a week of lifting and my walks are down a bit as well, I still have created a craving for activity. I have also proven to myself with the Fitbit that even on days where it appears to me I’m not that active, my life is such that I am still getting on average of 5000 steps in per day and on days where I try to get that number up, I’m over 10,000 per day.

From an eating perspective I do have some bones to pick with myself. I can’t quite bring myself to demonize food anymore. It’s a wonderful way of self-mind control to do this: break foods down into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and eat in such a way that you become a ‘good’ person. I think people sometimes use their diets as a way to feel superior to others – and I don’t even hold it against someone to do so. If they reclaim their health and happiness through this means, I am fine with it – even if they *do* become insufferable, self-righteous assholes in the process.

The problem for me is that I *know* how this magic trick works. And of course, when you know how a magic trick works, the magic disappears.

If there’s a change to be made, more than anything, it would be that I redefine what junk is. I’m OK with not losing weight right now, but if I’m going to splurge of goodies, I’d like them to be higher quality & less processed. Fruit instead of candy and cake, for example. Fresh instead of in a package with a shelf life guaranteed by chemicals to be longer than the lifespan of some family pets.

I don’t believe in total prohibition of any food. What I’m working toward is the eventual loss of desire for what I see as ‘tacky’ food. I would like to banish ‘good’ and ‘bad’ from the thinking about food forever and replace it with ‘lame’ and ‘pathetic’ and ‘pointless’.

Having a gooey and sweet God-knows-what on occasion should never be a crime. What should be a crime is that it wasn’t that good – that you wasted that intake on something that just wasn’t worth it.

Coming back to the notion of ‘depressed’, I do want to make clear that it’s OK, and that I’m OK.

I have an ability that I don’t think everyone else has: I can detach myself from my emotions and look at them as if I was not the one experiencing them. With this ability to observe myself, I can see that, yes, I do have external life issues – things that happen to people – nothing all that unusual – that are weighing on me. A dispassionate assessment of these show that these will pass, and I just need to weather this.

My mood is also sensitive to the actual weather, and the approach of summer and sun will do wonders for my mood.

Really – I’ve had the exact same problems I do now and been in a wonderful mood. It’s not the problems that are the issue – it’s the mood – and moods pass.

To complete the discussion of depression, it pays to make fun of it. The problem with depression is that it can be defined as a disease where one takes themselves way too seriously.

Life’s too serious to take too seriously, frankly.

To conclude this ramble, after the arts festival and grocery shopping, I came home and put away the groceries while my wife whipped up some ‘rapid brioche’ from her French baking cookbook. While filling the cupboards and stuffing the fridge, I ate 3 hot dogs on delicious potato rolls, followed up with a glass of milk. Later, when the brioche was done, I had a piece – hot from the oven. Delish.

Total grams for the day: 467 (16.5oz). Total calories: 2,642. Fat: 147g, Net carbs: 175g, Protein: 145g (31/38/31%)

I’m starting my week where at a weight close to what I gravitate around: 206. I’d like to see if I can be less, um, erratic this week and count better.

Sunday, April 15, 2012 – 205.8

I’ve started crunching the numbers I’ve gathered since April Fool’s Day. Right now I’ve got these great inscrutable charts like this:

It's meaning jumps right out at you, eh?

As reports come in calling me to task on my numbers being wrong, I think I’m going to abandon counting calories.  I’ll continue counting calories along with this as a reference for myself, a translation of sorts, even though it’s a translation to something that isn’t real, it’s such a common way to think about diet that leaving it out at this point would be uncomfortable as well as confusing.

Calories are bogus. They don’t mean what we think they mean. I decided to count grams instead. Unlike calories, grams can’t be faked. You can’t claim something is 30 grams when it really is 20. Anybody with a scale can prove this.

If you sell something that’s 100 calories but it’s really 200, it would be a LOT more complicated to prove. You need a bomb calorimeter to burn the food in a furnace and measure the heat output. Then you have to run a number of calculations on the food to determine how much of the food was bioavailable – a furnace can burn fiber – we can’t. To do this little calculation you have to do a lot of fancy math that ends up looking all scientific and gives you a result to 5 decimal places, but due to the variations in food, you’d be lucky if the number for a given product wasn’t off by +/- 20%, which, if I recall, is how much the US Government allows labels as an error.

Having written the above, I wanted to be sure I wasn’t full of shit so I did a little searching and found this:

Is there a U.S. labeling regulation that establishes the allowable variance for the analyzed value vs. what is printed on the label? If so, what is the specific regulation? (April 2011)

Yes, FDA regulations published at 21CFR101.9(g) specify two classes of nutrients; the allowable variance is different for each. Regardless of the class, the analyzed value is derived from a composite sample of twelve consumer units, with one unit coming from each of twelve different randomly chosen shipper cases.

Class I nutrients are nutrients added to fabricated foods for the purpose of fortification, such as vitamins, minerals, protein and dietary fiber. For this class, the analyzed value must be at least equal to the label value.

Class II nutrients are naturally occurring nutrients. For this class, the analyzed value for the “beneficial nutrients” (vitamin, mineral, protein, total carbohydrate, polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat or potassium) must be at least 80% of the label value and the analyzed value for the “nutrients to limit” (calories, sugars, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol or sodium) must not be greater than 120% of the label value. These allowable variances are commonly referred to as the “80/120 rule.”

So, as I interpret this…if you count your calories scrupulously and try to eat 2000 calories, you might have eaten as much as 2400 – that 400 calories is just shy of a McDonald’s double-Cheeseburger or running 5 miles per hour for 35 minutes –  and it wouldn’t be considered mislabeling.

Calories as we think of them, these magical food energy units, the star of the stage play ‘Calories In-Calories Out’, don’t exist. They are a series of simplifications, error corrections and inaccuracies that get put into You, a biological being with a great range in the ability to absorb 100s of different nutrients known and unknown due to genetics, lifestyle and frigging time of day.

Food Calories are as real as fairies or hobbits – the unicorns of nutrition.

(Please don’t confuse food calories with the real ‘calorie’, which is a unit of heat defined as  the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C. I’m not disputing this is a real, solid fact. I am an idiot, but not that big of an idiot.)

I’m going to count ounces of food I consume – or for my international readers who use a rational system of weights and measures, I’ll count grams.

I think most people have a conception of what an ounce is, or a gram.

If I tell you I ate 12 ounces of nutrients or 340 grams of food on a given day, you’ll have a visceral idea of how much I ate. It’s not perfect, but it feels to me to have a closer relationship to reality than a calorie.

So there.

Breakfast was roast beef and goat cheese. Early afternoon I had 3 fried eggs (kid leftovers). I also had some homemade ice cream – just a few bites. We just bought the machine (the wife wanted one) and I want to see what it tastes like.

Not bad. I might be able to whip up some low carb stuff with this in the future.

About mid afternoon I got the munchies (no illegal drugs involved – sorry) and grabbed some things I would have rather avoided: a small amount of Whole Foods store-made mac & cheese (which is awesome), a piece of greek toast left over from breakfast (put olive oil, oregano and a bit of salt on your toast instead of butter – a great alternative), along with some roast beef and the goat cheese that needs to get eaten before it goes green. I also had a pickled tomato.

Dinner was some mini hamburgers made with grass-fed beef and about 2 fish sticks my wife made from scratch.

I was OK until then. A little later the situation rapidly deteriorated. toast and butter, cake and a single chocolate ball (what restraint!), washed down with a glass of milk. The remainder of the fish sticks also got consumed.

Note that my percentages are very different from before. I’m not counting calories – I’m counting grams.  The percentages used to provide percentage of calories – but calories don’t exist in my new way of thinking.

Total grams for the day: 518 (18.3oz). Fat: 208g, Net carbs: 170g, Protein: 140g (40/32/27%)

Monday, April 16, 2012 – 208.2

If you look at my totals from yesterday, I can tell you that half of the total was eaten right before bed. I had, in fact, calculated my daily numbers before I did a commando raid on the kitchen. Night eating is a big problem of mine – putting the amount of food aside, it simply isn’t good food. It’s food out of my plan – food that does not help me in testing my hypothesis. And eating breakfast doesn’t change this.

Here’s what I would like to do, an attempt to solve this night eating problem: measure it.

Now I’ve been accused of being a little numbers-happy, but it’s a way to pay attention to things that go unnoticed. I remember first learning this trick when first trying to stop smoking cigarettes. Count them. The act of noticing what you are smoking always brought the number of ciggies down by 25-33% for me.

A comment on my last post from Lee struck home: in all your experimenting, have you tried a low carb diet like the one Atkins wrote about and you went on originally and stay on it for 2 weeks? She didn’t say it like that of course, people who comment on my blog are very nice, like anyone talking to a scary crazy person would, but that’s what I heard.

Jeez – I don’t know if I can do that…that’s why I spend all this effort doing everything but. I’ll try, though – actually, it’s what I have been trying to do all along, but I suck at low carb.

As to eats, a light day. I wasn’t all that hungry. And I tracked the times I ate At 1pm I had a greek yogurt. I readjusted the carbs down from 8 to 4. You can do that with Greek yogurt as the label must say 8 because that’s what the milk the yogurt started from had, but the yogurtizing of the milk creates lactic acid from some of the sugars so only half the sugar is left. At 3pm, a tin of baby clams. At 5pm, 3 oz. of roast beef with some goat cheese, at 7pm an Atkins shake, and 9pm, 2 hot dogs and 2 mini burger patties.

I did exercise though still sore even though I skipped yesterday, and my overall mood was pretty good for a Monday. My mind was popping with interesting ideas all morning – work drained that pond by the afternoon, but I was productive and upbeat. I also walked at lunch, though it was an oppressive dry and hot desert day – I don’t live in a desert, however, and I cut the walking short.

Lee also mentioned I should mix up my exercise.

I know.

I’m stalling.

Total grams for the day: 184 (6.5oz). Total calories: 1,113. Fat: 65g, Net carbs: 9g, Protein: 110g (35/5/60%)

Tuesday, April 17, 2012 – 205.4

Woke up and decided I would be consistent. How do you do that?

I figured by bringing the same stuff to work I did the previous day. I did think it might behoove me to eat something green, like a plant, maybe, so I grabbed some middle-aged zucchini from the veggie drawer along with the usual yogurt, 3 oz of roast beef, and 2 oz/2 tablespoons/28 grams of butter. Why does their need to be 3 different frigging measurements for the same thing – 2 based on weight and one volumetric?!? Humanity certainly succeeds in making things unnecessarily complicated and driving themselves crazy.

I think the total amount of food yesterday was a bit low. I actually ate in the evening feeling a bit light-headed. I need to aim higher today – but not overshoot my goal, like I am wont to do.

Total grams for the day: 238.5 (8.4oz). Total calories: 1,512. Fat: 101g, Net carbs: 14.5g, Protein: 123g (42/6/52%)

Wednesday, April 18, 2012 – 203.0

More of the same from yesterday, though ‘more’ in general.  Hungry in the AM – no doubt my body wanting more nutrients after 2 low days, I had an Atkins shake going out the door at 7am. A Fage yogurt followed mid morning, and hungry early afternoon I had the roast beef and, butter and a large cucumber with salt before my walk, which was cut short by rain. I felt weird, a kind of indescribable weird that I’m familiar with: going into ketogenesis. It doesn’t impact my mood nor my thought processes insofar as I can see – I was sharp and my mood was OK.

Late afternoon was a can of tuna.

Although sore, I stopped at the gym on the way home and did my weight routine. At home I had 2 burgers with reduced sugar ketchup, and 2 Babybel cheeses wrapped in prosciutto.

I was still hungry, which to me was more a cellular hunger than an emotional response or a carb-triggered hunger – my body wanted more because it needed more. I satisfied it with an Atkins shake, which did the trick.

Total grams for the day: 323.8 (6.5oz). Total calories: 1,937. Fat: 124g, Net carbs: 19g, Protein: 180g (38/6/55%)

Thursday, April 19, 2012 – 202.8

Only trace ketones in the AM, and if you look at my numbers, you see a possible reason – not enough fat. Thinking I need more fat, I decided to up the fat intake with our old friend: butter. I had butter in my coffee when I got up – I hadn’t done this in a while. You know what – I like it, really, really like it. Hungry in the AM I did have a shake (though I was trying to cut back on these). Early afternoon I began my afternoon grazing: yogurt, a cucumber, roast beef with butter, and more coffee with butter.

I skipped exercise because it seemed that every single person decided to converge on the place and there were people standing outside. I like it a little quieter than that.

Yesterday was that weird getting-into-ketosis feeling, on this day that had passed. And in the evening, the butter did what I expected – turned the keto stick a dark red.

Later in the evening the wife came home with this wonderful imported Belgian butter. I didn’t mean to eat 1/2 pound of the stuff – which by itself contained 144 grams of ‘evil’ fat – but it goes remarkably good on pork rinds. At least I didn’t touch the beautiful baguettes she brought home. A good butter on pork rinds is pretty darn good if you ask me.

Total grams for the day: 364 (12.8oz). Total calories: 2,917. Fat: 277g, Net carbs: 17g, Protein: 70g (76/4/19%)

Friday, April 20, 2012 – 203.2

There should have been no doubt that I would be in ketosis in the morning – and I was.

Another observation that comes to light when you cont total grams eaten rather than fantasy calories: you can’t gain more weight than the total weight of the nutrients you ate.

When I give you my total grams for the day, it measures the food without the water content – right? So yesterday I had 12.8 ounces, or a little over 3/4 of a pound of nutrients – food minus water. I ate 12 ounces and gained about 7.

I had run out of lunch and I had a big project that had to be done, so I brought a little extra in the way of food with me in case I had to stay late. There was bacon in the fridge and I weighed out 4 ounces. Four ounces of bacon is a LOT, really.

Didn’t pack anything green – I ran out of the cucumbers.

In work I was munching on my bag of bacon around noon when a coworker came in.

“What are you eating?”

“Bacon.”

He looked at the size of the bag and made that face: “You really like your bacon.”

“Joe, I ate a half pound of butter last night. Let me be that person in your life that you can say: ‘I might be screwed up, but he’s screwed up way more than me.”

“I don’t think you’re screwed up – I think you’re an enigma.”

This is typical of my conversations with other people on my diet. It’s why I tend not to talk about it anymore, and probably why I maintain this blog: people who eat a low carb diet not only don’t eat what the average person eats, we eat the stuff they’ve been taught should be treated like nuclear waste.

Go ahead – tell someone you ate a half-pound of butter. On your diet. And you’re losing weight. Watch their face. The confusion spreads across it. The brows furrow as, for them, you’ve just proved 2+2=3.

Am I about to have a sudden heart attack because I eat this way? I don’t know. I do know that my last blood work was OK, and that I have been eating like this for a long time. I also know I’m in better shape and feel better than when I started this diet in 2003 – and I know that one of the first symptoms of a heart condition is sudden death.

I suppose it comes down to personal responsibility again: whether we decide to go against the flow, decide to go with the crowd, or make no decision at all, we actually are making decisions. If I were to drop dead, my doctor would feel good that he knows the reason why. If I ate junk like most people, he would be confident that contributed.

If I ate ‘healthy’ as he defined it? It would be a tad bit harder, but unlike my death from eating ‘artery clogging fat’, the death of the low-fat-veggie-eating ‘good patient’ would be the enigma.

Ultimately, it’s my responsibility alone. I tried low carb and chose to stick with it. I’m that experiment of one.

Digression aside and back to eats, 4 ounces of bacon is quite filling, and it powered me through my walk and kept me going through the afternoon. Late in the day I had 2 organic hot dogs and as I was particularly parched after the salty bacon and the walk, I splurged and had a diet Coke.  I also had a can of smoked oysters.

I exercised on the way home, then came back and had another shake and, as the family was out, read a bit. When they came home I had a dozen olives, 1 leftover hamburger with some reduced sugar ketchup and a few strawberries.

Total grams for the day: 269 (9.5oz). Total calories: 1,735. Fat: 118g, Net carbs: 22g, Protein: 129g (43/8/48%)

Saturday, April 21, 2012 – 203.0

Back at that place. The low-end of my range. I have been keeping carbs under 25 grams since Monday. In ketosis since at least Thursday. I’m 5 days in.

And I was about to ruin it.

Out early for a dentist appointment, I stopped at the local supermarket for a few necessities I can’t get at the other 2 stores I frequent. I was shopping hungry (always a bad idea) and passing the deli, I decided to get my favorite bad deli meat – the Shop Rite ‘wide’ bologna. This I mentioned before. I had written Shoprite for the nutrition info and they never responded. I asked the miserable deli guy if I could see the label and instead he read it off to me – as if I’d remember. This time I had a more helpful deli girl hold it up for me to take a pic of the label, so now I had the goods.

Short of it is 5 grams of carbs per 2 ounces. High, but not so high as to ruin anything if I was careful.

I ruined it.

I picked on it on the way home, then weighed the package. Jeez – is my scale broke?!? I ate 10 ounces?

Well, that’s 25 grams of carbs – I’m still OK, I thought.

But I ruined it some more.

Unfortunately, this most wondrous specimen of cheap deli meat set off my appetite for most of the afternoon. What ingredient does this? I dunno, but my consumption continued: coffee with cream, bacon, hot dogs, some American cheese, some Greek dip, some supermarket roast chicken breast. Mostly low carb. Not too bad – at least in the carb department.

But then I ruined it even more.

My wife and I made an impromptu dinner date / play date with some friends. I figured that there would be food, and I would eat and enjoy myself, but sometimes in the balance between dieting and the pleasure of food leans toward the latter perhaps a bit more than a fellow on a mission to lose a few pounds would like.

It was also made more difficult because – stupid me – had ALREADY eaten more than a day’s share of food before we even left for the dinner date. Great planning, me.

While I abstained from alcohol and most of the chips and other complete and utter crap, I did indulge in the homemade lasagna, the mango cheesecake, and some tiramisu.

We came home late, and the appetite set off by the carbs I had earlier – maybe even that bologna this morning – I consciously and deliberately took the approach: WTF – I’ll eat what I want and assess the damage tomorrow. This led to some small baked potatoes with butter left over from the afternoon and the remainder of the bologna on a fresh potato roll.

While a failure for the scale, it was a great day, really. I had fun, I laughed, I ate well. That counts for something…though in a post about trying to lose weight it might seem out-of-place.

I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that this sort of thing – a pleasurable, guilt-free overindulgence in food – is precisely what IS needed in a blog about losing weight. It’s needed occasonally to avoid us becoming joyless, of hating food, of hating the beautiful sensual experience that food is, and us becoming thin and grim and living a life that will, in its ultimate ending that none of us can avoid,  only leave us good-looking corpses, who, when living, gave up many of life’s pleasures to look good in the coffin.

A poet named Thomas Jordan, who died in 1685, wrote a poem that, in reflection, I have stolen from in that last paragraph. While I’m not a poetry buff, this poem is worth reading in its entirety. For those not so inclined, here’s the last stanza from that poem. (For those of us who don’t know latin, the phrase ‘nulla voluptas’ is translated as meaning ‘no delight/enjoyment/pleasure’):

Then why should we turmoil in cares and in fears,
Turn all our tranquill’ty to sighs and to tears?
Let ‘s eat, drink, and play till the worms do corrupt us,
‘Tis certain, Post mortem
Nulla voluptas.
For health, wealth and beauty, wit, learning and sense,
Must all come to nothing a hundred years hence.

Total grams for the day: 750 (26.5oz). Total calories: 5,018. Fat: 377g, Net carbs: 180g, Protein: 193g (50/25/25%)

I am actually impressed with its accuracy. I’ve counted my steps a few times and compared it to the device and it is very, very close. It also seems to count going up stairs, but NOT going up escalators - clever. The weight numbers here might be a bit misleading because I haven’t been entering them in here with any regularity. I also question the accuracy of the sleep stats, as it’s easy to mess up – you’re supposed to essentially tell the thing you are falling asleep, but, like most people, this sometimes sneaks up on you if you’re reading in bed. I also have forgotten to put it on completely.

Anywho, these nits aside, I do like this gadget. I can carp a bit about the website and the app, but that can wait…

Johns Hopkins researchers have made the proponents of the always controversial Atkins diet very happy.

A recent study presented at the American Heart Association’s March meeting lauded low-carb diets such as Atkins for producing weight loss and belly fat loss — linked to heart disease — more efficiently than low-fat diets.

It goes on:

And in case this point was lost to those critics of Atkins, a press release from Johns Hopkins said, “These results show that weight loss, along with exercise, is important for improving vascular health, and suggest that following a low-carb diet rather than the conventionally recommended low-fat diet for weight loss is not a concern in terms of vascular health.”

If I were a shareholder in Atkins Nutritionals, which I’m not, I might be tempted to say, “so there” to all those naysayers.

But I’ll let Atkins staff do that.

“The findings from the Johns Hopkins study demonstrate what we already know to be true: Atkins has many scientifically validated health benefits, including improvements in cardiovascular health markers,” said Colette Heimowitz, vice president of nutrition and education for Atkins Nutritionals Inc., in a press release Atkins quickly put out.

I, of course, believe this. But I also like my facts to be untainted by bias, and like my journalism to be untainted by it. It appears not to be the case, however:

A few years back, I met Veronica Atkins Mersentes, widow of diet originator Robert Atkins. She had an apartment on Flagler Drive, next door to the Palm Beach Yacht Club, and presented me with a copy of her cookbook, Atkins for Life.

Now, having Veronica Atkins give you a book doesn’t mean you have been bribed, but paranoid me wanted to see if I could source this article elsewhere. A Google search yielded a lot of results, but they all led back to this single article. A lot of them on low carb sites, a lot of them self-congratulatory.

Jimmy Moore cites it. I found it other places, but, curiously, not on the actual John Hopkins website. There’s a lot there on ketogenic diets and epilepsy, but nothing about this study.

I checked the Atkins site to be sure it was a real press release from them. Yep, it was. You only do a press release when it favors your position, though lying in one would be the height of stupidity.

I searched on the name of the doctor who presented the paper and finally found it:

LOSING BELLY FAT, WHETHER FROM A LOW-CARB OR A LOW-FAT DIET, HELPS IMPROVE BLOOD VESSEL FUNCTION

Release Date: 03/13/2012

Overweight people who shed pounds, especially belly fat, can improve the function of their blood vessels no matter whether they are on a low-carb or a low-fat diet, according to a study being presented by Johns Hopkins researchers at an American Heart Association scientific meeting in San Diego on March 13 that is focused on cardiovascular disease prevention.

In the six-month weight-loss study, Hopkins researchers found that the more belly fat the participants lost, the better their arteries were able to expand when needed, allowing more blood to flow more freely. The researchers also found that participants in the study who were on a low-carb diet lost about ten pounds more, on average, than those who were on a low-fat diet. Being overweight increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, especially if the fat is accumulated in the belly above the waist.

“After six months, those who were on the low-carb diet lost an average of 28.9 pounds versus 18.7 pounds among those on the low-fat diet,” says lead investigator Kerry J. Stewart, Ed.D., a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of clinical and research exercise physiology at the Johns Hopkins Heart and Vascular Institute.

It continues – and is worth the read. Nice to find the original story so I can judge it on its own worth rather than have it filtered for me. I wish the author had included a link.

If you have any interest in business and productivity, I’ve written an article for Lifehack.org titled ‘Business Lessons from an Unlikely Source: Children’s Books‘. Check it out if you’re interested in these sorts of things.

I’m at a bit of an impasse at this point, I haven’t appreciably lost weight, nor gained, really. I have been faithful to the diet, unfaithful, high calorie, low-calorie, good mood and bad – and I still remain between 200 and 210.

It’s a little amazing, actually.

As it doesn’t seem much of anything impact the weight range I’ve settled into, I’m at a loss as to what to try next.

Reflecting on this actually reveals that none of these posts have been about low carb: they’ve really been about a guy who never, never, ever wanted to exercise actually begin to exercise. Admittedly not all that much compared to some others, but with afternoon walks and my 10 minutes in the gym on most days, I’m averaging an hour per week weight training and that Fitbit gadget I bought just sent me an email to tell me I’ve walked 50 miles since April 1.

Here at week 8, I still suck at low carb, but I suck a whole lot less at exercise than I did before I started. Putting exercise aside for the present, let’s go back to the diet – and what it means to ‘diet’.

Why am I doing this again?

When I started writing this post, I thought I’d like to get even more nerdy, more science-y and more count-y. For the coming week I though I’d like to get back to my low carb habit of past weeks, and get a bit more organized as to my numbers, and what they mean by looking at the trends. The kind of questions I have are:

• Is there a correlation between the fat/carb/protein percentages and weight?
• Does the above correlation differ with caloric intake?
• If I begin to chart mood, does it correlate with either?
• Does cheating correlate with any of the captured variables?
• Does hunger correlate with any of the captured variables?

Sunday, April 8, 2012 – 210.0

For Easter I had ham, chicken, brussels sprouts and shallots, zucchini and onions with goat cheese, and some Lindt chocolate balls in the evening. There wasn’t much in the way of measuring – except for the chocolate balls – they’re easy to measure – so other than them, the rest of the days numbers are a rough estimate.

Total calories for the day: 3,571. Fat: 777g, Net carbs: 84g, Protein: 148g (88/5/7%)

Monday, April 9, 2012 – 208.2

Leftovers for lunch. I skipped the cream or butter in the coffee in the AM, and didn’t have anything until noon. Lunch was brussels sprouts and ham. Hungry on the way home – but not too much. Stopped to exercise – it felt tough today, though I did it. Also noticeably tired on the way home. I made myself am omlette with the insides of the colored eggs – we blew them out this year so the kids could keep their creations. Ham and goat cheese went in the omelette. Also had 4 chocolate balls and went to bed.

Total calories for the day: 1989.  Fat: 293g, Net carbs: 50g, Protein: 105g (80/7/13%)

Tuesday, April 10, 2012 – 207.4

I wasn’t accurately tracking this day though I can report that it was pretty much like the previous day, but with some bread. I took the days numbers from a rough estimate as well as taking yesterday’s dinner.

Total calories for the day: 2,147.  Fat: 300g, Net carbs: 50, Protein: 133g (78/6/15%)

Wednesday, April 11, 2012 – 207.4

I walked as usual, and on this day my Fitbit sent me an email to announce that I’ve walked 50 miles since April 1. I like my Fitbit.

As to eating, I had cream in my coffee in the AM, roast beef and butter at work, a yogurt and a shake. Evening was a fantastic dinner out with my wife at a tiny basement restaurant nearby that serves, with little fanfare, the absolute best sushi and sashimi I have ever had. We’ve eaten there once before – we should have gone back earlier. At home, I gorged on potato chips (made with olive oil so they’re healthy :-/) and Lindt chocolate balls. Good news about the chocolate balls: as there’s hardly any left, it will be hard for me to continue eating them.

Total calories for the day: Not Available

Thursday, April 12, 2012 – 208.8

I took the day off to spend with my family. I exercised early, and had coffee with cream in the early AM. I was hungry and had an Atkins shake, then 5 strips of bacon and a few bites of scrambled eggs. While the previous day’s carbs didn’t have that much of an impact on weight, they do mess up my hunger. We took a long car ride to a distant mall, and my hunger subsided.

For lunch, we ate at Legal Seafood. There aren’t many of these restaurants, and they are expensive, but their food is second to none. It is also very easy to get a great low carb meal there – just skip the starches that come with the entrees and avoid the bread they bring to the table, and you’re good.

I had cajun-spiced wood-grilled haddock, with sides of spinach and brocoli. I also had steamed mussels. Great, right? Well, I did have a bit of bread as well as some calamari – the calamari came as a trio – a Thai version with a sweet curry sauce and pineapples, a Rhode Island version with hot peppers, and the classic with a simple but robust marinara sauce. I hd some of all, but not too much as it was shared by the table. I also grabbed maybe 4 french fries from the kid, and had some seared scallops. This was about mid-afternoon, and when we were done, we went back into the mall for more browsing as it is huge.

We didn’t leave until 7:30pm, and unfortunately, a leftover bagel from the kid was in the car next to me. I ate it on the trip. It was a birthday and we picked up a cake on the way home – a strawberry cake with whipped cream and fresh strawberries – actually it was mostly whipped cream and fresh strawberries. I had a nice slice, then went to bed. I (of course) had my Fitbit on and it registered that I only did 80% of the steps I normally do on a weekday.

Total calories for the day: Not available

Friday, April 13, 2012 – 210.0

Numb and sore. That’s how I would describe how I felt when I woke up. My arm was somewhat numb as if I slept on it wrong, and my muscles ache more than I would expect from the same weight I’ve been working out with for a while now.

I think there might be some correlation with the high carb intake. My mood as of yesterday was so-so – I was distracted by the day and I think that helped my mood, but there were times when my thoughts took a dark turn. Chemical or situational? I could jump on a connection between the upped intake of carbs and mood, but I also have a lot of stress in work and it’s April 13th and I haven’t done my taxes yet.

I also woke up feeling fat. Barring the inaccuracies of calorie counting (more on that in a moment), it appears that little has changed in terms of calories over the last few weeks, and my activity has probably increased. The only thing that has changed is the amount of carbs in proportion to fat and protein. Once again I prove to myself that it’s only carbs that make me fatter.

Oh, well, back to the low carb to take this weight off. While I have little confidence that I can predict I’ll be under 200 by any date, I can assure you that in 5 days – if I abstain from carbs – I’ll be back down below 205.

Another thing that is bugging me: I haven’t entered my calories for the past 2 days. As awful a measurement they are, I believe they have some value – and it’s screwing up my reporting, so I went back and added them – and noticed on some days my fat intake was upwards of 700 grams. How can this be?

A little research showed that the Loseit! app was counting 3 of their chocolate balls as having 165 grams of fat. That’s 5 ounces all by itself. From the Lindt site, 3 balls weigh in total 36 grams – 1-1/4 ounce.

So the LoseIt! app shows the fat content alone weighs almost 4 ounces more than the total weight of the items!

Again – the Losit! app lies – and it lied big-time.

I think this is because the people who make the app have their users enter the food numbers in their database, and a number of their users are simply idiots – and the developers of the app, being lazy like the vast amount of us are, don’t check these numbers.

They could write their program so that it flagged something as idiotic as 1.25 ounces of chocolate containing 5 ounces of fat, but they don’t.

Calorie counting sucks. And now I went back and did my best to adjust some calories from this past week – and I am going to be very, very suspect of what the LoseIt! app tells me about nutrition information.

As Easter candy has disappeared, and birthday festivities are over, eating became a bit more routine – but what routine to choose? I had a low carb, high calorie approach I could try of 2500-3000 calories, or the low-calorie, low carb where I try to keep it under 1,600-1,700.

The only difference I noticed between the two was that I was hungrier on the lower calorie approach (duh) and tended to cheat more.

As I wasn’t all that hungry in the am, and that 210 number on the scale does NOT make me feel good about things, I went the low-calorie route, having two yogurts during the day as well as a can of tuna. As I was extraordinarily busy, the day went by fast and I was certainly not starving myself – I just wasn’t hungry.

I’ve come to look forward to my midday walk – I’m still somewhat amazed at my craving for exercise now, and expect it to evaporate at any moment. It’s just not me.

My deep and long-standing hatred of all things athletic and kinetic – wasted.

I find myself walking for a few reasons: it’s a way to break up my day and get away from my desk and away from the relentless stream of seemingly unsolvable puzzles that I need to solve. I am a big adherent of analyzing a problem – then forgetting about it for a time. My best thinking is done by my unconscious (the conscious me is a dope). I take my walk, get back to my desk, and it’s as if while listening to an audiobook or music, my unconscious mind chugged through the problem – or a dozen – and the answer are there waiting for me. They’re not always the right answers, mind you, but at least the flow of ideas begins – and bad ideas frequently begat better ones. Hell is no ideas.

I also find it somewhat medicinal. Or at least I frame it like that to myself. I think framing – a fancy psychobabble term for how you look a things – is important to any sort of personal improvement. I use it a lot. It can appear delusional, but I believe, as we’re all delusional, it’s best to pick delusions that make you happy.

Lastly, I’ve gotten in the habit of wanting that Fitbit to register over 10,000 steps a day. The walk does it.

One last thing about the walk: I notice my back was not hurting as usual. It’s hard to notice non-events, and this might have occurred earlier. If this is the case, it’s a nice, additional side-benefit of the exercise.

Weight loss has NOT been a side benefit, nor do I hold my hopes out for that – there’s simply too much evidence that the amount and type of exercise I’m doing won’t do much for the numbers on the scale – and if I thought they would, I would have given up on it a month ago in frustration and disappointment. I’m doing it for overall health.

While skeptical on a lot of things and contrarian on others, I have no doubt that moderate exercise has health benefits.

I skipped the weights this day because of soreness. I am trying to do it daily to ingrain a habit though I know you should give muscle groups a rest. I need to incorporate other exercises in my weight routine – I just haven’t gotten around to it. I’m still lazy – even while I exercise, I am doing it in the laziest possible way.

Evening eats were light. There were scrambled eggs and bacon in the fridge and I had that. One thing this multi-week experiment has been lacking is cooking and meal plans – perhaps that’s part of the problem. Perhaps it’s that I have always eaten erratically, and family schedules usually prevent sit-down meals at the same time for everybody.

Having Daddy on low carb, Mommy on the Ultramind Diet and the kids on the standard ‘Picky Kid’ diet make it harder still.

On an aside, not familiar with the ‘Picky Kid Diet’? The rules are simple:

1. Adhere to a strict diet of only pizza, french fries, soda and pasta
2. Refuse any other foods, especially ones cooked from scratch, using fresh ingredients
3. Especially avoid anything green
4. Whine about being hungry and there being ‘nothing to eat’  in the presence of abundant healthy food until items in #1 are given to you

Total calories for the day: 1,641.  Fat: 65g, Net carbs: 22g, Protein: 114g (51/8/40%)

Saturday, April 14, 2012 – 206.4

See? See?!? I peel off 4 pounds in one day, after gorging myself for a good part of the week on extra calories and carbs – and end up at a weight that isn’t appreciably different than if I hadn’t eaten all that junk, at least as the chronicle of the past week tells it.

Now, if I wasn’t so damn erratic, and I kept to this eating, would it continue to drop off?

This also seems to show what a lie it is that you can’t lose weight, keep it off, and never, ever eat junk because you’ll gain it back. I have been this weight, more or less, since September. I took off 30 pounds. I have kept that weight off eating 10 Lindt chocolate balls in a row. A Dunkin Donuts bagel. A huge slice of gooey, sugar-infused strawberry cake. An immoderate amount of Sicilian pizza with toppings. Macaroni and cheese – and a lot more.

The past 8 weeks are more or less how I’ve been eating for more than 6 months. I’m just paying more attention now.

While I don’t have my cholesterol numbers for this time, I had a very comprehensive set of blood work done and aside from the mild pre-diabetes I was diagnosed with years ago, everything’s fine – and my experiment in pricking my finger 100 times in at all hours over a period of the past few weeks showed my blood glucose tends to stay in a small range and almost never goes over 140 – the point where the real damage from diabetes can begin.

In short – this is not where I want to be right now – but it could be a heckuva lot worse.

Last year I was drinking, had started smoking cigarettes again, not exercising, 30-pounds heavier – AND sucking on nicotine lozenges.

While at this moment I might be frustrated with my scale, the real and noticeable improvements to my health can’t go unnoticed.

I’ve made big progress – and, amazingly, reset my internal weight set point – somehow – and my body does not want to seem to budge from here. I just have to convince it to move to a lower setpoint…somehow.

It is perhaps coincidence that I am reading ‘The Obesity Myth’, an awesome book with a contrarian perspective on weight that I hope to discuss at length here, and the author goes into a particularly interesting experiment on overfeeding.

The subjects were overfed by 1,000 calories per day some of the subjects reacted by trying to get rid of the extra calories through energy expenditure. (I don’t know why excreting calories isn’t mentioned. We discuss ‘not properly absorbing nutrients’ all the time in medical science. Nutrients have calories. If we don’t absorb them, where do they go?)

Anyway, this passage struck me as interesting – maybe more than interesting:

The most striking finding that came out of this study was the radically different amounts of energy expended by the study’s subjects through what is known as “activity thermogenesis”, especially non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). Neat is largely determined by activities of daily living, such as fidgeting, maintaining posture, spontaneous muscle contraction, and the like – things most people do not keep track of, and often are not even aware of. The change in NEAT brought on by overfeeding the sixteen subjects ranged from nothing to 692 calories per day. 692 calories is what an average runner will expend in the course of a 10 kilometer (6.2 mile) race.

I wonder: is this how I maintain? Have I become a fidget-bucket and don’t know it?

Leaving this unanswered question for some other time, Let’s check out the eats.

Avoiding breakfast again. It didn’t seem to change things appreciably, so I am going with my natural inclinations again – let’s see where it leads me. I broke my fast late morning with a stir-fry of odds and ends – the last of the ham, onion, peppers, and I have a slight suspicion there might have been some cornstarch in it I wasn’t told about.

I ate 10 Lindt chocolate balls the other day – I’ll take a little cornstarch in stride

I had a lunch a little after: some Bela sardines in a cayenne pepper infused olive oil. These sardines were so-so – I added some salsa to them, which upped the flavor a bit. I also had cream in my coffee.

The afternoon was spent at the park with the kids, and coming home late afternoon I was hungry. The wife was out, one kid was asleep and the other in her room, and I ended up nibbling on what was about. I grabbed an Atkins shake, had some pork rinds (which ended up being the entire bag, the whites from an egg – a leftover the kids left behind, a few forkfuls of some Trader Joe’s Linguine in clam sauce, a bit of a bagel with cream cheese (maybe a quarter), with 2 pats of butter.

The wife came home and we went grocery shopping – our version of a hot date for a Saturday night. All the walking around the store got my Fitbit to count over 10,000 steps for the day, which is becoming frequent.

Back home later in the evening, still hungry, I had a baked yam. A simple baked yam, all by itself, is a dessert for me. I hated them as a kid, and as an adult. As someone on a low carb diet, they can be sweet awesomeness – and a heckuva lot better for you than most other desserts.

If you’re gonna – try a yam.

Total calories for the day: 1,932.  Fat: 120, Net carbs: 58, Protein: 137g (57/14/29%)