HEALTH NOT WEIGHT

Positives

 There are lots of good things about WeightWatchers.  

1) Educating  people about choices and providing food point values is helpful for the over eater. 

2) With unlimited vegetables (starchy vegies do have points) and fruits, there is absolutely no reason you should ever be hungry. 

3) They emphasize slow and steady and that is good.

4) WeightWatchers is EXTREMELY flexible and allows you to eat what you need to be successful.  You can be a vegetarian, into Paleo, etc and still do WeightWatchers.  

5) Keeping track of what you eat is a great way to bring some sense into your eating habits.

6) Lots of support opportunities. Meetings, online training and a wealth of information.

But like any religion, you have to use common sense.

WeightWatcher falls down in some ways.

Negatives

First, it completely ignores the reality that some people need to stay away from carbs and need more protein. If you are prone to insulin resistance, and load up on carbs, you will likley be disappointed in WW and run into insurmountable plateaus.  That doesn’t mean you should give up. You should just modify the use of your points to ensure that you focus on what you need.  We all can’t eat pasta, bread and rice at the same levels.

Second, because points are the focus, WW leads you to believe that drinking diet soda and using artificial sweeteners are ok. Zero Points. But these items should be banned from any healty diet. Again think HEALTH NOT WEIGHT.

Third, they are still wrongly in the camp that fat causes fat so lower fat foods are less points. Fat doesn’t cause your body to store fat. 

Fourth, you could eat incredibly badly and stay within the points  for the day so while you may be able to lose weight, you may not be healthy.

Five, it’s not free but this is only a minor fact. If you need to get help, it is exceptionally reasonable.

Recommendation

• Use the points system to gain control of your portions, to understand tradeoffs (6 ounces of filet mignon or a Snickers bar) and to know what you are eating
• If you are prone to being  insulin resistant like me (i.e. loads of belly fat) don’t think a white carb is ok even if it is less points than a protein
• NO SODA, IGNORE “Low Fat”

Your ultimate goal is still HEALTH NOT WEIGHT but getting excess weight off can occur if you are truly eating healthy food, exercising and dealing with appropriately with stress.

If you want to Thrive and Not Survive, try WeightWatchers and turn the potential negatives into positives.

July 9, 

2011— What a great day at the Polyface Farm Field Day near Swoope VA. The program was run flawlessly with upwards of 2000 people at $100 per person in attendance. Every detail was impeccable. Even the cream for the coffee was from real milk (non pasteurized). 

I don’t think there were many vegetarians in the crowd judging by the line for a wonderful barbecue featuring the Polyface products of chicken, beef and pork. The only vegetarians were the cows!

Joel Salatin is amazing. Actually, he is a rock star! There were people who were actually seeking and getting Joel’s autograph, one guy on his back!!!.  

But Salatin is not some hokey internet media star. Anything but that. This guy is articulate, well spoken, passionate, an expert in his field and downright funny. I actually found him to be less critical of the government agencies than I expected even though he skillfully pointed out that the USDA actually encouraged adding dead cows to cow feed for 30 years before the mad cow disease mostly stopped the practice. (I added the mostly). I have seen the films of feed lots and factory farms, the disgusting conditions in a chicken processing plant and I have driven by disgusting smelling pig farms. 

Walking the farm is an amazing experience. You would think walking down the middle of feeds with grazing cows, chickens and pigs that you would smell the foulest of smells but somehow even though you see the poop, the ground seems to absorb it and it just doesn’t smell.  By moving the various “herds” daily, their release of nitrogen is spread out evenly over every square inch of the farm and the ground absorbs it and revitalizes.  You get the feeling that Joel is actually making the ground better, not taking away from it or depleting the soil.  No pesticides, no non-animal fertilizer, no growth hormones, no antibiotics. No animals standing in inches or even feet of manure. This is what a farm should be (and really what they used to be)—A biodiverse system that yields healthy food and heals itself as it goes along. 

I walked all over the farm in my Sanuks. I walked the fields, into large, spacious pens, fenced in holding areas and various barns and farm buildings. Salatin let’s you go anywhere, anytime. Salatin uses rotation and chickens and pigs to clean up after cows. 

It was fun for me to be up close with pigs, piglets, cows, chickens, turkeys and rabbits. The little ones are really cute especially the chicks and piglets. Am I starting to sound like Bill Crystal in City Slickers?

If you haven’t seen a video or read one of Joel’s books, you owe it to your health. Joel came into national prominence with Michael Polan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and then in Food Inc. Salatin is a walking encyclopedia,  has everything well thought out and he has implemented his ideas into every square inch of the farm. From capturing rain in man made ponds and ravines to inventing Eggmobiles and Pigaerators.

For example, he has the pigs feeding in the woods to clean up the forest floor (and save money on feed) and chickens cleaning up after rabbits and cows.  He keeps the animals moving almost daily in an innovative manner involving lightweight but effective fencing.  In a Virginia county where 80 cow days per acre is the norm (the number of cows that can eat per day on one acre), his shepherding and nomadic rotation yield an amazing 500%  increase to 400 cows per day on an acre.  That is significant but it also keeps the fields “mowed” but not too short.  Furthermore, he actually waits exactly 3 days to bring the Eggmobile around with chickens who pick the protein out of the cow pies, eat the worms and eat the shortened grass.The Eggmobile is a portable chicken coop that lets the chickens rome freely and allows Salatin to transport them wherever he wants to. 

The result is healthy, tasty meat that is grass fed without hormones, without cages, without stress.

I am a marketing and communications professional and believe me, Joel is a master marketer.  After a morning of great talks, tours, and a tremendous lunch, he brought out his head of the buying club so you could sign up. The retail store was also running out of $15 T shirts and they had to keep restocking the freezer as people kept buying and buying.  

The Buyer’s Club is run by Salatin’s daughter-in-law Sheri Salatin. Custom online ordering from a tremendous selection of every Polyface product and delivery.  She built up the Buyer’s club into a major food distribution system and now Polyface delivers food to over 5,000 people 8 times a year in their Buyer’s Club.  http://www.polyfaceyum.com/ You need to be within a couple of hours drive. Salatin is a locavore so he doesn’t ship food further than that. During the final Q&A session someone asked Salatin about a succession plan (he’s only 54). After hearing Sheri speak and seeing what she has accomplished, Salatin should consider her to take over some day. I sure Joel’s son wouldn’t mind!

So the big question is: What about the Food?

How does it taste? 

I found the beef to be tasty and not too “gamey” as some grass fed beef can be. 

The hype about Polyface chicken is true, it is the best I have ever had. Hands down, bar none.

I came out of there with a cooler full of chicken, beef and pork. I will let you know how it all tastes.

If you want to thrive and not survive, you need to find a good local truly organic farm near you. If you are in Virginia and Maryland, you need to visit Polyface Farm.

Joel Salatin

This Saturday July 9,  I will spending the day with Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm. Real Organic, not the grocery store kind. I will be blogging and tweeting live from the event. 

The quality of what you eat matters. You are worth it. 

If you want to thrive, not survive, start putting quality food in your system. 

About Polyface Farm: 

Located in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, the farm services more than 3,000 families, 10 retail outlets, and 50 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs with salad bar beef, pastured poultry, eggmobile eggs, pigaerator pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey and forestry products using relationship marketing.

http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/health-care-8/2

“Wondering how a 3 days of skipping the gym and indulging in food adds up to an extra six lbs… Literally in less than a week - makes me realize why I never bothered before as it seems unsustainable…”

—A recent comment from a friend of mine, working out and cutting calories. 

How many great intentioned people do you know that join a gym (attend religiously) and change their diet only to have a setback like this. 

Focusing on weight and not health can be so frustrating an leads to failed regimens over and over again. 

My advice to my friend for the short term: 

1) DON’T PANIC

2) Stop beating yourself up. 

3)  It is really probable that you ate food with a lot of salt and you are experiencing quick water weight gain. No way you added 6 ponds of fat in three days.

 Long term advice:

 1) STOP FOCUSING ON YOU WEIGHT

You can lose 10 pounds of fat and gain 10 pounds of muscle and think your diet/exercise plan is a failure because you lost no pounds. However, everyone will notice you “lost weight” because your body will look different. You will also probably be healthier since you probably are eating better (I hope!).  

I knew a guy training for a marathon and gained weight because he ate anything and everything! Be careful, exercise isn’t a blank check for eating. You will probably eat more when you exercise because you are naturally more hungry. Go ahead and eat more but not more calories, eat more healthy food. Choose two apples over a little 4 oz cup (like three teaspoons worth) of Yoplait Strawberry Yogurt.  Eat four handfuls of spinach salad our sautee it in olive oil and garlic. Start thinking volume of healthy food, not calories. 

If you want to Thrive Not Survive, stop focusing on your weight, throw your scale away and focus on the most important exercise you can do, control what you put in your mouth.

Then, get out there and find exercise you love to do, not what you feel obligated to do. 

Just being a vegetarian doesn’t make you healthy. I have seen a lot of fat vegetarians. How can that be? 

And just because you don’t eat meat doesn’t mean you are eating good healthy food.  I find that many vegetarians eat way too many refined carbs like pasta, white rice and bread to fill the void not eating meat.  They fall into the trap of oversimplification “Meat is bad, I don’t eat meat. I must be healthy.”  But just eliminating or limiting a macronutrient is not enough. You have to eat healthy things. 

Potatoes and corn can be filling and delicious but the starchy vegetables are not for everyone.  If you are insulin resistant, you can actually be doing more harm than good by eating the wrong vegetables and loading up on carbs.

I am not saying you can’t be a vegetarian. I happen to enjoy being a megetarian which is adding high quality meat, eggs and dairy to excellent vegetables, fruit and limited whole grains.    

You have to know your body but you also have to know about the quality of what you put into your mouth. There are good carbs, fats and protein and bad of all three.

If you want to Thrive not Survive, you have to know the difference between good food and bad food. 

There is a great health site called healthmeup.com.  So many useful tips on getting and keeping healthy.  One of their recent posts was called the 5 Habits of Healthy People.  Check out the post at:

http://healthmeup.com/news-weight-loss/5-habits-of-healthy-people/4016

Their points are spot on and here they are with my comments: 

“Healthy Habit #1: Pay attention to nutrition”

This is a major theme of Health Not Weight.  Eating foods that are nutritious is essential to good health. Learn why sugar, fast food, processed food and soda are killing us and leading to all kinds of problems.  

A great book for understanding what foods are nutritious is Jonny Bowden’s “150 Greatest Foods on Earth”

www.jonnybowden.com

“Healthy Habit #2: Portion control”

I somewhat agree with this idea but not entirely. Clearly, overeating is a bad habit but restricting calories is not good for you in the long. You can eat ALOT of vegetables.  They will fill you up, they will heal your body and they will make you healthy.  You will never be hungry if you eat a lot of vegetables.   The way I get more vegetables and the way I guarantee getting 5 servings a day: Juicing!  Not V8, JUICING.  If  you don’t like radishes and kale, juicing them with things that are tasty will make them palatable and you will get all of the benefits. But remember to eat whole vegetables too, you need the fiber. 

Diana Stobo uses a blender to break down whole vegetables into delicious healthy shakes. They are amazing. Check her out and buy her books.

http://www.dianastobo.com/naked-bliss/

Healthy Habit #3: Daily exercise
In Health not Weight,  cannot stress enough how important physical activity is to your health. But do something you love, not something you hate.  We have been brainwashed by the fitness industry to think you have to kill yourself on a stair master or lift weights.   Lifting weights can be a great addition to your physical fitness but it is not for everybody. Gyms are great too and many have fun aerobics classes or spin classes that are great ways to incorporate music into your routines.  I love Bikram Yoga. 

Healthy Habit #4: Know good and bad carbs, fats

Another big theme of Health Not Weight.  You have to know that its not the mix of carbs, protein or fat that you eat. So many diets focus only on the percentage of macronutrients and ignore the quality of the macronutrients.  All carbs are not good, all fats are not bad, and quality protein is essential.

Healthy Habit #5: Know what’s bad for hormonal balance
In my research for Health Not Weight, I was amazed to find how little hormones have been studied in relation to health. Yet insulin is a major factor in controlling fat storage in our bodies. you would think with the number of diabetics that maybe hormones are important!! Gary Taubes points out in Why We Are Fat that in assessing a person’s height, we all readily agree that hormones that regulate height (from your pituitary gland) are responsible for how tall you get. Yet insulin (released from your pancreas) is often misunderstood and ignored. Hormones are major. 

But other hormones released during physical activity, anxiety, sex, sleep etc are all important to being healthy. Understanding hormones is a big part of health and what I am writing about in Health Not Weight. 

If you want to Thrive Not Survive, you need to look at the things healthy people are doing and incorporate them into your life. 

(Picture from http://www.businessinsider.com/were-growing-broke-because-we-are-fat-2011-3)

I have written many times about GaryTaubes and his work on debunking the crazy theory that we are fat because we eat too much and lead sedentary lives. He has two books “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and “Why We Get Fat” which do a good job of explaining quite convincingly why the conventional wisdom is wrong.

For those of you who don’t have the hours it will take to read the books, here is a blog with a link to an hour long presentation on the science that Gary uncovers.  

http://www.starling-fitness.com/archives/2008/04/06/unshelved-reviews-good-ca…

Don’t drink your calories.

Water is great. It is healthy and it it refreshing. 

They even make bubbly water with essence of whatever. Get the ones without sugar. Drink tea and coffee without sugar.

The soda guys actually want you to believe that high fructose corn syrup is good for you because fructose is in fruit. It is sad when they get doctors they pay to do research say the same thing. Sugar in drinks is a killer.  

But we fall for it. “Fructose is fructose. Fat is fat. A calorie is a calorie. Parts is Parts.” We believe it all. 

You can save some much wear and tear on your body by avoiding soda and not added sugar to your hot drinks. 

If you are diabetic and you still drink soda, look at the pictures below. Drinking diet soda makes you feel better? You think pouring chemicals in your body that is already screaming out that something is wrong is a good thing?  Take your pills, treat the symptoms and keep fooling yourself. 

I am saddened by the Mayo Clinic’s lukewarm approval for artificial sweeteners. Essentially they say “no studies prove it causes cancer” and “the FDA says its ok.”  Well the FDA has been wrong before and as for “studies” I am not waiting around like the cigarette smokers did to find out some day what intuitively seems ridiculously unhealthy. How can pouring chemicals into your body be good for you.  This is the problem with focusing on your weight and believing in calories in, calories out.

You wrongly think: Artificial sweeteners mean- less calories in. Therefore, less calories means more weight loss and less sugar intake (ha! how many fat people and diabetics drink diet soda). Why put chemicals in your body?  I’ll drink water with lemon. You can drink your Pepsi One, Tab, and Coke Zero. I’ll choose health over weight any day.

Back to sugar.

I love the guys at www.sugarstacks.com. Check out these sugar amounts from their website:

Would you eat a stack of 16 sugar cubes?

     A label can tell you there are 39 grams of sugar in your soda, but what does that much sugar look like?

I used to drink huge glasses of Orange Juice. Emphasis on used to. I just can’t process the sugar and it turns to stored fat.

Who drinks a single glass? Come on Man! Loaded with sugar.

I can’t imagine drinking this much soda at once! People buy this? Really? I can’t even count how much sugar this is.

I’m seeing Red bull a lot at bars. Be mindful of the “freshman 20” college kids. 7 teaspoons of sugar in each drink.   

The American icon. Why are we fat?  Here is a big reason. 

Even chocolate milk. The rabbit, the milk—- you mean it is loaded with sugar. Yes Virginia, LOADED with sugar.  

If you want to Thrive not Survive, stop drinking your calories. 

So you say, fruits have sugar in them and up to 20 grams in a serving (5 teaspoons).

So you say sugar is bad therefore I shouldn’t eat fruit either. 

Not so fast.

Fruit contains sugar but the good thing is that sugar from fruit is natural, not refined and not stripped of all nutrition.

Just like carbs, fats and proteins there is good and bad. There is good sugar and bad sugar. Refined sugars, chemical sugars and artificial sweeteners are not the same thing as natural sugar.

Generally I believe there is nothing wrong with sugar except for two major exceptions

1) We eat too much

2) Sugar will cause your blood sugar to rise and if your body can’t handle the amount it will be stored as fat, not used as energy

Check out this misleading ad by the sugar industry that promotes low calories and high energy.

The Bad

As you know from my previous posts, the average American consumes 160 pounds of sugar a year (the size of a grown up).  IT’S JUST TOO MUCH SUGAR and you have got to cut your intake of sugar down dramatically if you want to be healthy.

Forget about the weight, sugar is linked to too many chronic diseases including cancer.  

The Ugly

Here’s a major lifestyle change that will pay off big: Don’t drink your calories. 70 pounds of our annual sugar consumption is coming from high fructose corn syrup and the majority of those pounds come in the form of liquids. HFCS is also present in highly processed foods.  The big food guys are now turning their PR bucks towards bragging about pulling HFCS from products (see my previous posts). 

http://healthnotweight.com/fructose-directly-linked-to-cancer-proliferat

http://healthnotweight.com/death-by-soda

The Good

Look into natural sweeteners like raw honey, agave, real maple syrup (sot sugar water like Aunt Jamima). Yes they will increase the level of glucose in your blood but you can use small amounts of them because they pack a nice sweet punch. Raw honey also has amino acids and antioxidants and enzymes that promote health. It is just plain delicious. Agave gives you a different sweet taste and I use it to vary my taste buds. 

As for sugar in fruit, don’t worry be happy, but don’t overdo it.  

Fruit is an essential weapon in boosting your immune system.

http://jonnybowdenblog.com/vegetables-and-fruits-lower-risk-of-dying-by-22/

Nutritionally, the 13-17 grams of sugar in 3-4 teaspoons of sugar is not the as the sugar grams in a medium banana (14 grams of sugar); a medium apple (19 grams) or a large orange (17 grams). Sugar should not scare you away from fruit because there are so many benefits to eating fruit. In moderation fruit is great and a necessary component in boosting your immune system. 

Fruits contain fiber, minerals, vitamins and have been shown to reduce the risk of chronic disease. Fruit contains antioxidants like flavonoids, Vitamin C and anthocyanins which remove free radicals that are at the root of the problem for chronic disease. Fruit helps boost your immune system. (How many times can I say it) 

Check out Dr. Jonny Bowden’s book the 150 Greatest Foods on Earth to learn more about fruits.

The Advice

Keep in mind, sugar is something you have to be very careful for another reason and that is what it does in your blood stream. If you are insulin resistant it could turn to stored fat. If you are told to eat 5-7 servings of fruit and vegetables, I would eat 5 servings of vegetables (not starchy ones like potatoes or corn) and only two fruits. 

An apple is one serving of a fruit. So is a medium sized banana. A handful of grapes.  

Eat no more than 2 servings of fruit a day. Learn to most of your fiber and nutrition from vegetables!

I like to eat raw vegetables and nuts for snacks. I save my fruit for when I want to have something sweet. To balance the taste of raw onions, in my yogurt or kefir, to sweeten a fresh squeezed vegetable drink. 

If you want to Thrive Not Survive, eat fruit in moderation and stop drinking your calories.