Tag: ketosis

What To Do When You Reach Your Target Weight

February 3, 2020January 23, 2020 Peter JonesLeave a comment

What follows is an extract from ‘How To EAT LOADS And LOSE WEIGHT’ – available now.

Here, in a nutshell, is how a low-carb or keto diet works: keep your carbs as low as possible, your fats as high as possible, your protein moderate, and your body will gradually convert your stored fats into ketones. You won’t feel hungry, you might feel healthier than you have in a very long time, and all the while you’ll get slimmer and slimmer and slimmer.

And then one day—without really trying—you will finally reach an arbitrary number on the bathroom scales that you decided some time ago was your target weight.

But let’s get one thing totally clear: that magic number was made up by you. It doesn’t really matter how you came up with that number, my point is that your body doesn’t care.

So now that we’ve established that, let’s talk about what your options are when you finally reach it. Is it possible to adjust your diet such that your weight, by and large, stays constant?

And the answer is… {drum roll}… Yes! (Sort of.)

So. How do we go about introducing carbohydrates back into our diets?

We (me and Val) have experimented with three approaches. They all have their pros and cons.

Approach 1: add carbs into your daily diet.

Each day find a way to increase the amount of carbs you’ve previously allowed yourself.

Now, how you go about this is up to you. Missing toast for breakfast? Maybe this is the moment you’ve been waiting for. Hankering for the occasional jacket potato? Your hankering days might be over.

However, from experience we’ve found there is a slight problem with this approach. A wrinkle in an otherwise sensible plan: carbs are quite triggering.

They’re supposed to be. We’re designed to get MORE hungry when we eat them, so that all those sugars can be converted to fats, and stored, for when there are no more carbs to be had. Ever tried to eat just one piece of milk chocolate from a bar, then wrap it up and save the rest for later? Your body doesn’t want you to do that. It’s a waste of chocolate! Someone else might eat that chocolate in the meantime! That might be the last bar of chocolate in existence! Eat it all! Eat it now!

Introduce carbs every day and you might find that your hunger slowly begins to rise. Instead of one slice of toast for breakfast, you’re having two. Then a snack at around 10am when you start to feel hungry again. Then lunch is suddenly a sandwich. Two sandwiches. With a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. And all the while your weight is hovering ABOVE that magic target number you set for yourself. Never below.

To get around this, what you might ‘like’ to do, is forget about toast or potatoes or pasta, and instead introduce carbs that you were less fond of, before you started your diet. Maybe… carrots. Parsnips. A few berries for dessert. That sort of thing.

I know, I know… I can feel your disappointment from here.

Let’s try something else.

Approach 2: add carbs into your WEEKLY diet.

Instead of subjecting yourself to triggering carbs on a daily basis, try remaining low-carb during the week, but allow yourself to ease up at the weekends. Or maybe pick a day during the week when carbs are back on the menu. ‘Toast on Tuesday.’ Whatever works for you.

Personally I find this easier. This is where I’m at right now. Weekends come and I eat whatever I fancy. I don’t go crazy—I don’t fill up my cupboards with carby treats in preparation for Friday night—I just don’t stop myself from ordering chips if I’m in a restaurant. Or buying an ice cream if I’m on the sea front.

And come Monday morning, when I stand on the bathroom scales, I look down at the reading, and… “Oops!”—and then I return to low-carb. Sometimes (if I’ve really overdone it) I’ll start a sixteen-hour fast after my Monday evening meal.

Now I’m not going to lie to you; this approach requires discipline. And it tends to work better if you’re the sort of person who might go out for a meal at the weekends, or order a takeaway. It’s not so easy if there are still carbs, in your house, waiting to be consumed, when the weekend is over.

Also, if you have any kind of medical condition that’s made worse by sugars (such as asthma, or acid reflux) then bear in mind that a total carb binge at the weekend could come back and bite you in your ever-expanding bottom.

Approach 3: add carbs whenever you’re in credit.

Which leads us onto the third approach; an amalgamation of the first two ideas.

Weight yourself each morning. If you’re OVER your target weight, no carbs for you. Back on the keto wagon. But, if you’re UNDER your target weight—happy days!—today you can have some carbs.

Now, personally speaking, this is the approach I took for almost a year after I’d initially reached my target weight, and it worked quite well. Quite.

However it took me most of that year to learn that on the days I found myself ‘in credit’ (which were nowhere near as often as I liked) I couldn’t slam my foot on the gas and eat my body weight in potato crisps. Followed by a pizza. And flapjacks. And ice cream.

Gradually I had to learn (the hard way) that it was better to squeeze that metaphorical gas pedal, just gently.

So, if I was in credit I could enjoy a chocolate bar (singular). OR some chips. OR half a pizza. OR a five bean curry. If I did that, then maybe, just maybe, I could do the same a couple of days later. Maybe even the following day.

Finally, I was maintaining.

If you’ve got any maintaining tips or tricks, feel free to share them with me in the Facebook Group for this book. Link below.

Why You Can’t Have Low-Carb ‘Cheat’ Days

January 31, 2020January 23, 2020 Peter JonesLeave a comment

What follows is an extract from ‘How To EAT LOADS And LOSE WEIGHT’ – available now.

Back in ye olde times, when people thought fat made them fat (the fools!), someone at SLIMMING WATCHERS PLANET HQ (made up company) realised that most people have a hard time sticking to a calorie-controlled diet, and so decided to capitalise on the very natural desire to bend the rules.

Behold the cheat day; the ingenious notion that if you earn enough points you can have a high(er) fat ‘treat’, or even a day off your diet.

Now obviously, this is a very seductive concept, and one that a LOT of low-CARB dieters—especially the ones who previously spent many years trying every low-FAT diet under the sun—want to bring with them, to their new, carb-free, way of eating.

So let’s get right down to it: Can you—if you’re restricting your carbs—get away with the occasional cheat day?

No.

Firstly, in the world of low-FAT dieting, a ‘cheat day’ is really just a con. That low-fat dieting ‘cheat day’ was already factored into the total number of calories allowed on whatever plan you were following. So it was never actually a ‘cheat’ at all. Not in the real sense. I don’t know about you, but that would make me feel even more cheated!

But here in the world of low-CARB dieting we don’t count calories. We count carbs.

Broadly speaking a low-carb diet is somewhere between 75 and 100 grams of carbs a day, whilst a keto diet is under 50. Now, if YOU want to lower all those numbers by ten grams and keep those ten grams aside as some sort of daily ‘cheat-carbs’… well, er, go ahead. Let me know if that works for you. Personally I can’t really see the point.

The real reason why ‘cheat days’ don’t work for us low-carbers is simply this; you can’t cheat your body. It’s not physically possible. Cheating suggests you’re sneaking around behind your own back, stuffing biscuits into your mouth and hoping your digestive system won’t notice, but that’s ridiculous. It will notice. It’s YOU!

So here’s what happens when you try and ‘cheat’ on a low-carb diet:

As that ‘cheat meal’ enters your system, your body will turn those carbohydrates into glucose. As the glucose travels around your body in your blood stream, so your insulin levels will rise. Which in turn signals your body to STOP the ketosis process (i.e. turning your stored fat into ketones). Your body will stop losing weight, and return to using glucose to fuel your muscles and brain.

Some of that glucose will be stored in your liver. This requires a fair amount of water—about 3 to 4 grams of water for every 1 gram of glycogen—so overnight you’ll probably put on around four pounds of ‘water weight’. Cue cries of ‘there’s no way that pizza weighed that much!’ It didn’t. Most of that weight is water.

If there’s any glucose left over after this carb binge, that’ll be stored as fat.

Terrific. More fat. The very stuff we’re trying to lose.

But it gets worse.

Those extra carbs will trigger the production of other hormones—hormones that make you hungry. So suddenly that cheat meal or cheat day wasn’t enough… now you want a cheat week! More pizza! Some garlic bread! Those desserts look pretty good too…

Remember, so far as your body is concerned, you’re a cave man or woman. You’ve just come across an apple tree, bursting with juicy delicious fruit. Your body wants you to eat all that fruit so that it can store as much fat as possible for winter time. To do that it makes your appetite soar!

This is the biggest problem with cheating on a low-carb diet. That slice of cake, that chocolate bar, that toasted sandwich… it’s never quite enough. I’ve heard horror stories from people who had a bad day at work, and on the way home ‘treated’ themselves to a sugary beverage. Four hours later they’re waking up on the living room carpet, surrounded by a slew of empty Dunkin’ Donuts cartons, and a Snickers wrapper stuck to their cheek.

But that’s not the end of the cheat day nightmare.

This sudden introduction of carbs when you’ve been running on ketones often makes people feel sluggish. It’s called a carb-coma. It’s an actual thing.

Finally, if you suffer from any high-carb related problems such as bloating or acid reflux? There’s a good chance that’ll come right back.

You still want a cheat day?

The good news is that whilst you can’t cheat a low-carb diet, it is quite forgiving.

If your total carbs for the day is slightly over… well, there’s a good chance you might get away with it. Maybe you’ll put on a pound or two, but that’ll come off again, if… you get straight back on the wagon.

Better still, there does comes a point when your body becomes better at tolerating the odd carby… and I hesitate to use the word… ‘treat’. Are you at this point? Probably not. We’ll talk more about that later in the book.

For now I want to encourage you to shun this ‘cheating’ concept. You’re an adult! You don’t need ‘tricks’ or ‘cheats’ to help you stay on track… you simply need to concentrate on what you can eat (plenty of delicious low-carb food options) and monitor your steady progress. That’s where your energies should be.

Why Counting Calories is a WASTE of time

January 28, 2020January 23, 2020 Peter JonesLeave a comment

What follows is an extract from ‘How To EAT LOADS And LOSE WEIGHT’ – available now.

Counting calories has, for a long time, been a popular way of regulating a diet. Count the number of calories you consume, subtract the number of calories you burn, and if the number you’re left with is a minus—congratulations!—your body must have been forced to ‘burn fat’: Calories in versus calories out.

It’s an elegant theory, one that most people can easily get their heads around, and one that is supported by law; food manufacturers are legally obliged to print the total number of calories, as well as a host of other nutritional information, on all food packaging, to make your calorie counting efforts easier.

Such a shame then, that it’s absolute tosh.

Firstly, the ‘calories in calories out’ concept assumes that the amount of calories your body ‘burns’ is consistent. But that’s not actually true.

Recently—and by recent I mean one hundred years ago—two gentlemen published a study entitled A Biometric Study of Human Basal Metabolism (October 8, 1918). What J Arthur Harris & Francis G Benedict showed was that if you reduce the amount of calories you consume, the body performs a little self-regulation and adjusts the number of calories ‘burnt’—and by a similar amount. This is called your metabolism.

It’s little like putting your phone into ‘lower power mode’. When you consistently eat less, your body notices, and automatically starts to conserve energy. The downside is that, just like your phone, in low-power mode you don’t operate quite as smoothly. You might feel tired. A little sluggish. Colder than usual. But at least you’re not going to have to rely on your stored fats. Phew!

Despite the fact that the metabolism study has been replicated many, many times, the weight loss industry (and the world at large) has, by-and-large, chosen to ignore this rather crucial piece of information—not least because it renders the whole ‘calories in calories out’ notion completely useless. Have you been steadily reducing your meal sizes in the hopes that your body will be forced to fall back on its reserves? Oh dear. I have some bad news for you.

But people have been counting calories for decades…

That’s true.

Back in the 1980s, when the food guidelines in America and the UK were changed in line with the calorie counting, low-fat ethic, obesity in this country and the entire western world increased dramatically, but interestingly the average calorific intake actually fell.

We ate fewer calories, but we still got fatter.

The same decade also saw an explosion of fitness gurus, each with a video to sell. Fluorescent leggings and leg warmers became a thing. People started jogging. Gym membership escalated. The amount of exercise we were doing increased—and has done ever since.

We exercised more, burnt more calories… and yet we still got fatter.

Regardless of what you’ve read, or heard, or what your doctor or weight-loss guru may have told you, the evidence of the past thirty five years is pretty damning: the ‘calories in versus calories out’ equation just doesn’t add up.

What are calories anyway?

Aside from the whole metabolism issue, my biggest problem with our obsession with calories is this:

Calories are not things!

A calorie is a measurement. Like a centimetre. Or an inch. Or degrees Celsius. Or Fahrenheit. Or minutes!

What does the humble calorie measure? Energy.

Its exact definition is this:

the energy required to raise the temperature
of 1 gram of water through 1 °C.

When I was at school, I remember being given a ‘science experiment’ to determine the amount of ‘energy’ in a peanut. It went something like this:

Each student was given a peanut, a test tube, and a thermometer. We put one gram of water in the test tube, gripped the peanut with metal tongs, and then set fire to it. We held the burning peanut under the test tube, and when the nut eventually burnt itself out, made a note of the final temperature. From this we were supposed to be able to work out how many calories that humble peanut had.

Even at the time this experiment seemed flawed. For starters, surely the glass test tube, even the tongs, were absorbing some of the heat (and therefore the ‘energy’)? And surely it made a difference how close you held your peanut to the test tube?

But what bothered me most was I couldn’t see how this experiment could be replicated for other food.

Why weren’t we given a stick of celery? Or a steak? Or a potato? Or a mars bar? My adolescent brain quickly concluded it was because my teacher knew these things wouldn’t burn, which would render his hinky experiment completely useless. Being a teenager, I immediately took the opportunity to feel betrayed, hoodwinked, and angry. I probably had a good sulk about it.

Looking back now I realise that I may have inadvertently stumbled on something extremely important: When it comes to calories, you cannot treat all foods as equal.

We like to think that 100 calories of peanuts is exactly the same as a 100 calories of kale. But it isn’t.

Aside from the fact that it’s difficult to set fire to kale (!!), your body will treat those two foods in very different ways.

100 calories of peanuts has about sixteen grams of carbs. Whereas the kale has half that. Meaning that 100 calories of peanuts will yield more glucose, will cause your blood sugar to rise (more than the kale), stimulate the production of insulin (more than the kale), and ultimately cause you to store more of that glucose as fat—all whilst increasing your appetite. Exactly the same number of calories… but ultimately MORE body fat.

100 calories of peanuts will make you fatter
than 100 calories of kale!

Same number of calories, ultimately MORE body fat.

Let’s take this one step further. Let’s swap those 100 calories of kale for 100 calories of something ‘healthy’ like… rice.

100 calories of rice contain about 28 grams of carbs. Almost twice as much as the peanuts. Meaning that…

100 calories of rice will make you fatter
than 100 calories of peanuts!

Again; same number of calories, ultimately MORE body fat.

Let’s go further still. Let’s swap those 100 calories of peanuts for 100 calories of… petrol.

Petrol yields a staggering amount of energy. That’s why we use it to fuel our cars. And as calories are a measurement of energy, we know that a gallon of petrol is about 30,000 calories. Roughly. Meaning that 100 calories of petrol isn’t going to be very much. How many carbs in 100 calories of petrol? I have no idea. But my instincts tell me that drinking petrol, even in small amounts, is a really, really bad idea, and would probably make you very ill. Or dead.

That said, it would, once and for all, prove the point I’m trying to make—that your body responds completely differently to the foods you eat, and it doesn’t give two hoots about calories!

I want you to understand this: there are no calories in your food. Calories are not things. It’s a measurement. A measurement of one tiny aspect of the complicated biological process that goes into keeping you alive.

Counting calories is about as useful as counting centimetres, or inches. In fact, I’d like to suggest that counting centimetres sort of makes more sense. The next time you go grocery shopping, take a 12 inch ruler with you and measure each item you buy. Theoretically, the fewer centimetres a food has, the less weight you should put on! Get those total centimetres down over the coming weeks and you are just as likely to lose weight.

Or…

You could stop counting calories, and start counting carbs.