Be slim easy fix. Eat and drink as much as you like.
I guess you’ve pretty much got that one covered, so you’ll have no bother with this diet because you can keep doing what you’re good at, ie, eating and drinking as much as you want.
(I know you don’t believe me so I’ll tell you the secret up front so you don’t have to go to the bother of reading the article). The secret is …. change brands.
Yes my fat friend, all you have to do is change brands. Even then…. it’s only on those weeks that you want to lose weight. You can lose a kilo this week and none next week if you like.
By the end of this, you will have total control of your weight. If you’re still a lard-arse in six months, it’s totally your fault, because, like I said, the rest of the time, eat and drink as much as you like.
It can’t be that simple? Trust me, it’s that simple. Ask yourself these questions. Can I change from cake to steak, from beer to clear? Can I change from pasta to pork, from bananas to berries?
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Italy April 2007 at my ‘prime’ weight of 105 kilos (Jabba The Hutt is the one on the left) and 8 months later, on holidays (again) in New Zealand (before the financial crisis) with three of my grandchildren at a much better weight of 84 kilos.
In November 2015 I’m still around the 87 kilo mark but thinking about dropping it back to about 82 and doing a little muscle building to keep me healthy as I get older.
If you can change what you eat, put up with a little boredom, you can lose weight, and not just a few ounces, half a kilo a week (that’s 2 pounds or so for the metrically challenged). And…. you don’t have to be hungry any time at all. (Not that it would do you any harm.)
You can stop right here but it’s best to know a bit about the theory behind it, so you know basically why it works.
We start here.
Of the many categories and sub categories, the main types of food that we are interested in are Protein, Animal Fat and Carbs. While this is not a detailed description, it will do for what you absolutely need to know. Broadly speaking (very broadly)……your body uses Protein for muscle, Animal Fat for bones and bulk and Carbohydrate for energy.
Myth: “If you eat fat, you will be fat”. That is like saying, “if you eat brains, you will be smart” or “if you get cold, you will catch a cold”. They might sound the same or even be spelt the same, but they are not the same.
Look up a book of scientific tables that include the composition of food and you will find that beef is 46% water, 21% protein and 32% fat. If you eat lots of protein, your body uses what it needs and dumps the rest the same day. (Now you know where that American saying came from.) Same goes for animal fat. Our hunter ancestors mainly found it on the same victim. Fat has a higher octane level than protein so you get more bang for your buck with fat.
In other words, you get more calories with fat than you do with protein, so it’s a good idea to keep the fat to a reasonable level. It is almost impossible to eat enough protein to make you fat but it would probably be possible to do it with enough fat, but you’d have to eat enough to make you sick. Anyway, the bottom line is don’t be worried about eating fat but keep it down where you can.
Carbohydrates however are pure energy. Actually, there are three types of carbohydrates, sugar, starch and fibre. The first two are what made you fat.
Fibre is indigestible, so unless you are a termite it doesn’t matter except in a good way. It is rather good for your system and may even lengthen your life.
The main difference between the other two, starch and sugar, is the speed at which the glucose is available, so unless you are a diabetic, the speed is irrelevant. It will still turn into glucose which if it is not used (you’re not an athlete are you?) it will be stored as fat.
Evolution prepared us for lack of carbs because it was relatively difficult find. You either had to fight the bees for it or out-climb the monkeys for the fruit. Certain tubers provided carbohydrates but were hard to dig up and there was plenty of competition. Even a hundred years ago, a microsecond in evolution, sugar was hard to find. We evolved to convert carbohydrate into fat, stored for bad times.
It was perfect for day to day energy needs because your ancestor’s body could store the left overs for use later but, here is the problem with carbohydrates.
The body can’t hang on to it as energy. It must convert it into something it can carry around otherwise you’d light up like a Christmas tree. So the same day, instead of dumping it, your body saves it for lean times ahead. (That’s one of the reasons why our species (and most others) have survived so well.)
It can’t save it as energy because you don’t come equipped with batteries, but it can save it as fat. Where does it store this fat? On men, on their waists, on women, on their bums and when these containers are full, anywhere it can find a bit of flesh to hang it on.
Unlocking the fat store:
If you have been feeding your body bucket-loads of carbs every day, you will have plenty of fat stored, which is why you are reading this. Only problem is if you suddenly stop shoveling in all those carbs, your body will not like you very much. In fact it will get nasty and make you feel a bit dodgy for a while. Too bad. Your body will get over it. So will you.
If you can’t put up with feeling a bit off colour for a day or so, you should stop reading now and get used to being fat. If you think you can handle a bit of a headache, a bit of “not quite right”, read on my friend. You are about to get a whole lot thinner.
The first few days are the hardest and most diets are like a dodgy second hand car and break down before they make it to the end of the street. The problem is that when you are hungry, it is hard to believe that this feeling of misery is good for you, which it probably isn’t, and that’s why it’s hard to believe. Anyway, there is no point in being hungry and miserable. Being miserable is bad enough without being hungry too.
The reason you will be miserable is that the little man who now has to go down to the fat stores and dig out your old, un-used fat (now doesn’t that paint a picture) and cart it up to the energy engine, is pissed off. No wonder you’ve got a headache.
Where does all the fat go?
You breathe most of it out. As fat is energy fuel it’s “burned” as it goes through a chemical process to convert into energy. The overhead of running your body plus any exercise you do creates a chemical reaction splitting fat cells into carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen, the last two combined in the form of water (vapour).
Exercise:
Boring, boring. Fortunately, you don’t have to exercise. Insistence that ‘regular exercise is a necessary requirement for weight loss’ provides another reason for busy people to postpone weight loss. That is not to say you should not exercise, but only that it is just another overhead. It has great health benefits and speeds up the process but not essential to the weight loss part.
This is very good for guys that are too busy or too lazy, which just about covers most of us. BUT IF…you want to speed up the process, any increase in activity will make the little man shoveling fat into your energy engine work harder. The only problem is finding the time, the enthusiasm and the self-discipline to get into an exercise program. It’s just not going to happen, most likely. BUT, there is a trick, for blokes at least. Your ancestors had to hunt to survive. Their bodies adapted to the hunt by turning on the energy tap just before the hunt began.
How did their bodies know the hunt was on? Answer, they were hungry and they had to walk away from the village to find a lunch that didn’t want to be found. As soon as they started walking any distance, their bodies went into overdrive making them super alert to give them the best chance of catching a meal. Those who did this well, they survived, those who didn’t, died. Your ancestors were the ones that did it well, so you have the right genes.
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If you ‘go hunting’ a couple of mornings a week (sometimes you may just want to enjoy the scenery) your body will burn energy a lot faster and for quite a few hours. I don’t think they went hunting at night, so stick to mornings. About half an hour walk will do it, but you should be able to crack two or three k’s away and the same back giving you five or six kilometres (three and a half miles) which is enough to get faster results. Why mornings? Well the second reason you will burn fat, is that in the morning you probably haven’t got any carbs left in your inflated gut.
The last lot you had last night were burned up overnight running the body or if you tucked onto some ice cream and banana and a second helping of chocolate sauce, laid down as fat.
So, at this time of the morning, where does the little man get the energy to move your fat arse down the road and back? Out of your fat stores. Any morning you walk, you will lose more fat than the days you don’t walk. So, being the extremist I know you are, you say, “all I have to do is walk every day” and I’ll be thin in a few weeks. But you’d be wrong.
There is a possibility that more walking will not improve the energy burn because your body will not believe you go hunting every day. If you walk every morning, it may adopt this as a base level and stop going into overdrive when you walk.
You would still burn fat of course because it has to get the energy from somewhere. However, you might find the total burn for the week is no different because you system no longer goes into overdrive if you walk every morning. It just burns off the bit it needs for the walk but nothing is required to make you super alert for the hunt.
Also, the little fat shoveler will creep up into your ear and tell you to grab a few carbs because you are walking every day and can “afford” to eat some juicy carbs. The lazy little bastard doesn’t want to be shoveling fat off your arse if he can get away with it.
Of course, if you go mad and run and jump and carry on like a triathlete, you will burn heaps more energy and lose weight fast, but you are not going to do that or you wouldn’t be fat now. Just stick to a walk 3 mornings a week and you will be fine. Don’t overdo it, 3 times a week is plenty. Or, don’t even walk. You are going to lose weight anyway. So, how to go about the “diet” part?
First, let’s start with the most important part, booze.
BOOZE AND SUGAR- The High Octane Fuel
Booze. Ah, yes, booze. What would we do without it? Well, as I found out, about the same as I did when I drank it from a bucket. Alcohol is made from sugar, but it does not have any calories or carbohydrates (in other words, sugar) in it. Therefore, by my reasoning, I should be free to drink as much as I want and never put on weight.
After all, my fat friends told me, it’s only the bar freebies and potato crisps that put on the weight, not the booze. Unfortunately, that is both true and a lot of crap. Alcohol does not contain carbohydrates, it does something worse.[/one_half_last] It converts that wonderful feeling of being able to tell the boss to get stuffed, into…. you guessed it, bloody SUGAR. Bastard! And it is one of my favourite food groups too.
Does this mean I cannot ever have booze again? No way! Of course you can, just not on the days you want to lose weight. If you drink beer, (who doesn’t?) change to clear beer (soda water and lemon slice) or any version that has NO SUGAR. That does not mean “low alcohol” “low carb”. It means NO ALCOHOL.
I use a BIG glass because I like to drink. A little ice, a shot of diet tonic water and top it with soda water. I can drink it by the bucket, at least as fast as the other guys at the bar are drinking the brown beer. This is not for the rest of your life, just until you lose some of your gut, fatso. (Actually in my case, I never quite got around to going back to brown beer. This is hugely cheaper and I like it. Of course I still have the occasional brownie but we’re talking a few times a year, and this is just personal choice.)
I can hear you already thinking, “I will take all this on board, but I will just cut down on the brown beer, or change to a lite brown beer”. Forget it. It does not work that way. You can have ABSOLUTELY NO brown beer carbs during the week you are losing weight. Next week, when you are not losing weight, you can drink brown beer. Surely you can go one week without brown beer.
The other problem with beer is that it does have carbohydrates as well as alcohol. You get fat both ways. If you’re worried the guys will rib you about it, trust me, they don’t really give a shit about what you drink, so long as you pay for your shout. It is a lot easier than you think to change to soda water and lime/tonic as it has the same consistency as brown beer and you can drink the same amount.
OK, so they might have a bit of a laugh, maybe once or twice, but they will respect you being able to do something they think is beyond them. Of course, as your gut disappears, you get to be admired for being so ballsy. A bit of a bonus actually.
The other possibility is to start drinking spirits or wine. They both have the problem that when they are converted to sugar inside your corpulent carcass, you will fail miserably.
You will have given up all that lovely brown beer for nothing. Your body will convert one scotch and one glass of wine into 80 grams of sugar, which it then stores as fat. Bugger that, why drag it out? Let’s just get the job done.
SOLID FOOD
Some of my other favourites are also high octane foods, like bread, pasta, rice, fruit to name a few and they contain or are packed with the ingredients that easily convert to sugar.
The moment you eat lots of carbs, you will stop burning fat from the stores and start to use the carbs you just swallowed. Of course, what’s even worse, pure sugar, lollies, cakes, Coke, ice-cream (did you know it is 50% cream fat and 50% sugar? Surprised me too.) in fact most sweets, have heaps of pure sugar, which is simply high octane fuel for the body.
You can lose a whole day’s worth of fat burning with one can of Coke or a regular chocolate. If fact 2 cans of Coke and you could put fat into the stores that day. Yeah!
Your energy engine needs fuel 24 hours a day. The little man with the wheelbarrow who has to go down to the fat-bum store and dig it out to bring back to feed the engine, would much rather take the sugar and feed it to your energy engine. It takes no effort you see, and he can just sit on your fat bum and have a little rest.
The best way to make sure you don’t fail is to eat plenty.
Lots of protein, like meat, chicken, fish, eggs, cheese and yes you can even scoff a bit of fat. (I don’t now, but I have in the past and I am not sure if it made any difference because I still lost weight, but I generally lop off the fat part. Except when I don’t.)
You should buy a little book called “The Power of Protein” by Chris Smith from the Sunshine Coast (Australia’s northern book-end paradise that matches the world famous Gold Coast on the southern side of Brisbane).[one_half]
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It lists all the foods and their carbohydrate count. It was this book that got me started and a bit of research and testing produced the information you are reading now.
Eat as much as you want, but don’t eat more than 20 grams of carbs a day. Believe me, it is not that hard because a lot of food has no carbs or so little, it hardly registers. This is good because you can use your 20 carbs in lots of ways to make life more interesting. (Like no-sugar chocolate.)
[/one_half_last]http://www.powerofprotein.com/
If you want to know if your can eat a particular product, (like yogurt for example) read the label. Total carbohydrate is what you are looking for because it gives the number for all three carbs (starch, sugar and fibre) together.
If you want to get really technical you can look for the fibre number and subtract it as you are only interested in the other two that turn into fat. All the labels will give you the rate per hundred but they will try to trick you into buying by listing portion size numbers which look smaller. I never buy anything that has more than 8 grams per hundred total.
Protein:
The best part about protein is that your body uses a “down the hole” counter to tell when you have eaten enough. It works in other species so there seems now enough evidence that the same or similar works in humans.
It stands to reason as our ancestors would eat themselves stupid on protein because that’s all they could catch and kill. We evolved a system that checked how much protein was going down and shut off the hungry switch when you’d got enough in your gut to see you through another day or two, but not so much to slow you down so a large cat could round you up for lunch.
When you eat foods with lots of carbs and not much protein, you just keep eating until you feel sick because the protein counter has not yet reached “whoa”.
Cholesterol and the balanced diet
If ever there was a cop out for being fat, this is it. Most of the food you are likely to find in a supermarket has a few more “interesting” ingredients than those found in the kangaroo or hairy mammoth your ancestors found in their supermarket.
As a result, you will be eating plenty of those “trace elements” “vitamins” and other ingredient of a “balanced diet” whether you try to or not. Don’t worry too much about the “balanced diet” guff because concentrating on proteins for a while is not going to throw you out of balance. Especially if you throw a few, not a lot, just a few, vegies into your protein stew.
What about cholesterol? You don’t want to clog up your arteries do you? Sorry to tell you this, but they are already partly clogged just from living. Given that your body manufactures more than 85% of the cholesterol in your body, there is a very limited effect in eating “low cholesterol” foods. In fact the technical assessment of the difference is “bugger all” but it’s great for selling margarine.
I know it comes as a great surprise when you see the foods that are chocka with carbs; not just the obvious ones, bread, pasta etc, but fruit and vegetables too, so you need to keep them to a minimum until you lose some weight.
I’ve heard the routine about how dangerous it is to have a high protein diet because it is unbalanced and you need to include some carbohydrates in your diet. This would be right if you could figure out a way to eliminate carbs, but you can’t. The truth is, nearly everything has some carbs so no matter how hard you go at this, you won’t be “unbalanced” from this exercise.
Anyway, believe me, your body can handle a little “imbalance” for a few weeks even it did occur, which it almost certainly won’t because you will probably eat a fair bit of variety anyway..
SWEETS:
I have a sweet tooth, which is a nice way of saying I would be a fat-arse again too, if I didn’t know what I now know. There is an easy way to get your sweet hit. You can buy a lot of low carb products these days. They are available from the “health food” section in most supermarkets but I’ll bet no one expected to see all those fat people browsing the health food department. Of course there are a lot of very un-fat and previously-fat people there now too.
Some chemists also sell no sugar chocolate and what you are looking for is anything that has a carbohydrate value less than 8 grams per hundred. The serving sizes are generally 30 to 50 grams so you are getting 2 – 4 grams with each chocolate.
If you have that with a coffee, it will not add to your fat stores and will keep you under the magic 20 a day. At that rate, with no exercise, you will lose about 80 to 100 grams on that day. If you stay with it for a week, you will have lost about .6 of a kilo.
For soft drinks (sodas) no-sugar colas like Coke Zero are available in most shops. Supermarkets have them by the carton if you’ve got money to burn. It’s a lot cheaper to drink diet tonic and soda. By the way, tonic water has about 9 grams per 100ml so make sure you get the diet version which has NONE.
The “rest of my life” syndrome:
Many people express the desire to lose weight, but find the prospect of doing what they don’t want to do for the rest of their life a problem. Me too so I decided not to do it for the rest of my life. I decided to only do it for 8 weeks, and I figured I would lose 8 kilos and that would do for a while.
I found out after 8 weeks that it was easier than I thought considering I never needed to go hungry. Then I got greedy and decided to go on for a few extra weeks until I got to 95 kilos. This kind of became a habit and after a couple of months, I had lost 23 kilos and ended up around 82.
Looking back, it hardly seemed to be much of an effort and 6 years later at 84 kilos, I regret I didn’t know how to solve the problem 20 years ago. I would have been happy to have avoided the stent the heart surgeon put in my artery.
Any time I want, I can lose the best part of a kilo. No doubts, no special diet, no special effort, just reduce the daily carbs to 15 or 20 grams a day for one week and its done. I love that.
Here is the bottom line:
You must decide that for now, for the short term, hell, just for one bloody week, you will eat to avoid hunger. That’s all! If you insist on eating for pleasure, for self-gratification, say ‘just one glass of wine’ every night, you will not lose weight.
You must now decide. Do you want to be thin? If so, you must forget eating for pleasure until you are thin again. It’s not forever. You have been gobbling down the lovely tasting sugar now for how many years? Surely just eating to avoid hunger for a few weeks is not beyond you.
Yes, you can have some pleasurable food but the goal is to be not hungry. The goal is not self gratification. (If you want to pleasure yourself, go do it in private. But not near the refrigerator.)
For the time being, food is only there to stop hunger and you should eat just enough to put the fire out. This is easy. Grab a piece of cold meat sausage or cheese and wash it down with a coffee, water or soda water.
Your hunger will disappear and you can go back and do it again in half an hour. That’s if you think of it which you probably won’t. This is the good news. By just having the small amount of protein, you will not be hungry for some time and you will lose weight.
There is a very good scientific explanation for this phenomenon. We all have a motor response system call peristalsis which is triggered by the time lapse of about 2 hours after eating a meal. It sets off a set of muscle contractions that move any left overs in the stomach down the gurgler for processing and triggers a hunger ‘suggestion’ at the same time.
You can ‘trick’ the system. When the peristalsis triggers a hunger ‘suggestion’ to your brain, if you eat a small amount of protein, it switches off the urge within a minute or two.
Good, handy excuses.
‘Slow metabolism’.
Sorry, it doesn’t matter how fast or slow your metabolism runs, you will lose 140 grams of fat every day your carb intake is below 20 grams. In a week you will lose about half a kilo. You don’t have to do this every day, only those days you want to lose fat.
‘Doesn’t work for me’.
If you are still looking for an excuse why not adopt the old favourite, ‘It works for you but it doesn’t work like that for me’. Really? We are of a different species perhaps? This is another of those myths ‘that sound right’. I cannot believe that after 200,000 years of evolution, there is much difference in the way our bodies work.
Sure some are more active and burn it a bit quicker, but we all work the same way at not too different a rate either so don’t even bother with that miserable excuse for an excuse.
Measuring it
I suspect the act of measuring progress makes a big contribution to success.scales I can’t say for sure because I always weigh myself on the same scales, at the same time on the same day every week. Saturday morning, starkers. Not even a drink of water. (Sorry about the image. I hope you can erase it easily.)
Once I got down to the low eighties and taking for granted the pleasures of no back aches, no sore feet, being able to get up off the floor without making loud noises and some rather startling libido changes (sorry again) I stopped doing my weigh-ins.
Then I started to gain a little weight, not much but kind of, steady, which could be a coincidence. Sure. When I jump (actually, gingerly creep) onto the scales, I know what I expect to see and frankly, I am more than pissed off if the number is not down on the previous week (which has happened on a few occasions.)
I then enter this on my spreadsheet (I used to just enter it in my diary) but the important part is to keep it from week to week. It really concentrates the motivation when you see how far you have come.
The old way
Think about your current / past method/s of losing weight. Let’s face it, a complete failure. If you tried something that doesn’t work, how can you possibly think that doing it again will have a different outcome? Of course it will be the same. Are you crazy?
You must change the method and use your body’s love of protein to your advantage. Sure, you will get bored with it but so did your ancestors. The ones that craved carbs are the ones who survived and you have inherited the genes for findin’ and lovin’ carbohydrates.
They didn’t have to worry about being fat, but we do, so I guess it’s one of those ‘just suck it up princess’ situations and we have to put up with a little boredom. At least not being hungry is the upside and anyway, you only have to wait until after dinner and you can have your 4 grams of low carb chocolate.
Now, don’t tell me you can’t lose weight.
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