Ang asks:

…I’ve started on a whole food diet. …very little processed crap- whole grains, fresh veggies, fresh fruit and low fat meat/soy/legume alternatives.. I feel great, my energy is higher, but I still can’t seem to lose the weight!!! What to you recommend to boost my metabolism?? Is there a secret that I just don’t know about?

Before I get to the “secret” that Ang alluded to, let’s first clear one thing up. Weight loss, and FAT LOSS, are two very different processes. They get interchange by the media and so called “medical professionals” very freely, but we must understand that WEIGHT is somewhat irrelevant when talking about health. I personally am considered clinically obese, even though I maintain 10% body fat, am healthy and energetic, and haven’t been sick -except for the odd minor cold- for years. We know that muscle weighs more than fat, so if you have increased your activity levels and are building muscle, you may actually see an INCREASE in weight before you start to come down. Don’t let the scale discourage you.

Health is a broad term. It encompasses many variables, so using a single measure such as cholesterol levels, or weight, or bone density -though providing good baseline information- doesn’t necessarily translate into telling you how healthy you are, only how you compare to the rest of the people your age.

Now that that’s cleared up… lets get to the secret:

But first, lets talk about 3 simple factors that influence our body composition…

1) Thermodynamics. It is a physical law that an energy system (like your body) can only shed stored energy (bodyfat) if there is a negative energy balance. Basically, Energy In < Energy Out. If you aren't burning more than you're eating, all the dieting in the world will not help you lose fat.

2) Insulin. First, read this article on the Insilin Response. Next, think about this notion: Our bodies have been on this earth, in one form or another, for about 2 million years. We have only discovered how to cook and processes foods that were previously inedible, or scarcely available (SUGAR, grains, starches, soy, flours, rice etc.) in the last 10,000 years. That’s less than 1% of our existence on Earth! It’s no wonder why our bodies have problems with refined carbohydrates (sugar).

To put it simply, our bodies just aren’t ready for the high sugar, high energy foods that are ever-present in our Westernized diet.

Our bodies are still cave-people. We still live in the same genes as our nomadic ancestors. As humans, we would generally walk all day, settle down for the night, and have 2-3 hours before the sun went down to hunt what we could, and gather the plants, nuts, seeds, and if we were lucky, fruit in our immediate surrounding. Notice, no grains, no starches, and no rice. Humans can not digest these foods in their raw form, and in the case of potatoes, can be mildly toxic if not cooked.

To keep our insulin levels low, we need to mimic our paleolithic forefathers and try to eat as close to their diet as possible.

Which is:

Meats
Vegetables
Nuts and Seeds
Some Fruit
Little Starch
NO SUGAR

As you can see, the list doesn’t get restrictive until we get into the sugar end of the spectrum. The reason for this? You guessed it… INSULIN CONTROL.

3) Ratio. To keep our insulin levels low, we must eat foods that don’t stimulate a large pancreatic response, or in other words, avoid the sugars. To put it into perspective, 2 slices of bread (common to most sandwiches) contains about the same amount of sugar as 12 cups of broccoli. That’s a lot of fiber… yikes.

So how do you get energy without eating sugar?

Fun fact: Of the three macronutrients your body needs you to eat protein and and fat to live. If you stopped eating one of these essential compounds, your body would begin to eat itself, and you would eventually die from malnutrition. Carbohydrates however can conveniently be made from the protein and fat that you eat. So, you could, in theory never eat another carb and stay alive… you may not thrive, but will stay alive.

To keep your body full of energy, we need to make sure we are feeding our muscle’s energy stores (with glycogen) only enough to fuel our day to day energy needs, and not more. Excess energy intake gets stored in our body as fat (see step 1).

Fat loss is as simple as figuring out how much energy YOUR body needs to maintain a high level of activity, but not eating a surplus of energy. We do this by figuring out personal food quantity. I recommend getting yourself a copy of The Zone: A Dietary Road Map to Lose Weight Permanently by Dr. Barry Sears.

I don’t usually like to advocate a so-called “fad” diet, but if you do your research, the way Dr. Sears has, you will realize that there is sound science behind the Zone.

The zone is not a diet in the traditional sense. It is more of a rationing system. A way of quantifying how much food, and in what ratio, you need to function optimally, and to stave off disease. I will be writing a post in the future dissecting the zone a bit more, but I would strongly recommend picking up a copy of this book and trying out “zoning” for at least 3 weeks (usually how long it takes your body to adapt to a dietary change). Figure out your block prescription and weigh and measure your meals for at least a week so that your eye can develop a sense for what your personal macronutrient ratios are.

A key step to success with this eating system is getting over your fear of FAT. As I stated before, fat is essential to our survival, and is required for many vital bodily processes. (Fun fact: You brain is made up of 70% fat, and the fatty myelin sheath is what facilitates fast neuro-processing… so eating fat may make you smarter?) Fat is what makes you feel full, and satiated, which is the reason most “diets” fail… you feel hungry all the time (re-read my post on the insulin response for why this happens in high carb, low fat diets).

Are you ready for the secret to fat loss?

The truth is, you already know it, and you learned it in kindergarten: You are what you eat.
So eat REAL food, the way your caveman ancestors did, which coincidentally, keeps your insulin response low, and trains your body to begin using stored body fat for energy… and once that is used up, dietary fat in a process called ketosis (more on this in a future post).
You will get a long way toward your goal of fat loss by just cleaning up what you are eating, eliminating the grains, rice, pastas, breads etc., that require processing for us to digest, and cause an insulin spike. If you want to fast track these results, you will start figuring out your ”zone blocks” so that you’re only feeding your body enough to stay active, and lastly, make sure you keep your activity up, and continually try new things like CrossFit to keep that pesky law of thermo dynamics in check.

Related Topics

• How to eat healthy on the road.
• The Insulin Response
• Diet: Another Four Letter Word

Supplementation implies that you have a void in your basic diet that needs to be filled. It is a solution to a symptom, and not a cause.

Nutrition is at the foundation of health and well being, and every culture in the world already knows the secret to good health: You are what you eat!There is little room for argument surrounding the fact that your body can only repair and fuel your body with the food that you are feeding it. If you are feeding yourself refined, modified, denatured, and otherwise chemically altered variations of food, then how do you expect your body to perform? To use an analogy, would you pour dirty gas into your car and expect it to perform at an optimal level? Probably not.

To restate what I have said in earlier posts, food should not be broken down into micronutrients. There is a popular trend in the media right now to tout the latest magic bullet pill, vitamin, or antioxidant as the cure to X health risk. The problem with this approach is that our place in nature is a part of a larger system. Our genome didn’t evolve to eat the extracted vitamin C from citrus fruits, or isolate whey protein from milk, or iron pills, we evolved to eat the WHOLE FRUIT, and drink WHOLE MILK, and eat WHOLE VEGETABLES… seeing a trend here?

The three macronutrients of protein, carbohydrate, and fat are the building blocks of human life. Keeping your food in the rawest form you can before digestion ensures that you are getting as much nutrition as you can from the food you eat. Excessive heating, processing, and nutrient isolation removes much of the digestive enzymes from food that helps your body process and break down these foods into useful compounds. Without these enzymes, many foods get treated by the digestive system as a threat and trigger a stress response.

Supplements often lack many of the chemical components that allow the body to use them properly. To compensate for this, most supplements increase the amount of raw product you have you ingest to absorb a significant amount of whatever nutrient you are supplementing for. This practice can often lead to allergies caused by repetitive exposure to compounds that agitate the digestive system.

If you feel that you need to supplement your diet with a protein source, or vitamin, you should probably step back and take a look at where your real food diet is failing. A paleo based diet of meat, vegetable, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar, combined with proper proportions for your body type, should be providing all of the macronutrients, and consequently all of the micronutrients that you need to thrive.

Related Topics

• Milk. Part 1
• The Paleolithic Diet
• Milk. Part 2

The key ingredient in the process of creating good quality meats and dairy from cows is grass. Grasses are the natural food source for cows, and the reason they have rumens. Modern factory farming however, has decided to go over the head of nature.

Factory farmed dairy cows are now fed mixtures of corn, soy, grains, and other “high energy” feed stocks to make sure the cows are producing as much milk as possible, for as little money as possible. A major problem with this diet is that many non-grass foods (such as soy and alfalfa) contain compounds that mimic the actions of the female hormone, estrogen. While these can cause cows to produce more milk than they normally would (and thus increase profit per animal), some studies have called into question possible impacts on animal health and nutrient content of the milk.

Also, a major issue with cows eating mostly a grain based diet has to do with the cow’s biology. As I mentioned before, cows have an organ called the rumen, that functions to break down cellulose in grass into simple sugars through a mixed process of mechanical churning, and a symbiotic relationship with plant digesting microbes. The problem comes with the fact that these microbes perform best in a pH neutral environment, like the one created in the rumen when cow saliva mixes with fermenting grass. When cows are feed too much grain, the pH balance in the rumen turns acidic, and the bacteria that break down cellulose can no longer do their job, and bacteria that can survive in an acidic environment flourish and begin eating the walls of the rumen. This is where all the antibiotics come in.

What does this mean for human?

Humans have an acidic stomach for a reason, to kill harmful bacteria. It is a safety mechanism that evolved partly because of our taste for meat. Because cows that eat grass grow bacteria that thrive in a pH neutral environment, most bacteria that was left on the meat after slaughter could not survive in our acid stomach. It was a fine balance.

Does the problem now become evident?

Factory farmed cows, which are fed a net acidic producing diet of grains, grow bacteria in their rumens that THRIVE in acidic conditions. This means that any bacteria that is left on the meat when we eat it can no longer be killed by our acidic stomachs.

The message to be taken away from all this info is do your research, and look for high quality sources of meat and dairy. There has been a movement recently back to pasture, or grass-fed beef, and many small farms are beginning to raise cattle again as the demand for high quality meat grows. A Google serach is your best bet to find grass-fed beef in your area.

The issue of factory farming and it’s effects on the health of our society is no stranger to controversy. Corn surplus, a high demand for dairy, and cheap antibiotics have all contributed to the relatively recent decline in nutrition and quality of a food source that has been a staple of the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years.

Michael Pollan talks extensively about the corn and dairy industry’s intimate relationship and how it is degrading out standard of living in his excellent book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The book is also a must read for anyone concerned about what they are putting in their mouths (read: EVERYONE).

Related Topics

• Milk. Part 1
• Supplementation. Macronutrients vs. Micronutrients.
• The Paleolithic Diet

What is the truth behind chocolate milk? I have heard that it is better for you than regular milk, and that you should drink it after a hard work out.

The answer to this question requires some background information on milk, so lets take a step back and look at the broader topic of dairy in general.

The verdict on dairy’s effectiveness as a healthy nutrient source has not been passed yet. There seems to be a war raging between those for the consumption of milk, mainly the dairy industry, and those against it, mainly vegan activists, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

As in most wars unfortunately, truth is usually the first victim, and the dairy battle is no exception. Propaganda put out by both parties of the debate have left little room for objective investigation, and truthful reporting of the facts.

Milk, it would seem is yet another case of the West’s industrial complex destroying a food that was once a valuable source of nutrients. Much like beef, chicken, and pork, our quest to squeeze the most profits out of a resource has left it barren of nutrients, and full of unknown additives. This shift is not just happening in animal products. Fruits and vegetables have long been selected for genes that express themselves as the best looking, best tasting, and longest lasting produce. Sounds good doesn’t it? Unfortunately, these traits have come at the detriment of our nutrition and health, as nutrients were needlessly bred out in favour of a taste (Read: Higher sugar content).

Similarly, through the processeses of pasteurization and homogenization, milk has been effectively stripped of most of it’s natural enzymes and bacteria that are necessary for the proper digestion of dairy products.

Furthermore, the common misconception that fat is evil has lead to the mass production of reduced fat milk.

Never drink reduced fat milk. (skim, 1%, 2%…)

Fat is taken out milk through a process that over-heats the milk until is it becomes a powder. The fat is separated, and then water is added back to the powder until a milk like consistency returns. You are essentially drinking water with milk ingredients to it. Not milk.

The heat, and exposure to oxygen during the powdering process also damages cholesterol in the milk, which can cause injury to your arterial cells, as well as cause a pathological buildup of plaque in the arteries similar to having high triglycerides.

Heating milk also:

• Alters milks amino acids, lysine and tyrosine, making the proteins in milk less available for use.
• Lowers Vitamin C content as much as 50%.
• Lowers the water-soluable vitamin content as much as 80%.
• Destroys vitamin B12 completely.

To mention just a few…

These destroyed vitamins are added in artificially after the pasteurization and fat reduction processes so that they may appear on the nutrition label.

If you would still like to consume milk, your best option is to try and find a source of raw milk. Unfortunately, raw milk is illegal to buy in Canada, however, the option does exist to buy a share in a cow. Drinking raw milk from a cow that you own is not illegal. Also, cheese is still allowed to be made from unpasteurized, raw milk. Emmental and Gruyere are just a few of the options.

The second best alternative to raw milk is to buy whole milk, or switch to goats milk which can still be bought in a raw form.

It seems like many other foods, paying attention to the source is the best way to ensure you are eating quality dairy. Furthermore, just as our diet affects our health and performance, the diet of our dairy source is equally important. I will cover importance of what cows are built to eat, and how that is important to humans in the second part of this series.

I admit I have digressed from Shannon’s original question, but it was necessary to formulate a complete answer. As you have read, milk is a good source of protein and vitamins… in it’s original state. Commercial production however, has destroyed most of what is good about milk, and the nutrients that it does contain are artificially inserted backing into the milk product.
Also milk, being high in lecithin produces a high glycemic load, and thus a high insulin response. Adding chocolate syrup (sugar) to milk adds to insulin response, and should thus be avoided.

There was a study however, published in 2006 which indicated that chocolate milk aids in recovery when taken after intense athletic workouts. The study authors believe this to be due to its ratio of carbohydrates to protein, among other nutritional properties. The study was small in scale and partially funded by the dairy industry, but the results may warrant further study. (“Chocolate Milk: The New Sports Drink?”, Associated Press, 24 February 2006)

Related Topics

• Supplementation. Macronutrients vs. Micronutrients.
• The Paleolithic Diet
• Milk. Part 2

Can you determine your economic status by how healthy you are?

In my opinion, the answer to this question is NO, because health is independent of socioeconomic status (SES).**

Eating well, and being conscious of your health should be a top priority in everyone’s life. If you agree with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it is easy to see how failing to satisfy the needs of good food and health will cause a major weakness in your personal pyramid.

We live in a world in which obesity has reached epidemic proportions. With more than 1 billion adults overweight (at least 300 million of them clinically obese), this extra bulk is a major contributor to the global burden of chronic disease and disability. Often coexisting in developing countries with under-nutrition, obesity is a complex condition, with serious social and psychological dimensions, affecting virtually all ages and socioeconomic groups.

We as North Americans pride ourselves on being part of the developed world and having the resources to feed our population. It is sad that the way we have chosen to feed these people is with refined corn products such as high fructose corn syrup, and meat that has been so pumped full of antibiotics that it’s slowly destroying our immune systems. Combined this with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and it is easy to see why obesity rates are exploding across all socioeconomic levels.

Figuratively speaking, yes everyone eats, but most of them eat crap!

To get back to Brandon’s question, just as economic status doesn’t determine health, health can’t determine your economic status. It works similar to trying to judge SES by looking at the clothes someone is wearing, or the car they are driving. Almost impossible in today’s credit supported, culture of stuff.

What health can determine or at least positively affect however, is a person’s happiness.

A healthy body, fueled by good food is an excellent vehicle for fun. You will be able to take part in more experiences, not miss out due to illness, and living your life upright and able instead of overweight and in a chair.

If you are worried about how to finance your new healthy way of eating, consider this: An apple cost less than a bag of chips, water is free, and when you stop spending money on cheap carbohydrates which have little food value, and only make you feel more hungry. You will have all that money to spend on good quality protein and fats.

** In the developed world.

Related Topics

• Supplementation. Macronutrients vs. Micronutrients.
• Milk. Part 1
• Robb Wolf of CrossFit HQ on Insulin Resistance

With all the diets (meaning eating habits, not weight loss solution) out there, how do I know which one is right for me and my lifestyle, budget, etc. I assume you will promote the Paleolithic diet, which seems like one of the best to me, but what makes it better than the rest and do any other diets out there follow the same lines?

The fact that you even have to ask this question is a telling sign of the state of our general food culture right now. We have lost touch with what food once represented. An activity that used to be at the hub of our social culture, a daily ritual, that brought together whole communities and promoted social interaction has been reduced to fast food and protein bars.

The meaning of the word “diet” has been heavily construed in today’s saturated food market. From what used to simply mean the general kinds of foods we consumed as a community, has evolved into a definition that is now used excessively to mean a restriction of foods, or an adherence to only eating certain types of foods. The Atkins Diet, The South Beach Diet, The Graprefruit Diet, etc., the list goes on and on.

The major issue however, is not with the term diet, but in fact with the term FOOD. We have lost touch with what food really is to us as humans, mostly because we have far too much choice in the supermarket. In reality, we have gone almost full circle in our quest for sustenance. Hunting and gathering enough edible, energy providing food from our environment, which was once a daily task and required most of our time and energy, was eventually replaced by technology. Better tools allowed us to hunt more efficiently, cooking opened the door to new calorie packed plants that were once toxic, and eventually farming and agriculture allowed us to stop searching for food, but rather have the food come to us. Today however, as these technologies have advanced in leaps and bounds, we are faced with millions if not billions of choices, all touting themselves as food. To close the circle, we have returned almost to our hunting and gathering ways, only now we hunt for natural ingredients, and scour the supermarkets in hopes of gathering REAL food from the myriad of impostors.

Thus, the meaning of “diet” has transformed from all that we did eat, to all that we don’t eat in only a few short decades.

To answer your question, I want you to first figure out what food means to YOU. What is your end goal, the reason why you put
If you believe as I do that human brains have evolved much faster than human bodies, it is not a stretch to reason that the best choices we can make for fueling out bodies are one’s that closely resemble what our Paleolithic ancestors would have found in their natural surroundings. Meats, vegetable, nuts, seeds, fruit, and little starch and NO sugar.

Furthermore, the phrase “You are what you eat” still holds very true, and I will echo it many times in future articles. You can only rebuild and heal your body out of the proteins and fats you consume. If you are feeding your body processed, denatured, hydrogenated foodstuffs (I refuse to call these these chemical concoctions food), then it should come as no surprise to you when your health suffers.

That being said, this way of eating is not a “diet”, it’s a filter through which you should analyze any food that goes in your mouth. As author Gary Taubes captures in his must read book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, not all calories are created equal, and the quality of food you eat is just as important as the quantity.

Some tips on reshaping your lifestyle, and restocking your refrigerator:

• Try and keep your food shopping to the perimeter of the grocery store (this is usually where the fresh produce is).
• If it comes in a box, or needs a nutrition label to tell you what is in it, IT’S NOT FOOD!
• If doesn’t expire, IT’S NOT FOOD!
• If you are eating out, get extra veggies and skip the potatoes, fries, sweet potatoes, etc.
• Do not eat grains, pasta, bread, rice or beans, all of which wouldn’t have been available to our Paleo ancestors.
• Make sure you are eating enough good fats. (Fish Oil especially!)
• The further removed (both in processing steps, and in distance ) from the source your food gets, the less nutritious it is.

To address your budget concerns, following these simple steps when grocery shopping or eating out will also save you money, as you will no longer be spending it on useless foodstuffs that don’t provide your body with what it needs to thrive, nor will you be spending as much on medical bills when you stop getting as sick. The twisted relationship of the food and medical (read:pharmaceutical) industries is a subject for another article.

To finish this response, I will leave you with a question:

Why worry about saving pennies on good food, and then spend thousands of dollars on medical bills?

You are what you eat. Eat good food, stop getting sick, get out of the hospitals and off the drugs. Start living your life. Your body is a vehicle for fun. Fuel it properly, and keep it in good shape, it’s the only one you’ve got.

Live, laugh, love.

For more reading on the Paleo way of eating, check out my article on the subject, or visit the Paleolithic Deit link in the sidebar.

Related Topics

• Paleo Diet in a Nutshell.
• The Paleolithic Diet
• Diet: Another Four Letter Word