Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary

(Continued from yesterday’s entry; the series began on 1/25/2009.)

Recapping: After losing five pounds by not eating Cheerios every morning for breakfast, I tried replacing the calories with protein and fat calories to see if those five pounds would return. I deliberately ate more to see if I could accelerate the process, but what I ate more of was limited to eggs, meat, and cheese. It backfired, and I lost two more pounds in ten days.

When I told Carol on the phone that I was down to 148, she told me to knock it off and go back to my Cheerios. So on the 11th day I called a halt to the experiment. Most of the meat and cheese was gone by then, and I’d had to get another dozen eggs and more yogurt. But I started cooking carbs again: primarily rice, and some conventional pasta. Since I was still batching it, I did weird things like having a bowl of Cheerios as my carb course at supper, next to a yummy plate full of formerly frozen shrimp and a side of creamy cole slaw.

That was only about a week ago, and as of this morning, stark naked and dripping wet, I weighed 151. It only took a week of slamming carbs again to gain three pounds. Carol got home last night. I’m a much happier guy, and will be returning to eating like a real human being. The only long-term change is that I’m having an egg for breakfast instead of Cheerios. Keeping my edge all morning has been delicious.

This experience didn’t surprise me too much. I’ve run into the effect before, although I never had the opportunity to do anything quite this gonzo to test it. Back when I was in college, I weighed about 125 pounds and was mostly skin and bones. Over the years I gradually put on weight, as people do. By the time I was 45 I weighed 170, and Carol told me that I was starting to look several months’ pregnant. Then something interesting happened: I threw a bad kidney stone, which forced me to stop drinking three or four Snapple bottled sweetened iced teas every day. I stopped drinking anything but water while the stone was being analyzed, and I lost several pounds almost immediately. This intrigued me, and when I started drinking sodas again, I drank only diet. The weight stayed off, and started drifting slowly downward. (None of this is news to my long-time readers.)

The next event happened a year or so later when I stopped eating rice bowls down at the corner for lunch every day. I switched to sandwiches or pizza (and no longer ate a softball-sized wad of white rice on a daily basis) and lost another slug of weight very quickly. My weight since then has wandered between 155 and 160. Once I started weight training in 2004, it drifted down to 155 and has been remarkably consistent since then…until last summer, when I stopped eating Cheerios for breakfast.

And now the experiment is over. So…what did I learn? Mostly, this: The conventional wisdom that Fat Bad, Carbs Good, is not unassailable, and the whole business is hugely more complex than most people think. It’s not an issue of thermodynamics, as far too many people believe. We do not “burn” calories in the same sense that we burn leaves out in the alley. Metabolism is an enormously complex biological mechanism, one that we still don’t understand as well as we should–or even as well as we think we do.

I was certainly struck by this: Changes happened a lot more quickly than our conventional understanding of calories and weight gain/loss would explain. If it were simply a matter of wadding on weight when we eat more than we burn, or losing weight when we burn more than we eat, it should take a lot longer. A pound, after all, represents 3,500 calories, and my intake deltas were nowhere near large enough to account for the changes I saw as quickly as I saw them, both on the downswing and on the upswing. I’m aware from my reading of the tendency to shed water on low-carb diets. I took care to drink more water than I generally do, and did not notice myself losing any more than usual. Something else must be going on, and while I’m still researching it, I think the answers may lie in a book I read almost by accident a month ago, a book that triggered this whole crazy idea.

(To be continued as soon as I can manage it.)

Recapping Part 1 of this series, yesterday: Back in the summer of 2008 I stopped eating a bowl of Cheerios every morning, to see if I could avoid the “fuzzy” feeling that commenced half an hour after breakfast and lingered for an hour and sometimes longer. Within three weeks, I had lost five pounds. I also lost the fuzzy feeling.

I found this intriguing, since it meshed with a few other things that had happened years earlier when my diet changed abruptly for some reason. (I’ll save the deep history for Part 3.) I read a few books, some of which I will review in the near future. There is a very old and very contrarian position in the health field to the effect that if you eat more carbs, you gain weight, and if you eat less carbs, you lose weight. This seemed to be the case with me, though all the data that I could find had been gathered in the treatment of overweight people. I was not and had never been significantly overweight. (I have never weighed more than 170.) It was a head-scratcher, and the question would have remained purely academic, except that we have known since last fall that Carol was going to be in Chicago for two or three weeks in January. I was going to be cooking for myself and eating alone all that time.

Hmmm.

I had lost weight by dropping one daily bowl of Cheerios from my diet. The hypothesis was obvious: Suppose I replaced the calories represented by a bowl of Cheerios with an equivalent number of calories, but from protein and fat. Would I gain the weight back?

I went shopping on the way home from dropping Carol off at the Denver airport. I bought more almonds. I bought a dozen extra-large eggs. I bought lots of cold meat, cube steaks, bratwurst, and frozen shrimp. And cheese, wow: sliced Havarti, a wedge of Romano, grated Parmesan, and a package of those appallingly delicious artificial Swiss-flavored cheese slice substitutes. I bought a big container of creamy cole slaw. I bought several cups of Greek-style high-fat yogurt. I bought a pint of table cream for my coffee. As a coup de gras (heh) I bought half a pound of bacon.

Slightly daunted by all that unapologetic fat, I drew up my courage, and I ate.

Now, a largish bowl of Cheerios with a half cup of 2% milk represents about 150 calories. An extra-large egg is 85 calories; fried in butter brings it up to a little over 90. A tablespoon of cream for my cafe au lait is another 29 calories. 3 oz of Greek-style yogurt gave me 115 calories, over about 85 for the light yogurt I had been eating before, for a calorie delta of 30. It was close to a wash; 150 before; 150 after.

That was breakfast. For lunch I had cold meat and cheese and occasionally an egg, and every couple of days, two strips of bacon. I did a lot of interesting things with the raw materials: I made a handcrafted Bacon Cheese Egg McMuffin. I made a new sort of ham and cheese sandwich, by sandwiching two slices of ham between two slices of Havarti cheese. I did not cut out carbs completely–I like them too much–but one Bays english muffin was it for lunch. For dinner I typically had a cube steak fried in walnut oil, another 3 oz of Greek-style yogurt with blueberries, some Romano cheese, and maybe a few Wheat Thins.

I made buffalo spaghetti sauce, enough for several nights, and served it over whole-wheat capellini. When I didn’t feel like cooking, I just thawed some shrimp and went nuts.

What I did not eat was sugar or refined carbs. I read labels like I generally read only SF, history, and theology, taking notes. There’s at least a smidge of sugar in almost everything, but if it was high-fructose corn syrup, I put it back on the shelf. I had no desserts, and I left the last two boxes of Christmas cookies in the pantry, unopened. I did not eat any potato chips. I did not eat any rice. I did not eat any white pasta. The only bread I ate was from a package of cracked-wheat bratwurst rolls. When I snacked at all, it was on dry roasted almonds.

I did not scrimp. I ate as much as I wanted; in fact, to accelerate the process (given that I only had a little over two weeks to regain my five pounds) I ate as much as I could stand. I probably ate about 25% less in terms of carbs than I generally do, but I ate a lot more protein and fat. I did not change my exercise regimen.

After ten days of this, I tallied the results: I felt great. I was never hungry.

And I had lost two more pounds. Oh, dear. If I wasn’t careful, I would be burned at the steak for heresy.

(To be continued tomorrow.)