Those of you I’ve spoken to about my weight loss will know that I’ve achieved this primarily through following a low carb-type of lifestyle based heavily on John Briffa’s “Escape the Diet Trap” but which I’ve added other bits and pieces to over the last 20 months. Before launching into what worked and didn’t work for me, I want to spend a bit of time writing about why I think a low carb lifestyle is the way to go, and why in some ways this is common sense.

Firstly, you’ll hopefully note that I deliberately used the word “life style” rather than “diet” – unfortunately, the word “diet” suggests that this is temporary; i.e. we go on a diet and then we come off the diet when we achieve our objectives. Well, that’s the reason most diets fail long term unfortunately – most of us who have tried shifting the flab have been there. You find some motivation to do something, you cut out the crap from your diet (or at least what you think is crap, what if you’re cutting out the wrong crap – more later), you eat less, you lose 3-4 pounds in your first week, you think “Wow, how cool is that! This new diet is working – I’ve already lost nearly half a stone in my first week. If I carry on at this rate, I’ll have lost a stone in 3-4 weeks!” – then on your second week, you lose maybe 1 pound (2 pounds if you’re lucky), and the third week the same, and so on. Except at some point maybe 5-6 weeks after, you hit a plateau – you’ll still eating as you were when you started the diet, yet the weight loss has stalled. So your motivation drops – you go back to bad habits and the weight creeps up. Before you know it you’re heavier than when you started your diet. WTF? How is that possible? And the worst thing is that during that entire time you were eating less, you were hungry all the time, and constantly thinking about food! And for what!

As far I’m concerned I haven’t been on a diet – I’ve changed what I eat, when I eat and how much I eat, and what I’m eating now is what I’ve been eating since I made this change. There’s nothing temporary about it – BUT, I can tell you I’m not hungry, I’ve not been miserable and it is without a doubt one of the best feelings in the world when you can put on clothes you haven’t fitted into for years! To digress a little, when I was 16 stone, I was 37 years old, so approaching 40. I’d decided that I needed to find clothes that were commensurate with my age. From living in central London in my 20s, I’d moved to Bucks in my 30s – I used to wear what I considered to be funky, urban gear from  brands like Diesel when I lived in London. But as I got heavier, entered my 30s, that type of gear just didn’t look right on me. So by the time I got to my late 30s I’d sort of decided that I needed to dress appropriately for my age, and thought that a “country gent” look was about right (yes, I know, shame!) – I found myself one day shopping in Austin Reed, and caught myself in the mirror and thought “This ain’t right!”. Anyway, the point of this is to say that losing weight helped pull me out of this mind set – the sheer delight I felt 6 months after I moved to a low carb lifestyle when I walked into the Diesel store in Covent Garden, and bought a load of clothes in their “Large” size (note, not “Extra Large”) was amazing. A real sense of pride and achievement!

So back to the original point of this particular post – why low carb is common sense. There are basically two opposing schools of thought in the world of diet & nutrition; the fat hypothesis and the carbohydrate hypothesis. The fat hypothesis is what is considered conventional wisdom – we get fat because we consume more calories than we need, and that dietary fat is the prime cause of this; the carbohydrate hypothesis is what low carb diets are based on – that is, we get fat because we consume far too many carbohydrates than we need, and our body turns the excess carbs into body fat. In a future post, I’ll cover this in more detail but for now bearing in mind my recent post about being sceptical about nutrition research, let’s put aside what we’ve been told, and go back 2 million years.

It’s a well understood fact that the humans have been on the Earth for around 2 million years and that evolution is an extremely slow process. In effect, we have not evolved physically in this time. Our bodies, how we process food, how we convert it to energy, what we do with excess calories are essentially unchanged from 2 million ago. What has clearly changed is the environment and therefore what we put into our bodies, and without a doubt the single biggest change to what we eat has been the advent of farming, which started around 10,000 years ago – before that our ancestors lived a hunter-gatherer existence, and our bodies were adapted to this type of existence. So for 99.5% of the entire time human beings have been on the planet, we have been hunter gatherers, not farmers. This is really important in the context of diet.

What did our hunter-gatherers eat? How did they live? Well, we believe they would have moved about with seasons to make sure they always had a supply of food and water. So lots of walking then. They wouldn’t have “grown” things as such, just lived off what the land provided them with. So that would be mainly nuts, berries and they would have hunted birds, animals and fish. Funnily enough, these things form the basis of most low carb diets! In fact, there are loads of books now, websites, blogs etc on primal living. Whilst I won’t go as far as walking everywhere bare foot like some of these primal advocates suggest, I do think there’s something in it. Remember this is how we have lived for 99.5% of our species existence on the planet. It is common sense to a certain extent. If you’re interested in whole area of primal living, check out Mark Sisson.

The point about farming is critical – there is a fantastic article, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” by American Scientist, Jared Diamond, on this: http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html From a diet perspective, farming brought us two things – grain and sugar, and you’ll see, these are the two things that pretty much all low carb diets say you should stay away from. And most processed food today contains tons of sugar in it – and as for grain, well, so many of the things that taste SOOOO good and are convenient, such as bread, pasta and pizza are derived from grain. My next blog entry will look at why the extent to which we consume grain and sugar is what is making us fat, and why I believe these types of carbohydrates are actually addictive. But let me leave you with a thought – when you read the words “bread, pasta and pizza” above, what did you think? Did your mouth start to salivate? Did you start thinking about a lovely, hot tomato and cheese pizza? You are now I bet. In fact, if you walked into a room with a hot pizza on the table, and were told to sit down and not eat the pizza, would you be able to take your mind off it? Would you be able to concentrate? What about if you walked into another room and there was a steak on a table? Would you experience the same sensations? Probably not – you wouldn’t be interested in the steak, because meat (i.e. protein) isn’t addictive. Having been a smoker, I know what it’s like to be addicted to something. And how I personally have reacted to these types of carbs in the past is very similar to how I reacted to smoking. Unfortunately, the cravings I went through when I gave up smoking were similar to the cravings I had when I reduced the amount and type of carbs I was consuming. More on this next time.