Lauric acid is one kind of saturated fat and is associated with several health benefits. Unfortunately, Americans’ intake of lauric acid has almost been eliminated with the misguided decrease in saturated fat intake. This healthful oil is traditionally found in heavy cream and butter of grass-fed animals. One of the highest sources is sheep milk products and lamb. Vegetable sources include coconut oil.
How to interpret your skinfold caliper measurement to your health – Dr. Richard Maurer
To begin – As a general rule, compare the triceps measurement to the hip:
FOR WOMEN:
The triceps should be about the same (measurement in mm) as the hip.
If the hip is greater than 50% higher than the triceps – there is excessive energy storage. Over 50% higher and I suspect metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes, In other words, cutting carbohydrate calories in favor of fat calories is the best treatment. If the hip is double the triceps – I strongly suspect diabetes. Thorough blood tests usually find this at this number!
If the triceps is greater than the hip, I suspect deconditioning, or lack of adequate exercise. This imbalance can also be a signal of sluggish metabolism. If the triceps remains higher than the hip despite adequate exercise, I suggest looking further at the thyroid. Hypothyroidism is a common problem in people who have the higher triceps despite good compliance to exercise.
FOR MEN:
The triceps should be between equal to less than double the hip.
If the hip is triple the triceps – I suspect diabetes. The back measurement should be about the same as the hip.
If the Back is higher – I will emphasize exercise to get the tone of the muscles improved. If the hip is higher than the back – reduce carbohydrates for aggressively with the FatBack Diet. Keeping the Fat: Carbohydrate ratio higher on the fat side.
For both men and women, If all points go up simultaneously, there is a combination of too little exercise and perhaps just too many calories. Just plain old overeating, evaluate the diet and see if there is a place where excess food is being eaten.
It follows, that improvement in your bodyfat measurements can be effectively interpreted.
1 – If your skinfold caliper measurement gets smaller in your hip…it is due to an improvement in your diet. You are storing less abdominal body fat – probably due to a better carbohydrate-fat ratio in the diet.
2 – If your skinfold caliper measurement gets smaller in the triceps…it is because of conditioning and better exercise. “You are in better shape”
3- If your skinfold calipers show proportional loss in all locations, you are probably doing a good job improving both diet and exercise.
Food addiction, Overeating & Cravings: Recognizing Emotional Eating Patterns
“Emotional eating” is usually defined as eating to satisfy or quell a feeling of depression, conflict, boredom or loss. Emotional eating can also happen when the feelings are not overtly negative, such as with excitability or happiness that makes you want to celebrate. Whether the mood or feeling is positive or negative, the desire to eat is different than hunger.
To complicate matters, some foods have addictive, mind altering qualities. The book written by Dr. Andrew Weil back in 1983 was aptly named “Chocolate to Morphine”. The human desire or craving for an altered state of consciousness is well-established. “Chocolate to Morphine” offers that drugs will not be eradicated as long as the desire for altered states is alive and well. I extend this to how we eat. A person’s craving for chocolate or tendency to overeat & over drink will not be cured until the need for an altered state of consciousness is resolved.
Let’s look at the effect of emotional eating. According to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers discovered that the six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s account for 51% of the annual weight gain in average American Adults. This effect was significantly more pronounced in overweight adults. (Yanovski, March 23, 2000) While this study is revealing of something we all suspected, knowing this information has not changed the pattern over the past decade.
Look at the internet, and you would think that emotional eating is easily resolved with just a few quick steps. At a major medical center website there is a list of what to do. Some examples include: Don’t keep unhealthy foods around, Snack healthy, Eat a balanced diet, Exercise regularly.
This is over half of the treatment options for emotional eating patterns and none of them get at the emotional choice that precedes the craving or desire to eat. To their credit, they do offer the suggestion of distracting yourself with a walk or healthy activity instead of eating. But all of these treatments involve doing something different. We have to change the behavior of our being, not just our doing.
We all know the diets that state, “Do these 8 steps and have the body you’ve always wanted!” We want to believe them so we but the magazine. But part of us knows the emptiness that lies in such a promise.
If you just change your behavior but not your being, your reward is as temporary as the “happiness” imparted by a chocolate candy bar. Weight loss in “doing” and “having” based programs are temporary at best.
The FatBack Diet Cure for Emotional Eating
Look at your lifestyle and assess where you exercise the three steps.
Finding your way toward more mindful and inspired eating should positively affect every other part of your life. Your ritual or routine or habit life will then reinforce the foundation that you live upon.
Mindfulness
We start here. Mindfulness as interpreted by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is “The state of being full of realization, perception or knowledge.”
OK, so you didn’t bargain for this. You only wanted to lose a few pounds not attain self-enlightenment, right? But I don’t think there is a shortcut.
Systems theory simplified
BE à DO à HAVE
BE
If you want to have a leaner body, you must start at the being. Here is why. Thinking an planning are part of the being phase of any system. Being involves apprehension. The BE phase results in acquiring data until there is comprehension and an appreciation for underlying principles is gained. Sounds a lot like mindfulness doesn’t it. Apprehension is an operative experience. The movement of SLOW FOOD throughout the world brings light to the mindfulness required to our entire food process from land to farmer to you.
DO
This is the implementation phase, the time for you to take action. In a larger system this is time for all the players to come together in concert. The farmer who has been rotating location of a pasture raised chicken pen is part of this play. The actions we take at mealtime are not just coming from mindful eating, but part of a bigger system of mindful food preparation and sustainable agriculture. There is no sustainable way that this can be fast and voluminous food. This will be slow food. This will be sustainable.
HAVE
You have a body that is sustainable. You own your accomplishment, not some doing-based weight loss program. You are lean and strong as intended. You are also part of the solution toward healthy FatBack living.
Physical Activity
Fact: Weight loss without exercise results in substantially more muscle mass loss and bone density loss than if exercise is simultaneous with weight loss.
Forget most of what you have heard about “calories burned during exercise”. Exercise machines and exercise charts painstakingly try to relate activities to calories burned. Like twenty minute on a treadmill at moderate speed represents 300 calories burned. The flaw in this thinking is known. Your metabolism, exercise efficiency and underlying health condition all play a significant role.
The higher the percentage body fat you start with, the more you body is metabolically sluggish, even with activity. OK that’s the bad news. The good news is that with every percent of body fat lost (lean body % gained), you become more metabolically active and more efficient at weight loss through an improved metabolism.
Being physically active is about more than just exercise. Our body requires movement to circulate blood and especially lymph. Without deep breathing our thoracic duct drains poorly. Dr. Gerald Lemole, accomplished cardiac surgeon and deep breathing advocate states “The lymph system is the river of life,” he says, “a river nobody knows.” Deep breathing is probably one of the more important aspects to our exercise.
Is outdoor activity important? Does it matter what I do? Yes and sort of. People who exercised outdoors were twice as likely to have healthy vitamin D levels as those who exercise in a gym. How well you stick to an exercise plan relates to both how well it integrates with your life and your relative enjoyment of the activity. But outdoors may even be important here too. In 2000, the British Heart Association and Countryside Agency found that 50% of people participating in an exercise gym dropped out after 6-months. But 80% of those in the outdoor walking program stayed with it citing “being in the countryside” was part of their adherence.
Like children have been told for thousands of years…”Go out and play.”
Ritual
Ritual: “Done in accordance to social custom or normal protocol.” Ritual was not hard for my great grandmother, Jesepina Paiano. Her Sicilian social customs set the stage for what she would eat, how she would prepare it, and that she would walk the miles to procure fresh food daily. In a word, she had “cuisine”.
Cuisine may need to be relearned in your life. Some of it lies in certain rules we should have heard as children, “Don’t spoil your dinner by eating ahead of mealtime”, “Don’t insult the chef with the whine, “I don’t like this””, “don’t over fill you plate”. But cuisine can also become a discovery of how to make a perfect pastry crust with lard like your grandmother.
Ritual helps us understand when a meal is eaten and how much it contains. If 2 and ½ meals per day are the goal, lunch and dinner might be the bigger meals, while breakfast is a half meal. The French call breakfast “Petit dejeuner” or little lunch.
Having a normal protocol allows for patterned appropriate eating habits rather than emotional eating habits. Having a meal time that is part of our ritual life means that no matter how stressful a day may become, there is a respite, several time in the day.
With the onset of school schedules and interest in sports and athletic performance, I find it important to review the benefits of the Fatback diet not just for weight management, but for overall athletic performance. This will be in the style of Dragnet…just the facts Ma’am. —Dr. Maurer
FatBack Fact #1: “Eating high fat does not cause me to be fat”
A study by researchers in New Zealand has found that total body fat, lean tissue mass, and body weight did not change when the athletes ate a high-fat diet vs. a high carbohydrate and low-fat diet. The results of this study send a clear message: When energy requirements are high, athletes should choose to increase dietary fat intake. Remembering that even when you consume most of your fat calories as saturated fats (46% in this study) there was no extra weight gain and/or increased adiposity.
R. Brown, C. Cox, A. Goulding, High-carbohydrate versus high-fat diets: effect on body composition in trained cyclists, Med Sci Sports Exerc 32(3): 690-694 (2000)
Thirty male and two female cyclists had diets in which 50 percent of their energy intake came from fat for three months. Being engaged in endurance training allowed their bodies to maintain an energy balance and continue to perform at a high level of physical fitness.
FatBack Fact #2: Long-Term Intake of a “high-fat” diet may improve athletic performance
It appears that endurance athletes can adapt to high-fat diets without any detrimental effect on physical capacity. At the very least, it has been clear in a list of studies that utilizing a diet that is higher in fat does not adversely affect exercise performance. In a study comparing athletes eating a high-fat diet (70% of calories from fat and 7% from carbohydrate) and a high-carb diet (74% carbohydrate and 14% fat) peak performance remained unchanged between the groups. But when these athletes maintained 50% of their peak performance for a sustained period, the high-fat group performed better.
It is helpful to note here that “peak performance” is when one exercises at 85-90% of their maximal capacity. Most of us can better relate to the 50% peak performance state, A full day at work, stressful demands at home, perhaps time for a moderate exercise, and the ordinary day has the same demands as the athlete at 50% of peak performance.
FatBack Fact #3: Short-term Intake of a high fat meal before an endurance event does not adversely affect your performance
In fact, more fat = more endurance: According to a new study by the University of Buffalo, a low-fat diet may hamper your endurance. Researchers concluded that a medium or high caloric intake from fat, about 30 to 45 percent of your total caloric intake, is your best bet for improving performance if you run at least 35 miles a week. Some runners and athletes simply need more calories. Also, when your body burns fat for energy, it conserves glycogen, which is always in relatively short supply.
Four behavioral rules for eating the FatBack Diet™
I can see the 1930’s Little Rascals episode now. I know the Little Rascals was not a dietary commentary of the time, but the same scene is in so many old shows and movies. The child goes to grab something from the kitchen and the response is quick and usually accompanied by a swat on the hand, “Not now, you’ll spoil your dinner”. We were taught early on not to eat before we eat.
Where do we get our guidelines now? Where is the beacon of how to eat if not shown to us on the Little Rascals, or Leave it to Beaver?
The following are eating behaviors to live by. Enjoy.
Don’t overfill your plate or overstock your kitchen
In the 2006 book “Mindless Eating”, Brian Wansink performs various experiments to show that we humans actually have pretty pathetic self-capacity to self-regulate. The size of the portion we see on our plate strongly influences the quantity we eat. Simply put, it you put less on the plate, or in the serving bowl, less will be consumed. He went one better in his experiments and invited people to cook dinner themselves. One group had big bottles of sauce and pasta, and the other more reasonably sized packages of ingredients. Yes, as you guessed, the group with the larger packages of ingredients made 23% more food and ate it all just the same.
America has the biggest refrigerators in the world. I suggest that if someone did the study, there would be a direct correlation to people size.
Avoid processed foods: including artificial and natural flavors, artificial sweeteners and the like.
David Kessler, a man with a remarkable resume, wrote a book “The End of Overeating”. While the book title implies that the problem of overeating is solved by reading the book, it is only one more piece of the puzzle. He presents the tension between the food manufacturing industry, with food scientists using phrases like “unlocking the code of craveability”, and our better judgment of when enough is enough. Overeating is a conditioned response to food stimulus in the mouth. The food industry has no shortage of chemicals that stimulate all sorts of alluring stimulus in our bodies.
Maybe more variety is not the answer. Find your ritual.
Dr. Kessler’s book is shedding light on what has been known for a long time. There was another study done several years ago in England that showed that people that ate less variety at breakfast, ate less calories. The less ingredients in a meal the better you can self-regulate how much to eat.
Another study awhile back did the same with alcohol. It was long suspected that if you mixed different kinds of alcohol, the effect of alcohol was amplified. It turned out, when studied under controlled circumstances, people that stayed with one kind of drink got no more affected than people that mixed drinks – when they controlled for total quantity. What was found was that people that mixed different kinds of drinks drank more without knowing they were drinking more. When the mouth and body experiences something new, there is a response in the brain that somehow says, “Ooh, I want more of THAT”.
Again, the simplicity of the Mediterranean diet seems apt. Although less familiar to me, I am sure the same would be true of the diet in Thailand or Japan. The quality of fresh ingredients is kept simple in recipe and in preparation. The local food and slow food movements are presenting great opportunities for Americans to rediscover their roots and take their diets back from the food industries’ interest to have us eat more.
Eat no more than three times per day
In surveys around the globe, people in every other country eat less frequently that in America. Two-and-a-half meals per day are common in most other countries.
A study done in Greece was published in the journal “Obesity” in 2007, The lead researcher, Mary Yannakoulia, showed that post-menopausal women who ate more frequently had more body fat. And those that were pre-menopausal, and no significant difference. A suspected cause of the findings was given: “Frequent eating predisposes women after menopause to a higher energy intake by increasing food stimuli and rendering it more difficult for them to control energy balance.”
Historically, the American recommendation to eat more frequent meals has only been post-1970 when low-fat foods started to become more prominent in the daily diet, thus making it more difficult to make it 4-6 hours without eating.
The American theory of eating more frequently to stimulate weight loss is faulty logic at best and a harmful call to overeat at worst.
“Whether you are eating for your health, politics, local community, genetics, environment, or your optimal weight – the diet should be the same.”
-Richard Maurer, ND
I commented a couple of years ago on a study that showed that that following a diet higher in fats resulted in better weight loss and compliance than the low-fat alternative. This was the most important study to date as it was not based on questionnaires as past studies so often are performed. The low fat group ate 1500 calories per day and the high fat group ate 1800 calories per day. Both diets were calorie-restricted. The high-fat diet win was tempered by the naysayers who said, “OK, it works better for weight loss but a lot of good that will do you if you have heart disease from all that fat”
A follow up study was then designed and published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2008. In this study the low-fat model was compared to 2 other diets: the “Mediterranean Diet” and the high fat, low carb diet. In this study again, the low-fat plan fared the worst and the low carb, high-fat diet did the best for weight loss. The high-fat group added more protein, more cholesterol, and more fats than the other groups, and had the best of the weight loss results. The participants in this group also benefitted from the greatest improvement in cardiovascular risk with HDL/Cholesterol improving, and the blood triglyceride levels dropped significantly.
What is more impressive about the high fat, low carb group was that the model was set-up “cafeteria style” with a buffet set out and no set caloric restriction in the low-carb, high fat group. The other 2 dietary groups had their calories restricted at each meal to keep the daily intake to target.
If you were to look at the buffet, you would not see cookies or desserts. You would see vegetables, butter, olive oil and meats/fish. Refined foods disturb our natural regulation of food intake, so it is no surprise that in a diet that has no processed foods, people are able to self-regulate effectively.
Welcome to the FatBack Diet.