VERTIGELT

First off, I was (only a little bit) surprised how many entire blogs are titled with this post’s subject.

Second, while I’m not one for “resolutions”, this new year, I’m doing something I’ve never done before: going on a diet.  Specifically, I’m going to do the South Beach Diet… starting Sunday.  I picked up Dr. Agatston’s book last week, and have been making my way through its first few chapters: my eyes have been completely opened anew to approaches to nutrition.  I feel like a number of my built-in ideas about things are being challenged.

First: for some reason, I figured the diet was named the South Beach Diet exclusively to evoke imagery of hard-bodied babes and hunks that seem to perennially populate South Beach.  I was surprised to understand the origin of the name was tied to the location not because of its bold and beautiful denizens, but because this is where Dr. Agatston has his cardiology practice, and where he first started experimenting with the diet.  It is at South Beach where it started and from South Beach that it spread, and thus it became known as the South Beach Diet.  I had partially been biased against the diet because it seemed to be geared as a fad towards those who wanted to look good in bikinis.

But, being designed by a cardiologist, it is primarily about blood chemistry and how that affects your heart and the health of the rest of your body.

The second ingrained idea being bucked by reading this book is what whole foods are all about.  Somewhere in my head, the proclivity to whole foods was more a world-view statement than it was a concern for personal health.  I enjoy shopping at stores like Whole Foods, Market Street, or Central Market for a variety of reasons: the service is great, the stores are always clean, the clientele is upscale, the prepared meal offerings are more sophisticated.  But the idea of whole foods always seemed to be a great deal about environmentalism and free trade, things that appealed to folks who are a bit more… “granolla”, or politically liberal–folks who are typically a bit more elitist (and not a little self-righteous) in their perception of their own ethics.  And that’s fine: people are entitled to their opinions, and there’s plenty of viewpoints from that camp I tend to agree with. That’s not the point of this article.  Just that “whole foods” was, in my mind, a pillar of a political world-view and not at all associated primary with health.

And now, having read what I have, I get it–at least to a much greater degree than I used to.  Or, moreover, I get its importance.  Growing up I was blessed (although I wonder now if it were a curse) with a performace metabolism.  In high school, I typically had to eat five meals a day.  My diet typically consisted of 3,000 - 5,000 calories  a day.  No matter what I ate, my weight never straighed far above 165 pounds.  And I ate pure crap most of the time.  Nutrition was very far from my mind.  My parents always boiled vegetables, and so that’s how I learned to like them.  In college, I learned that cooking them that way “destroyed all the nutrients”.  So?  And then to learn in the late nineties that carbs are responsible for obesity, and that fibre mixed with the carbs seems to help.  Watching carbs just seemed like a pointless exercise.

But then, I started studying the chemistry of trans fats earlier in the year as an intellectual exercise, and I started to see a) how bad trans fats were for our lipid transfer systems and other biochemistry; and b) exactly why the processing of foods yields such high concentrations of trans fats (it’s both an attempt to reduce the amount of animal fat used, as well as to provide the same consistency of animal-based fats but with a much higher melting point, making foods both taste better and keep longer).  So, I  started to perceive that processed foods were evil, purely for the trans fat content.

Then I read something very interesting that Dr. Agatston wrote that really made it click for me: typically digestion of the food we consume begins before we even put it in our mouth.  By cooking food, the break-down of the fuel, vitamins, minerals, and other building blocks of healthy biochemistry begins right there.  But so much of our food has already been prepared and processed many times over before it even hits the shelf.  The vast majority of the food we buy has the stuff that’s good already taken out of it, and all that’s left is quicky-accessible energy.  And it’s this idea of the energy resident in the food-fuel being too easily accessible that suddenly made sense to me.  Blood chemistry is dependent upon the steady regulation of insulin, which is responsible for the conversion of glucose in the blood into other forms of stored energy for shrot term or long term use.  The pancreas generates insulin and the petuitary gland regulates its release into the blood stream as a reaction to changes in glucose content.  It’s a very complex second-order differential system.  But it is designed to react in certain ways to certain changes.

The types of sugar supplies found in nature take time to break down in the digestive system: the fibrous structures in natural, “whole” foods require a lot more digestive work to break down in order to release the sugar into the blood stream.  With a slow release, the body responds with an appropriate, measured release of insulin.  When the body detects a quicker rise, more insulin is released, since, in nature, this would only be due to a much greater influx of sugar to be processed.  When we eat food whose natural structure has been destroyed, making the sugar that much more readily available to the digestive system, this creates a huge and sudden rise in blood sugar that is far outside the realm of what the body would normally encounter. The body perceives this burst as an indicator that there will be much more sugar to process, and it releases a flood of insulin as a response. However, the body perceived the situation wrongly: there’s not more sugar present, it was just presented with all of it at once instead over a longer period of time.  But it’s too late, the insulin has already been released in a massive dose in anticipation of more sugar than is actually going to be present.  The sugar is promptly processed to the point where sugar that would normally be left in the blood stream to facilitate immediate needs (like healthy neuro functions) is all but gone.  This results in extreme hunger and impaired neurofunctionality: hypoglycemia.  The only way out is to feed yourself more sugar.

Unfortunately, we typically still don’t privide the sugar in a form that will simply interact with the existing insulin in the blood stream.  Instead, the body is faced with yet another flood, and the yo yo of sugar and insulin spikes continues. All the while, tons of sugar–far more than required to meet the body’s energy needs–have been introduced to the body.  Dr. Agatston has a chapter titled, “Why eating makes you hungry”.  And this made absolute sense to me.  And I was able to see how it’s directly related to the fact that, through processing them, we strip our foods of all the things that allow it to interact with our digestive system in a fashion that will facilitate healthy blood chemistry.

The last few years, I’ve been seeing myself gain all the more weight and typically around three or four hours after lunch, I find myself in a hypoglycemic haze.  Nothing I eat has ever seemed to make me feel less hungry, even though my appetite was satisfied.  I finally udnerstand why.

So, I’m going to do the South Beach Diet.  The first two weeks is a brutal Spartan exercise, removing pretty much every primary source of carbs and sugar from your diet: no bread, no fruit, very few vegetables, and no alcohol.  Believe it or not, there’s still plenty of protein-rich foods and fibrous vegetables and legumes that this leaves available. It just takes disipline, and maybe even more importantly, planning.  After following this very strict diet for two weeks, your body has suddenyl found a means of maintaining healthy blood sugar and the process of ketosis can begin: that is, instead of constantly calling for the further introduction of new sugars into the bloodstream, it will realise that there’s a wealth of the stuff just sitting around in the body.  Without the crazy insulin roller coaster, the body will know how to burn this alternative fuel in a way that doesn’t impaire other bodily functions. That is, fat is burned without making you tired.  Obviously, the more energy requirements your burden the body with (exercise) and the more you provide the body nutrients it does need, the more effectively, it will consume the energy reserves without demanding that new fuel sources be introduced into the body.

It’s amazing that this stuff is making sense to me in this fashion for the first time.  I’m a pretty smart guy, but my past ability to “eat anything without a care in the world” has really put me at a disadvantage and blinded me to how important all this really is.  I think, for the first time since I noticed that I started to gain weight (about 9 years ago), I’m going to do something about it.  I have about 35 pounds to lose.  I’ll keep making updates here through my blog, even if doing so makes me look as fat in cyberspace as I feel right now, sitting in front of my computer.