It's May 13th, over six months have passed, and I have dropped a ton of weight, albeit positive, it's only part of the story. The real story is the health benefit, a story told by measured results also, with one distracting measurement.
So, here are the real positives.
- Weight stabilized to a healthy weight.
- Mental clarity
- Joint pain all gone
- Energy levels raised
- Sleep much, much better
Apart from the second one, mental clarity, the rest are physically observable results. Like the weight. I wasn't really heavy, not even obese on the BMI scale; however, I had noticed that since stopping my marathon training, I did gain weight, irrespective of any diet. I had tried everything that has been written about, from a pure whole food (nothing processed at all including oils) to a vegan (not a single animal product) in my life. If it's been written about, I have tried it.
GLUCOSE
Removing glucose from the diet let me to a study about metabolism, and I'm surprised, ashamed, that I did not think about this sooner. Given the breadth, and wealth, of diet advice, mostly from those trainers who train movie stars, I should have clued into this one much, much sooner.
Biochemistry - it's all about biochemistry. How your body processes food and what happens when you eat. This, coupled with activity, tells the whole story. And there's nothing else.
When you eat carbohydrate that you don't use it is converted to fat.
When you eat fat that you don't use it will be excreted.
When you eat protein that you don't use it will be converted to whatever building block your body needs.
Carbohydrates are nothing but glucose chains.
Worth repeating.
Carbohydrates are nothing but glucose chains.
When you eat carbohydrates, you are eating glucose.
Worth repeating again.
When you eat carbohydrates, you are eating glucose.
Whether it's a complex carbohydrate (and the word complex is used very, very loosely here since there's not much coming out of our farms that is not genetically modified) then perhaps it takes stomach acid to reduce it and so better for slow processing, or whether it's a simple one (like a fruit) the result is the same. It's glucose and if you don't use it it's going to be stored as fat.
FAT
Fat is interesting. Your body stores fat as a storage mechanism for later use. Fat is used when you don't have food. There's no argument about this from anyone, doctors or those pseudo-types that masquerade as nutrition experts.
And HUNGER was a normal state in our ancestry. Not famine, per-se, but real hunger. We didn't have the three-square-meals per day thing going on, but fed when food was found and did not eat when there was none. And the human condition was simply eating and procreating - much like every other animal. Because we are animals.
But hunger is eradicated and there's now farming and plenty. And we can afford to eat every single day and without being hungry. So, everything is now converted to fat for storage.
But when you don't eat food, the body then takes the fat that you have stored and uses it for energy. This is the natural state. Not eating and using fat. However, it's not the body's preferred method of energy usage. At the top of the list is, as expected, glucose. Glucose is quick and easy to metabolize. In fact, when you eat carbs, the body starts working on them as soon as they are in your mouth.
UPDATE - 30 MAY 2024
For the past couple of days I have been able to get out and do some long exercise - no carbs were involved. While I was not able to jog because of knee pain, I did a really long walk yesterday, over 2 hours, and didn't feel the sugar shock I would normally feel when I bottom out, run out of carbs. However, I paid for this exercise the rest of the day, up to this morning. My stomach feels really strange, nausea and that feeling of vomiting - or close to vomiting. This was bad yesterday so I came off the no-dairy and had some yoghurt, and coffee with milk. That helped. My stomach settled enough to allow me to sleep, but when I got up this morning, once again the feeling was there.
What does this mean? Does it mean that I cannot do cardio exercise?
Or when I do cardio, I really need to consider adding sugar to the mix? I don't think that eating carbs is something to start doing right away, not given the gains that I have seen so far. However, I should get back to the hospital and get my blood tested again, and as soon as I get back.
What sorted that feeling out was some Earl Grey tea, with milk. Whole milk, not skim or anything like that. So I bought a small bottle of milk and will have a couple of cups of tea before we head out for the airport in an hour, or so.
