Fat – Part 2

In Fat – Part 1 I explained some details about our body’s use of lipids (fat) and the role it plays in both survival and diet.  The most important concept to take away is that you MUST go on a naturally “high-fat diet,” digesting your OWN adipose tissue, to lose weight.  This may seem so incredibly obvious, but if you take a few minutes each day to think about it, I believe it will have profound impact on your results.

Why? because every calorie you put into your mouth will fuel your body and that will result in the part you WANT to lose remaining safely in place – the rainy day fund. You can juggle macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat) to your heart’s desire and still it will not make any difference unless you run a caloric deficit.  No matter how frequently you pay your credit card bills, if you keep spending, you’ll never reduce the balance.

There is a yin yang to carbohydrate and fat and that is why they are presented as the evil sisters of the macronutrient triplets: protein carbohydrate and fat.

As we learned in the Carbohydrate posts, these starchy foods (natural starches – not french fries and chips) are not evil things to be “completely avoided.”  Glycemic index has a role, but it’s far from absolute. Fat is much the same.  It got its bad wrap in the 80s and became synonymous with weight gain.  When we look back in 100 years to the chronic obesity epidemic created at the end of the 21st century, the focus on fat in the 1980s will be shown to have started the health decline and launch us into record chronic illness. It will be our amazing mastery of calorie (food) that will be shown to have caused a decline in health after millions of years of battling starvation.

In fact, once fitness experts, media, and even physicians became obsessed with a “low-fat diet,” the food industry surged with advertisements: FAT FREE, low FAT, reduced FAT, no trans-FAT, saturated FAT-free and the list goes on and on. Of course you and I were lead to believe that fat-free = healthy, but all the food industry did was load up our food chain with simple sugar (high fuctose corn syrup, honey, sucrose, agave, etc…) and processed starches (flour, corn meal, wheat flour, etc).

Voilà, we began stuffing our mouths with healthy, low-fat “carbs” and now here we are 2 decades later and suddenly the new enemy is the carbohydrate. Can you sense the pattern here? It’s incredible to think our body’s entire energy economy is based on blood-sugar and yet the “new and improved” diet experts are now telling us our primary energy source is bad for you.

The Lizard Brain

You see, all of these concentrated energy foods give us that “lizard-brain” hit.  Simple sugars, processed starch, and fats (even OLIVE OIL) are all nothing more that concentrated energy with very little nutrient value. Ok, stop right there with the Omega-3 “good fats” thoughts.  Sure, we need omega-3s and we NEED fat (and carbohydrate) in our diet. The problem comes when it’s over processed, think concentrated and readily available.

If you’ve been reading this blog from the beginning (if not, start here), you should start to recognize a pattern and it doesn’t matter if you are paleolithic, vegan, body for life, The Zone, Atkins, Mediterranean or Ornish. No matter WHAT diet you decide to go on, the way you lose will be a caloric deficit.  It was clear to me after a few months of blogging on “boosting” your weight loss with mild cold stress that there was no way to boost, if everyone was confused about the primary issue at hand – burning ones own body fat as fuel.

So let’s think just a little more about fat and compare it to simple sugar.  In both cases you have something that is relatively unavailable in nature in it’s pure form. Rather, you find it in nature combined with other micronutrient your body needs.  Just try eating 250 lbs a year of sugar by gnawing on sugar cane – knock yourself out.

Your body needs more than energy and perhaps it’s seeking the plant-derived minerals, amino acids vitamins and other phytonutrients (light produced nutrients such as antioxidants) or maybe the amino acids found in meat.  Either way you will note that ENERGY (fuel) is ALWAYS packaged in nature with micronutrients or fiber – it just doesn’t exist in its pure form of simple sugars or fat.

We can go ahead and throw out the Inuit now as the exception that survived on seal and whale blubber. I might point out, selfishly, that they also had an ENORMOUS thermal load on their body, which called for extreme caloric intake (in excess of 5000 cal/day); they are not the healthiest culture despite their popularity to justify excessive fat consumption.

Low-carb and low fat diets are one in the same. Both limit ENERGY (fuel) and attempt to maintain the flow of micronutrients (maintenance) your body needs to function and repair while simultaneously living off your fat stores.

If it’s really that easy,  then why is it so difficult to resist?

It’s that damn lizard brain. Eat. Survive. Store. I don’t know when I might get a chance to drive through McDonalds again. WTF? That is the problem.  Your body is the result of millions of years of evolutionary starvation and we have been thrust into a world of plentiful, no EXCESSIVE calorie.

You know what is even worse than this excessive calorie? You are intelligent and you WANT to listen to all the experts that tell you it is okay to eat __________ and still lose weight. Here is what we can all be absolutely certain of: unless you begin to live off of the fat in the stomach, thighs, buttocks, or hips that you so desperately want to part ways with, no amount of macronutrient “juggling” will work.

Oh, and you can’t out-exercise your mouth.

If it Jiggles and Wiggles – Eat It.

So rather going into yet another scheme to juggle good fat from bad fat or good carb from bad carb, just know that simple sugars, processed carbs, and extracted fat/oils (including meats and excessive nuts) all contain a ton of energy (fuel) and will slow down the rate of loss. Its YOU and YOUR FAT that you want to digest. Don’t screw it up with olive oil and bacon. They might taste good and really give you that lizard brain hit, but it is only short lived. It’s only lasts as long as you are eating.

The reason I enjoy a vegan diet is that I  LOVE to eat and eating stops after you swallow.  I can simply eat a tremendous volume of food and not have to worry. Unlike most “vegans” (I use it as an adjective, not a noun), I don’t use oils (gasp – even olive oil) or  excess simple sugars, because I am focused on the maximum micronutrients with minimum calories and the MOST food I can joyfully stuff into my mouth (sorry – it’s true, I love to cook and eat). Besides, there are a lot of fat vegans and vegetarians. Just because it doesn’t have eyes or a mother, doesn’t make it automatically healthy.

For others you might still be addicted to simple sugars, or fat and so The Zone, BFL, paleo approach or Mediterranean might appeal. Just understand that if you tinker too much with fat (or simple sugars and processed carbs) you can easily over consume calories. If you do, your body will not be teased into burning “stomach, hips and thighs.”

So Fats, are necessary for good health, skin, nails, and brain function, but they contain a lot of calories per serving. What is worse is that one can EASILY hide an entire Snickers bar in the dressing on your salad…or cheese sauce on your broccoli…or the butter/sour cream on your baked potato without you even knowing it. Compounding this are the dopamine hits your lizard brain will get from these calorie-dense foods that did not exist when it evolved; eat more. eat more. eat more…thunder thighs.

Don’t kid yourself, sucking down loads of refined oils – even plant oils – are not going to help you in your battles. Afterall it was the vegetable oil and margarine surge of the 60s and 70s that lead to the 1980s “low fat” products that put us on the fast track to obesity.  Refined oils and fats and simple refined carbohydrates and highly processed starches (breads, crackers, chips, and milled grains) are both at the heart of the obesity surge and chronic illness we face today. The french fry, donut or potato chip are iconic images for me – fat-fried (even the “good fat” – LOL), sugar (oh yes, agave – the new, trendy “high-fuctose syrup”) and processed  starches. 

Is the answer protein? well, we will see about that in the next post.

Happy New Year to everyone and thanks for an amazing year in 2011!

Ray

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