"I'm... Dreaming... of a white... Easter...!"

Yes, a snowman penguin built on Easter Sunday. DS was busy building this large beast before we were even out of bed - this is worked out according to the simple equation of

kids + snow = lie in for Mum and Dad

Yes. That's right. The whole village is covered in the white stuff. Wish I had put a couple of quid on that one! I consider the most impressive thing about this snowman's construction to be the fact that it is so particularly well clothed. As you can see, DS wasted no time in making sure it didn't catch 'warm' and gave it his £90 North Face coat. Ahhh Bless.

*Insert blank, furious face, of a mother who works fingers to the bone for
said child to have nice clothes*

Also, thankfully DS pays attention to his science lessons, because he told me he found out the best thing to save a snowman from melting was to clothe it for insulation. "Yeah, they said so on Mythbusters" he chirped.

Oh Goody.

Happily, after calming myself down by looking at my husband having hysterics at how cute our son is... I was able to pleasure myself with the fact that snow at the end of March usually means that within about 4 weeks it will be roasting hot sunshine. Every time we have had a strange tumble of snow this late in the year, it has been followed by a really great summer. I hope that's the case this year.

Today I am going to be mostly doing nothing. I am currently trying to eat some pomegranate and raspberry wheats with milk from Tesco. I have eaten about 20g of the 50g serving I gave myself. Monsieur Bandino, however, seems a little pissed off today for some reason, so I am giving up. Just so you can see how wonderfully little I am eating here is a funky little picture of the remains!

The L-word

That's right, ladies and gentlemen: lard. The word alone makes lipophobes cringe like a vampire from garlic. It also makes epicures salivate. But why is lard so unhealthy? Let's take a look.

The fatty acid profile of lard might give us a clue. A major portion of lard is monounsaturated, 40% by weight. This is the same type of fat that predominates in olive oil (73%), and which is widely recommended by mainstream nutrition experts. Another prevalent class of fat in lard is saturated, at 48%. More than one third of this saturated fat is stearic acid, which even the most hardened lipophobe will agree has a "favorable" effect on blood lipids. Then there's the 8% polyunsaturated fat, which has been the darling of mainstream heart disease research for decades due to its ability to lower blood cholesterol (for the record, I believe the polyunsaturate content is lard's least healthy feature). The omega-3:6 ratio depends on how the pig was raised, but is typically skewed more toward omega-6.

So what does that leave us with? 66% fats that we're told are heart-healthy, and 30% non-stearic saturated fats that are supposed to be unhealthy. But if you still believe saturated fats cause heart disease, check out this post, this one and this one.

Lard also contains a small amount of vitamin D. The sun is the best source of vitamin D, since your skin synthesizes it when it's exposed to UVB. But due to the low angle of the sun in winter, and the fact that many people don't spend enough time outdoors even in the summer, extra vitamin D in the diet is helpful.

I think you can see that lard's bad reputation is undeserved. It may be a legacy of the time when hydrogenated vegetable oils were competing with animal fats for the food market.

There is such a thing as unhealthy lard, however. It's the stuff you might find at the grocery store. Store-bought lard is often hydrogenated to make it more shelf-stable. It also comes from confinement-raised pork operations, which aside from being profoundly inhumane, do not allow access to the outdoors. Thus, the fat won't contain vitamin D.

In the next post, I'll talk about how to buy pasture-raised lard and render it yourself.

YES - LOWEST WEIGHT EVER!

I have DONE it!

Ya ya ya ya ya ya ya!

Today I weighed (many times just incase)

16 stone and 2 pounds

AWESOME

The lowest I have ever been with my band is 16 stone 3 pounds. That was on 16th May Last year. Wow, this makes me feel completely awesome.

Its absolutely GREAT to be in Uncharted Waters again. There is something awful about trudging the same couple of stone up and down and up and down over a few years. It makes you feel really useless.

There is no doubt now people, MY BAND IS WORKING!

LONG LIVE THE BAND

Ok, the last couple of days...
Went to Mum and Dads yesterday. Had a really cool time and a good laugh. I ate the following:
Banana
Nutrigrain bar
small pot of mini eggs
few more of DS's mini eggs
half a chocolate egg
packet of hula hoops
chicken curry and rice

Not good, but the calories were actually reasonably low at 1200.

I know that its calories that count at the end of the day, but it still makes me feel like a greedy pig when I eat chocolate. I didn't exactly have anything else! However, I don't want to be someone who subsists on a mars bar and a coffee for lunch. What with Dad having Bowel cancer I think it brings home that I don't want to eat junk any more. I really felt grim yesterday evening and drank several glasses of water throughout the night. I am just not used to that much crap any more I guess.

Anyway, today has not been any better to be honest. Its been a bit of a rubbish day and we have been rushed off our feet. Shopping, hair dying, and again because it was DREADFUL, etc etc.
I didn't have breakfast as I wasn't hungry at all. We had lunch at KFC. I ate 4/5ths of a twister and gave up after that. I kept it all down which I am glad about, as I ate really really carefully. I was still eating when everyone was finished and DS was eating his ice cream! A normal KFC meal for me would be 2 twisters, large fries and a large drink and an ice cream. That's what the band does folks! WICKED HUH!!!!!

Then there was the hair disaster. I have obviously been black haired for a while. I get bored easily, so I decided to go back to blonde, or brown or something... anything! I put a whole heap of bleach on my mop and left it there. When it had cooked for about 40 minutes and I had washed it out, I revealed a delicate shade of violent orange.

Seriously you could NOT get this style in a hairdressers. I had a black fringe with white (YES WHITE) roots, orange back of the head with scarlet streaks and a mixture of orange and flame coloured patches interspersed with black highlights. My whole head had about 0.5 cm of WHITE roots. Its was AWFUL. It also felt like a birds nest!!

So I died it another colour... I realised that it had an ash hint in it too late, but actually its not so bad. Its kind of a pinky brown... Hmmm But at least its not on fire any more.

I still have black highlights which actually look really radical... Might have those again!

Right, see yaz folks

Small result...

I caved. I got on the scales and I have lost another pound, so that has really pleased me.

I have now lost 24 pounds - 16 stone 4lbs this morning

1 elusive pound away from my all time low of 16 stone 3 ... cool.

At least now I don't need to worry that I have put anything on or anything like that.

Today's food:
banana
mars bar shared with DS
mussels in tomato and pineapple sauce. Mmmmm
5 chips
half an avocado

I love mussels. You can just put ANYTHING with them and they are fabulous. These were lush wild Cornish ones. To die for. They are my all time favorite food now.

I will get some more on Tuesday next week - can't wait

Oh and I forgot, I also had a slice of DS's sponge cake that he made. Bad news I'm afraid. I puked most of it back up. Its just too dry, and I cant do dry.

Other than that, no PB's

Determined to Lose the Flab

Here's a really good video by one guy who is 40 years old and wants to get fit again.



By his birthday on May 12, he wants:

1) More muscle tone and continued cardio
2) Continued weight loss (lose the rest of the tummy so you can see those killer abs hiding beneath the cottage cheese)
3) Healthier and more frequent eating, but not at night.
4) Reduced caffeine

It's easy to forget why you started something, so here's my reminder to myself. I wanna feel really healthy and secure hanging out by the pool this spring/summer!

Thoughts on Obesity, Part II

In my reading, I've come to the conclusion that, in some people, overweight may be a type of carbohydrate intolerance.

Insulin is the master hormone that orchestrates the metabolic changes that cause fat accumulation. It instructs the body to transport glucose and fat from the blood into the cells. It tells the liver to synthesize fat from sugar. It inhibits the release of fat from fat cells. There are no other hormones that have a similar range of effects.

Insulin is the "storage hormone". Don't believe me? Ask a type I diabetic. Type I diabetes happens when the pancreas no longer secretes insulin. These people are rail-thin until they are given insulin injections, at which point they often gain excess weight. Many deliberately skip injections to lose weight. Unfortunately, this has serious consequences as it allows their blood glucose to rise to dangerous levels unchecked.

If insulin is kept low, fat synthesis and storage are inhibited, and fat release from fat cells is increased. Carbohydrate is particularly effective at elevating insulin, acutely and chronically. As carbohydrate digests, it's broken down into glucose, which enters the bloodstream. The pancreas releases insulin in an attempt to keep blood glucose within a healthy range, and the storage begins. Refined carbohydrate is the worst offender, because it causes a large and rapid rise in blood glucose.

Regular overconsumption of carbohydrate causes insulin to be chronically elevated in many people [update- I no longer believe this is true. I now believe that only certain types of carbohydrate- namely wheat and sugar- cause a pathological increase in fasting insulin over time]. This comes along with "insulin resistance", whereby most or all tissues become desensitized to insulin. This is the tissues' way of saying "Stop! My energy stores are already full! I can't handle any more glucose or fat!".

Some people are able to maintain normal insulin levels (and sensitivity) in the face of a high-carbohydrate diet. This is probably partly genetic and partly environmental. Certain people, for whatever reason, have fat tissue that is prone to fat accumulation. It could be because they oversecrete insulin, or because their fat tissue is sensitive to the action of insulin, but probably both. It likely has to do with a combination of insulin resistance in non-fat tissue, and insulin sensitivity in fat tissue. Inactivity and fructose consumption (from corn syrup or sucrose) are also high on the list of suspects.

Fat tissue is typically the last to become insulin resistant because it acts as a valuable buffer to remove excess (and potentially toxic) glucose from the bloodstream. Unfortunately, simply being thin is not a reliable indicator that your body tolerates carbohydrate well. It can indicate either that all tissues are insulin-sensitive and insulin levels are low, or all tissues (including fat) are insulin resistant and insulin levels are high. The latter scenario leads to type II diabetes, pronto.

Since fat accumulation revolves around carbohydrate intake and insulin production, it makes sense that reducing carbohydrate causes weight loss. No more carbohydrate = a lot less glucose, and a lot less insulin to deal with it. This completely sidesteps the problem of insulin resistance, although that seems to respond favorably to carbohydrate restriction as well. Every time true low-carbohydrate diets are matched head-to-head with reduced-calorie, carbohydrate-rich diets, subjects lose more weight and have fewer problems with hunger on the low-carbohydrate diet. I discussed a recent study here.

The idea that you can achieve and maintain a healthy weight without cutting calories sounds too good to be true. In fact, all it represents is a return to our natural pattern of eating as human beings. It may involve breaking an addiction to carbohydrate. True hunter-gatherers eat between 0 and 35% of their calories as carbohydrate, and no refined carbohydrate [correction: a number of hunter-gatherer groups ate more than 35% carbohydrate, typically from starchy tubers]. In industrial nations, we eat approximately 50% of our calories as carbohydrate. Hunter-gatherers also exercise regularly, and don't eat Frosted Sugar Bombs for breakfast. This helps maintain good insulin sensitivity. Since we are genetically very similar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we would be wise to learn from their example.

Thoughts on Obesity, Part I

From the US Centers for Disease Control website:

Since the mid-seventies, the prevalence of overweight and obesity has increased sharply for both adults and children. Data from two NHANES surveys show that among adults aged 20–74 years the prevalence of obesity increased from 15.0% (in the 1976–1980 survey) to 32.9% (in the 2003–2004 survey).

In hunter-gatherer and some semi-agricultural societies, obesity is rare. In most, it's nonexistent. Wild animals typically do not accumulate enough fat to interfere with vigorous exercise, and when they do, it's because they're about to hibernate or migrate. Wild animals also tend to have similar amounts of body fat between individuals (at a given age and sex), unlike industrialized humans. This makes me think that obesity is an unnatural effect of our current lifestyle. Whatever the cause, it's getting progressively more common.

According to self-righteous nutrition experts, we know exactly what causes overweight. It's a character flaw known as overeating. Calories in, calories out. And the cure is to eat less. The problem is, this is not supported by the evidence. First of all, overweight people often eat no more than the thin. Second, weight gain is a highly individual process. Overfeeding under controlled conditions can produce more than 3-fold differences in weight gain between individuals fed the same number of calories.

Restricting calories is also fraught with problems. Each person's metabolism has a preference for a specific body composition within the context of a particular lifestyle. If total calories are restricted without changing diet composition, the body reacts vigorously to maintain homeostasis. Energy expenditure is reduced; muscle and organ mass diminish. The psychological effects are particularly bad, as anyone can tell you who has been on a low-calorie diet. In 1944, Ancel Keys undertook a calorie restriction trial in conscientious objector "volunteers" in Minnesota. They remained on a 1,570-calorie diet that was low in fat and protein and high in carbohydrate, for 24 weeks. Hardly a draconian calorie count. Here's a quote from the study:

As starvation progressed, fewer and fewer things could stimulate the men to overt action. They described their increasing weakness, loss of ambition, narrowing of interests, depression, irritability, and loss of libido as a pattern characteristic of "growing old".

Some of the men ended up suffering from neurosis and borderline psychosis before the end of the study, one culminating in self-mutilation. This is what we're being prescribed for weight loss?

There are some diet trends that have associated with rising obesity in the US. Per capita calorie consumption has increased. This increase is due to a higher consumption of carbohydrate. Total protein and fat consumption have been almost identical for the past 30 years. This period also saw increases in the consumption of unsaturated vegetable oils, hydrogenated vegetable oils and high-fructose corn syrup. It's hard to say from this association which of these factors (if any) has caused us to gain weight in the last 30 years, but it certainly isn't total fat or protein. Fortunately, we have other clues.