Diet Tips for Summer

Here's a guest post by Heather Johnson:

Diet Tips for Summer

Summer is here and that means the temptation to indulge in fun, fatty foods is here too. It can be really difficult to say no to hot dogs and burgers when there seems to be a barbeque every weekend and to keep driving past ice cream stands as they stand out on a hot, sunny day. Vacations also mean eating out which means tempting menus with tasty treats that would never find their way into your kitchen. The pressure that comes with wearing a bathing suit or lighter clothes can be overwhelming. So, what can you do? You want to stay in shape after you struggled through the winter months and you don’t want all your hard work to go down the drain. Consider these tips for dieting this summer and you should achieve a happy balance:

1. Stay away from the sodas. When you reach into the cooler at the beach or your next party, make sure you skip the sodas. Soda is loaded with sugar and calories that are empty. We know how tempting it is slug back a soda on a hot afternoon but this is one way you can keep your calories down. Jason Giambi, a major league baseball player, said a few years ago he cut out soda during the off-season and dropped close to fifteen pounds.
2. Drink water instead. Water is the answer year round and even more so in the summer. Aside from being devoid of calories, water is such a healthy drink in the summer to keep you hydrated throughout the day. 8-10 glasses of water are recommended. Water is a substance that goes through the body quicker than any other drink and helps in raising your metabolism levels.
3. Eat light. You should eat lighter meals and avoid eating snacks in between meals. This will give you the notion of feeling lighter instead of the full feeling you have after a heavy meal.
4. Stay away from spicy foods. The salts you intake from fruits and vegetables are organic in nature and are retained by the body. However, the salts from spicy foods are inorganic and need to be expelled from the body. Drinking plenty of water will help in this process.
5. Stay away from sugary foods. The sugar from fruits and vegetables are natural unlike the manufactured sugary foods that stay clogged in your system for days and days.

This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who writes on the subject of nursing program. She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.
The water bottle image above is by Jenny Downing.

Day two of no wine

OMG, I was seriously fancying a glass of vino last night. That's completely worrying isn't it! Thankfully the urge lasted about as long as my old diets, and coffee did the trick.

Yesterday was not a bad day. I didn't eat anything until lunch time when I had some clear chicken broth that Csilla made on Sunday. In the evening we had a BBQ. I did Frikadellen and bratwurst, salad and a jacket potato. I managed 2/3rd of a frik, 1/4 jacket potato, 1/2 bratwurst and a little salad. I was last to finish, but didn't have to puke.

I was naughty though as I did have some ice cream. Eismann came yesterday and I bought some Big Cheesecake Mary Lou ice creams... MMMMmmmmm. So, oops, but there we go. Not bad when your not having anything else.

Today, I decided to sell my MG. I have put it on eBay. I was going to do a swap at a garage for a Peugeot. Yesterday everything looked great, but today, the car didn't look so hot as it had yesterday and I noticed that it needed a new front headlamp, and it has been in a smash as the rear driver side door was completely new and re-sprayed. Also someone at one time or another had tried to break into it, so it was a bit bent on the door lock. Yesterday it was go. today it was Ummm... maybe not. So I went with the old guts and decided not to do it. Also I was going to be losing about 2K on my MG doing a swap, so I am chancing it on eBay.

However, this means that I shall shortly be looking for a new car to buy. I want it to be newish, but either diesel or a small engine petrol. We shall see.

Today I had some rice and onion rings for lunch. Not a usual choice, but Csilla made it. Its doesn't seem to matter if you say "yes please" or "no thanks", you get it anyway. Its going to be sad when they move out on Friday, but at least we wont have to ingest a tonne of lard each day.

Been speaking to a fellow bandit, and I think that I am in the same place and possibly need an unfill. I really am not psychologically happy about that, because its gonna cost me £85 to have fluid out. Then what if I need some more back in? Another £85 and I haven't got it. I am so scared of having fluid out and being able to eat more, but on the other hand its doing me no good eating shit.

So, will have a good hard think about it. I think basically I either have to get more dedicated to mastication, or have an unfill.

Hmmm

Book Review: "The Human Diet: Its Origins and Evolution"

I recently read this book after discovering it on another health site. It's a compilation of chapters written by several researchers in the fields of comparative biology, paleontology, archaeology and zoology. It's sometimes used as a textbook.

I've learned some interesting things, but overall it was pretty disappointing. The format is disjointed, with no logical flow between chapters. I also would not call it comprehensive, which is one of the things I look for in a textbook. Here are some of the interesting points:

• Humans in industrial societies are the only mammals to commonly develop hypertension, and are the only free-living primates to become overweight.
  
• The adoption of grains as a primary source of calories correlated with a major decrease in stature, decrease in oral health, decrease in bone density, and other problems. This is true for wheat, rice, corn and other grains.
• Cranial capacity has also declined 11% since the late paleolithic, correlating with a decrease in the consumption of animal foods and an increase in grains.
• According to carbon isotope ratios of teeth, corn did not play a major role in the diet of native Americans until 800 AD. Over 15% of the teeth of post-corn South American cultures showed tooth decay, compared with less than 5% for pre-corn cultures (many of which were already agricultural, just not eating corn).
  
• Childhood mortality seems to be similar among hunter-gatherers and non-industrial agriculturists and pastoralists.
  
• Women may have played a key role in food procurement through foraging. This is illustrated by a group of modern hunter-gatherers called the Hadza. While men most often hunt, which supplies important nutrients intermittently, women provide a steady stream of calories by foraging for tubers.
• We have probably been eating starchy tubers for between 1.5 and 2 million years, which precedes our species. Around that time, digging tools, (controversial) evidence of controlled fire and changes in digestive anatomy all point to use of tubers and cooked food in general. Tubers make sense because they are a source of calories that is much more easily exploited than wild grains in most places.
• Our trajectory as a species has been to consume a diet with more calories per unit fiber. As compared to chimps, who eat leaves and fruit all day and thus eat a lot of fiber to get enough calories, our species and its recent ancestors ate a diet much lower in fiber.
  
• Homo sapiens has always eaten meat.
  

The downside is that some chapters have a distinct low-fat slant. One chapter attempted to determine the optimal diet for humans by comparing ours to the diets of wild chimps and other primates. Of course, we eat more fat than a chimp, but I don't think that gets us anywhere. Especially since one of our closest relatives, the neanderthal, was practically a carnivore.
They consider the diet composition of modern hunter-gatherers that eat low-fat diets, but don't include data on others with high-fat diets like the Inuit.

There's some good information in the book, if you're willing to dig through a lot of esoteric data on the isotope ratios of extinct hominids and that sort of thing.

Stale mate

I really thank you for you comments, and I totally agree. I am back in the whole "its easier to stay as things are" phase again.

I haven't put on weight this week, nor have I gained any thank God. I deserve to though. I have had numerous bottles of wine, including the sweet Tokaj wine from Hungary which I love and a whole bar of cadburys dairy milk and sweets and crisps galore.

What I need to do is get into a routine. I don't have a food that I can routinely eat and not be ill with, but this week I have had a lot less problems with HMS'ing.

I have had to HMS twice, no, three times that I can remember. 2 were yesterday. I had one of those snack pots like Philadelphia with bread sticks but it was actually french toast and tomato salsa and cheese or something which they called a Brushetta Snack. I would use that phrase loosely to be honest, but I followed just 1 'brushetta' with a mouthful of pesto pasta ad it sat there and I had to get rid of it. Then yesterday evening we had a massive meal cooked by the Hungarian section of the family - chicken soup followed by breaded meat filled pancakes with herb potatoes followed by Bakewell tart made by Sue. Wow, there was no way I could eat all that. I had the soup which was thin chicken stock basically with little bits of pasta floating in it, then I had half a pancake and 1/4 of a potato. Then I had to HMS. Then I had a spoonful of custard and a taste on the tip of my tongue of bakewell tart. That was yesterday.

I find that in the morning I cant eat anything to be honest. If I do, it just gives me grief with burping and that heavy stuck feeling on my chest. Lunch I can usually manage something like soup or dairylea dunkers eaten slowly or a little pasta with a wet sauce. Dinner I can do. I cant do much of it, but I can at least do it.

What I am trying to do is eat too much. I don't need a fill, I just need to forget the way I used to and want to eat. Its impossible and just makes me miserable. If I struggle to eat all day, by the end of the day I ALWAYS will have something foodie to make myself feel better like wine, or chocolate or ice cream, and this has got to stop.

I figure that if I stop trying to be a fucking idiot and eat what I know I CAN eat, then by the evening I will feel good about the days eating and not feel like I want to have a sugar fest.

This week, I am going to make a concerted effort to just eat what I know I can and not be a prick and try and eat a whole pancake or even a half! I had to admit that I am writing this revelation as I am chocking on a bite of gluten free pancake made by DS and Lili the Hungarian. They wanted me to try their master piece, and I regret it. So I am going to HMS and then just go with the flow. I am also not going to have wine until my brothers wedding as I expect that I will lost 2 dress sizes just cutting out that crap.

I am under no stress now, work has finished for the summer hols and I am at home all day doing what I love best... nothing! So I am going to get my head together and work my arse off to make sure that next summer I am a scrawny bint.

New Low-carb Study

I know you’ve all heard the news about the new low-carb study in the New England Journal of Medicine by now, but I have to chime in. I‘m going to try to offer you a different perspective of the study that you may not have found elsewhere. First of all, this is a Rolls Royce of a study. It was large, well-controlled, and two years long. It was partly funded by the Atkins foundation, but it's a peer-reviewed study in a good journal and if anything the study design is slanted against the low-carbohydrate diet.

The study compared the weights and various health parameters of 322 overweight subjects put on one of three diets: a “low-fat diet”, a Mediterranean diet and a “low-carbohydrate diet”. The first two were calorie-restricted while the low-carb diet was not. First of all, the “low-fat” diet was not particularly low in fat. It was 30% fat by calories, only a few percent short of the US average. What they call low-fat in the study is actually a calorie-restricted version of the American Heart Association diet recommendation, which suggests:

“…30% of calories from fat, 10% calories from saturated fat, and an intake of 300 mg of cholesterol per day. The Participants were counseled to consume low-fat grains, vegetables, fruits, and legumes and to limit their consumption of additional fats, sweets and high-fat snacks.”

So henceforth, I’ll refer to it as the AHA diet rather than the low-fat diet.

The “low-carb” diet wasn’t particularly low in carbohydrate either. The low-carb group was only getting 10% fewer calories from carbohydrate than the low-fat or Mediterranean diet groups. Despite these problems, the low-carbohydrate diet was the most effective overall. It caused a weight loss of 5.5 kg (12 lb), compared to 4.6 kg (10 lb) and 3.3 kg (7.4 lb) for the Mediterranean and AHA diets, respectively.

One of the most amazing aspects of the study is that the low-carb diet was the only one that wasn’t calorie-restricted, yet it caused the most weight loss. People in the low-carb group naturally reduced their calorie intake over the course of the study, ending up with an intake similar to the AHA group.

The low-carb diet also came out on top in most of the markers of health they examined. It caused the largest drop in HbA1c, a measure of average blood glucose level. It caused the largest drop in C-reactive protein, a measure of inflammation (the Mediterranean diet also did well). And finally, it caused the biggest improvement in the triglyceride:HDL ratio. This ratio is the best blood lipid predictor of heart disease risk I’m aware of in modern Western populations. The lower, the better. They didn't calculate it in the study so I had to do it myself. Here's a graph of the change in trig:HDL ratio for each group over the course of the study:


Other interesting findings: despite the calorie restriction, diabetic participants on the AHA group actually saw a significant increase in fasting blood glucose.

I've speculated before that wheat and sugar may cause hyperphagia, or excessive eating. We can see from these results that reducing carbohydrate (and probably wheat) reduces overall caloric intake quite significantly. This squares with the findings of the recent Chinese study that showed an increase in calorie intake and weight, correlating with the replacement of rice with wheat as the primary carbohydrate. It also squares with diet trends in the US, where wheat consumption has risen alongside calorie intake and weight.

I'd love to know what the results would have looked like if they had gone on a true low-carbohydrate diet, or even simply eliminated grains and sugar.

Is that a Tumor or a Belly?

I couldn't believe this story today, but a woman recently lost a whopping 140 pounds by having two tumors removed from her midsection. She had gone to the doctor for many years but the tumor had grown undetected. See the 140 pound tumor story here.

The unrelated photo here is by Gaetan Lee.

Sunscreen and Melanoma

Melanoma is the most deadly type of skin cancer, accounting for most skin cancer deaths in the US. As Ross pointed out in the comments section of the last post, there is an association between severe sunburn at a young age and later development of melanoma. Darker-skinned people are also more resistant to melanoma. The association isn't complete, however, since melanoma sometimes occurs on the soles of the feet and even in the intestine. This may be due to the fact that there are several types of melanoma, potentially with different causes.

Another thing that associates with melanoma is the use of sunscreen above a latitude of 40 degrees from the equator. In the Northern hemisphere, 40 degrees draws a line between New York city and Beijing. A recent meta-analysis found consistently that sunscreen users above 40 degrees are at a higher risk of melanoma than people who don't use sunscreen, even when differences in skin color are taken into account. Wearing sunscreen decreased melanoma risk in studies closer to the equator. It sounds confusing, but it makes sense once you know a little bit more about UV rays, sunscreen and the biology of melanoma.

The UV light that reaches the Earth's surface is composed of UVA (longer) and UVB (shorter) wavelengths. UVB causes sunburn, while they both cause tanning. Sunscreen blocks UVB, preventing burns, but most brands only weakly block UVA. Sunscreen allows a person to spend more time in the sun than they would otherwise, and attenuates tanning. Tanning is a protective response (among several) by the skin that protects it against both UVA and UVB. Burning is a protective response that tells you to get out of the sun. The result of diminishing both is that sunblock tends to increase a person's exposure to UVA rays.

It turns out that UVA rays are more closely associated with melanoma than UVB rays, and typical sunscreen fails to prevent melanoma in laboratory animals. It's also worth mentioning that sunscreen does prevent more common (and less lethal) types of skin cancer.

Modern tanning beds produce a lot of UVA and not much UVB, in an attempt to deliver the maximum tan without causing a burn. Putting on sunscreen essentially does the same thing: gives you a large dose of UVA without much UVB.

The authors of the meta-analysis suggest an explanation for the fact that the association changes at 40 degrees of latitude: populations further from the equator tend to have lighter skin. Melanin blocks UVA very effectively, and the pre-tan melanin of someone with olive skin is enough to block most of the UVA that sunscreen lets through. The fair-skinned among us don't have that luxury, so our melanocytes get bombarded by UVA, leading to melanoma. This may explain the incredible rise in melanoma incidence in the US in the last 35 years, as people have also increased the use of sunscreen. It may also have to do with tanning beds, since melanoma incidence has risen particularly in women.

In my opinion, the best way to treat your skin is to tan gradually, without burning. Use clothing and a wide-brimmed hat if you think you'll be in the sun past your burn threshold. If you want to use sunscreen, make sure it blocks UVA effectively. Don't rely on the manufacturer's word; look at the ingredients list. It should contain at least one of the following: titanium dioxide, zinc oxide, avobenzone (Parsol 1789), Mexoryl SX (Tinosorb). It's best if it's also paraben-free.

Fortunately, as an external cancer, melanoma is easy to diagnose. If caught early, it can be removed without any trouble. If caught a bit later, surgeons may have to remove lymph nodes, which makes your face look like John McCain's. Later than that and you're probably a goner. If you have any questions about a growth, especially one with irregular borders that's getting larger, ask your doctor about it immediately!