In which I tell you all about my avoidance of refined carbohydrates.
As you may remember, I went on a traditional low-calorie, low-fat, semi-starvation diet on January 5th. I did this because I was so fat I could barely cut my own toenails and I felt uncomfortable in my own body. I was twenty pounds shy of obesity, and at the rate I was gaining I’d have been clinically obese in a year or two.
I lost both weight – mostly water, at first – and inches for about five weeks. The experience, after the third or fourth week, was nothing short of miserable (save the pride I felt in my accomplishment): near the end of the diet I was obsessed with food and calories, and I literally spent most of my time planning my next meal.
By the end of the diet, my body was buying and consuming entire bags of potato chips without my consent. I was hungry all the time.
Then I read Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, more or less by accident (someone must have recommended it to me, because I found the sample on my Kindle). It was astonishing, this book. Game-changing. Mind-blowing. It challenged every single thing I knew about diet and weight loss, and it did it with actual science. I decided that although a lot of the author’s conclusions were, by his own admission, anecdotal or theoretical at best, and needed more studies, I could do some experiments in my own lab: my body.
Continue reading The no-refined-carbs thing: an update on the experiment. →
