<p>Livestrong: I don’t track exercise there for two reasons: 1. It has ridiculous assumptions – way, way too high – for calories burned, and then 2. Adds the calories burned to your calorie goal for the day, making it harder than necessary to see what’s left. I like looking and seeing how many calories I have left.</p>
<p>My big learning experience from the last time I lost weight significantly: buy a food scale with a tare function. Mine’s from Escali, and has a button that switches the readout from ounces to grams, and goes up to about 6 pounds. No longer issues with trying to figure out if a slice of cheese is right in Livestrong – my slices are never 1 oz, but if the slice is .75 ounces, I just put in .75 of a serving (if the serving size is listed as one ounce.) I can usually find a food entry in either grams or ounces in the Livestrong listings. The tare function let’s me put a plate or bowl on the scale, then Tare to zero that out, then I add whatever I’m eating and get an accurate weight measurement. Other than liquids, I never use measuring cups. I keep a stash of torn up sheets of waxed paper in the drawer where the scale is (I measure right in the drawer – good excuse to clean out one of the junk drawers) and use one to protect the scale from the food and vice versa. If I get deli meats/cheese, I weigh a slice from the package, and then use a sharpie to write on the ziploc bag – 2 slices = 1.5 ounces. </p>
<p>I’ve set up some standard meals via setting up a “recipe” for them so I don’t have to do this with stuff I have regularly, but it turns out to be pretty quick and greatly improves the accuracy AND my compliance.</p>
<p>I agree on the calories burned side so I don’t use it.</p>
<p>Ran 2.5 miles today. I just need another mile to meet my current weekly goal.</p>
<p>I was playing around with the LiveStrong site and I noticed the log of carbs, protein, cholesterol, etc. It tells you what you had vs what your daily intake should be. My red flags were much higher protein and moderately higher cholesterol. Basically I had two eggs and they really jammed it up there. A turkey burger has far less cholesterol for the calories.</p>
<p>I’ve been increasing the percentage of fat and protein in my diet (very heavy on carbs before) and I noticed something interesting in my running. Before, I had the problem of muscle breakdown (ammonia smell on clothes after a run) and that’s gone away after increasing the percentage of fat and protein. It appears that my body didn’t want to metabolize fat in my long runs and went after the muscle. Now it doesn’t want to hold onto the fat as badly. We’ll see what happens when I get back to six miles.</p>
<p>In the meantime, I will probably try to adjust cholesteral down and that means not eating two eggs in one day.</p>
<p>Or don’t worry about the eggs. Dietary cholesterol seems to have a relatively low influence on cardiac health, despite what we were told for such a long time. Enjoy the eggs.</p>
<p>The Stanford study I referred to a few pages back found dieters on Atkins who ate plenty of eggs had better cholesterol than those on any of the other diets.</p>
<p>Yep. The whole cholesterol jihad has turned out to be a bunch of nonsense – basically a very effective marketing scheme by pharma to sell a bunch of very expensive cholesterol lowering drugs.</p>
<p>The cholesterol from eating protein – meat, eggs, even butter – is now thought to be a non-issue. In fact several studies have now shown that low-carb/high fat/high protein diets tend to lower cholesterol and increase the “good cholesterol”.</p>
<p>The recommended proportions of fat, protein, and carbs at livestrong are the official government recommendations. It in increasingly clear that you should follow those recommendations if you want to get fat and have a heart attack. Those recommendations first appeared in the 1970s; timing that coincides with the start of the obesity epidemic as the government and the food industry worked together to encourage people to stuff themselves with carbs. If you would like to get leaner and reduce your risk of coronary disease, aim for somewhere around 20% to 30% carbs, as much protein as you can eat, and the rest in fat. During the 13 months I’ve been losing weight, fat has been the clear majority of my total calories.</p>
<p>Insulin controls how much fat you store or how much of your stored fat you hang onto. It also controls the levels of cholesterol production. Only one dietary group has any impact on insulin: carbohydrates. Fewer carbs, less insulin, less fat storage, improved cholesterol – especially if you are at all insulin resistant.</p>
<p>Studies have found that most people’s blood cholesterol is not sensitive to dietary cholesterol. However, a minority of people are sensitive to dietary cholesterol. But the only way to tell is experimentally, but that can be difficult, since you’d have to eat high and low dietary cholesterol diets that were otherwise similar while maintaining similar exercise and body fat/muscle and measure blood cholesterol after each diet.</p>
<p>It would take a fair amount of work for me to get to 1/3rd, 1/3rd, 1/3rd. I just checked LiveStrong and I’m at 1/4, 1/4, 1/2 and that’s with lower carb adjustments.</p>
<p>Gardner, in his lecture on the Stanford AtoZ study, makes a key point. It is unusual to see big differences in protein consumption. Most people tend to eat protein in a fairly consistent range. Thus, it really is a zero-sum game between fat and carbs. Cut one and you’ll replace the calories with the other.</p>
<p>The theory is that the low-fat jihad has increased carbohydrate consumption in the population. Eggs get replaced with cereal and so forth and so on.</p>
<p>I got my 3 workouts in this week, that’s 3 weeks in a row. I feel good about that.</p>
<p>So apparently I’m drinking radioactive milk now. Unfortunately, there’s no calorie count for radioactivity on the livestrong site, so I’ll have wait and see if this is a good thing or a bad thing.</p>
<p>I had a can of sardines this morning and that got me to 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. So I can see how you can do it but you really have to cut bread out. Breakfast was an egg sandwich with a slice of turkey bacon and the proportions were 1/4, 1/4, 1/2.</p>
<p>Now I’d like to get some fruits and veggies in today which I’m guess is mostly carbs so to do a balanced 1/3 1/3 1/3 really requires killing breads.</p>
<p>Well, the first thing that has to go is liquid carbs (soda, fruit juices, sports drinks, beer, etc.) and candy/sugar.</p>
<p>Then, stage two is killing the carb snacks (chips, cookies, cake, donuts, dessert cereals, etc.)</p>
<p>Then, the next stage is making some choices about starches and carbs in your diet. Eating rice and potatoes and pasta and pizza and bread is going to add up pretty quickly. So, you have to look at things that you need to eat to feel satisified and things you can live without. Then, try to limit the times you eat them. So, if I want pizza for dinner, I can’t have a sandwich on two slices of bread for lunch. If I’m doing fajitas, I have one tortilla instead of the two I used to have. That’s half the carbs right there. My vice is croutons on my salads. I should probably switch some of those to nuts, even though they are more calories.</p>
<p>You can get carried with fruit 24/7 (tangerines have been my go to sweet snack lately), but – in general – I don’t worry much about carbs in veggies. Yeah, carrots have carbs, but for the most part veggies are the kind of simple carbs that are immediately digested and result in big insulin spikes. If you were trying to do really hard core low carbs, then, yeah, maybe you’ve got to look at that. But, I don’t think most of us need extreme low carbs to lose weight – just cut back from the massive amounts of carbs in our normal diets. For a lot of us, it’s like fattening us up for market like corn-fed beef.</p>
<p>The liquids and candy went a long time ago. I think that most of the carbs in my diet is bread and rice and it would take a fair amount of work to get rid of that because the bread is very convenient and the rice is cultural.</p>
<p>I’m considering switching to apples for fruits. My wife can do what she wants with veggies.</p>
<p>The thing about apples is that I am allergic to the skin but I can eat them, as long as I cut off the skin. I find it a pain in the neck to do that but I’m starting to try to set it up as a habit. I think that somewhere between 1/3 1/3 1/3 and 1/4 1/4 1/2 is where I will wind up. I’ll just keep an eye on the pie chart to see how I do.</p>
<p>It is possible to lose weight on a mostly carb diet. I did this about 12 years ago losing 35 pounds with very little fat and not much protein. It was an environment in which I had full control (family was abroad for quite a while).</p>
<p>BC, my H thought that he was allergic to apple skins until he tried organic apples from Costco. We now think that it was the pesticide residue in the skins that was causing his allergic reactions. He can eat apples from my garden or organic apples from stores, skins and all, but he has to peel store-bought “inorganic” apples and pears. Apples are great source of fiber and microelements and do not have too much carb impact. A big Gala apple is only 80 calories or so.</p>
<p>I’ve always had this allergy: it’s apples, bananas, peaches, pears, nectarines, plums and similar fruits. There are known genetic markers for apple allergies; there are also hay fever - related allergic reactions to fruits and apples in particular. We had apple trees in our yard when growing up and we never did anything to the trees other than pick the apples from them and I had a reaction to them too.</p>
<p>Except that fat consumption has not really gone down. Reality is that both carb and fat consumption (and hence total calorie consumption) has been going up, though carbs somewhat more than fat (probably because food companies have gotten good at making low fat junk food).</p>
<p>And that Stanford study shows that most of the dieters did poorly at complying to whichever diet they were assigned to and trained in by the dietitians.</p>
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<p>Some croutons are surprisingly calorie dense, since they have added fat which is absorbed quite well by the bread that they are made of.</p>
<p>^^^
That’s the way I understand it, too. The fiber carbs are never digested and, therefore, have no caloric impact. Even more, the real culprit are fast acting carbs: sugar and simple carbohydrates (like bread and pasta) that are quickly converted to sugar. These are the foods that cause an immediate spike in blood sugar which triggers an insulin release which in turn tells the body to stop burning fat for fuel so the blood glucose can be burned up.</p>
<p>I went back through this thread and collected the links to Taubes and the Stanford study and video. Created a Growly Notes Notebook with diet and fitness stuff to hold them in. Growly Notes is like Microsoft One-Note - a software product originally designed for college students to organize their college courses and lives. I find it useful for work, home projects, taxes, sports, etc. It allows you to pull in text, images, pdfs, video, audio and so on. Finding stuff in this thread can be a pain in the neck. I could have asked again for the links but I knew that they were no more than three weeks old.</p>
<p>For stuff like LiveStrong, I created a Firefox pinned APP so that it is always in my browser.</p>
<p>Thanks for the tip on One Notes. I just upgraded Microsoft Office and ended up with a copy of that. I’ll have to explore it a little bit. Sounds like it could be very handy for stuff like that.</p>
<p>BTW, Taubes is hardly the first with his premise. Clearing out some bookshelves, I came across a dusty old paperback called Protein Power, a 1995 book by a couple of MDs in Little Rock. A NYTIMES bestseller back in the day:</p>
<p>Their blog is in the same vein as Taubes: that the health policy makers have gotten it all wrong and been promoting a diet (high carb) that actually makes people fat and increases health markers assoiciated with coronary disease:</p>
<p>Probably it goes up when a few relatively committed people succeed with it. Then it gets popular with less committed people who try it but fail (or have only a small, unsatisfying loss). Then it fades away. Then it repeats…</p>