THE NEW ATKINS FOR A NEW YOU
Page 5
In addition to taking control of your weight and your health, an equally important and related goal is to discover a nutrient-rich pattern of eating that supplies you with a steady stream of energy. It’s vital that you understand the basics of nutrition, but you also need to learn to read your own body’s signals. Rebalancing your diet is the first step in this personalization process.
You probably know some lucky individuals who seem to be able to eat everything and never gain an ounce. (Don’t hate them.) Then there are the rest of us who struggle with a metabolism that can’t handle the high carbohydrate load typical of the modern, processed-food diet. Fortunately, your body will behave differently if you feed it differently. All you have to do to stop the struggle is banish the metabolic bully by activating the fat-burning switch, aka the Atkins Edge. In this chapter, we’ll focus on how much and which carbohydrates you should be eating to do so. In following chapters, we’ll explore the roles of protein and fat in weight management.
WHAT ARE CARBS?
First let’s clarify some terms. Carbs come in two general “flavors”: sugars and starches (also called simple and complex). The most common simple carbs are glucose, fructose, and galactose, each containing a single sugar unit. These simple sugars can be partnered to make sucrose (glucose and fructose) or the milk sugar lactose (glucose and galactose). Sucrose is the main sugar in table sugar, honey, maple syrup, brown sugar, cane syrup, and molasses. Starches, on the other hand, are composed of long chains of glucose, but when they’re digested they break down into their component glucose parts. Starches make up the majority of carbs in breads, pasta, cereals, rice, and potatoes. The leafy greens and other vegetables that are key to the Atkins Diet contain relatively small amounts of both sugars and starches, so they’re often called “nonstarchy” vegetables.
WHAT DO CARBS DO?
Carbohydrates provide energy, but if you’re trying to lose weight, you clearly must reduce your energy intake—in the form of taking in fewer calories. Using that logic, lowering your carbohydrate intake makes sense. But there’s another, more important, reason to curb carbs. By increasing your insulin levels, dietary carbohydrates control your body’s use of fat for fuel. Insulin acts as an immediate roadblock, inhibiting your use of body fat. As we explained in the previous chapter, when you eat lots of carbs, they hobble your body’s ability to burn fat. And that’s why you can’t shed those unwanted fat pounds.
WHY EAT CARBOHYDRATES?
If carbs are such metabolic bullies, why eat them? Many foods that contain them also offer a range of beneficial minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, and other micronutrients, giving them a place in a healthy diet. The preferable carbohydrates come from foods with a modest number of grams per serving (after fiber grams have been subtracted) and are usually those that are digested and absorbed slowly, so that they don’t interfere with your overall steady supply of energy. Unprocessed carbohydrates, such as those found in vegetables, some fruits, nuts, legumes, and whole grains, are also good sources of fiber and water. High fiber content is one reason why most complex carbs are absorbed more slowly than sugars and processed carbs.
Most vegetables and other whole food carbohydrates are fine in moderation, but in the typical American diet, a huge proportion of the foods consumed is not leafy greens, cooked vegetables, berries and other low-sugar fruit, and whole grains. Instead, they’re foods made of ground-up grains, refined starches, and various forms of sugar. Think of bagels, pasta, and cookies. Other foods, such as potato chips and corn muffins, bear little resemblance to their origins. Even foods that appear at first glance to be healthful are often packed with sugar. Take low-fat yogurt, a favorite “diet” food. Of the 21 grams of carbohydrates in a 4-ounce container of a popular brand of strawberry yogurt, 19 grams come from sugar!
Atkins is not just about identifying and avoiding foods full of empty carbohydrates, it’s also about finding the right carbs—in the right amounts—to suit your individual metabolism. You’ll hold off eating some whole food carbohydrates in the initial weight loss phases of Atkins as you learn how sensitive your body is to carb intake. Instead, you’ll focus initially on leafy greens and other nonstarchy vegetables. Some people have a metabolism that may eventually tolerate moderate amounts of legumes, whole grains, and even some starchy vegetables. All these foods are on the acceptable food lists for later phases of the Atkins Diet, but other individuals find that even these starchy whole food carbohydrates interfere with weight loss and/or maintenance. In that case, they should be avoided or eaten only occasionally. You’ll know which camp you fall into after several weeks or months on Atkins.
DO YOU SEEK COMFORT IN CARDS?
An inability to stay away from certain foods may not be a true addiction akin to alcoholism or dependence upon opiates, but eating these foods is still playing with fire, healthwise.
• Are your favorite foods bread, chips, and other snack foods and/or cookies, pastries, and other sweets?
• Are you unable to just have one (or two) portions?
• Do you snack on these foods throughout the day?
• When you’re bored or depressed, do you turn to these comfort foods?
• Are you hungry again a couple of hours after a meal or snack?
• Do you find yourself eating such foods even when you’re not hungry just because they’re in front of you?
• Are you often tired, irritable, headachy, or unable to deal with stress or to focus in the afternoon or other times?
All these symptoms are evidence that you’re caught in a vicious cycle of craving the very carbohydrate-rich foods that raise and then precipitously drop your blood sugar level. Unlike a true addiction, in this case, you do have a choice. If you can stay away from such foods for a week or two, which will give you the Atkins Edge, you’ll soon find that you can be much more comfortable without them.
A FRUIT IS NOT A VEGETABLE
Although fruits and vegetables are often considered interchangeable, they’re more different than similar, both botanically and metabolically. Nonetheless, the USDA Food Guide Pyramid continues to group them together. Not a good idea. Most fruits are significantly higher in sugar and therefore behave very differently in your body than do lettuce, green beans, and other nonstarchy vegetables. On Atkins, you’ll postpone eating almost all fruits until you’re past Induction. The exceptions are olives, avocados, and tomatoes, which—believe it or not—are all botanically fruits but behave metabolically more like vegetables. The next fruits you’ll reintroduce in OWL are berries, which are relatively low in carbs and packed with both antioxidants and fiber. A helpful way to think about fruit is to regard it as a condiment to enhance a meal or snack.
WATCH OUT FOR THE BAD GUYS
In contrast to whole foods that contain carbs, refined-grain products, sugary treats, and many other packaged foods—the list is nearly endless—supply calories but are almost devoid of beneficial nutrients. To complicate matters, there’s sugar and then there’s sugar. The sugars in fruit are natural, which is not to say that you can consume them mindlessly even when you’re in Lifetime Maintenance. Sugar also occurs naturally in dairy products, vegetables, and other carbohydrate foods. But added sugars, which, as the name suggests, boost the level in foods, are a huge problem. Added sugars can be either manufactured or natural, so the honey in honey mustard, for example, is still added sugar. According to the USDA, each person in this country consumes an average of 154 pounds of added sugar per year, up from an average of 123 pounds in the early 1970s. This translates into nearly 750 calories a day.1
This insidious sweet “poison” fuels the food-processing industry but damages the health and quality of life of people who are struggling with carb overload. Practically every item in the center aisles of the supermarket contains added sugar. Learn how to spot it by carefully reading both the Nutrition Facts panel and the list of ingredients on the product label. In addition to the obvious culprits such as soft drinks, baked goods, fruit drinks, desserts, can
dy, and cereals, added sugars lurk in sauces, salad dressings, ketchup, pickles, and even baby food. All manufactured sugars are full of empty carbs and have been implicated in a host of health problems from cavities to insulin resistance. Sounds as though nothing could be worse, right? Wrong!
THE MOST DANGEROUS CHARACTER ON THE BLOCK
High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) deserves a special place in the rogues’ gallery of sugars. A manufacturing process that increases the fructose content of corn syrup (which starts out as pure glucose) creates HFCS, making it taste much sweeter. The end product typically contains 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. In contrast, table sugar has equal parts fructose and glucose. Ah, you ask, what’s a mere 5 percent difference among friends? As you’ll learn below, this extra 5 percent of “sugar” as fructose is fated to turn into fat.
HFCS has infiltrated our food supply. Some public health officials link the doubling in the rate of obesity in the last four decades to the growing use of HFCS to sweeten soft drinks.2 In 1970, on average, each year Americans consumed about half a pound of HFCS. Fast-forward to 1997, and annual consumption per person was a staggering 62.5 pounds.3 From 1975 to 2000, annual soda consumption alone soared from an average of 25 gallons to 50 gallons per person! 4
The counterargument is that sucrose, which is half fructose and half glucose, occurs naturally in fruit, and humans have eaten it for thousands of years. That’s why you’ll see HFCS listed on food labels—and hawked in advertisements—as “all natural,” even though factories produce it in tank-car quantities. Although chemically similar to the fructose in fruit, HFCS in processed foods is problematic because of the sheer quantity involved. Whole fruits (and vegetables) contain a relatively small amount of fructose, which is packaged with fiber and healthy antioxidants and other micronutrients. The manufactured stuff is just empty calories with none of fruit’s benefits.
Though most cells in your body can metabolize glucose quickly, fructose is processed primarily in the liver, where most of it turns to fat. From there, it takes a direct route to your love handles. Though our forebears did okay with the small amount of natural fructose present in fruits, today we’re taking in massively greater amounts. Frankly, our bodies weren’t made to deal with it, as a recent study makes crystal clear.5 Two groups of overweight people were told to eat their usual diet. Individuals in one group had to consume one-quarter of their daily calories as a specially made beverage sweetened with glucose. People in the other group had to consume an otherwise identical beverage sweetened with fructose. There were no other dietary requirements or limitations. As expected, everyone gained weight, but only the fructose-consuming subjects gained fat in the tummy—the most dangerous place to carry extra weight. They also showed increases in insulin resistance plus significantly higher levels of triglycerides. None of these indicators was present in the glucose group. Pass up any product that lists HFCS as an ingredient.
THE WILLPOWER MYTH
THE MYTH: Successful weight loss is simply a matter of willpower.
THE REALITY: Like hair color, you inherit your metabolism, and metabolic characteristics vary greatly among individuals. Some of the best demonstrations that genes control metabolism involve research on identical twins. When many sets of twins were given the same reduced-calorie diet, all of them lost weight. However the amount of weight loss (and fat loss) varied widely across the whole group. And guess what? The individuals within each pair of identical twins lost very similar amounts of weight. That means that people with the same genes respond to energy restriction in the same way, but people with a different genetic makeup (in this case the different pairs of twins) have a wide range of responses, some losing easily and others very slowly.6 The same similarity of response within each pair of twins and wide variation across the sets of twins occurred when they were put on an exercise program that burned 1,000 calories a day.7 So don’t be frustrated if someone else is losing weight faster than you. If, despite doing everything right, you’re experiencing snaillike progress, you can blame some of it on your great-grandparents!
AGAINST THE GRAIN
A little over a century ago, a Swiss invention changed forever the diet of people around the world. The steel roller transformed the milling of grain, making it possible to quickly and cheaply produce white flour and other refined grains. The good news turned out to be the bad news. White bread, once the exclusive preserve of the rich, was now available to anyone. However, by removing the oil-rich germ and fiber-rich bran, flour was stripped of virtually all of its essential nutrients. Only after millions of people worldwide died as a result of malnutrition from eating a diet based on bread made with white flour did the U.S. government act, mandating that flour be fortified with at least eight essential vitamins and minerals to replace some of the micronutrients removed in the germ and bran (with the notable exception of magnesium). This new and supposedly improved white flour was dubbed “enriched.”
With or without fortification, white flour is better suited to glue for kindergarten art projects than for nutrition. White flour may still help kill people; it just takes longer, as diabetes and cardiovascular disease take their toll. Nonetheless, like sugar and its kin, refined flour and other refined grains—HFCS is a refined-corn product—have become mainstays of our diet. As a society, we are just as hooked on highly processed grains as we are on sugar. Sadly, people around the globe are following in our dietary footsteps.
Just as drinking an energy drink, aka sugar water with some taurine, guarana, fruit flavoring, or a splash of fruit juice added, is not the same as eating the fruit itself, grains that have been robbed of their essential nutrients are pale imitations of the whole food originals. For many people, there’s a place for whole grain bread, steel-cut oatmeal, brown rice, quinoa, and the like in the later phases of Atkins. Refined grains are a whole different story. It may be unreasonable to expect you never again to touch foods made with them once you’re in Lifetime Maintenance, but don’t kid yourself that they hold much in the way of nutrition. If it turns out that you have insulin resistance that doesn’t improve with weight loss—although fortunately, it usually does—even whole grains may be more than your metabolism can tolerate.
CARBS CAN MAKE YOU FAT
We’ll look at the misconception that eating fat makes you fat in detail in chapter 5. But carbohydrates and, to a lesser extent, protein can also metabolize into body fat. Guess what a farmer feeds a pig or a steer when he wants to fatten it for market? That’s right: grain. An increasingly popular theory is that the chief culprit in America’s expanding waistlines is not fat but sugar, HFCS, and white flour—the penultimate metabolic bullies. Consider the all-too-typical American diet: a toaster tart and OJ for breakfast; an on-the-run lunch of soup in a cup and a bag of chips; and a microwave dinner of breaded chicken and mashed potatoes; spiked with a few cans of soda and “junk food” snacks throughout the day. You could easily be looking at 300 grams of carbs. Moreover, most of these carbs are coming from refined grains and various forms of sugar. Low-calorie, low-fat diets also rely heavily on carbs, including lots of those less nutritious ones. In contrast, the carbs you eat on Atkins come primarily from whole foods, especially vegetables.
When you do Atkins, you rebalance your intake of the three macronutrients, removing the roadblock to burning fat for energy. That roadblock is—guess what?—a high blood insulin level resulting from a diet that includes too many carbohydrates. This change in diet, which allows you to burn mostly fat for energy—making it easy to lose weight—is the Atkins Edge.
REVIEW POINTS
• Consuming less carbohydrate relative to fat and protein, and only as many whole food carbs as your metabolism can tolerate, will enable you to lose weight and keep it off.
• Consuming too many carbohydrates, even those in whole foods, blocks burning fat for energy.
• Significantly decreasing carb consumption causes your body to burn its built-up reserves of its preferred fuel, fat, for energy, a perfectly na
tural process.
• Eating sugar, refined grains, and other nutrient-deficient foods results in spikes in blood sugar; avoiding them eliminates both the spikes and slumps.
• Increased consumption of high-fructose corn syrup has been linked to the recent surge in obesity.
• Whole food carbs contain more fiber, which slows the digestive process and minimizes hunger.
• Gram for gram, whole food carbs are packed with far more micronutrients than manufactured ones.
After reading the next Success Story, that of Julian Sneed, who lost more than 100 pounds on Atkins, move on to chapter 4 to find out how eating protein plays a major role in weight control.
SUCCESS STORY 3
THE BIG THREE-OH
Heavy since he was a teenager, 20-something Julian Sneed decided it was time to get serious about his weight—and health. He’s already shed well over 100 pounds and is still going strong, proving he can be fitter in his thirties than his twenties.
VITAL STATISTICS
Current phase: Ongoing Weight Loss
Daily Net Carb intake: 50–75 grams
Age: 30
Height: 6 feet, 1 inch
Before weight: 306 pounds
Current weight: 199 pounds
Weight lost: 107 pounds
Goal weight: 185 pounds
Has your weight always been an issue?
As a kid I played basketball, and I was still slim as a young teen. But when I was seventeen, we moved from New York to North Carolina and I went from going everywhere on foot to driving everywhere. Plus there were lots of family barbecues, cookouts, and other gatherings with much richer food than I was used to. By the time I was eighteen, I weighed 240 pounds. Later, my job as a manager in a fast-food restaurant, where I could eat as much as I wanted, also made it difficult to control my weight.
How did you hear of Atkins?
My supervisor at the restaurant had lost about 100 pounds on Atkins. She gave me New Diet Revolution to read, but for a while it just gathered dust. When I did get around to reading it in April of 2007, I weighed more than 300 pounds and knew very little about nutrition. It seemed strange, but tell me that I can eat steak and eggs, and I’m there!