In a 2003 review in Cardiology Clinics, it was also pointed out that wine decreases C-reactive protein, which is the most prominent marker for vascular inflammation—and also associated with obesity. Today, more than sixty first-rate studies tether a daily glass of wine to health.
That covers the health of your heart, and fits with the way we treat wine as a drug. But what about the notion of having this intoxicant, this depressant, during the workday like the French do? British researchers Lloyd and Rogers at the Institute of Food Research in Reading, U.K., showed in 1997 that “mood and cognitive performance are improved by a small amount of alcohol given with a lunchtime meal.” In fact, their research demonstrated that the most productive thing employees could do for their afternoon productivity would be to have a beer or glass of wine over the noontime meal.
No kidding. A small amount of alcohol improved the attentiveness of employees better than a high level of alcohol, and even more than having none at all!
All this already makes sense to the French, who consider wine in the same way as food. Very simply, it attends the meal. Its potentially intoxicating properties are lost on no one, of course, but intoxication is not the point. One drinks wine for its pleasing complement to the palate and plate.
Seen in this light, a glass of Bordeaux over lunch is as acceptable as it is obvious. By the way, remember the free, all-you-can-drink wine cask? I never saw anyone sloppy, nor anyone beating a path back for multiple trips to the cask (and I had my Alabama eyes peeled).
The key to enjoyment and good health is moderation—for all your drinks as well as your food. But here’s the kicker—when it comes to effortless weight loss, wine’s benefit is about more than just the alcohol or heart-healthy polyphenols. It’s about volume control at all levels of consumption. Wine naturally encourages moderation during mealtimes because you have to sip it. And learning to control the quantity of your drinks turns out to be a solution to control the size of your food portions as well. The case in point is a fact typical of the drinking American—the “toilet bowl effect.”
Super Big Gulping: The Toilet Bowl Effect
I get calls from all over. One particular call came from a woman in Kansas who had read The Fat Fallacy and had a few questions. We chatted for a while about food and health and weight. She eventually noted that she grew up in Dothan, Alabama, just like I did. Getting a phone call out of the blue from someone who grew up in my hometown was a little like seeing a falling star in a leap year. Her maiden name was Carpenter. “I didn’t know any Carpenters, except my old baseball coach, the chiropractor with about six kids,” I said.
“He was my father!” she exclaimed. After catching up on mutual acquaintances, she mentioned an interesting quirk about how her father ate: Dr. Carpenter didn’t like them to have anything to drink at the table with the meal.
Okay, I thought. “Why not?”
She went on to explain that it was precisely because of the “toilet bowl effect.” Her father hated to see people get their mouths so full of food that they needed a tumbler of water just to flush it all back, and so they were allowed a beverage before or after a meal, but not during. Once she explained it, this made so much sense to me. The simple rules for drinks should be the same as those for food. Don’t gulp your drink, don’t gulp your food.
In fact, remember the rule of thumb from Step 4? The analogous rule for drinks is to sip your drink. Okay, I hear your questions already … and no, there’s no exact measurement that’s the perfect sip volume.
Remember that this French Don’t Diet Plan you’ve now begun retrains your healthy behaviors. Where the first rule is to eat small, that applies just as well to the huge drink sizes we face every day. Just sit down to eat in any restaurant, and they’ll bring you an enormous glass of whatever you want. Step inside a convenience store and you can walk out with practically a drum full of any beverage for just forty-nine cents. Even at home, we pour drinks into large glasses when we eat. The volume of liquid we consume is too large and unfortunately flies under the radar of our weight and health strategies: We never even consider this an important issue!
But let’s say you’re avoiding high-calorie beverages and drink only water. Surely there can’t be any problem with downing lots of water every day—it has no calories, right? That’s true, but remember the French approach: It’s not just what you consume; how you consume it matters every bit as much. The habit of eating and drinking large quantities of anything, even water, can affect your weight and health.
Water is a perfect example of a drink that’s indisputably good for you, but in excess it can cause trouble. For example, take professional competitive eater Eric “Badlands” Booker. Eric is one of these people who goes from town to town to show how many hot dogs or pizzas or oysters he can ingest in a certain amount of time. It’s great theater, like professional wrestling or the sword swallower at the circus, but don’t try this at home.
Meal Drinks
Some drinks, such as tea, coffee, and wine, really lend themselves to sipping.
Beer, water, milk, and juice can be overconsumed by gulping, so you have to practice your healthy habits with these.
Like others of his ilk, he trains by expanding his stomach capacity. Do you know how they do this? Not by eating, but by drinking. Each day for two or three days before “meets,” he drinks a gallon of water.
Professional eater “Crazy Legs” Conti goes even further. In a recent interview, he stated that he would drink a gallon of water in under two minutes and even swallow ice cubes to stretch his esophagus.
Here’s the problem: When you flush your meals down with a lot of liquid, you can inadvertently expand your capacity for eating in greater volumes. Thus, consuming more liquid actually primes our bodies to take in higher quantities of food over the long term.
Of the incredible number of factors that cause weight problems (besides just calories in, calories out), the toilet bowl effect is perhaps the most overlooked. But if you are serious about controlling consumption, and thereby calories, and thereby weight, you’ve got to train in the habits of healthy drinking as well.
Ending the Toilet Bowl Effect
You’re going to move in the opposite direction from the extremes of eating and the extremes of drinking. Instead of training your body to increase your eating capacity, you’re going to further decrease it without deprivation. In this step, you’ll form the new drinking habits that free your body up for natural weight loss.
Thirst and the Mind-Body Connection
“[Thirst] is regulated by the central nervous system and arises from neural and chemical signals from the periphery interacting in the brain to stimulate a drive to drink…. Osmotic and hormonal stimuli from the circulation are detected by neurons in this region and how that information is integrated with other neural signals to generate thirst” (McKinley, 2004).
SCIENCE-TO-ENGLISH TRANSLATION
True bodily thirst signals get transported to the brain. Then they’re “interpreted” before you feel the thirst.
But before we can conquer the toilet bowl effect, we’ve got to understand what’s going on here. Face it, we eat when we’re not hungry and drink when we’re not thirsty. Consumption is driven by something else—visual cues, emotional baggage, who knows. It could be anything. The point is that a healthy relationship with food and drink requires us to relearn to recognize the natural sensations of the body.
Just as your body’s hunger gets amplified by your mind (you feel like you “could eat a horse,” but it’s just not true) your sensations for thirst are altered as well. For example, the subjects in a 2004 study published in Physiological Behavior were tested during a normal workday. Here’s the question investigated by the scientists: “Is thirst just a product of dehydration?”
The answer is no. Blood samples were taken every hour from healthy young men who also rated how thirsty they were. The researchers found that the perception of thirst came even when the body was not “thirsty.” Specificall
y, subjects didn’t have the blood markers for low hydration and yet (especially when eating) something else had generated the apparent thirst. “The results indicate that during free access to water humans become thirsty and drink before body fluid deficits develop.”
More studies show that, when you drink very quickly, your sensation of “quenching your thirst” results from filling up your belly with liquid, not from changing the hydration level of your bodily fluids. This leads to mixed signals when drinking too much too fast.
Sound familiar?
The point is not that you shouldn’t drink water, but to understand that your signals for drinking are like those for hunger, and are filtered when they go from body to mind. The link between these pairs, just like the link between high-quality and low-quantity eating, keeps returning over and over in the French approach, in what they eat, how they eat, and even how they drink. Before you can get to this point though, we have to overcome some of our most ingrained biases and myths. These coach us to consume more and, when we do, to train our bodies to expect more over the long term.
PEOPLE ON THE PATH
Dear Dr. Clower,
I do wish I had learned about this way of eating sooner. You see, I have just been diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer and am scheduled for surgery at the beginning of February. I strongly believe that my years of low-fat/no-fat eating robbed my body of the protective nutrients it needed to fight off cancer. In addition, this same mentality convinced me that prepackaged food laden with chemicals was the healthy choice for weight control, the same chemicals that may have also contributed to my cancer.
Over the years, I’ve lost twenty-five pounds, fifty pounds, fifty pounds, and this last time twenty pounds. I was desperate for a plan that would help me keep the weight off. (Sound familiar?)
Reading your work was like having a locked door suddenly unlock and free me from the trap I seemed to live in. Since April, I have kept the weight off (in fact, I lost an additional five to six pounds) while enjoying my food more but eating less. I no longer fear food or look at it like it’s something I must grudgingly endure. I feel confident for the first time ever since losing weight that I can keep it off.
I am thrilled to be a convert to a new lifestyle that allows me to enjoy food without the neurotic obsession that permeates our fat-phobic society. I have been living this lifestyle since last April, and I can tell you that it works for me.
My thanks to you, Dr. Clower!
—Dianna R.
The Myth of Eight Glasses of Water per Day
But wait, you say. Aren’t you supposed to drink at least eight glasses of water every day? Shouldn’t you carry around a quart of water with you wherever you go, clipped to your belt so you can down a bit more at every occasion … including your meals? You have to stay hydrated, right?
The kernel of this widely reported fallacy is actually quite true. Dehydration is a covert source of many health problems and you do need water to stay healthy. Moreover, we lose water daily through our breath, sweat, and when we go to the bathroom. We can offset that loss and stay hydrated only through oral intake.
Everyone agrees up to this point. But the notion of “eight glasses” has been taken to an extreme that science has since put the brakes on. For example, Dr. Heinz Valtin of Dartmouth Medical School performed an exhaustive review of all work done on the subject. Here’s what he found: “Despite the seemingly ubiquitous admonition to ‘drink at least eight 8-oz glasses of water a day’ (with an accompanying reminder that beverages containing caffeine and alcohol do not count), rigorous proof for this counsel appears to be lacking.”
This is the kind of conservative language you find in a peer-reviewed science paper. Another way to say it is that this advice has all been a big fat myth. After all, the health media is not just telling you to drink water, but that you must drink at least eight eight-ounce glasses of water every day! So people carry quart-sized bottles and tank up on their daily allotment like a Labrador getting ready for a long walk.
Dr. Valtin’s results state a little more emphatically later on that “surveys of food and fluid intake on thousands of adults of both genders, analyses of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals, strongly suggest that such large amounts are not needed.”
His results square exactly with the behavior of the French, who drink water with their meals in small glasses, not quart bottles.
So the truth is somewhere in the middle. You do need water. You just don’t need to drown in it to be healthy. Remember that a tomato is 90 percent water, as are most denizens of a common tossed salad. Unless you’re eating nothing but dry, powdered food, you’re likely getting water from your meal as well. And you take in the most water when you eat foods such as fruits and veggies.
Another important point concerns the diuretic effect of drinks containing alcohol and caffeine. Drinks such as tea, beer, and coffee contain water, obviously, but they also pull water out of your body. This can be confusing—what is the balance? Are they water-positive or water-negative? The answer is that you actually gain more water than you lose, so you don’t need to drink extra water to make up for their effects.
The Science of the Water Myth
Drs. Grandjean and colleagues compared equal volumes of many kinds of drinks on the state of hydration: changes in body weight and standard urinary and plasma variables. The drinks included water, caffeinated and noncaffeinated, caloric and noncaloric beverages. There were no significant effects on any measure of hydration. The authors concluded that “advising people to disregard caffeinated beverages as part of the daily fluid intake is not substantiated by the results” (Grandjean, 2000).
It’s important to point out that if you’re among those who are very active or are out in the hot sun all day, you’ll lose a lot more water to sweat, and so must drink more fluids to compensate. On a recent trip to Vail, Colorado, I was advised to drink a little water because it’s very easy to become dehydrated in the thin air. Additional water is also very necessary for those who are ill. But if you’re in the broad middle of the cubicle worker population who are basically healthy, sedentary, and not too sweaty, you can safely drink less than we’ve been told.
Problem: How do you find the healthy middle ground with your drinks? And how can your drinking habits positively influence your eating habits and, ultimately, your weight?
Solution 1: Don’t eat and drink at the same time.
The French definitely drink water or wine or both with their meals, so what about the idea of not having anything to drink with your meal? Frankly, it sounded as weird to me as self-serve refills on wine for doctors over lunch so, hey, I decided to give it a shot. And to my surprise, I found this technique to be a perfect training tool for healthy eating habits—which are directly affected by your drinking habits.
Try this as your homework this week: eat your dinner without a drink. I know it seems strange at first, but just try it. You’ll find that you’ve got enough saliva in your mouth naturally, and your food has enough moisture, that you don’t actually need a drink at all. Eat small and you can swallow without incident, without having to flush it down your throat.
If you have trouble swallowing, your bite was too big. That’s how you know.
Solution 2: Sip your drinks.
Once you’ve eliminated drinks at meals for a day or two, add them back and practice sipping. At that point, your drink becomes something you include because you love the taste or how it goes with the food. That’s exactly how you follow the French habits of eating at the table. In other words, you’ll choose your drink because you love the way it tastes or complements the meal, not because you need assistance swallowing.
From now on, taste your drink. Sip, never gulp! Never fill your mouth full of anything, including the liquid you drink. This must become ingrained, so practice the behavioral habit. Each time you pick up your drink, or put straw to lips, sip from it. Whenever you do this, you train your body to expect less volume in the long term.
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Solution 3: Try smaller drink sizes.
You will find it easier to sip when the volume in front of you is small. Remember, your body is probably half as thirsty as your brain says you are. So when you buy a drink, always get a small one, not the medium size that’s huge by traditional standards, and certainly not the fifty-five-gallon drum with the straw in it! To follow this French lifestyle approach, it’s important to buy small, drink small, and make that amount last over a longer time.
Likewise, it doesn’t matter how extra-tired you think you are, you don’t need the extra-large coffee. You don’t need to drink that much fluid, nor do you need that much caffeine—even if you think you do. The grande coffee from Starbucks has an eye-popping 550 milligrams of caffeine in it! And just like your caffeine tolerance goes up, drinking that much coffee just trains your body to expect that amount every time.
By the way, the syrupy milkshakes disguised as coffee? With the caramel or fudge or other syrup in them? Please don’t buy these. You might as well eat Karo syrup by the spoon. And don’t think you can just order this calorie explosion with low-fat or skim milk in it, because that won’t counteract the high-fructose corn syrup and make it all healthy again. This is no different than downing a diet soda with a bar of taffy and thinking that they cancel each other out somewhere in your lower gastric world!
Don’t Forget, Don’t Diet
Because for years our standard fad diets have overlooked the big picture, we have missed a critical factor contributing to our weight and health problems—not just food, but drinks as well.
The French Don't Diet Plan Page 15