Living Low Carb (33 page)
Authors: Jonny Bowden
The Fat to Skinny Program as a Lifestyle: Who it Works for, Who Should Look Elsewhere
It would be hard to see how this program would work for vegans, and truthfully, I think even vegetarians would have some challenges with it (unless they were pretty flexible on the issues of fish, eggs and whey protein). It’s a program very well suited to meat eaters and others who really thrive on higher levels of protein and fat.
The plan is also going to be somewhat challenging to people who simply can’t see going “off” carbs for any real length of time. Those folks might be more suited to one of the plans that allows the reintroduction of foods like grains and starches albeit on a very limited and controlled basis (plans such as the ultramodern “Unleash Your Thin,” or even some of the older stand-bys like “Protein Power” or “Atkins”). But if you like a cut-and-dried, no-nonsense approach to bringing down insulin and turbo charging fat-burning, and you don’t mind the somewhat challenging level of carb restriction, this plan is great.
What makes Fat to Skinny one of the best overall plans I’ve seen is that it has something going for it that many other plans do not: utter and complete simplicity. You don’t even follow a diet; you definitely don’t count calories, grams, or points, or anything else. All you do is eat foods from the accepted ingredient lists, which basically consists of any protein food, any fat, and any vegetable. It’s another variation on the “caveman” diet—eating from what I call “the Jonny Bowden Four Food Groups”: food you could have hunted, fished, gathered, or plucked.
It’s that simple—and that’s the beauty of it. I suspect this program will be especially suited to men as well, partly because of how easy it will be for men to relate to Doug’s personal story, and also because, well, frankly, men are more likely to respond positively to a diet heavy in meat and fat. However, make no mistake—this is a very effective plan and a very simple one, and should work for anyone.
JONNY’S LOWDOWN
I’m going to give this plan five stars just on the basis of its simplicity, effectiveness, and presentation. It’s uniquely user-friendly, Doug’s personal story of triumph is inspiring and visually compelling, and the plan is just a breeze to follow. It’s hard to imagine how you wouldn’t lose weight on this plan. The only challenge is the rather strict level of carb restriction, but that’s more than balanced by the fact that restricting carbs to the recommended level (20 grams a day) is really all you have to do to make this work. That’s going to appeal to an awful lot of people
.
WHAT IT IS IN A NUTSHELL
A definitive program for treating diabetes with a low-carb diet by one of the most respected thinkers in the field. Bernstein is a type 1 diabetic who developed this program for himself and his patients
. The Diabetes Solution
is much more detailed and technical;
The Diabetes Diet
is kind of like the Cliff’s Notes version of what you need to know
.
About the Diabetes Diet and the Diabetes Solution
Diabetes and obesity are so often found together that people working in the field have coined a new term that conflates the two: diabesity. About 80% of type 2 diabetics are overweight, about 80% of diabetics are insulin-resistant, and insulin resistance is the core symptom of Metabolic Syndrome (one feature of which is abdominal obesity). Given that, it’s easy to see how the two conditions can become entangled. For most of the diet-book authors discussed in this book, the low-carb diet is the treatment of choice for diabetes
and
obesity.
It certainly is for Richard Bernstein, MD. “The diet presented in these pages was originally designed as a diabetes diet,” writes Bernstein. “[A]nd as effective as it has been for countless diabetics, it is much more than that. Indeed, as more information has become available over the last two decades on the
toxic nature of a high-carbohydrate diet
, it has never been clearer that the
benefits of this diet are nearly as profound for those who do not have diabetes as for those who do
.” (Emphasis mine.)
From time to time, I get interviewed by magazines, newspapers, and television shows about “the right diet” for all manner of things—to treat yeast, acne, obesity, diabetes, you name it. Interestingly, the prescription is almost always the same—get the sugar out. As Bernstein himself pointed out in the above paragraph, you don’t have to have diabetes to benefit substantially from
The Diabetes Diet
. If you
do
, this book is a major find. If you don’t, it’s still loaded with incredibly important information that may help prevent you from getting it. At the very least, following the guidelines found within will most assuredly help you lose weight.
Richard Bernstein was diagnosed with diabetes at age 12 the year I was born—1946. From that day forward, he’s made understanding diabetes—its causes, prevention, and treatment—his life’s work. For as long as I’ve been in the field of nutrition, he’s been the “go-to” guy for diabetes and bloodsugar management; and he’s pretty much an icon in the low-carb community, for reasons that will become apparent shortly.
Bernstein’s path from patient to healer tells us a lot about the diabetes establishment. When he became a successful business executive and engineer, a career in medicine was the last thing on his mind. But after conscientiously following “doctor’s orders” for more than two decades, he found his health failing badly. His own discoveries on how to manage his blood sugar—and the complete lack of interest in those discoveries from the “medical establishment”—prompted him to enter medical school at age 45 so that he could publish his findings and eventually treat other diabetics.
“What if I, a physician, told you, a diabetic, to eat a diet that consisted of 60 percent sugar, 20 percent protein and 20 percent fat?” he asks in the book. “But this is just the diet to which I was subjected for many years. The ADA (American Diabetes Association) made this recommendation to diabetics for decades.” According to Bernstein—and virtually every other knowledgeable author and doctor who writes and promotes a low-carb diet and therefore bucks the “establishment”—the real dietary problem for diabetics is fast-acting or large amounts of carbohydrate, which result in high blood sugars requiring large amounts of insulin to contain them. The key to controlling and managing diabetes—and, as we’ll see, to controlling and managing weight—is in controlling blood sugar.
And there’s no better way to do so than with a low-carb diet.
This flies in the face of “conventional” wisdom and advice, which—as you may have guessed by now—is anything but “wise.” “With some important exceptions carbohydrates have the same effect on blood glucose levels that table sugar does,” Bernstein writes. “The ADA has recently recognized officially that, for example, bread is as fast-acting a carbohydrate as table sugar. But instead of issuing a recommendation against eating bread, its response has been to say that table sugar is therefore okay, and can be ‘exchanged’ for other carbohydrates. To me, this is nonsense.”
The Diabetes Diet
is actually a consumer version of Bernstein’s more comprehensive and still-classic work,
The Diabetes Solution
. If you want a really detailed explanation of diabetes (both type 1 and type 2) and want to understand this disease and all its treatment options in great depth,
The Diabetes Solution
is the go-to book.
The Diabetes Diet
is the Cliff’s Notes version—it tells you just what to do and gives you just enough information to understand why you are doing it. For the vast majority of people,
The Diabetes Diet
is all you’ll need to control blood sugar, lose weight, and prevent (or treat) diabetes.
Let’s get right to the actual diet plan first, which is actually pretty simple once you understand the thinking behind it. Bernstein calls it the 6–12–12 plan. His basic approach is to first set carbohydrate amounts for each meal. Breakfast contains 6 grams of carbs, lunch and dinner 12 grams each. “What I’m advocating is really as easy to conceive as the old meat, potatoes, vegetable, salad picture—just leave out the potato,” he explains.
If you’re wondering why the carb allowance at breakfast is lower, it’s because of something Bernstein calls the “Dawn Phenomenon.” Bernstein suggests that for reasons not entirely clear, the body “deactivates” more circulating insulin in the early morning hours than at other times of the day. When there’s not enough insulin, your body makes sugar from protein (a process called gluconeogenesis), and your blood sugar goes up. Non-diabetics will simply make more insulin to handle the increased blood sugar, but type 1 diabetics can’t (and, according to Bernstein, many type 2 diabetics also show signs of the same phenomenon). That’s why he halves the amount of carbs allowed in the early part of the day. Whether the Dawn Phenomenon is a problem for non-diabetics is not addressed—the much more common approach among many nutritionists is to actually allow a bit
more
carbohydrates in the early part of the day as opposed to, say, at night. If you’re diabetic, I’d recommend following Bernstein’s prescription. If you’re not, you could experiment.
Snacks are fine, with a caveat. “For many people with diabetes, snacks should be neither mandatory nor forbidden,” Bernstein explains. “Snacks should be a convenience, to relieve hunger if meals are delayed or spaced too far for comfort.” Because many diabetics take fast-acting blood-sugar– lowering medications before meals, it may be necessary to take those medications before snacks as well.
Even if you’re not on medication, his advice about snacks applies to anyone wanting to control blood sugar: “Be sure your prior meal has been fully digested before your snack starts (this usually means waiting 4–5 hours),” he cautions. “This is so that the effects upon blood sugar will not add to one another.” The same rule applies to snacks as to meals: carb limit of 6 grams during the first few hours after arising, and 12 grams of carbs afterward, whether it’s in a meal or a snack.
There’s a list of all the “really good” low-carbohydrate vegetables, a portion of which have about the same effect on blood sugar as 6 grams of carbohydrate, and the list will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with low-carb diets. It’s the same list of standbys—from artichokes to zucchini—that you’ll see in many plans, often under the heading “Free Foods.”
But Bernstein has some important points of disagreement with many “traditional” low-carb plans, and they’re very much worth reading and thinking about. For one thing, he’s very aware of the issue of carbohydrate addiction, and for that reason alone, there are no “treat” days here. “Many low-carb diet plans ignore the reality that much of overweight and obesity is directly related to carbohydrate addiction and constant snacking,” he writes. He correctly points out that many dietitians and doctors don’t really understand carb addiction at all. “Treat days are a little like having a smoker go all week without a cigarette and then saying ‘go ahead and have a cigarette on Saturday.’” In Bernstein’s view, for people with a history of overeating “treats,” it’s much simpler just to give up the treats than to have the self-discipline to eat only one small portion of sweets or starches on a treat day. I couldn’t agree more.
The second big difference between Bernstein and many traditional low-carb plans—including, by the way, Atkins—is that there are no “phases,” and that’s not by accident. As we’ve seen throughout this book, many lowcarb plans begin with a highly restricted regimen and then allow you to gradually reintroduce more carbs as you progress. For Bernstein, this approach is fraught with problems. “Just as you start to lose weight nicely, you change your diet,” he says. “Many low-carb diets might as well add the caveat that after phase one, you’re going to quit the diet because suddenly you’re back to the same old stuff that got you into trouble in the first place.”
There’s a genuine difference of opinion here, and neither side is “wrong.” We’ve seen lots of studies over the years where people lose weight at a nice clip on the early stages of carb restriction, only to gain quite a bit of it back. Talk to a lot of the docs and researchers off the record and you start to hear the same story—people keep eating the higher-fat, higher-protein diet they lost weight on, but add back the foods that caused the problem in the first place. They figure that bacon and eggs are fine—why not add a little toast and potatoes, since they’ve already lost the weight? This defeats the whole purpose and causes the regain so commonly seen in low-carb diet studies.
“The amount of carbohydrate that you ought to eat will remain constant for life,” says Bernstein. “For purposes of weight loss, or if you significantly increase or decrease your physical activity, protein amounts can be adjusted, but that’s about it.” Though it sounds like tough love, in this respect the Bernstein diet is much simpler to follow.