Living Low Carb (56 page)
Authors: Jonny Bowden
And if a low-carb diet is working for you and you don’t want to change it, there’s no reason you couldn’t still use
Deadline Fitness
for its excellent fitness program and friendly motivational coaching.
38. The Ultimate New York Diet 
If you read my reviews of
The 5-Five Factor Diet
and
The 3-Hour Diet
, you might be forgiven for thinking that I have an unfair bias against diet-book authors who are young, good-looking personal trainers with celebrity clients and great publicity machines. However, if you
did
happen to have that thought, let me just say two words: David Kirsch.
Kirsch—a young, good-looking personal trainer with a celebrity clientele and a great publicity machine—is terrific. And he’s written a smart, appealing book that deserves to be read. It’s an effective workout routine coupled with excellent nutrition information, written in a very friendly style made all the more engaging by the fact that Kirsch—unlike many of his colleagues (e.g., Jorge Cruise and Harley Pasternak) is remarkably free of “full-of-himself-itis.”
The Ultimate New York Diet
actually grew out of Kirsch’s experience on the famous television show
Extreme Makeover
, where participants willingly took part in self-reinvention and image makeover with the help of a team of experts—including professionals from the worlds of makeup, surgery, lifestyle, life coaching, fitness, and diet. (His previous book,
The Ultimate New York Body Plan
, was based on that experience and was designed as a tough 2-week “balls to the wall” program for short-term results.)
The Ultimate New York Diet
is a follow-up book that also focuses on immediate results, but takes a longer view—it’s a long-term program of controlled-carb healthy living on which you could sustain a healthy life for decades.
The Kirsch program builds on the 3-phase structure that has served so many classic books in the low-carb literature well: Atkins (although that’s technically a four-phase program), Protein Power, the Fat Flush Plan, South Beach, and so on. In fact, “Phase One” of
The Ultimate New York Diet
is very much like “Phase One” of Atkins (the Induction Phase) and very similar to the first stage of South Beach. The reason for this is elegantly simple: it works!
The novel twist on the classic-3 stage approach comes from a clever idea Kirsch calls the A–E’s of nutrition: A is for Alcohol, B is for Bread, C is for starchy Carbs (and also Coffee), D is for Dairy, and E is for Extra Sweets. On Phase One, you eat absolutely nothing on the A–E list: not a drop of alcohol, bread, starchy carbs (which includes the usual suspects—cereal, pasta, rice), dairy, and certainly no sweets. Tough? Sure. But effective as heck.
Kirsch also has mastered the concept of giving clear, unambiguous instructions about what to eat, something that will go over very well with an enormous number of people. The breakfast options on Phase One, for example, are elegantly simple: either a protein shake or an egg-white omelette
*
(with various vegetable options). Period. Other staples on Phase One include salmon, chicken, nuts, mushrooms, asparagus, and the usual list of what would be considered “free foods” (non-starchy vegetables like kale and spinach) that are pretty much unlimited on all but the most stringent of programs. Cauliflower gets special attention for its versatility as a starch substitute, and there are some nice recipes (for “faux” mashed potatoes, among other things) using cauliflower as a base. (This cauliflower-as-mashed-potato was an early favorite on the South Beach diet, and it’s interesting that cauliflower was the one vegetable they couldn’t keep on the shelves in the grocery store in Alert Bay during the “Big Fat Diet” experiment—see
chapter 8
, page 273. A word to the wise.)
The first two weeks of the Ultimate New York Diet are decidedly low-carb, and follow what Kirsch calls the 7–7 plan—you eat from 7
A.M
. to 7 p.m., and not afterwards. Generally this works out to about three meals and two snacks, but within that 12-hour time period you can be flexible as long as you stick to the acceptable foods (about which more in a moment). The old “don’t eat after 7” rule has had its share of detractors, but I don’t know of any hard-core trainer in the trenches who hasn’t had success with it.
A word about timing, which is a big part of the program. (Not only do you not eat after 7 p.m., you also eat your carbs before 2 p.m.) Dietitians will argue that it doesn’t matter
when
you eat (just how much), but if you were inclined to listen to dietitians parroting their same old party line on diet and weight loss, you probably wouldn’t be reading this book. I don’t think “not eating after 7” has to be followed obsessively, and clearly it isn’t the single major “secret” to successful weight loss, but the rule can be an enormous help to those who are able to do it. (For the record, one famous study tested two groups of people eating the identical 2,000-calorie meal once a day. Group one ate it in the morning, group two ate it at night. The morning group lost weight, the evening group actually gained some.)
The Ultimate New York Diet follows the tried-and-true formula of gradually adding back foods that are disallowed in the early stages, as you move through subsequent stages. Following the A–E model, during Phase Two you may add one daily serving of any A–E food, from a slice of bread to a glass of wine. It’s strongly recommended that the added serving come from foods like beans, berries, lentils, quinoa, or sweet potatoes, but you’ve got some flexibility here. And in Phase Three you can add—on top of that single A–E food you added in Phase Two—a 150-calorie snack of any carb you choose during your morning snack.
Kirsch has a sophisticated understanding of the individualities of human metabolism and psychology, and points out that—program be damned—some people may not be able to add that one “A–E” serving a day (not to mention the extra 150-calorie carb snack). That’s fine. The book encourages you—to paraphrase the Saab commercial—to “find your own road.” Kirsch is one of the few trainers to speak about carb addiction, and he understands that for some people even a “little” bit of something can set off cravings and for that reason should be avoided entirely, a point of view I happen to agree with completely.
That said, he does allow “cheat meals.” I’m not a huge fan of cheat meals, simply because many people who need to be on low-carb diets find that an “anything goes” meal deregulates their blood sugar so severely that they’re a mess of cravings for days afterward. But some people do well on them. Kirsch’s formula is a concession to the reality that many people just aren’t going to say “no” to favorite foods forever. And his solution is to offer some really good “damage-control” options. Example: if you’re going to have pizza, go for one slice with a side salad, and you get extra points for veggie toppings. Practical, concise, and user-friendly.
The workout programs—as you’d expect from a top New York trainer—are excellent. Illustrations are clear and well done, instructions are easy to follow, and he even has some terrific extras like “workouts for office,”
“workouts for active vacations,” and (get this) “workouts for parents using baby” (baby bench-press, anyone?). I particularly like the 10-minute express workouts.
The book is the only one of its kind that I’ve seen that actually has the nutrition-data info for each recipe (and snack) so you’ll know exactly what’s in everything you’re eating. And there are some neat cooking strategies (“how to make the perfect hard-boiled egg”) that are as unexpected as they are delightful.
The Ultimate New York Diet
gets kudos for attitude, quality of information on healthy low-carb eating, overall design, and attention to detail. On every level, this is a five-star book.
*
To get the “effective” (or “net”) carb content of a food, you simply look at the label and subtract the number of grams of fiber from the total number of carbohydrates. What’s left is the net amount of carbs, which is all you need to count. For a fuller discussion of effective/net carbs, see page 98.
*
By the way, the “revised” pyramid—known as MyPyramid—is not much better than the old one. Just so you know.
*
Shortly after
The Fat Resistance Diet
was published, Dr. Galland and his son Jonathan Galland published an excellent accompanying cookbook—
The Fat Resistance Diet Cookbook.
*
Fructose is a “simple” sugar that doesn’t raise blood sugar very much at all; but when it’s isolated from fruit and made into a liquid sweetener, it does a lot of damage in other ways.
*
Sharp-eyed readers will note that I’ve railed against the egg-white omelette both in this book and for the last ten years; but at least in Kirsch’s case, he advocates it not for any cockamamie fear of cholesterol, but simply because egg whites have fewer calories than the whole egg. I still don’t like egg-white omelettes as a dietary staple, but at least he’s not idiotic on the subject.
My Big Fat Diet:
The Town That Lost
1200 Pounds!
I
f you’re interested in weight loss—or even if you’re not—the headline is virtually guaranteed to grab your attention: “The Town That Lost 1200 Pounds!”
That’s exactly what readers first saw when they picked up the March 16, 2008 Sunday edition of the Canadian newspaper
The Province.
Here’s how reporter Lena Sin started the story:
His town was shrinking, and Greg Wadhams was determined to shrink with it. So on a cold December night in 2006, the 55-year-old commercial fisherman sat down to say goodbye to the past. He devoured a spread of chicken chow mein, fried rice and deep-fried prawns to triumphant delight. Then, with the final bite, he bade farewell to his favorite foods.
Intrigued? Read on.
Greg Wadhams lives in the small fishing village of Alert Bay, off the northern tip of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Most of the inhabitants of this sleepy town (2006 population: 556) are members of the ‘Namgis First Nations people—the Canadian counterpart to what we would call American Indians. Obesity and diabetes are rampant here, about 3 to 5 times greater than the national average. Understanding why this is so can teach us a lot about diabetes and obesity—and about the value of low-carb diets.
The ‘Namgis have always been fishermen. But the local fishing industry was collapsing. Wild salmon supplies were diminished, largely because sea lice from the increasing number of salmon farms were making their way into the oceans and killing thousands of the wild fish. Fuel prices had made it difficult, if not impossible, for local fishermen to regularly travel out and back to their usual fishing sites. Meanwhile, supermarkets had sprung up and convenience foods were everywhere. Paralleling the experience of the formerly lean Pima Indians on the Arizona reservations—now among the most obese and diabetic people in the world—the ‘Namgis had begun to consume vast amounts of packaged convenience foods, sugar, and other supermarket “staples.”
The disastrous effects of this Canadian version of the “Standard American Diet” were even more pronounced with these First Nations people. Genetically, they are perfectly well adapted to a world in which food is hunted, fished, gathered, and plucked. They are supremely
ill-
equipped—as are most of us—to deal with a food supply that comes mostly from the 7-Eleven.
Jay Wortman, MD, a researcher from the University of British Columbia, had more than a passing interest in what was happening on Cormorant Island, which consists primarily of the village of Alert Bay. Several years ago, he had noticed that he was gaining weight. His blood pressure was rising, and he was constantly tired and thirsty. A vigorous guy who exudes good health from every pore, he slowly realized that he was exhibiting all the classic symptoms of type 2 diabetes.
“I stopped eating sugar and starch just to get my blood sugar down,” Wortman said when I interviewed him. While he did not intend this dietary change to be a treatment for diabetes, a curious thing happened. “Cutting out sugar and starch literally reversed all my signs and symptoms of diabetes,” he told me. His blood pressure normalized and his energy came back.
He began to wonder if similar dietary changes could make a difference to the First Nations people of Alert Bay.
With funding from Health Canada and the University of British Columbia, he decided to find out.
Wortman—along with colleagues Mary Vernon, MD, Eric Westman, MD, and nutritional biochemist Stephen Phinney, PhD—designed a oneyear study to see what would happen if the First Nations people returned to their “native” aboriginal diet. “People here traditionally got their calories mostly from protein and fat,” Wortman told me. “If you ‘reverse-engineered’ their traditional diet, you would come up with something that looks—in modern parlance—like the Atkins diet.” Wortman enrolled about 100 people in his study and got to work.