Category: Diet

When I was bugging out of my house the other day (pun intended), I only had moments to pack, and one of the few things I grabbed as three shirts from my closet. These were virtually the only clothes, other than the ones I was wearing, that I ended up leaving the house with.

Unfortunately, these were three old-and-not-very-nice shirts, but they were among the few clean ones I had left (doing laundry being a major goal of my labor day weekend). Grabbing these was dumb. What I should have done was grab an armload of dirty laundry and then found a place to wash it once I was settled elsewhere, but there you have it.

I thus emerged from my apartment with not enough shirts to make it through the week, no extra socks or underwear, and no extra pants–a combination of circumstances that would make it remarkably difficult to do laundry in any laundromat.

I decided that a trip to Wal-Mart was in order.

I might not end up looking stylish, but I’d be able to get through the week and do laundry in public until I can get back into my apartment.

I bought a cheap polo shirt, a couple of cheap grey T-shirt/undershirts, and an inexpensive pair of jeans.

Deciding on the sizes to buy was a little dicey, as all of my old clothes sizes are out of date, but my guesses were pretty accurate.

I know that different manufacturers use different sizing schemes, but I’m pleased to report that polo-maker Puritan and T-shirt maker Fruit of the Loom both now consider me to be just a “large” (as opposed to the XXL they used to consider me).

My pants-guessing didn’t go quite as well. I assumed that I’d lost four inches off my waist, but it appears that I’ve lost six, as I still need to keep my belt snug. Also, although I no longer need Wrangler “relaxed fit” jeans, neither–it turns out–do I need “regular fit” jeans. They’re too bulky on me. I really need “slim . . .”–er–“tight . . . “–er–well, let’s just say that I need whatever is below “regular fit.”

Incidentally, interesting Wal-Mart they have here in El Cajon. It’s not laid out like any Wal-Mart I’ve ever been to. Among other things, it’s two-story, and next to the human escalators they have special escalators to take your shopping cart up and down as well.

Here’s an interesting article from JunkScience that calls into question the obesity-related death statistics that are conventionally cited.

Make no mistake, overweight and obesity are problems, but they are problems that need to be dealt with by accurate science, and there has been all too little of that in connection with diets and dieting.

The article points out that the obesity-related death statistics are unbalanced because they exclude the effect overweight has on elderly Americans. This may be a bad thing because, as the article notes, studies find that among the elderly obesity either has no correlation with mortality or it has a strong negative correlation.

In other words: Having some extra pounds available as nutritional reserves when you are old and in ill-health may be a good thing.

Having excess weight when younger is definitely bad and is correlated to all kinds of health problems, some of which can be life-threatening. But it may be that our bodies know what they’re doing when they allow extra pounds to accumulate with advancing age. We may be stocking up supplies for when the going gets tough in old age the way bears put on fat for the winter.

Much more research obviously needs to be done here, but it’s an interesting hypothesis.

In the future we might have more ideal-weight tables that include age as an axis, only this time they’ll be backed up by science instead of guesswork.

GET THE STORY.

BACK IN THE DAY:

THEN:

NOW:

MORE TO COME IN A FEW MONTHS!

Well, that makes sense. If you cut the carbs you don’t have blood sugar spikes and lows that will sap your strength during competition. After going on the diet I noticed how much energy I had in the hour following lunch now that I wasn’t trying to shrug off a blood sugar low like those who ate carbs during lunch.

Further, you’ll need the protein to build the muscle to compete.’

GET THE STORY

Visiting an Asian market can be a little like visiting another planet. Indeed, it seems that the property departments on sci-fi shows often visit such places in order to procure exotic-looking fruits, such as the aptly-named star fruit (left) to use as set dressing in alien environments.

I don’t know on how many Star Trek or Stargate or Babylon 5 episodes I’ve seen fruit that look just like it was freshly purchased at Ranch 99 Asian Market–though for some reason, I’ve never seen one of the most popular Asian fruits: durian. I can’t imagine why the studio folks wouldn’t want a bunch of durians sitting around under hot lights all day. 😉

But going to an Asian market can give one an even stronger experience (the same is true for Asians visiting American markets for the first time–that whole diff’rent strokes thing).

This weekend when I visited the local Mitsuwa Japanese market, I was reminded of the experience.

For a start, though I know a few words and phrases in Japanese, I have no idea how to read Japanese script, though I have thought about memorizing the Hiragana or Katakana “alphabets” (they’re really syllabaries, but at least they aren’t logographic). But I’m not there yet, so almost all of the writing on the food is completely unintelligible to me.

Often the only English writing is on the nutrition label that the importer has (usually) glued on (most) products. This typically has the name of the food–or an approximation of it. Sometimes the name will simply be the Asian name for the food transliterated, in which case I’m not further enlightened if I don’t know the food already. Other times you’ll get a loose conceptual description of the product like “Corn Snack” or “Yam Alimentary Paste” (which just means “Yam Nutritional Paste”).

Of course, if I know what the food is, I may be able to recognize it by sight, but much of the time I’m looking at kinds of food I’ve never seen before, so I end up reading a lot of nutrition labels to figure out what I’m holding in my hand.

It is at this point that I often think of characters in sci-fi shows meeting new cultures and trying out foods they’ve never seen before. It’s usually pretty easy to imagine trying and eating a food if you don’t know what it is. If you’re a typical American, you’ve likely never had lychee or rambutan, but they’re fruits, and Americans generally don’t find fruits threatening (durian being a notable exception).

Other foods are similar to American ones . . . but different. This weekend I bought a product (very low in carbs) labeled “egg custard.” It was the oddest custard I’ve ever tasted. It didn’t taste bad, but . . . it wasn’t sweet. In fact, it was salty, and the honey-looking glaze that came with it tasted like soy sauce. It also was a lot more firm (like firm tofu) than custard I’ve previously had.

This also resonates a little bit with what you see on sci-fi shows. When characters are talking about “Tarkalian tea” or “Raktajino” (i.e., “Klingon coffee”) or “Saurian brandy,” one knows that they must be similar to but still different than the teas, coffees, and brandies that we are familiar with. Trying Japanese egg custard is kind of the same experience.

On the other hand, you sometimes encounter foods and you know exactly what it is, though you would never imagine that people would want to prepare food in this way, like shrimp-flavored crackers or fish paste or . . . (shudder) . . . clam jerky.

It’s odd that, in a way, the more familiar a food is the more unsettling unexpected uses of it can be. This is particularly true, I find, for meats. Unexpected uses of meat are particularly unsettling for Americans . . . or at least for me.

This is not to say I don’t enjoy trying such foods. I’m told that I’m rather adventurous for an American in what foreign food I will eat (at least if I’m not dieting). I enjoy trying other folks’ food–even foods I don’t especially like the taste of–in order to experience what they do and thereby gain insight into their culture, knowing that if I had grown up eating the food, I’d like it just as much as they do. It’s a way of honoring others’ cultures and, thereby, the potential for cultural diversity that God built into mankind.

The Asian markets I’ve visited tend to be very much like American markets in some ways and very different in others. This goes beyond the similarities and differences in the foods. For example, they are similar in that they have impulse-purchase items (like kids’ toys and inexpensive health and beauty items) right up by the checkout stands. But they also are different. For example, in the Mitsuwa market this weekend there was a hand-lettered sign on the wall that said (in English) “Eat Calcium.”

One of the most interesting differences (though this doesn’t apply to little, small mom-and-pop stores) is that the markets are often like mini-malls. In addition to the central grocery section, there will be a number of small shops within the market (around the periphery) that sell things other than food. For example, at the one I visited this weekend there was a bookshop selling Japanese books and newspapers, a beauty supply store, a furniture store, even a place that you could buy Japanese toilets.

And that’s all quite understandable. If I were an American in another country and went to an American market to get some groceries from back home, I’d like to pick up other things from back home as well. Even . . . the way the plumbing works in some countries . . . an American toilet.

Visiting an Asian market can be a little like visiting another planet. Indeed, it seems that the property departments on sci-fi shows often visit such places in order to procure exotic-looking fruits, such as the aptly-named star fruit (left) to use as set dressing in alien environments.

I don’t know on how many Star Trek or Stargate or Babylon 5 episodes I’ve seen fruit that look just like it was freshly purchased at Ranch 99 Asian Market–though for some reason, I’ve never seen one of the most popular Asian fruits: durian. I can’t imagine why the studio folks wouldn’t want a bunch of durians sitting around under hot lights all day. 😉

But going to an Asian market can give one an even stronger experience (the same is true for Asians visiting American markets for the first time–that whole diff’rent strokes thing).

This weekend when I visited the local Mitsuwa Japanese market, I was reminded of the experience.

For a start, though I know a few words and phrases in Japanese, I have no idea how to read Japanese script, though I have thought about memorizing the Hiragana or Katakana “alphabets” (they’re really syllabaries, but at least they aren’t logographic). But I’m not there yet, so almost all of the writing on the food is completely unintelligible to me.

Often the only English writing is on the nutrition label that the importer has (usually) glued on (most) products. This typically has the name of the food–or an approximation of it. Sometimes the name will simply be the Asian name for the food transliterated, in which case I’m not further enlightened if I don’t know the food already. Other times you’ll get a loose conceptual description of the product like “Corn Snack” or “Yam Alimentary Paste” (which just means “Yam Nutritional Paste”).

Of course, if I know what the food is, I may be able to recognize it by sight, but much of the time I’m looking at kinds of food I’ve never seen before, so I end up reading a lot of nutrition labels to figure out what I’m holding in my hand.

It is at this point that I often think of characters in sci-fi shows meeting new cultures and trying out foods they’ve never seen before. It’s usually pretty easy to imagine trying and eating a food if you don’t know what it is. If you’re a typical American, you’ve likely never had lychee or rambutan, but they’re fruits, and Americans generally don’t find fruits threatening (durian being a notable exception).

Other foods are similar to American ones . . . but different. This weekend I bought a product (very low in carbs) labeled “egg custard.” It was the oddest custard I’ve ever tasted. It didn’t taste bad, but . . . it wasn’t sweet. In fact, it was salty, and the honey-looking glaze that came with it tasted like soy sauce. It also was a lot more firm (like firm tofu) than custard I’ve previously had.

This also resonates a little bit with what you see on sci-fi shows. When characters are talking about “Tarkalian tea” or “Raktajino” (i.e., “Klingon coffee”) or “Saurian brandy,” one knows that they must be similar to but still different than the teas, coffees, and brandies that we are familiar with. Trying Japanese egg custard is kind of the same experience.

On the other hand, you sometimes encounter foods and you know exactly what it is, though you would never imagine that people would want to prepare food in this way, like shrimp-flavored crackers or fish paste or . . . (shudder) . . . clam jerky.

It’s odd that, in a way, the more familiar a food is the more unsettling unexpected uses of it can be. This is particularly true, I find, for meats. Unexpected uses of meat are particularly unsettling for Americans . . . or at least for me.

This is not to say I don’t enjoy trying such foods. I’m told that I’m rather adventurous for an American in what foreign food I will eat (at least if I’m not dieting). I enjoy trying other folks’ food–even foods I don’t especially like the taste of–in order to experience what they do and thereby gain insight into their culture, knowing that if I had grown up eating the food, I’d like it just as much as they do. It’s a way of honoring others’ cultures and, thereby, the potential for cultural diversity that God built into mankind.

The Asian markets I’ve visited tend to be very much like American markets in some ways and very different in others. This goes beyond the similarities and differences in the foods. For example, they are similar in that they have impulse-purchase items (like kids’ toys and inexpensive health and beauty items) right up by the checkout stands. But they also are different. For example, in the Mitsuwa market this weekend there was a hand-lettered sign on the wall that said (in English) “Eat Calcium.”

One of the most interesting differences (though this doesn’t apply to little, small mom-and-pop stores) is that the markets are often like mini-malls. In addition to the central grocery section, there will be a number of small shops within the market (around the periphery) that sell things other than food. For example, at the one I visited this weekend there was a bookshop selling Japanese books and newspapers, a beauty supply store, a furniture store, even a place that you could buy Japanese toilets.

And that’s all quite understandable. If I were an American in another country and went to an American market to get some groceries from back home, I’d like to pick up other things from back home as well. Even . . . the way the plumbing works in some countries . . . an American toilet.

This weekend I went to the local Japanese market in San Diego. It was the first time that I’d been in an Asian market for some time. Though I love Asian food (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Thai), my low-carb diet makes it difficult to find anything to eat in such places, so I haven’t had reason to go to one.

Until yesterday.

The thing that brought me there was, ironically, my low-carb diet. For some time I had been aware of a particular Japanese flour that is made from yam. It’s Japanese name is konnyaku, and in English it’s called konjac or glucomannan. This flour is virtually all indigestible fiber, so it has an extremely low carb count. Further, it has the unusual property of dramatically expanding as it’s digested. Supposedly, the stuff swells to 15-50 times it original size (claims vary), so it keeps you full. It also has the usual benefits of fiber (absorbing toxins, slowing down the assimilation of calories, etc.).

Low carb count + keeps you full + usual benefits of fiber = something dieters will want to use, therefore, they do.

I’ve used konjac before as a nutritional supplement in capsule form, but I’ve never known how to find the foods Japanese make from it. Well, the other day I got a name–shirataki–which is a kind of noodle made from konjac. Armed with this knowledge, I knew what to ask for at an Asian market, and so I went to the local Japanese one.

It turns out that there are a bunch of different kinds of shirataki noodles. They comes in different thicknesses and flavors. They also have cakes (i.e., slabs) made of the stuff and dumplings. (I’ve also seen references online to deserts made from it, but didn’t see those at the market). I got a couple of kinds of noodles and some dumplings and a salad mix that has glucomannan strips in it (as well as picking up some seaweed flakes and dried “sea vegetables”).

If the nutritional lables on the products are to be believed, these products have digestible carb counts as low as one gram per serving, and they are much, much more like typical spaghetti than the current low-carb pastas (which tend to be a little heavier and stiffer, though still quite edible).

Early results are quite promising. The taste and texture of the noodles is excellent, and it certainly seems to be living up to its promise of keeping you feeling full. As a starting experiment, I’ve only eaten very small portions of the noodles (a normal size portion might be too much, given how much the stuff swells up), but have felt quite full for quite a long time.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to order the noodles online (perhaps because they come packed in water; they don’t seem to be available dry). But if you are dieting–whether you are on a low-carb diet or not–and you live near an Asian market, you might want to see if you can find some konjac noodles or other products to try. The words to look for are: shirataki, konjac, konnyaku, glucomannan, or simply yam. You may need to ask a salesperson for help, as most of the labels will be in Japanese (except for the nutritional labels stuck on by the importer).

Be sure to check the nutritional labels if you are on a low-carb diet just to make sure you’ve got the right stuff. Other Japanese noodles are very high in carbs. While at the store, I read one food label on a bowl of noodles that had over 100 carbs in it! (For me, that’s three to five days worth of carbs in one bowl!)

Okay, let’s see if Amazon is now responding fast enough to avoid long page loading times.

I’ve added back a set of Amazon recommendations down yonder in the lower right margin, only I decided to try some different ones. Instead of the fiction books I recommended before (which will be back in the future), I created a list of health & fitness books (and one DVD) that have been very useful to me.

I’m extremely suspicious of claims made by health & fitness “experts,” but I’ve used each of these items, and they are all top-notch and really work.

Many of them are available cheap if you use Amazon’s used book (etc.) service. There are lots of used copies since they’ve been out long enough for me to use and gain confidence in them. They aren’t the current “rage” diet books that the publishing industry is pushing this year (e.g., The South Beach Diet). Any diet that new I wouldn’t be comfortable recommending, as I wouldn’t have a track record with it. The newer diet books may be good, but I haven’t personally tried and proven them.

These, I have.

They’re rock solid.

Okay, let’s see if Amazon is now responding fast enough to avoid long page loading times.

I’ve added back a set of Amazon recommendations down yonder in the lower right margin, only I decided to try some different ones. Instead of the fiction books I recommended before (which will be back in the future), I created a list of health & fitness books (and one DVD) that have been very useful to me.

I’m extremely suspicious of claims made by health & fitness “experts,” but I’ve used each of these items, and they are all top-notch and really work.

Many of them are available cheap if you use Amazon’s used book (etc.) service. There are lots of used copies since they’ve been out long enough for me to use and gain confidence in them. They aren’t the current “rage” diet books that the publishing industry is pushing this year (e.g., The South Beach Diet). Any diet that new I wouldn’t be comfortable recommending, as I wouldn’t have a track record with it. The newer diet books may be good, but I haven’t personally tried and proven them.

These, I have.

They’re rock solid.

Every diet book will tell you that you should try to weigh yourself under the same conditions every time so that you minimize the effect of daily fluctuations in weight (caused by eating and drinking) on the readings you get.

Virtually every diet book will also tell you that as you diet you can expect considerable ups and downs and that you shouldn’t worry about these. They are caused by various factors, most notably your body’ retaining fluids for reasons which may not be obvious. Consequently, you shouldn’t worry about these multi-day fluctuations in your weight. As long as your overall weight goes down over time, you’re making progress toward your goal. To keep you from stressing out about these upticks in what the scale tells you, some diet books will recommend that you only weigh yourself once a week. That will give you a better chance of seeing a lower reading than what you saw the last time you got on the scale, but it will not guarantee this.

From what I’ve seen in others who have followed this strategy, it may actually increase the stress they feel when they see an uptick in the scale reading. They feel like they have wasted a whole week of dieting, and if they don’t weigh themselves for another week, they’ll have that feeling hanging over them for a week.

So I don’t do that.

I tend to be systematic in my approach to things and, since I have something of a scientific bent (as illustrated by this blog), I keep detailed info on my diet, exercise, nutritional supplements, etc. By analyzing this data, I can note trends over time and figure out what my body best responds to.

One item I keep track of is a daily reading of my weight, which I used to generate the above graph (click it to enlarge it in a pop-up window). It shows me losing sixteen pounds between April 9th and May 30th. (Overall, I’ve lost almost forty-four pounds since going back on my diet in mid January, after taking a few months off to let my metabolism re-set.) The graph lets you see the kinds of ups and downs one can expect during an effective diet, which is why I thought I’d show it here. Most diet books don’t show what your weight trendline is likely to look like, but it seems to me that it would help prepare the reader for the kinds of ups and downs to be expected.

One of the things I’ve noticed over time is that I tend to have a weight rebound immediately after each time I achieve a new low (unless I’m on a semi-liquid variant of my diet that keeps pushing my weight down). It’s like at each new weight low my body decides that it needs to reassure itself that we aren’t going to starve, so it starts hanging on to water and my weight increases temporarily. You can’t see this very well on the above graph because of the special events it records (the colored areas), but now that I know this happens, I expect it and so I don’t get concerned when it happens. It’s a normal part of how weight loss works for me.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that the stress of travel will cause my weight to bounce up. That’s what’s happening in the purple box on the track line. It was the day I went up north of L.A. to give talks at a Protestant school. Sure enough, when I got back my weight had gone up (this particular spike is exaggerated due to the time of day I had to weigh myself), but the effect was temporary and only lasted a few days.

The two blue boxes on the graph represent tiems I was varying my diet. I occasionally do experiments to see if I can make it more effective than it normally is. (Normally I lose two pounds a week on average.) The first blue box represents a period when I switched to an almost-all-liquid diet that focused on protein. At the moment, I’m trying a diet variant focusing mostly on fat. I can’t maintain such diet variants for overly long (they tend to be way too BORING to sustain indefinitely), but gathering the data will show me what my body responds to best.