Tag Archives: diet

The tale of the poison-filled cupboard

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My dear aunt Sunita e-mailed me recently.  “Ravi, I have been following the Ravionhealth diet and lifestyle religiously, but I haven’t lost much weight!”.  I was intrigued, because I now have over a hundred people following my diet, and the only person who has not shown results is a friend with a thyroid problem.  It was time for a forensic investigation at Aunt Sunita’s home!

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, I knocked on her door.  “Helloooo!” said the familiar singsong voice and the million-watt smile, but I could see what she meant when she said that my diet was not working.  Aunt Sunita was as rotund as ever, looking like the most eligible bachelorette in Uganda*.

After the pleasantries, I made a beeline for her kitchen, and started my investigation with the refrigerator.  Full of fresh vegetables, whole milk, cheese, dark chocolate (85% cocoa), paneer, eggs, mayo, butter, and not a juice in sight…so far an A+ from me!  The freezer was full of fish and frozen chicken and no problem there.  Next I looked in the cupboards, and there was no sign of cereal, rice, pasta, flour, sugar, honey, and now I was starting to really worry…how can Aunt Sunita be putting on weight with a kitchen stocked like that?

“So Auntie, tell me what have you been doing since you started my diet?” I asked, and I wondered if she was simply eating out all the time.

“Not much, son!  Have been staying home.  Can’t really eat out much in India because the vegetarian food in restaurants is full of sugar carbs.”

Now I was flummoxed.  Was she that random person who won’t lose fat no matter what she eats?

As I was trying to work through this problem, the doorbell rang.  “Oh, it is my mahjong group!”, said Aunt Sunita as she waddled to the door and let in four other aunties who were all plus-sized.

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with…

The Jim Rohn quote danced in my mind’s eye as I looked at the kitchen table, now occupied by this gaggle of famine-prepped aunties.

“Son, this is how I spend my afternoons these days.  We meet mainly at my place for mahjong and a little gossip.” Aunt Sunita smiled at me.

I feared that the end of my investigation was near.  I went to the living room and browsed the daily papers, lost deep in thought, until the familiar “tea-time” call from my aunt’s cook an hour later.  I walked back into the kitchen/dining area, and there was the answer to my question on the table, a whole spread of potato samosas, flour murukus, potato and paapdi chaat, rice crackers, corn chips and dips, you name it!

“Auntie, what is all this?”  I was aghast.

“This is just for when I have guests, son!”

“But you have guests every day for mahjong, auntie!”

“Yes son, but it is only for tea time!” my dear Aunt Sunita smiled as she tucked into a fried potato triangle.

“But where do you keep all this stuff?  I didn’t see any of it in the kitchen!”

“Oh it’s not for me, so I keep it in the guest cupboard!” she pointed to the dining room cupboard, where I could see the words in clear typeface “Guest Cupboard”.

As I left Aunt Sunita’s house, I marveled at the power of sugar addiction.  It is no different than alcohol or any other drug, in that once you develop a dependency, the addiction will create a delusion that you don’t have a behaviour problem, and that whatever symptoms you are experiencing are beyond your control, i.e., genetic.

Here was my aunt, a perfectly sane and reasonable person, who simply put all her junk food into a cupboard marked “guest”, and ate healthy food three times a day.  But she simply put it out of her mind that since going on my diet she had joined a daily mahjong group that met at her house, and she put away at least a thousand calories of sugar from the “Guest Cupboard” daily while entertaining her guests.  She was by no means the fattest of her mahjong group, so she never feels out of place when she is in their company…quite the opposite!

Breaking sugar addiction is an extraordinary achievement for some people, the same as quitting smoking, while other people do it with ease.  We have to sympathize with our sugar-addicted loved ones, be patient with them, and ultimately respect their choices.  But it is not impossible.

Aunt Sunita, I will find a way to rid your home of the poison cupboard…eventually!

 

How to lose weight on a diet of twinkies and doritos.

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Today I want to confuse you, dear readers, with an inspirational story.

 

A fella by the name of Mark Haub, a professor of nutrition at Kansas State University, set out to prove a point. For ten weeks, two-thirds of his calories came only from junk carbs, including twinkies, doritos, oreos, you name it. The rest came from a protein shake and some vegetables.

But he carefully measured everything before he ate, and limited his food intake to 1800 calories a day, as against a requirement of 2000 calories a day for a man of his height and weight and physical actvity.

The result? He lost 27 pounds of weight over 10 weeks, as you can see in this link.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html

The CNN reporter in this story is scratching their head as to how that could be!

But why is this so difficult to understand? If you measure everything before you put it in your mouth and have 10% fewer calories a day than your daily requirement, it absolutely does not matter what you eat, you will still drop weight and drop fat. This is the basic law of eating. Eat less, and lose weight! But can you imagine how many hunger cravings he would have had with this approach. What about the insulin spike followed by the sugar downer and how his energy levels would have fluctuated before and after meals? Does anyone wish to live like this, with hunger pangs and massive sugar highs and downs?
The lesson that we should all take away from Mark Haub is something entirely different.

The fact is that life is too short to measure calories and spend a huge amount of time thinking about how much we are eating.

Even more importantly, if human beings were routinely capable of counting calores, 95% of men in the developed world would not have body fat over 20% and 95% of women would not have body fat over 25%.

What we should learn from Mark Haub’s experiment is this; Do not count calories, because you have only a slim chance (no pun intended!) of succeeding in your weight loss program if you try to do so.

The diet that is most likely to succeed is one where you change the composition of what you eat permanently, and get rid of fast carbs and sugar from your diet.

The diet that is most likely to succeed is when you eat as much food as you like, but are careful about what you eat.

The diet that is most likely to succeed is one where you eat a wonderful and varied and epicurean diet that is rich is taste and variety, and really enjoy your dining experience.

This is the Ravionhealth lifestyle diet!