The "calory is a calory" mindset. Doug, you may have a point, and so
may Atkins, but in my experience both following up Atkins citations to
Keckwick and Pawan articles in musty old volumes of medical journals
and within the laboratory of my own body, Atkins has indeed been
proven right in the past and you haven't.
That's one thing that I have to say about Atkins. Despite what I
consider to be his dismissive attitudes regarding the psychosomatic
aspects of hunger management, if you can find the journals, he doesn't
lie and prevaricate when he quotes research. At the time I checked out
his work, I had access to an international medical library with back
issues of primary journals going back 50 years, not even microfilm
copies. When I checked out all the comments made in my little yaller
book, there was just one that I couldn't find, on page 68,
Pilkington's dismissive conclusion in Lancet.
And finally, in the long term, any approach leads to failure 95% of
the time, according to every study I've heard tell of. If that was all
that was stopping me, I would have laid down and died long ago. It's
only served to convince me that conventional wisdom is dead wrong,
perhaps only when it comes to me, perhaps when it comes to everyone.
Yes, those participate in these studies in programs that allow them to
lose weight and build up exercise programs gradually tend to keep it
off better than those who don't. Even in those cases, unless I
misremember, the differences between success rates are something like
99% failure for fast-lowers and 92% failure for slow-losers. Hardly
the glowing recommendation. I've got dial-up and I write these posts
off-line, so forgive me for not googling that. I also believe there
are alternative explanation for the reasons why these success stories
exist, but let's not get into that today.
-------------------------------
In the category of too unbelievable to be fiction, can you believe
that during the Korean War, the Army used to recruit doctors in the
New England Journal of Medicine with promises that they would have
free access to golf course at their bases abroad?
---------------------------------
I've also lost a pound a day on a strict, high-carb Pritikin program,
600 calories a day netted me 90 pounds in about 100 days, but a diet
like that cannibalizes your muscle tissue like nobody's business, does
not suppress your appetite at all, and once your attention wavers just
a touch, you could end up like me back then, a 17-year-old male
bulimic, binging and purging to try to keep the weight off.
When I started weight-lifing in my senior year of high school, I was
already 6'2" but I was ridiculously flabby all over, and it was
difficult to bench-press 100 pounds. Since back in those days I walked
three miles every day, my legs had adapted and I could still squat a
reasonable amount, but 100 pounds, for a 17-year-old, especially a
larger kind of guy like me, is ridiculous.
On the whole, bulimia was not all that bad an experience and not at
all a scary one (I never have to deal with that "want to puke but
can't feeling"😉 but it's a fundamentally unsound place to be in your
head. In my view, it makes you take on a certain idea of your body
that's hard to get rid of, which does indeed turn you into a conceited
piece of [censored].
Years later, on my first trip through a mental hospital, the fact that
I found it easy to talk about my experience shocked the group
therapist. At the time, I was 22 and weighed about 220, and much of
the group was made up of habitual substance abusers (the norm in a
mental hospital) and a handful of depressive anorexics. I felt stupid
even feeling remotely ashamed surrounded by these poor women. It took
one trip to the school counselor, just one admission to another human
being, and I was in reverse away from a bad place, lucky me. It turned
these poor women into frightening caricatures of humanity.
It was individual therapy that brought me face to face with my money
problem, the fact that I was raised poor and that has really created a
series of dysfunctional spending habits in me. And it was therapy with
a guy who didn't have a PhD, who just kept talking to me until the
time came when he forced me to look straight on at my problems, at my
ballooning debt and health-care costs, at the options available to me,
at the built-up anxiety so terrible that I couldn't face it.
This group is very much already helping me in that way. Even the
occasional snide and the very few ignorant comments go a long way: by
upping my determination to prove them wrong. Some of you have
extremely good suggestions, and by reading and contributing to this
thread, you've already offered me something new, a forum where I get
to connect with people who know something about my problem, where talk
can just happen.
--------------------------------
I'm glad finally someone asked about exercise. I run for half-an-hour
every day. There is absolutely nothing like running to take fat off,
from what a Navy doc once explained to me, the continued jarring
impacts just beat hell out of your flab and force dissolving fat
tissue to aerate. When it's time, I'll get back to judo, which I
started doing years ago overseas but had to quit when my schedule went
to hell.
For now, anxious not to make the odd neighborhood I live in talk (I
live in what I would call a suburban residential townhouse condominum
complex with primarily retirees and yuppies for neighbors, but more
about that some other time), I go down to my basement with a hand-held
lap counter and jog back and forth through the rooms until my timer
beeps. I had to build up to it by walking 10,000 steps a day for a
while, but I like running, even though the kind of running I'm
detailing is not all that fun, unlike running a consistent route
through a large park as the seasons change, which, as you build that
good habit, can truly become one of life's finest pleasures.
Again, I got into running overseas, just after I turned down the Navy.
If you had told me when I was fifteen that I would someday enjoy
running, the overweight teenager that I was could have spent weeks
patiently trying to convince you that it would be impossible.
---------------------------------------
Jackie, once again you have handed me exactly what I need to know.
Thank you.
----------------------------------------
Roger, I don't agree with you that cutting back on carbs will control
appetite for me. It cures the worst of the hunger pangs, but for me,
given my open mental issues concerning food, and I suspect for quite a
few dieters, few of us actually eat as much as we do simply for the
biochemical reasons Atkins would like us to believe. But it's going to
take some time and thinking to properly present my argument for that,
so I'll save that for another day.