The Fat Diet

Always Hungry?

No diet is worth doing unless you can sustain it.

It is not a diet, it is a lifestyle change.

Heard those mantras before? Well, they're not lying.

I now know why I lost 2 lbs on the whole30 diet.

I had come to the realization that fat is not your enemy, it is your friend. I'm not sure how that warped back into a low-fat diet within the last 3 years, though. The whole30 diet is not a sustainable model. It's not realistic, having to make all of your sauces - all of your mayonnaise and BBQ and ketchup because you can't have 1 ounce of sugar - even the fake stuff. You had to find special tuna because Chicken of the Sea wasn't good enough for this special diet (it has soy in it). So even though I lost 2 lbs, I didn't know why, so it wasn't worth trying to keep going.

Until I read Always Hungry?. Turns out there's a reason low-fat diets are not good for you, and why eating fat - healthy fat - is. Besides the fact that it is satiating, eating fat tells your body that it's okay to let go of the stores of fat that you already have. It won't store fat that you don't need (or that it thinks you don't need). Trying to restrict calories and exercise works in the short term, but then you are always struggling with cravings and willpower. My nutritionist would constantly tell me to distract myself by going for a walk, or doing something fun in the evening when I'm just sitting on the couch watching TV, and even after eating dinner, my brain is like "hmm, I could go for some more food."

It was always a struggle. I kept reading to "eat more protein. Protein takes more calories to break down and it's filling". No. No actually it's not. I busted my ass shoving protein down my gullet - all healthy proteins by the way. Chicken breast, greek yogurt, tuna, collagen, whey and casein shakes. See a trend here? They're all little to no fat. They sound healthy, right? But I was always eating more. I would throw mass amounts of collagen into my breakfast bars so that I would get 20g right off the bat in the morning. But, my breakfast bars are made of carbs. And by 9am I was already drinking my 36oz of water trying to fight back the hunger that was slowly creeping up on me. By 10 I needed a snack. And by 11:30 I wanted lunch like nobody's bin'ness. 

Knowing how hungry I always was by lunch time, I'd do a trick I bet a lot of you do: Overeating. Trying to stuff yourself as much as you can so that you can "make it" to dinner. It never worked. My minestrone "soup"? Sounds like a super-soup right? (Btw I exchanged the brown rice for barley and lentils) Even those carbs, those healthy, slow digesting carbs, had me hungry an hour later. There was no fat in that soup. No fat in my chicken salad (besides a smidge of mayonnaise just to hold it together), and no fat in my broccoli slaw salad.

I needed a snack by 3pm.

And by the time I got home at 5pm, I wanted dinner.

Eating dinner so early had me wanting to eat again before bed.

This wasn't working.

You can be on a plan where you don't constantly have to fight your cravings or willpower. The physician who wrote this book is not trying to sell you some "diet plan" complete with spending hundreds of dollars on branded products. He's getting nothing out of telling you this information (and sharing helpful recipes) besides the money he gets from selling the book. All he wants in return is to spread the news. I grew up in the era of fat being bad. I spent the last 2 months craving carbs and overeating and gained almost 10 pounds. I'm done with this low fat bullshit. 

I give plasma every week. It's almost like having a mini-physical all the time. They check my iron, Total Protein, blood pressure, temperature, and weight. Today my protein was 7.2. That's crazy. Back when I was trying to throw as much protein at myself as I could possibly stand, it was often below 7. (There are theories out there about protein turning into fat if you eat too much, or not being able to digest more than 30g at a time etc) and my weight? I'd lost 3 lbs since last week. (I always do plasma early in the morning because it's not as busy, so the weight stays pretty consistent). 

And I'm going to tell you right now, although Always Hungry? is about reducing carb intake, it's not as strict as Keto or Atkins. And right now, I'm not even doing any of the recipes in the book (I'm really just reading it for the science lol) I just register my food in myfitnesspal and try to reduce the amount of carbs I get over time while increasing my healthy fats (I know, it's hard. Eating fat is a lot of calories and I've been trying to do the "low cal" thing for so long it's become ingrained into my subconscious) But not all calories are the same and it will give you that satiating feeling (not just the "full" feeling!) so that you don't have to eat more trying to chase away the hunger that always seems to be present somewhere in the background.

I'm going slow, but I can already tell that's it's working. Its astonishing. I'm still getting probably 30% carbs (while keto has you only eating 5%) and I'm still trying to reduce this number, but even at this level it's working wonders. I don't get a bunch of energy from eating this way, but I can tell you that I've pretty much stopped crashing throughout my workday. Right now I've taken out even the healthy carbs like everything that was in my minestrone soup because I knew it wasn't helping me any. I'm eating egg salad and putting more fat in my chicken salad, and using full fat dressings, changing one meal at a time (will worry about dinners later). The only carbs I get during the day are from things that happen to have some added sugar like my Lighthouse Asian Sesame dressing (which I will switch out when I'm done with it), and the small amount of carbs that come in my yogurt and mayonnaise etc. Absolutely no grains. Also, on the plus side, anything that has added dietary fiber, you can minus from your carb total (it's called net carbs). At first I thought well damn, I can't have avocado because it has 12g of carbs!! But guess what? 9 of those grams are actually fiber. So, an avocado only has 3g. HA. So cheater.

credit to W. McPh - something. I can't read it, sorry :P

Anyway, I've made this post WAY longer than I intended so I'll stop talking now. Just consider it. Read the book (he scienced the shit out of diets lol but it's all in laymens terms with pictures and examples) and draw your own conclusions. Try it out for a week or two; see how you feel. Start slow. Take it easy on yourself. You don't have to dive in 100%.
Let me know how it goes, and I'll keep ya'll apprised of my progress!!