Yes it is true. Food producers do not care if you ever get a six pack. They don’t care if you lose fat at all. They don’t even care if you are healthy. In fact when it comes down to it, the producers only care about one thing when it comes to consumers. That they consume, and that they consume often.

If we cannot count on the people and companies who produce the foods we eat to watch out for our waistlines and health, who can we count on?  Where does the responsibility lie for making sure what we are consuming on a daily basis is serving our ultimate well being?  Is it the government agencies who have established the RDA’s?  No I don’t think so.  The fact is they have as much interest in your health as the food producers. Their interests lie more in making sure you consume lots of the products that are subsidized by government like corn, wheat, and soy. How you consume these products and in what form is secondary to the fact that you consume them, a lot of them.

If we can’t count on big business or government to make unbiased healthy food choices for us, who do we turn to? Who should make the final decisions on what goes into our mouths and how it is going to affect our “bottom line”? Guess what? It is that person staring back at you in the mirror.

Maybe nobody wants to hear it but if you are overweight or unhealthy it is  mostly if not completely your fault. Nothing affects your bodyfat levels and your health more than what you eat. Exercise is a close second but without proper eating on a consistent basis you will ultimately gain weight and lose your health.

Making healthy food choices can seem like a pretty daunting task in todays world. Everywhere we turn there are foods of convenience that, lets face it, everybody knows are not good food choices. You don’t need a degree in nutritional science to figure out french fries and ding dongs for dinner is not a good call.  But what about all the products that are have the words “natural” and “healthy” and “organic”  screaming across the packaging. Surely these must be good choices.  These term are really meaningless and are far more about getting you to buy the product than contributing to your health. The very fact that these products are in a package nearly guarantees they are not all they are cracked up to be. “Organic” or “whole grain” ding dongs are still crap and they will still make you fat. End of story.

Here is a simple way to evaluate foods. Test the food against these 3 rules and if it passes, its in your basket, if it fails its out.

1) Is it a food or a food product.

Most of the contents of any grocery store is not food but rather food products. Taking a whole food and processing it into another product typically removes any goodness the original food contained. As an example lets use oats. Oats on its own is a highly nutritious food with lots of fiber, vitamins, minerals, and a good source of slowing digesting carbohydrate.  All things conducive to a lean and healthy body.  Take those whole large flakes of oats and grind it into a flour, remove the fiber so you have a nice fine consistency,  bleach it so it is all the same color, add sugar, salt and a host of other preservatives, form it into a shape appealing to the eye and put it in a box. Now you have a whole grain oat cereal. Because studies have shown that oats can reduce cholesterol and reducing cholesterol may prevent heart disease lets put a government approved heart healthy badge on it just for good measure. It should be easy to see although these foods both contain oats, that is where the similarities end. This actually leads right into the next rule.

2)Does it have more than 5 ingredients.

The more processed a food is the worse it is going to be for your health and your waistline.  The more processed the food the more ingredients will be added to ensure that product can stay on the shelf longer without spoiling. The longer it can stay on the shelf, the more profit is made because of factors like central manufacturing,shipping, and storage facilities. A loaf of wonderbread can be shipped across the country, sit on the shelf in a warehouse or in the store for days or weeks, and still be sold as soft and white as the day it was made. It also has over 20 ingredients, most of which no one but a chemical scientist would even know what they were, that ensure it will remain soft and white for a long time. Try leaving a loaf of homemade whole grain bread on your counter for a week and see what happens. Hope you are not allergic to penicillin.

Ideally it would be nice to pick foods that only have one ingredient.  A whole apple contains apple, a steak contains steak for example. This is not always possible though.  If you make a effort to fill your cart with as little “ingredients” as possible and stick to food, you will be way ahead of the game. No need to count calories or gram of protein or carbs. Try counting ingredients. Its easier and it works.

3)Could I pick it, dig it from the ground, or chase it down.

This is the simplest rule of all but it is also very effective.  You can put any food to this test and if it passes you are pretty much guaranteed a wise choice.  You can pick apples, dig potatoes or carrots from the ground, or chase down a chicken.  There is no Apple Cinnamon Cheerio tree, no french fries in the garden, and no chicken nuggets, or tofurkey running around in the barnyard.  All of these products started out as whole foods but after processing they are now products.  See rule 1.

Using these guidelines to chose your food takes out most of the guess work and make counting calories a thing of the past. No eliminating foods based on macro-nutrient profile but instead eliminating “non nutrient food”.  Give it a try. Your health and your waistline will thank you.

Have a custom diet designed for you

kevin@kevinweiss.com

Sometimes in the quest for those ripped abs and tight glutes people can become, shall we say, a little obsessive. I have personally witnessed natural bodybuilders weigh out every oz of food and eliminate one food over another because of a difference of a few calories or a gram or two of fat or carbs. Also people interested in general wellness or life extension have been know to be very restrictive when it comes to food selection. I am all for following a properly designed diet and training program but I will let you watch the video below and decide if chasing ultimate health can be taken too far.

Now that we have looked at all the various indexes that are suppose to help us chose the proper foods for fat loss, it is time to get down to the real issue. How can you make intelligent decisions  when it comes to planning meals? Does every food you choose have to have a Glycemic index of less than 50, a Glycemic load of less than 10 and, and a satiety index of more than 100?  Good luck with that!  As I said before, the various indexs are not in agreement on what foods are best and what are worst. Personally I have no desire to  look up every food I choose before I eat it to see where it ranks either. There is an easier way.  All we have to do is apply some common sense and everything else seems to fall into place.

Essentially what was trying to be achieved by all of these indexes was 3 things:

1. control insulin secretion and stabilize blood sugar levels.
2. control calories
3. control hunger

These are 3 important things in my opinion if dropping bodyfat is your goal.  All 3 of these factors go hand in hand as well. Keeping your blood sugar stable throughout the day will control your hunger so you eat less calories overall. If you eat fewer calories than your body burns you will be in a deficit and will lose fat. Sounds pretty simple, and it actually is.  You just have to chose foods (or eliminate foods) based on one single question.

• How processed is this food?

Processing food essentially prechews, predigests, and preserves it.  Processing also removes water from a food and replaces it with fat, usually a saturated or trans fat so it will keep on the shelf longer.  Processing usually strips most if not all of the fiber out of the food, and adds salt and other “spices” (MSG is classified as a spice).  All of these things make the food taste better.  Unfortunately all of the processes cause a food have a greater impact on insulin secretion, allow us to eat more before we realize we are full, and cause use to be hungry again soon after eating.

Lets use the simple potato as an example of how processing affects a food and how that affects you.  A baked russet potato has next to no processing. It has been washed (it better be anyway) poked a few times and baked.  A 7.5oz potato has 168 calories, 0.2 g of fat and 4 g of fiber. If we go to the extreme end of processing,  potato chips,  a 7.5 oz serving has 1123 calories, 67.5 g of fat and 7.5 g of fiber.  Nearly all of the additional calories in the chips are from fat. That is because the water in the potato that has zero calories has been replaced with fat that contains 9 calories per gram.  This is a very extreme example, but lets compare baked french fries that you buy and prepare at home.  They are just cut up potato that is frozen right?  What’s the difference between that and a whole potato?  Well all you have to do is flip them both over and read the ingredients.  I had a hard time finding the ingredients label on the potato but I am going to go out on a limb and say it contains “potato”.   The bagged frozen potato contained  not less than 10 ingredients, Potatoes, Sunflower Oil, Batter (Wheat Flour, Modified Starch (Maize, Tapioca), Rice Flour, Salt, Corn Starch, Natural Colours (Turmeric Extract, Paprika Extract))  A 7.5 oz serving of these potatoes was 365 calories. More than double what an actual potato is.  This of course does not include any oil you use in the cooking process and anything you add afterwards.  Also of note, if you cooked and broke one of these fries open, it was obvious that the rough, starchy, consistency of a potato was not there. It was more like it had been mashed to almost a liquid and then pressed into its current shape. Your body has to do very little to break these “potatoes” down, they almost melt in your mouth. Like they had already been pre chewed. This makes it very easy for you to eat a tremendous amount of calories in no time. A high intake of easily digested food spikes your blood glucose and causes a insulin spike to deal with the sugar in the blood steam. Once the insulin has dealt with the glucose you become hungry again.  The less food you eat and the longer it takes to digest the more stable your blood sugar remains and the lower the insulin response.

There are many other factors I consider when I design a fat loss diet for a client, like individual lifestyle factors, macronutrient breakdown, and portion size, but people can make tremendous progress just by eliminating processed foods as much from their diets as possible.  We need to worry about the elephant in the living room crapping on the floor instead of the dust on the blinds. Try this the next time you go grocery shopping. Try to buy as many things as possible with no label.  The things you do buy with labels, try the limit the ingredient list to 3 or less.  You might be surprised how different you cart looks going through the checkout. In a short time you might be surprised how you look to.

kevin@kevinweiss.com

It may seem like I am stating the bloody obvious with the title of this post, but there is yet another index I should cover before I get to what I feel is the most important factor in fat loss.  This index offers a few benefits over the Glycemic Index (GI) and the Glycemic Load (GL) covered in the previous posts, and gets us closer to what is really important.

The Satiety Index

“The Satiety Index of Common Foods”, was published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, September 1995. In this study, the researchers fed human test subjects fixed-Calorie portions of thirty-eight different foods, and then recorded the subjects’ perceived hunger following each feeding.
The results of this study clearly indicated that certain foods are much better than others for satisfying hunger. The researchers used white bread as their reference point, and arbitrarily assigned it a “Satiety Index” of 100. Foods that did a better job of satisfying hunger were given proportionately higher values, and foods that were less satisfying were assigned lower values. Among the most satisfying foods they tested were plain boiled potatoes, raw fruits, fish, and lean meats. Subjects that consumed the prescribed portion of these foods were less likely to feel hungry immediately afterward. Foods that did the poorest job of satisfying hunger included croissants, donuts, candy bars, and peanuts.

It is interesting to note that the food that scored by far the best for satisfying hunger was boiled white potato (a high GI food). It scored a whopping 323!  Now Don’t use this as an excuse to gobble down french fries.  They only scored 116. Also some of the foods that scored the worst for satisfying hunger, like peanuts (84 SI), are low GI (14 GI).

It is very easy to see that comparing foods across these various indexes gives very different results.  Many foods that would be shunned because of their high GI look not so bad under the GL scale and even better under the SI. The opposite is also true.

Choosing foods that satisfy you faster is certainly a step in the right direction when it comes to dropping bodyfat, but it is not the only factor. Relying on indexes to tell you what foods to eat can be tedious and quite honestly a pain in the ass.   In the next post I will finally bring this all together and show how you can choose foods that will get you going towards your fat loss goals, no index required.

Many people are familiar with the glycemic index (GI) but for those that are not lets start with a brief description. The glycemic index (GI) is a ranking of carbohydrates on a scale from 0 to 100 according to the extent to which they raise blood sugar levels after eating. Foods with a high GI are those which are rapidly digested and absorbed and result in marked fluctuations in blood sugar levels. Low-GI foods, by virtue of their slow digestion and absorption, produce gradual rises in blood sugar and insulin levels. It stands to reason that when fat loss is your ultimate goal a low GI diet is the path to the promised land and all high GI foods should be banished. Well maybe it is not that black and white.

One problem is how the GI of specific foods are determined. In a clinically controlled setting,  portions of food that contain 50g of carbohydrate are fed to people who have fasted overnight. The rise in blood sugar is measured every 15 minutes for 3 hours and then plotted on a graph. The area under the curve is measured and indexed against glucose at 100. That number is the food’s glycemic index. The higher the rise in blood sugar, the higher the glycemic index of that food. Although this makes nerds in lab coats happy, because of the controls that can be imposed, this is not a reflection of real life.  The digestion/absorption of previous meals, as well as the context of the carbohydrate food can drastically alter GI. Rarely are foods eaten in isolation and in the amounts that are seen in these tests. For example carrots, contain about 7% carbohydrate. This means you would have to eat more than 5 lbs of carrots first thing in the morning, by themselves, to get a GI rating. That’s not realistic. Also the GI of a food is different if it is cooked or raw, mashed or chopped, and more or less ripe.  Adding protein, fat or fiber to a carbohydrate further alters it GI.

If a lean, ripped physique is you goal, choosing food based on GI alone holds many pitfalls. Many high calorie foods have relatively low GI ratings. Ice cream, milk chocolate, and peanut M&M candies all have a lower GI rating than a yam.  I have designed many successful fat loss diets that included yams. I have yet to reccomend ice cream for someone seeking a ripped six pack.

Although I would like to take credit for exposing these flaws in the GI that is very far from the truth. These short coming have been known for a long time. Of course when a flaw is found with a particular system an alternative is proposed to pick up where the other fell short.  Enter the Glycemic Load Index or GL.  Next time we will see if this holds the answers to the never ending battle of the bulge. Have a great day.

Get a custom fat loss diet designed for you.

If you would like to contact me shoot me an email at kevin@kevinweiss.com

Many people are familiar with the glycemic index (GI) but for those that are not lets start with a brief description. The glycemic index (GI) is a ranking of carbohydrates on a scale from 0 to 100 according to the extent to which they raise blood sugar levels after eating. Foods with a high GI are those which are rapidly digested and absorbed and result in marked fluctuations in blood sugar levels. Low-GI foods, by virtue of their slow digestion and absorption, produce gradual rises in blood sugar and insulin levels. It stands to reason that when fat loss is your ultimate goal a low GI diet is the path to the promised land and all high GI foods should be banished. Well maybe it is not that black and white.

One problem is how the GI of specific foods are determined. In a clinically controlled setting,  portions of food that contain 50g of carbohydrate are fed to people who have fasted overnight. The rise in blood sugar is measured every 15 minutes for 3 hours and then plotted on a graph. The area under the curve is measured and indexed against glucose at 100. That number is the food’s glycemic index. The higher the rise in blood sugar, the higher the glycemic index of that food. Although this makes nerds in lab coats happy, because of the controls that can be imposed, this is not a reflection of real life.  The digestion/absorption of previous meals, as well as the context of the carbohydrate food can drastically alter GI. Rarely are foods eaten in isolation and in the amounts that are seen in these tests. For example carrots, contain about 7% carbohydrate. This means you would have to eat more than 5 lbs of carrots first thing in the morning, by themselves, to get a GI rating. That’s not realistic. Also the GI of a food is different if it is cooked or raw, mashed or chopped, and more or less ripe.  Adding protein, fat or fiber to a carbohydrate further alters it GI.

If a lean, ripped physique is you goal, choosing food based on GI alone holds many pitfalls. Many high calorie foods have relatively low GI ratings. Ice cream, milk chocolate, and peanut M&M candies all have a lower GI rating than a yam.  I have designed many successful fat loss diets that included yams. I have yet to reccomend ice cream for someone seeking a ripped six pack.

Although I would like to take credit for exposing these flaws in the GI that is very far from the truth. These short coming have been known for a long time. Of course when a flaw is found with a particular system an alternative is proposed to pick up where the other fell short.  Enter the Glycemic Load Index or GL.  Next time we will see if this holds the answers to the never ending battle of the bulge. Have a great day.

kevin@kevinweiss.com

In the last post it was established that your body would not burn fat for energy when insulin is present. Since insulin is released every time we eat the trick is to get insulin levels back down as fast as possible after a meal so we can get back into fat burning land. How do we do that though? Well there are a few ways and if you are reading this blog,  you are probably already doing some of them. One of the obvious ways is to eat a low carb diet, but that has many drawbacks and needs to be implemented properly to maintain workout intensity. That is a subject all its own so I will address that in a future blog. What I want to focus on today is minimizing insulin resistance, and maximizing insulin sensitivity.

We already know that insulin delivers glucose to the muscle cells, fat cells and liver. That”s a good thing. When these cells become “resistant” to insulin’s effect, bad thing definitely start happening.  Muscle cells will not “uptake” the glucose to be stored as glycogen, the fat cells release more free fatty acids into the blood steam,  and the liver ignores the signal to stop producing more glucose. Elevated blood fatty acid levels, reduced muscle glucose uptake, and increased liver glucose production all contribute to elevated blood glucose levels. This causes the pancreas  to release more insulin and the vicious circle continues. Next stop, type 2 diabetes.  Hopefully, and quite likely, if you are reading this you are a long way from this condition and are just trying to get leaner. So lets look at how to maximize your insulin sensitivity so you can get those insulin levels down and burn off  some body fat.

Here are the main factors that will help increase insulin sensitivity:

• eating less saturated fat and fewer total calories.
• keep blood sugars stable throughout the day.
• drink little or no alcohol.
• exercise regularly
• not smoking
• reducing  stress.

Obviously doing the opposite of these thing will increase insulin resistance.  If you are doing all of the above CONSISTENTLY, good for you! You are well on your way to that six pack. If you have room for improvement, and most of us do, it could be the reason you fat loss goals have stalled.

Next week I want to talk about the glycemic index, how it relates to controlling insulin levels, and why it can be misleading when planning a diet. Have a good week.

A calorie of protein provides the same amount of energy to the body as a calorie of fat or carbohydrate.  This may in fact be true but lost in this broad statement is the fact that these different nutrients have different effects on metabolism and hormone secretion that are far  more important than just their caloric value. One of the major hormones influenced by nutrient intake is insulin.

So what is Insulin? In simple terms insulin is defined as a polypeptide hormone  that regulates carbohydrate metabolism.In simpler terms this means that after a meal, insulin deals with the rise in blood sugar by delivering it to the cells where it can be used for energy.  While this function is very important, insulin does much more. A study in 1999 showed that insulin is involved in many critical metabolic functions including, the breakdown and utilization (burning) of both dietary and body fat. Insulin was shown to inhibits fat breakdown, so when insulin levels are elevated your body cannot break down stored fat to be used for energy.  If you cannot burn bodyfat for energy it does not seem likely you will reduce your fat stores. Insulin must be the worst thing in the world! Anything that stops us from burning bodyfat and achieving that highly coveted six pack must be completely done away with! Not so fast.  That type of thinking gets babies thrown out with the bath water.  Over the next several posts I will discuss, 

1)Why and when insulin is bad.

2)Why and when insulin is good.

3)How to eat to minimize the bad and maximize the good.

Not sure how many posts this will be broken into as it is a massive subject but I hope you stay tuned.