These pancakes were effin’ great! I ate them as soon as we were done filming! I think I might have let her have one bite!

Ok so here is the nutritional breakdown for both pancakes together:

280 calories
27g carbs
39g protein
2g fat

Recipe

3 egg whites
1/3 cup oatbran
1 tbsp low fat sour cream
1/4 cup pumpkin puree
28g vanilla protein powder
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp (each) nutmeg and clove

These were damn good and the nutritional profile is so much different than your standard pancake.

Thanks again to Becky for another kick ass recipe.

John

Can You Really Lose Weight Eating This Every Day?

The ketogenic diet was first tested as a treatment for epilepsy in the 1920′s. It was relatively successful and was used as a form of treatment. The diet basically consists of a very low daily carbohydrate content (15 or so grams per day) with the bulk of the remaining calories consumed coming from fat and a small amount of protein.

This diet was never meant to be used for weight loss rather it was meant as a clinical treatment for a disease state. But somehow just about any nutrition intervention (no matter what it’s for) ends up getting turned into a diet/weight loss program.

Anyway here is the quick review of what ketosis is.

Ketosis is a state when your body does not have sufficient carbohydrate intake to fuel your normal daily functioning so it starts to rely more on ketone bodies (which are made from fat) as a primary fuel source.

This happens during starvation, however you can recreate this state by eating a zero carbohydrate diet.

After a few weeks of eating in this pattern most healthy individuals seem to be able to adapt to this style of eating although it’s not necessarily fun to do for more than a couple of days (which isn’t really long enough to really get into ketosis).

In other words, you’re likely not going to want to do this for very long if you don’t have to.

The bottom line is that ketogenic diets are a rather extreme way to modify your diet. It’s not dangerous per se, but it’s also not necessary and probably unsustainable for most people. There is simply too many fun and tasty carbohydrate foods to eat (that can be incorporated into an effective weight loss program) to justify going on a restrictive ketogenic diet.

John

P.S. A simpler way to lose weight without restricting food choices is Eat Stop Eat, if you haven’t already read it I suggest you check it out.

Forget about 'what if' and starting focusing on 'what is'

If you do any recreational reading of nutrition info and nutrition marketing you’ve likely read a lot of ‘what if’ stories.

‘What if’ stories are things like:

What happens if I eat all my daily calories from carbs

or

What happens if I don’t eat enough protein today

or

What happens if I don’t eat a balanced macronutrient diet and control  my insulin levels

or

What happens to my metabolism if I don’t eat enough meals per day

This is typical of nutrition/diet marketing. But none of it deals with what IS happening right now. If you took an inventory of your current state including what you’re eating and how it is currently affecting your insulin levels, your metabolism, your energy and muscle building you’d likely find that whatever you’re currently doing is already enough and doesn’t need to be changed.

Without establishing a baseline of where you currently are you’ll never know if you need to change anything and in what direction you need to make that change.

Worrying about ‘what if’ scenarios without knowing ‘what is’ happening will just cause you stress and worry that you don’t need.

John

Are you Really Going to Measure Your Ratios Every Meal?

Most weight loss diets will usually give some sort of recommendation of the preferred or optimal protein carb and fat ratio based on the effect is supposedly has on your hormone balance and the way your body digests the food, how it will make you feel yadda yadda.

But what gets left out of the recommendation is the principle of less total calories is what is causing weight loss.

We can debate the merits of a 30/40/30 calorie ratio on appetite and the way it makes you feel all day long, but it’s a rather pointless argument.

If you’ve ever tried to actually eat at a specific ratio you’ll find out that it’s almost impossible. You’d have to measure the protein fat and carb content of each meal and of each individual food. For example you may assume that pasta is a ‘carb’ in this case, but pasta also has a fair bit of protein (and different pasta’s have different protein contents).

Same goes for things like bread, and most dairy products (they all have a mix of protein and carbs, and some of them have all three nutrients)

Balancing the nutrient ratio of a meal makes sense in theory but it’s highly impractical in practice, and as a final note it was never meant to be done on a meal by meal basis but rather on a more long term (weekly basis)

If you happen to eat a bit more carbs and bit less protein today it’s not a big deal, you’ll most likely have another day when you’ll eat more protein later in the week.

The point is that most of these dietary recommendations are meant to be done on a much longer scale than a day or a single meal. Worrying about the macronutrient content of each meal will cause you far more stress than any potential health benefit.

John

The buffet’s are treating me well here in vegas even though I’m downright abusing them. (it’s not a fair trade at all)

I can't stop eating prime rib in vegas!

Eating at buffets has reminded me of the inherent contradiction to the healthy eating mantra of eating a ‘variety’ of foods.

It’s pretty common to hear health/fitness marketers advise eating a diet with as much food variety as possible…the proverbial ‘everything in moderation is ok’ or ‘eat lots of colors’ etc.

But there is a catch 22 with this story…the more foods you have available the more chance you have to overeat. You could almost say that you get ‘full’ on one type of food or flavor/taste, but you still have room for other types of foods and flavors. (the ‘eat variety’ story should be qualified with ‘eat a variety of fruits and veggies’ specifically)

The reality is we need far less food variety then we might think. Most of our nutrients can be found in a few foods, and most of us (when we’re not lighting up a buffet in vegas) eat a routine selection of the same dozen or so foods. And this works perfectly fine for the bulk of the modern world.

You can easily make the argument that the option for eating a wide selection of foods has only become available since the modern industrial revolution anyway. So we’re not evolved to need the type of selection your grocery store offers (how the hell would someone in canada get access to a banana in the winter before the industrial revolution).

In other words, you can get by just fine with far less food variety than you think, and you most likely eat less food variety than any healthy eating mantra ever speaks of anyway. (try to think of all the different foods you’ve eaten in the past 7 days, I’ll bet it’s not as varied as you might like to think)

And that might not be such a bad thing. The more available and affordable different food choices are the more chance you will eat more of all of them.

Thanks for the suggestions on eating venues, I’ll try to check them out, but I gotta say that I’m having a hard time going anywhere besides the various buffets simply to eat prime rib and whatever else happens to be available!

John