Hi Zoe

I am generally interested in nutrition and there were two books I have seen before that I wondered if you had ever come across and if so what your view was:

1. Skinny bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin
2. French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano

Thanx

I replied:

Hi Lily – I’ve not read either but I’ve got a copy of Skinny Bastards (the male version of the Skinny Bitch book) and I put it down immediately when I first got it. I just hated the language – there was swearing (F words etc) and insulting and I just found it aggressive and offensive and not how I like to take in information. I persisted a little to try to get the principles and, from admittedly a quick look, it seemed like the typical eat less/do more diet that won’t work. They call low carb diets “ridiculous“. They say that carbs are vital for providing energy (their emphasis). They are not – there are cultures today and have been many historically that have lived on meat alone for years. (The only debate is around Vit C and that’s a blog in itself one day!) RF & KB order people to stay off sugar (that’s fine with me) but then they don’t approve of milk or meat (which I don’t agree with). They want you eating carbs, basically – fruit, veg, pulses, beans, breads, pasta, potatoes etc. The American Dietary Association should love them! They don’t address for one minute the fact that the body cannot store fat without insulin and only carbs cause insulin to be released and therefore they think turning the body into a fat storing environment will create weight loss. Not a diet I would support or I book I would give reading time to.

The French women one – I got quite excited about when I first heard the title and I thought “Great – someone is doing a book on the French diet and how it is high real in food (fat) and low in processed food and this would make for a good story.” However (and I haven’t got a copy) I understand that it is more about the lifestyle of French women – eat anything, but eat slowly being an example bit of advice. I saw a great review on line that said “Her book is about lifestyle. Forget low-carbs. Ignore high-protein. Too reckless. Too du jour. As she likes to put it: ‘French women think about good things to eat; American women typically worry about bad things to eat.’ ” I like that last phrase – that makes a lot of sense. I don’t know if it advocates an eating plan or a lifestyle approach – if you read it please add a comment and let us know!
Very best wishes – Zoe

What low calories/low fat diets are effectively telling you to do is to drive from Scotland to Cornwall in the UK, or from the West to the East Coast of America, but without putting enough fuel in the car to do so (“Eat less”). Worse than that, you are invariably told to ‘flog the car’ even harder, so that it will conk out even sooner than it would have done, had you driven it to conserve energy (“Do more”).

If a car mechanic seriously told you to do this to your car you would think they were mad and yet millions of people in the ‘developed’ world are deliberately trying to run their bodies on less fuel than they need, every single day.

This is the very idea of the low calorie/low fat diet – take in less fuel than you need. The theory is that your body will make up for the calorie deficit by burning fat that you have stored already, but it is not as simple as this. Your body first and foremost is a survival machine. The human body has developed over hundreds of thousands of years and it has survived and adapted to far more challenging things than calorie counting. The body doesn’t know that you have read a diet book and it thinks you are starving and it will do anything it can to keep you alive.

The book “Stop Counting Calories & Start Losing Weight” takes you through the 3 direct things that happen when you follow a low calorie diet and the 3 indirect things and how every one of the unavoidable responses of the body to eating less works against you to keep you alive and to protect against weight loss.

Fat is also an essential part of the human diet. There are three macronutrients – carbs, fat and protein. Macronutrient is just the collective term for these three things. Fats and protein are essential for our body repair and maintenance, at the level of every single cell. Carbs are not essential. Carbs are the easiest macronutrient from which the body can get energy, but the body will turn fats and proteins into energy in the absence of carbs.

People who cut fat substantially out of their diet suffer with dry skin, brittle hair and nails. The cell repair functions of the body are impaired. Think, women especially, about how much effort you put into moisturising your skin – you can moisturise it so much better from the inside by having a good level of fat in your diet. (Drinking plenty of water is also invaluable).

Fat has been shown to have a much more effective level of satiety, so people feel fuller for longer when they have had fat in their meals. Try for yourself one day having an omelette for breakfast vs. cereal and see how much longer you can manage without wanting more food. Fat has a natural appetite regulation – try eating a bucket of popcorn or sweets and then try eating more than 2 large pork chops. We just have a far more natural appetite mechanism when it comes to real food.

The other key aspect about eating fat is that fat/proteins, like meat, fish, eggs etc, have no impact on our body’s need for insulin. We can eat a steak and the pancreas has no need to release insulin. We eat any carb e.g. a piece of fruit, or a cereal bar, and the body immediately MUST release insulin, to return our blood glucose level to the normal range. If the body doesn’t get this insulin release exactly right, we can release too much and our blood glucose level can end up lower than it was before we ate the carb. We then want another carb to get our blood glucose level up again and we are on the well known roller coaster of eating carbs and not being able to stop.

The USA, UK, Australia and NZ have spent the past thirty years testing low calorie/low fat diets, with tragic consequences – obesity has increased six fold in the UK, as an example, such that approximately one quarter of the population of all these ‘developed’ nations are now obese. Whatever diet you follow, don’t let it be low calorie/low fat!