Paradise in Cheeseburgers. Matt James
Introduction
On January 21st, 2010, I weighed 247 pounds. On March 14th, 2010, I weighed 226 pounds. What I was doing was working and something I could keep doing long-term.
There is no need to jump to the back of this book for the conclusion. The way I lost weight was by reducing my carbohydrate intake. There, now we can talk about what this entails and how an average guy like me went about doing it.
Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard stories about these fad diets like Atkins and South Beach or insert fad diet here. My hope is to dispel some of the myths behind these stories and to get you, esteemed reader, to research for yourself the effects of carbohydrates in an overweight person. I’m not promoting the “Matt James Diet.” I’m not going to try to sell you a bunch of frozen dinners, or make you use a point system. I don’t really want my own talk show, and you probably won’t see me on Oprah’s favorite book list. After researching the subject, I found that there is a lot riding on most people not knowing what actually controls our weight. The diet industry is huge. Any data that can prove you don’t need them is, needless to say, bad for their bottom line—yes, even Atkins.
Okay, I have a disclaimer first. I assume if you bought or borrowed this book, you have a weight problem, so disclaimer: I do not promise that you will lose all the weight you want to lose. In fact, I do not promise you will lose a significant portion of your weight. The fact of the matter is DNA plays a lot larger role in our weight than most of us have been told or believe. I do not know your DNA personally, or socially for that matter, so I cannot tell you how your body will react to a reduced carb lifestyle. I can only tell you what I did and what those results have been.
It must also be said that I am talking about “healthy” bodies. If you have a disease of some kind that prevents certain functions to, well, function properly, do not follow the advice of this book. If you have problems with your liver or kidneys, that is far above my pay-grade. If your issue, however, relates to your thyroid, a low-carb diet may help stabilize your weight. I am also speaking about people who accumulate fat relatively easily, so fat people, not the naturally thin.
Like I said, I’m an average guy, or at least think I am. I like sports (go Bruins, Sox, Pats and Celts!), women, and food (what else is new?). Since you aren’t buying me dinner, I won’t bore you with more details about my personal life except, of course, the whole weight loss thing.
This book smashes a few commonly held beliefs about fat accumulation. For instance, we do not get fat because we overeat or are lazy or whatever combination of the two you want to use. Also, the calories-in/calories-out paradigm is wrong. Strong words I know, but words that need to be said. There are also many health issues related to high-carbohydrate diets that we are becoming more aware of as time goes by and more research is conducted. I don’t want to scare the guys, but erectile dysfunction can be one of these issues.
Conventional diets of the low-calorie/low-fat variety, in many cases, can be detrimental to your physical and mental health. Many semi-starvation diets lead to binge eating, depression, and a whole host of other negative symptoms that severely affect our daily lives.
These are extremely important issues and some of the reasons why I decided to write this book. Hopefully, it helps a number of people along the way.
This book is laid out in a pretty straightforward manner. I am going to tell you my story first with some facts and myths interspersed along the way. After that, I’ll get technical or as technically layman (oxymoron alert!) as I can be. Our bodies are extremely complex.
Disclaimer number two: I am not a doctor and have not been trained at any medical school, although I’ve passed them on the highway. I’m also not a nutritionist, a fitness trainer, a gypsy, or a Communist. I cannot stress this enough (especially the Communist part). I am just some guy that lost a lot of weight by reducing my carb intake. I think you can too.
Most Dieting Promotions
Dieting is a relatively new phenomenon. A diet is not. Explain please! Your diet is what you make of it every day. If you eat Twinkies morning, noon, and night, your diet consists of a lot of enriched bleached wheat flour, high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, B vitamins, whole eggs, animal shortening, and a whole bunch of stuff I can’t pronounce. Your body doesn’t necessarily care what the name on the box is or what it tastes like. It will break that Twinkie down into its core parts. As far as energy goes, that means carbohydrates, fat, and protein.
A Twinkie has 150 calories per serving (one Twinkie). Those calories are made up by the 4.5 grams (g) of fat, 27g of carbs, and 1g of protein. This is when most dieting promoters tell you that you need to significantly reduce or eliminate the fat. The reason for this is mathematical for the most part.
A gram of fat contains about nine calories. So, you must burn nine calories to burn off one gram of fat. Makes sense. A gram of carbohydrate and protein contain four calories each. Cool. If this was a logic problem and this was all the information you had, you would conclude that by eliminating fat, it makes it easier for our body to burn calories. I’d rather have 28g of carbs and protein at four calories per gram equaling 112 calories than the 4.5g of fat constituting 40.5 calories.
This simple formula says to eat more carbs because you literally get more food without the high caloric intake. Easy-Peezy-Lemon-Squeezy, right?
Remember, all the ‘splainin’ for this comes later on, I’m here to tell you what I did to reduce my weight without reducing my food consumption to the point of semi-starvation. So, remember this Twinkie example as I delve in to it later on.
My point of bringing up the Twinkie now is to show you what most dieting promoters tell us what’s bad about that Twinkie and why. “It’s the fat, stupid” they shout from their rather well lit exercise havens full of beautiful people (if you’re in to tight bodies and ample bosoms).
As the kids would say, here’s the straight dope. Yes, Twinkies are bad for you. They got that much right, but they give the wrong reason. “It’s the carbs, stupid!” I shout from my not so well lit dungeonesque room full of me. Speaking of me, I don’t eat Twinkies. That’s one of the first rules of my low-carb diet. So here it is in all of its bold text glory:
Rule 1: Don’t eat Twinkies
More rules will come as you read through the book and if you’re lucky, I’ll provide all of the rules on one page for easy reference.
You’re now asking “I should eat more fat?” Yeah, Fat and protein. Dietary fat is not really the reason we get fat. Let’s say you’re on a diet (if you’re reading this, you probably are) and I offered you something that had zero grams of fat, zero grams of saturated fat, 50 milligrams (mg) of sodium, 39g of carbs while one serving contained only 140 calories. Would you take it? If you were on a low-fat/high-carb diet you would and you’d thank me.
Now, on that same diet, would you accept the Coca-Cola Classic I just offered you? No. Why not? It’s fat-free, right? No one believes that a Coke will help you lose weight. Hell, the Coca-Cola Corporation knows it so well they make several other products like Diet Coke and Coke Zero to capture the “diet crowd.” So why do we fall for the idea that low-fat/high-carb diets help us lose weight? Most dieting promoters are, in fact, promoting this in a roundabout way.
The next thing they tell us is to exercise regularly. On the surface, this is good advice. Fitness can be an important part of anybody’s life. But here’s my advice on the subject; exercise because it makes you feel good and results in better cardiovascular health, not because you are trying to lose weight. Because we have been trained to believe that if we simply burn more calories than we consume, we will lose weight, we commit ourselves to rigorous exercise programs that make us feel terrible and don’t actually result in any significant weight loss. Wait a minute, how can that be?
Again, I am speaking about myself, but test after test has proven this to be correct, exercising to lose weight fails almost every time1. I say almost because there are people that have the discipline and DNA to shed pounds while exercising. The most visible of these specimens are athletes