August 12, 2012: Day 11 of 30

8/12/2012: Day 11 of 30
Morning weight: 179.0!!!
Today's calorie count: 1580
Morning exercise: 90 minute bike ride

• Set my target heart rate monitor for 60% - 75% of max (light aerobic) which is 101bpm - 126bpm. 
• 4 minutes were below target range,
• 50 minutes were in target range, and
• 36 minutes were above target range. 
• Minutes above target range were during hill climbing.  It doesn't take much of a hill to get me in the 130s.

Evening exercise: 30 minute walk with Jack (about 2 miles)
Alcohol consumption: None
Younger Next Year pages read: 35
Notes from book: (Quotes and very near quotes are in italics)
This 35 pages covered most of Harry's chapter about diet.  He sums it up with three words, "Don't eat crap."

Specifically he talks abouts fats and starch, "The White Foods."

He starts with starches or "bad carbs." Bad carbs are The White Foods - potatoes, white rice, and pretty much everything made with white flour.  Good carbs are those that you find in nature like fruits, vegetables and whole grains.  Aside from the fact that good carbs have all kinds of great nutrients in them that you don't find in The White Foods, the biggest problem with bad carbs is that they pack a much larger - much, much larger - calorie-per-pound punch than those found in nature.

There is no equivalent to The White Foods in nature and your body does not really know what to do with them.  One of the primary signals your body receives when digesting food is the amount of sugar you just ate.  In nature, there was relatively little sugar in the food that was available.  A large meal of game, nuts, and fruits consists of relatively little sugar.  That sugar would signal the release just the right amount of stomach acid and insulin to digest that meal.  Your body doesn't know what to do with a large meal of hamburgers, french fries and a milk shake.  It sees all that sugar and releases way to much stomach acid and insulin, both of which accelerate the cycle of decay. 

The basic moral of the story on "The White Foods" is don't eat them.  Or, "If it doesn't grow that way don't eat it."  Ideally, you should be able to recognize the food you cook with and eat as something that came from the earth in more or less the condition that you see it in before you cook with it or eat it.

Harry then talks about fats.  The first type of fat he talks about is active fat, which we absorb and burn up every day, fat that we might store for a few hours, or a couple of days, but that moves in and out of our bodies as easily as it does in the migrating birds flying to Africa.  It's the healthy, "unsaturated" fat you've been hearing about.  This fat, which is supposed to be the majority of the fat you consume, is the basic fuel for your metabolism and a key building block for your body.  This is fat as fuel, you are constantly burning it as you go about your day.

Unsaturated fat is also the fat that is used for growth.  Our cell walls are largely made up of fat, as are all the connections between our brain cells, our sex hormones and many of our chemical messenger molecules.  You couldn't live a moment without the scaffolding of healthy fat that supports each living cell in your body.  Indeed, you can't make a new cell without fat, and you make new cells all the time - more than twenty billion a year - especially when you are getting younger.

Unfortunately, most of the fat that we eat today is saturated fat - which is the type of fat we use to store energy for hard times.  This is the fat that is used to store energy because it is light and it is amazingly stable.  This stability is also the reason why saturated fat is used so widely in the food industry.  Unsaturated fat gets rancid fairly quickly.  Saturated fat has a long shelf life.  It just makes economical sense to make those Oreos with a fat that will allow you to be able to sell them for as long as possible.

When we eat saturated fat our bodies do everything they can to store it.  It's our rainy day energy source and if we're eating it, our bodies think we must need to store it for the upcoming famine.  And there is more bad news, saturated fat is not a passive player; it's an inflammatory messenger in its own right, an automatic signal that it's time to decay.  That explains why rates of colon, breast and ovarian cancers in populations around the world are directly proportional to dietary levels of saturated fat.

The moral of the fat story?  Read labels, avoid saturated fats.  But don't avoid unsaturated fats, they are an essential building block of your diet.  And avoid transfats altogether.

What's left?  Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, legumes, very lean beef and pork, poultry, and fish.  In short, avoid The White Foods and avoid saturated and transfats.  Getting down to the very basics, don't eat junk.  For the most part, you know junky food when you see it.  Just turn around and keep on walking!

Harry spends the first two thirds of the book talking about exercise and one chapter talking about diet.  Daily, hard exercise is the key to being younger next year.  If you stop eating crap, you will also be thinner next year.  He does not recommend going on a diet, he recommends that you start exercising every day, beginning with today.  Eventually, you will start to feel healthier and younger, and you won't want to be overweight anymore...it will just feel wrong.  That is when you will decide to stop eating crap, and once you do that you can't help but start losing weight.