Weight Loss Secret – Fiber

A while back I made some discoveries in my diet that helped immenselyto control my appetite. Still working on applying them all the time, but at least I know about it. I will let you in on my little secret. I still have the days where I find myself in the kitchen eating item after item. It used to be getting up from the couch or whatever other sedentary non-activity I was doing. But I am now finding it happens more when I work out more. I basically use up a lot of muscle glycogen and then my body wants to replace it. No problem really as long as I eat the right foods. Therein lies the problem. Here is an excerpt from a blog I wrote a while back but did not post for some reason.

I have been struggling with the calorie counting for 11 weeks or so now. OK, struggle is not the right word, it has been very successful, but it is a battle to do better. My goal was initially to eat 1800 a day and it didn’t happen, I was still successful at 2200 calories daily but it takes longer that way to lose weight. I have been getting it down close to 2000 on average for a few weeks now. This last week I intentionally added some fiber to my diet and the meals are not only making me full, I sometimes feel stuffed. These days where it happens I am eating less than 1800 calories and I have the feeling of being stuffed! I can hardly believe it.

The discovery was that fiber keep you feeling full. And it is even better if it is the bulky stuff like a cup of carrots, as opposed to something that sounds goofy but many people do, like eating a granola bar that wasn’t all that great for you but is laced with several grams of chickory root that was dried and ground up and added to the bar. Yeah this is what a fiber one bar is, only 140 calories and 10 grams of soluable fiber. Soluable means two things, to those with even a little high school chemistry it means that it will dissolve in water. But the real way soluable fiber is classified that way is that it ferments in the gut. Thats right, you can hear it talking back later. Eat a fiber one bar in the morning and evening for a couple days if you need to win any contests.

Now it is recommended to eat several times after a hard workout at short intervals.  The first item is a liquid recovery drink followed by small meals at two hour intervals. Ideally these would be chosen for their nutritional value and they would involve fruits and vegetables and protien and even some good fats. My problem, is they are trips to the cupboard for a snack not a meal. I eat cheese crackers with a glass of milk. Then I am back later for ritz slimed with peanut butter and another glass of milk. Then that weight watchers popsicle for 140 calories calls me out. Then that wasn’t really a meal so I prepare a small sandwhich to go with it.

The thing is I am supposed to eat meals at these intervals when I work out long and hard. The last two Saturdays I did quite a bit. 1.2 mile swim, a 16 mile bike and a 3 mile run here for 1500 calories. Or a half marathon and a 1050 yard swim for 2100 calories. It takes over 2 hours and I get very hungry. I need to skip the dense caloric foods that come prepackaged for quick eating and take the time to eat more like I do during the week.

I eat breakfast during the week, then pack up a snack for the morning, lunch, and a snack for the afternoon. By the time I am out the door for work I know exactly how many calories I will have eaten before I sit down to my dinner, barring unforseen circumstances of course. Things like donuts using Jedi mind tricks to make me scoop them up off the plate when idiots bring them in to work thinking they are being nice. I usually avoid them cause they are not around, but sometimes I am weak. Who the hell needs to eat a 400-500 calorie deep fried pastry slathered with superfine ground sucrose mixed with a liquid and flavors like maple? Maybe I should cut the donut into sixths and take one bite. One 60 calorie bite that is still not worth it. Or better yet take a donut, take a bit, and toss the blasted thing in the trash. That will be what I try the next time, it gets rid of one more donut from the pile so they are gone faster, I get a little taste, and I still only eat 60 calories. I will head out like I am refilling my coffee so no one sees me and gets offended.

On Saturday I have no concept of planning. The only thing I do lately is make sure I get the recoverey drink. And then plan to eat 3 times after each of the next 2 hour periods. I shall plan all the meals the next few times. One of the items should be a soup that has lots of fiber. Another should include veggies, and another should include a piece of fruit. Here is the plan:

1. after workout: revovery drink (Endurox R4) 270 calories
2. 1 hour later or when hungry: 1/2 c plain yogurt, 1/2 c fruit, stevia sweetener, with added fiber (T ground flax) and 1/4 c of a crunchy cereal.  200 calories
3. 2 hours later: 8 ritz crackers, 3 slices lunch ham, 1 slice cheese, 1/2 c baby carrots, 1/2 c raw brocolli. 300 calories
4. 2 hours later: large bowl of lentil and sausage soup with veggies. This recipe is one of our family favorites and we use turkey sausage now. 200 calories.

Now this 1000 calorie blitzkrieg might sound like I am going overboard. But I tell you I just burned 1500 calories and only ate 1400 (breakfast of 400 plus 1000 recovery) and I am sitting at just about dinner time with a negative calorie balance for the day so far. If I am not just raving hungry I have accomplished my goal. Besides looking back over my calorie counts I notice on Saturdays I have been doing better since I started doing a recovery drink alone, so this is the easy first step to a successful workout and not eating too much later. But I still do poorly when I eat unheathy snacks by the time I get to dinner I still have big hunger cravings. Granola bars, cheese-n-crackers, cheesy-crackers sandwiches, and those darn weight watchers cookies-n-cream popsicles, and the skinny cow ice cream sandwiches are the typical things that find their weigh into my belly. (yeah I spelled it wrong on purpose).

There was one saturday where I ate 300 calories for breakfast, 200 in gel and sport drink during the 1700 calories workout (1.2 mile swim, 14 mile bike, 3.2 mile run). Then went on to have 550 calories for lunch, 600 calories in afternoon snacks, and found myself with such an urge to eat that I ate 1400 calories around what should have been dinner time in snacks that consisted of: girl scout cookies, ice cream sandwhiches,crackers n peanut butter, popcorn, and cereal. Good thing the day ended there.

 I really do think fiber, by way of eating it in naturally low calorie high bulk foods is the key to not being hungry and eating too much. I will leave you with a little more from that blog entry that never got posted where I was dicussing what I learned from eating fiber.

 I am skipping an afternoon snack here and there not because of will power but because I don’t feel hungry. I can really pack away the calories when we go out and eat for example at Red Robin Burger a couple of months ago I had the banzai burger (1000 calories) with steak fries (hundreds more) and then a tase of the kid’s milkshakes and birthday sunday for a total of 1500 calories in one meal. Granted I was full, and a little uncomfortable, but it is the same feeling I had the other evening when I ate about 600 calories of lentil and sausage soup which had about 18-20 grams of fiber in the one serving (lentils are amazing). And get this, less than half of the calories came from the soup, the crackers and milk were more calories. I did not even consider a late night snack and ended the day on 1760 calories stuffed and wanting no more. Every other time I ate 1760 calories or less (11 times about once a week) the following day I ate (2145, 2420, 2320, 2460, 2570, 2000, 2620, 2260, 1935, 2165, 1950) which is an average of 2260 and this time I ate 1920 the lowest followed by another day that was better than my goal of 2000. (It is cool to have the spreadsheet of data for comparisons like this.) And this second day the heaviest workout day of my workouts at 2300 yards swam in 64 minutes and 4.7 miles run in 44 and a half minutes. That is 1380 calories burned and still I sit here without hunger writing this, full for the day on 1850 calories. This fiber stuff is magic I tell you.

Tricky Nutrition Labels

I hate how marketers use the nutrition labels to display unrealistic information. They are following the rules sure, but the biggest thing they love to do is make the portion size so small they can put a big fat zero for everything. You are thinking silly am I being? (Yeah I love Yoda, so what)

Take this example. Pam spray, which is an oil, has zero calories. This is oil, pure oil, nothing else. Oil has 9 calories per gram, so they make sure that the hole size on the can does not spray out more than 1/18th of a gram in a third of a second so they can round the half down to zero. Then they tell you the serving size is a third of a second of spray. Well I spray about 2 seconds to cover a small 6″ pan to cook an omelet, maybe it is more like 1.62 seconds on further reflection. So let’s see, 6 times zero, oh that’s easy, zero. I am sure marketers are telling the food engineers, packaging engineers, and whoever else is involved to come up with certain numbers. Gosh if you could just make this 5 calories per serving then people will write it off as nothing but if you have to put 13, then we are not only going to lose those people that read labels for weight loss but anyone that is supersticious as well. Oh, well that is easy the group of engineers says, we just replace 15% of the sugar with erythritol and cut the serving size in half.

Now I am willing to bet there are much worse things going on than the simple serving size example of Pam spray. I have no proof, but if I thought of it after thinking about it for a total of say a few minutes then certainly someone in a position to do something about it could have. And one of them probably did it. So what might they do? How about sending a batch of food for testing that is not the same as the one they sell. Now outright lying is probably not a good idea, let’s say they get a batch of avacados for their guacamole that are not so creamy. They grew in less than idea condition or were picked too early or something and they have less fat content than the norm. Well send this batch off to test for the labels and voila, we have the lowest fat content in our guacamole of all the leading brands. There is variance in all foods that grow, it can be seasonal, it can be a bad area or bad farming techniques or just bad weather that year. It would be easy to alter the content of a test batch to get the results desired. Even if by accident this will be happening all the time. This is part of why buying your herbal remedies is frowned upon, no matter what you think you are getting if you are not going with a company that actually has to charge more to do it right, then you are getting junk quality, which is certainly not what they sent in for testing. We are talking billions of dollars in this business every year.

So now for one other example. Weight Watchers points is the perfect example. I did weight watchers way back when and got the little slider to figure out the points of a meal. Well, the handy dandy pocket slider tool was not something I was going to carry around. So I figured out the formula.

ww_points = (calories – 20 – 10 * fiber_grams + fat_grams * 50 / 12) / 50

So there are a few things to notice about the formula, first off each 50 calories is a point once you are past the free 20 calories and the fiber and fat modifiers. If you calculate 5 items separately you get an extra 100 calories. This is not only silly, but the Weight Watchers tells you to do the whole meal not item by item. Another thing to notice is that you get bonus calories for the fiber. It is supposed to stop at some number but I cannot remember what, I seem to recall 4 grams. It would depend on how much food you are talking about I think. You can’t just add fiber to a yogurt until it reaches 0 points and then suffer the abdominal pain, you can only count so much per item. If you are doing the calculations for an entire meal then obviously the limit would be higher and 4 grams would not be enough, but then who knows. I don’t use the program anymore so I am not going to look it up again. It should be very clear that if you are designing a meal to be labled with the weight watchers points you could easily do some things to make it look better. That is by reducing portion size to round down. Points were not meant to be broken apart.

Now for the product we are going to pick on. Progresso Soup, I have two cans, one each of Light Italian-Style Vegetable / Light Chicken Noodle. The label says 0 / 1 points and 60 / 70 calories. All of this is per serving of course. The serving size is 1 cup which is 242 grams/236 grams. Yeah, each soup weighs a different amount. The label says about 2 servings on both.

<<About?>>, what the hell!

Who is going to open a ready to serve can of soup and not eat the whole thing. It appears to be 120 or 140 calories which is not too many calories for anyone, so just put 1 serving on the darn label guys. Each can of soup has 524 grams in it. So the actual servings in each can is 2.17 / 2.22. I wish I could pay my taxes like this. $3225 tax bill is about $3000. Better yet let me pay about $125 every two weeks from my check and wind up paying $100  x 26 times.

So each can has

veggies: calories = 130, fiber = 9g,fat = zero of course,

chicken: calories = 155, fiber = 4.4g, fat = 3.3g

If you ate a can of soup for lunch you think you either had 0 points or 2 points if you just read the label, or you would probably assign the whole can of veggies 1 if you had any sense that they were tricking you. But in fact you would be eating 2 points for the veggie, or slightly under if you were not willing to round up, and 3 points if you appropriately round up the number for the chicken noodle. And if you just ate the soup every day for lunch thinking it was two servings and therefore 120 /140 calories, you would be surprised to learn that you ate an extra 3650 / 5475 calories during the year. Yeah I am using their “skewing data” techniques against them but they do it all the time so they can’t really complain that I am now can they?

Now all said and done I love the soup and didn’t buy it because of the weight watchers points or the exact calorie counts. It simply lets me fill up on soup and eat my crackers too. An easy way to get a meal under 400 calories is all I am shooting for when I grab a can.

So what can we take away from this? Besides the fact that I am long winded? One should always take advantage of a poor situation. I do this by math exercies in the store as I shop to work my way through all the obfuscation and to stay sharp so I can live longer.

Oh and another thing. Let’s all force the beer and wine and hard liquor companies to put the nutrition labels on their product too. It is, after all, something we ingest, although using the word nutrition is kind of an oxymoron.

Post Exercise Recovery Drink

 A Post exercise recovery drink is something that someone who has depleted their muscle’s glycogen stores by working out for a long time drinks to recover faster. I have personally found that 90 minutes is not quite enough to “need” one but two hours is. This from a person that still has enough fat stores to help me through a 90 minute workout better than the fit athlete that has nothing to spare. I would imagine someone with a lower body fat percentage would hit this point sooner (that would be me in 90 days).

How did I figure this out you ask and where did the 90 minutes to two hours come from? I recently increased my Saturday workouts to two plus hours of pretty intense work from ones that were not more than 90. What I found is that when I get home I am tired and want to nap. OK, no real surprise there. But, we are not talking about a nap like those my dad used to take where he would turn on the golf tournament and proceed to drift in and out for then next 3 hours. I am talking about I can’t hardly keep my eye lids open I feel like I didn’t sleep last night I need to go to bed. And then find myself under a few blankets hours later feeling like I just woke up after surgery in the recovery room straining to lift my drool covered face off the pillow and focus on something in the room. Which just happens to be about 3 hours later, not really a “nap” in anyones book. I chalked the first week up to not sure what is wrong, maybe I am a little sick and just didn’t know it. But the second week sort of made me think it had to do with burning more than 1500 calories while only eating a 300 calorie breakfast and a 100-200 calorie energy bar afterwards. Also a point I must make, my typical 60-90 workouts always includes me eating a 100 calorie mini-cliff bar at a minimum. My guess is that it may have been some help but not enough and with no food I would hit the wall sooner. With this study consisting of one it is all anecdotal evidence anyway.

As I am sure you know, I am trying to lose weight by triathlon, and have now reached a point where I can work out longer and this eating like a bird does not work if long workouts are the order of the day. I can have my 300 calorie breakfast no problem, but then to work out and burn what is approching 1800 calories in 150-160 minutes of working out without more energy is a problem. I need to consider what my body needs not only after that workout but during it as well. I decided to eat a 100 calorie mini-cliff bar between the swim and bike and bike and run. I also tried a gel pack during the bike instead. I think I need to skip the bars, they have too much chance to upset my stomach, and the gel is kind of pointless cause you need to swash it all down with a ton of water anyway. Instead I am going to try a gatorade equivalent this Saturday. I will start drinking it after the swim and finish it off at the end of the bike to head out for the run, since that is the easiest time to drink. Last Saturday I made a post exercise recovery drink using the protien drink powder, some milk, and a packet of hot chocolate to boost the carbs and make the stuff tase better. I don’t think I had the ideal mix yet, but I did have 25 grams of protien and another 40 grams of carbs. This is about 260 calories and although this might be a little bit light on the calories and carbs, it sure did make all the difference in the world. I had no overwhelming tiredness, and I felt later in the day and the next morning like I hadn’t even worked out. Most all of the weeks in the past I felt a little tight Saturday evenings and the next morning I knew the day before was a big workout. I also did not have the chew-chew-train of eating urges that normally follow a big workout. I made sure I had the drink ready and downed the thing about 10 minutes after I got back from the run over a 5 minute period. So I didn’t even flirt with the time frame recommended to get something in you within 30 minutes to an hour. I also ate my lunch within 90 minutes of the workout, so I did not stop at 260 calories. I am trying to lose weight as well, so I am trying to find the balance between endurance workouts and running a daily calorie deficit.

My last thought on this is that the commercially available drinks that cost $2 a serving are a rip off. I am sure they work and do the job, don’t get me wrong. But, it’s not like they have some magical ingredients that only the right mix of rare earth compounds mixed with special a slew of special chemical reactions can conjure out the healthiness. I mean what can possibly be in these drinks anyway that makes them so expensive? There is protien. There are carbohydrates. They also name off several amino acids which are super duper mondo important, in a way to make you feel impressed with all the studies and research that went into the development of their drink. The problem is that these amino acids have another name. They are called protien. Protien just refers to the whole group, and I can’t argue against what may be the drink manufacturers point that maybe it is benficial to have slightly more of the ones specially required for the recovery process to be more abundant in the drink. In fact I will go along with that as an assumption. So what are the ones that are more important? Hint, hint, they list them for us on the label. Nice! And if I make my homemade drink to also have more of these than the standard protien then didn’t I accomplish the same thing as them?

OK, back to the list. They also have some vitamins and then some electrolytes. Well these should be easy to add in too. Even if we have to resort to special powders for some of the ingredients, as long as the powder isn’t being sold as a “recovery drink” then it is probably much cheaper anyway and I can hopefully still add it in and keep the cost under a quarter. As a quick example, the electrolytes are probably going to be had from salt and salt substitutes. Salt is so cheap you just buy it if you need it and we could care less if they doubled the price. What is it like 25 cents a pound or something?

Now before we go any further let’s consider this drink. Protien drink with lots of carbs, a few vitamins and electrolytes. Call me crazy but this sounds like chocolate milk, or better yet fortified chocolate milk as in “more ovaltine please”. A few sprinkles of various salts and voiala we have a delicious drink. Uh, maybe, or we can call it an equivalent drink anyway. So I will probably take this direction for my first homemade drink, including a version with a shot of espresso and maybe blended with ice to make it frozen if I am at home. Although I can certainly see how a fruit juice and soy milk smoothie might also fit the bill once a dash of electrolytes are added. Nothining like going all natural, I think the key there would be to keep the fiber out as the whole point is to absorb the thing fast and leaving in the fiber will slow things down. There might finally be a point to breaking out my guy-with-the-big-fat-gray-eyebrows-that-sold-me-the-juiceman-juicer on tv juicer from the back of my cupboard collecting dust. I always knew that thing had a purpose.

So now you have the ideas behind my research and my roadmap of the next few posts. Links follow to some of the research I am looking into.

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Here is an entertaining article written by a certified marathon coach, Wendy Bumgardner, that pointed me in the right direction on a chocolate milk drink.

Here is the research, completed by Jason Karp, that Wendy mentioned in her article that completed a study comparing chocolate milk vs Endurox vs. Gatorade as a recovery drink. An excerpt of the study follows for those not inclined to read the whole thing: 

In conclusion, the results of this study suggest that, chocolate milk, with its high carbohydrate and protein content, may be considered an effective alternative to commercial FR (fluid replacement drink= Gatorade) and CR (carbo replacement drink = Endurox) for recovery from exhausting, glycogen-depleting exercise.

Here is a nice  blog entry about post exercise nutrition by Bob Seebohar, MS, RD, CSSD, CSCS. So many letters… he definitely knows what he is talking about.

And an article about post exercise recovery drinks by Jessica Seaton, D.C.

Finally, one last article by Erica Lesperance, RD, LD.