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.

Fiber – Soluble or Insoluble

Why am I writing about fiber you ask? Because it has magical properties, that’s why. This stuff is the essence of eating well without dieting. By diet I mean having to keep track of something so you don’t overdo it and then stopping when you get there whether you wanted to or not. I read something about fiber a week or so ago and started eating more, I even had a bottle of fiber in my batch of food supplements that I bought at Costco several months ago. (Alas, it was probably because all the pretty colors on the bottle mesmerized me not because I am a food genius.) So looking into fiber further I have found several things that started me baking bran muffins and now has me scouring the web for hard to find fiber facts.

So first things first there are two types of fiber, soluble and insoluble. What this means is two things, although any single place will tell you only one. First, is that if it disolves in water it’s soluble, if not it’s insoluble. Basic chemistry right there. The second is that soluble fiber is fermentable by the bacteria in your intestines (gut flora) which sounds scary but it actually is the reason that fiber has all these magical anti-cancer good for your health qualities.

There are some other interesting properties of fiber that may help you make more sense of things as you experience them from eating more than normal. Insoluble fiber speeds up things through your intestines. Taken to an extreme, of something along the lines of 80 grams a day total fiber (podcast fact linked to below), it becomes difficult to absorb all the nutrients from the food as it cruises by. Nothing to worry about though if you are just getting the recommended values of 25-35 grams a day on the top end. Soluble fiber not only disolves in water but it sort of makes a gel blob that tends to slow things down. So those that worry about the laxative effect may just need to rebalance the soluble and insoluble to get better results. That soluble fiber gel blob absorbs things that then become difficult to get into our system. It binds with fats which is good because it will remove cholesterol from your system as it is eaten before it is absorbed (eat a soluble fiber supplement before steak dinner to feel less guilty.) This is mechanism that allows Cheerios and other oat cereals to make all those health claims about lowering cholesterol (well that and the FDA says it’s ok). If someone counting calories has a little fat exit without counting this can hardly be a bad thing. It is bad when the fat soluble vitamins: A, D, E, and K have more trouble being absorbed, as do some medicines. If you are taking a supplement or medicine that has trouble simply take it an hour before or two hours after a soluble fiber supplement or a meal that has a lot of soluble fiber. There are many other good properties and the bad ones are much less a worry. The gas and bloating one might feel is only temporary if you stick to your new high fiber diet because the gut flora of which there are some 500 types living in your intestines tend to rebalance as to what food is coming down the pipe to feed them. Another thing that might seem scary is that if you look up any specific type of fiber it is always mentioned that it is used as a mild laxative. To that I say whatever, it is food and it is healthy until a person finds a problem with the high fiber food consider it ok to try then see what works. 

Here are some links to the best of what I found to read:

Gloria Tsang, RD wrote an article about the soluble vs. insoluble fiber: http://www.healthcastle.com/fiber-solubleinsoluble.shtml

5 minute podcast episode on a high fiber diet, hosted by Gloria (she has a nice website by the way):  http://www.healthcastle.com/podcast-006.shtml

fiber is something of a natural method of treating diabetes or prediabetes, here is a quote from the website linked to:

Several clinical studies reviewed by Anderson et al. (2001) reported that using fiber supplements rich in soluble fibers such as guar, pectin, apple fiber and pysllium extract reduce requirenments for insulin. They reported that the fiber supplements lowered blood glucose and cholesterol (especially LDL) levels. http://www.dietaryfiberfood.com/diabetes-mellitus.php

This was a difficult one to find, where you can tell how much soluble fiber there is in a food, keep in mind this stuff will vary on things like growing conditions so none of this is a fixed number. So these two links hve some soluble fiber numbers: http://dietaryfiberfood.com/soluble-fiber.php

http://www.dietaryfiberfood.com/fiber-content.php

and this link is the usda database where everyone gets their info from:

listed by specific nutrient in common foods: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/Data/SR17/wtrank/wt_rank.html

or searchable: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

The USDA database is a gold mine if you want specific info on foods with high content of a particular food, for example if you want to know what vegetables have high fiber you hit that total fiber link on the release 17 page linked to above and scan through to see that first vegetable on the list is split peas or if that doesn’t count for you as a vegetable then lima beans, or if you want to get out of the legumes alltogether then you will pass raspberries and asian pears, not a vegetable just an option, and finally get to regular peas. This works the same for any nutrient they measure which makes it nice if you want something in particular. This would take forever to figure out if the USDA didn’t just give us this lovely list to glance through. And the searchable database helps too as you may have noticed (yeah right) raw lentils weren’t in the list (only cooked) but a quick search yields a stunning surprise that it would top the list above pearled barley with a number that doubles that of the barley at 61 grams of total dietary fiber in 200 grams (1.04 cups or 1 cup plus two teaspoons). I know this because I made some killer lentil soup with sausage and potato. I was astounded when trying to measure the nutrient counts and found that I had stumbled onto the best soup in the world that had over half of the fiber you should eat in a day in one single bowl that had 240 calories of mind-numbingly-delicious soup. Another recipe I will have to share when I get around to doing the bran muffins recipe on here.

So now I am trying to add soluble fiber to my muffins. It is customary to use wheat bran which is mostly insoluble if not all. The things to consider on my list are using ground flax seed, which is about as fiberous as you migh ever want to get with more soluble and insoluble. I am also considering oat bran, apples, pumpkin, and carrots. As well as some of the types that can be purchased refined where they are isolated from a high content food (this is how something like cornflakes get a high fiber food label, because they add pectin): grapefruit or other citris rind – the white part is about 30% pectin, psyllium husk, and chicory root which is largely made of inulin http://www.naturalnews.com/022356.html. I am a bit worried like the guy that wrote the natural news article that refining a food to get the individual coumpounds out of it may not be the wisest thing to do, but I just don’t know if it is possible to buy psyllium husk or chicory root unprocessed and I am sure of one thing that if my muffins have 1 gram of each of the three that is better than having 3 grams of one type. So I will make another batch or two of muffins over the long weekend and see if I can come up with something I am happy with on all aspects, particularly taste.

South Beach Diet Dessert – Chocolate Milk Substitute

OK, I finally found something worth writing about that uses stevia. I have not been trying all that much and when I do I run into the taste problems. Not a big deal to me, but nothing to share as if it was a breakthrough. If there is a large tradeoff in taste then I am not going to suggest it. This chocolate milk substitute is perfect however. It has a delicious taste. It is very simple and almost can’t be considered a recipe.

One cup of this stuff has 2 grams of carbohydrates, which are not sugars, and 1 gram of fiber, 3.5 grams of mono and poly unsaturated fat, no transfat or saturated fat, and 2 grams of protien. You add the Stevia bulked up with erithritol based on how sweet you want it between 2-3 teaspoons, and you have yourself a drink that tastes sweet and lucious, not like fat free milk that tastes watered down. I cannot lie, it doesn’t taste exactly like chocolate milk, but the stuff is made from almonds so it has sort of a creamy flavor all its own that adds to make the flavor better. I imagine after I buy this a couple more times I will probably prefer it to chocolate milk. The amazing thing is it has less carbos than a tablespoon of salad dressing, yet you get to drink a whole 8 oz portion. It is perfect for diabetics as well, which I suppose is who this product, since it is unsweetened, is aimed at anyway. There is a version that has added sweetener, so be sure to avoid that if you are going for the super low carbs. The stevia is a bit spendy, but once you can find it in your local supermarket and don’t have to pay for shipping it should be worth the cost.
Chocolate Unsweetened Almond Breeze
Stevia Packets

I bought the unsweetened almond breeze in my local store, but they have no stevia yet, I bet the cargill brand — truvia will work too, but I just bought some of the wisdom stuff today. I am hoping for less aftertaste than the steviva brand I bought when I first found the product.

If you are new here and are wondering why stevia is better than nutrasweet or splenda then read these if you have time:
Nutrasweet is Unsafe
Nutrasweet vs. Splenda
Stevia