I want to welcome all of you who’ve never visited our site before. I know we have many new readers that are coming to us as a result of Jennette’s guest blog and I want to thank Jennette Fulda for her excellent post. For those of you who are new to us, we hope you’ll stick around! After all, maintenance is where we’re all headed and it’s never too early to start learning about how other people are managing it. You’ll find lots of inspiration from our passionate and literate community-at-large, so please consider this a heartfelt invitation to join us.
Barbara
In the years that I was laboring over my book, it somehow never occurred to me that people would actually read it and make comments about it. Isn’t that strange? Now that my “baby” is toddling around in the real world, I feel like a mom who is hiding behind every bush waiting to see what people think of my little treasure. One of the first comments that knocked me on my heels was an internet post by someone who liked the book, but thought it had some “kooky” ideas. Gee. I’d never thought of myself as kooky.
Since most of “Refuse to Regain” is pretty straightforward, I must assume that the “kooky” part is my advocacy of the Primarian Diet. As a good mom, I feel obliged to come to the defense of my creation.
First, let me say that I fully subscribe to the following philosophy: maintaining the weight you’ve lost, or even a part of that weight, is what is most important. If you have found an eating plan that does this for you, and if it’s not manifestly unhealthy (eating only small handfuls of M&Ms all day, for example), I think you’re doing fine. Different techniques may work for different people and rigidly advocating philosophies is never a good idea.
This lesson was imprinted on me 30 years ago when I was a young teacher of the deaf. I worked in an “oral” school; a place that believed that all deaf students should learn to speak. Our pupils were forbidden to use sign language while in the classroom because that was the philosophy the school believed in. The only problem was Pedro Martinez. Pedro was profoundly deaf, nine years old, and completely incapable of forming even the most basic speech. When our class was given the assignment of performing a play for the school, I spent two months coaching Pedro to say his single line (a single word, actually. He had to point his finger and say “Go!” ) He never managed to get it out properly. Pedro was an adorable, lively little kid who should have had a way to communicate. But he ran aground of someone else’s philosophy. I remember Pedro whenever I hear people insisting that their way is the only way.
Having said this, I do believe that you should give consideration to a mostly Primarian approach for weight maintenance. Primarian is an invented term, but it’s meant to reflect the basic, or primary, nature of the foods that make up the diet. The idea is to eat foods that are closest to the ones humans have eaten for most of their existence. Here’s where the idea comes from:
1. In my world view, overweight does not come from an overconsumption problem, it comes from a processing problem. If you’re overweight, fuel that should be burned is being diverted into storage instead. Naturally, there are some people who eat excessively---perhaps even enormous amounts. But most overweight people I know don’t really eat that much more than freely eating NOWs (never overweight people). Every one of us is aware of the fact that some people gain weight easily while others don’t. This fact has been borne out by studies where similar people were overfed by the same amount while exercise was controlled. The result? Some people gained lots of weight, others very little. In short, some burned the calories. Others stored them.
2. Why do some people store instead of burn? I believe that the reason has to do with too much insulin. Insulin is released when we eat starches or sugar (S Foods). While it is known to regulate blood sugar levels, insulin has another crucial function. It controls fat storage and release. When people chronically make a lot of insulin, they start to divert fuel into fat cells ( they store). In addition, the muscle cells that would normally process the fuel become “resistant” to insulin (less burning). These ideas are not unusual or revolutionary. They are well known. The question is, why do some people fall into this pattern when others don’t. No one knows. They simply may be more sensitive to chronic exposure to S Foods.
3. Given 1 and 2, I believe that diets which are low in starches and sugars lead to resolution of the insulin problem. Again, nothing radical here. Most weight loss diets cut back on S Foods (starches and sugars), or limit starches to the “complex carbohydrates”.
But, I feel that this knowledge points us to something more obvious. If we look at the diet that humans ate for most of their 2.5 million year existence, it is a diet that lacked S Foods. It is not much of a leap to hypothesize that as a result we are not well-adapted to these relatively new additions to our diet. Maybe when some of us are chronically exposed to foods our body is not prepared for, we start to malfunction. Maybe, when we bring our diet back in line with our genetics, we can heal.
4. For these reasons, I like a Primarian eating style. This is essentially the stripped down diet that our ancient ancestors ate: lean animal meats, poultry, eggs, fish and seafood, vegetables, fruits, nuts,and seeds—the foods that we ate as hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years. To add some flexibility, I include low fat dairy. This is not an ancient food, but it appears to be weight neutral—at least in my experience. What? No whole grains? No, because grains in any form—whole or not—are starches. They were never a part of the original human diet and they are not consumed by any other primate. This is not to say that you can never have a grain. But I advocate adding them back with care. And I go one step further: I question their importance in our diet.
The Primarian eating style is only a departure point. But it takes us all the way back to the foods our body is best designed to handle. And it’s good to start at the beginning. I think that Primarian choices should form the majority of foods eaten in maintenance. In time, we can each experiment to figure out the non-Primarian things that we can add back without restarting the cycle.
So. Are these ideas kooky? Not from where I sit. But then again, I’m the biased, nervous (proud) mom.
