healthy eating

Keto Case Study #4–Stay Away from Gurus!

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This is the final post for now about the problems with following the so-called “ketogenic” diet. Today I’m addressing some issues I’ve discovered with one of the leading keto gurus, Eric Berg DC. Note that I don’t call him “Dr.” Berg, even though that’s what his YouTube channel, his books, his website and his ads call him. HE IS NOT A MEDICAL DOCTOR. HE’S A CHIROPRACTOR. Sorry. I try to steer clear of all-caps ranting, but sometimes it’s just necessary.

Just a reminder: the “case study” I’m using is that of the blogger who runs the Addicted2Decoraing website. She says in a post titled  “The Personal Stuff: A New Furry Family Member, More Keto Info, and What I’m Listening To” that one of her five ways to get started on the ketogenic diet is:

Find one keto expert you like and trust, and stick with him or her.

And the “expert” she’s decided to follow is Eric Berg DC. Now why on earth would you want to “stick with” just one source? That makes no sense. The best way to get a balanced view of any topic is to consult multiple sources, checking out the discrepancies that you find. Then you make your own well-informed decisions. Otherwise you’re just outsourcing your choices. (And, as I’ve said before, I love this blog, follow it faithfully, and totally respect its author. She’s so independent in her decorating choices that I find it very puzzling that she’s willing to blindly follow anyone about her health choices.)

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A Keto Case Study, Part Three

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A reminder if you’re just coming across this series of posts: I am taking some material from the website Addicted2Decorating which I follow faithfully and enjoy tremendously. Ordinarily it’s a DIY home improvement site, but the author sometimes includes a personal post—what music she’s listening to, how the new dog is doing, and, for my purposes, what new diet plan she and her husband are following. I want to emphasize again that I am in no way trying to badmouth Kristi, the website author. I am simply using what she says herself as a means of examining the mistakes people make when they adopt some type of extreme fad diet, in this case the so-called “ketogenic” diet. I’m putting the name of the diet in quotation marks because it’s actually very difficult to get your body into the state of ketosis, a condition in which your body has switched from burning glucose, its preferred fuel, to “ketone bodies,” which is fuel made from fat. This switch in fuels is supposed to “trick” your body into dipping into its fat stores, thus helping you lose weight. I’d encourage you to go back and read parts one and two of this series if you haven’t already done so. You’ll note below that I’m still mining the ideas contained in the original quotations I used, as there’s so much to say about just this short section.

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A Keto Case Study, Part Two

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I left off the last post with a description of how habits work. As we keep repeating an action we wear a neurological groove, making the action easier and more automatic every time we perform it. If you read Charles Duhigg’s book that I referenced yesterday you’ll learn about one way to disrupt a habit: basically, you have to figure out what the reward is and then substitute a new routine that will give you the same result without the negative consequences. For instance, and this is quite relevant here because it’s about eating, Duhigg analyzes the habit he’d formed of going down to the cafeteria every workday afternoon and getting a cookie. He gained five pounds, his wife let him know that she disapproved, and he set himself the task of changing the habit. What did he really want as his reward? he asked himself. Was it satisfaction of true hunger? Then he could eat an apple. Was it a shot of energy? Then he could get a cup of coffee. Or, perhaps less intuitively, did he just need a break, a chance to interact with people after sitting in front of his computer for several hours? He decided that last one was it. So he started getting up from his desk and looking for a chance to chat with people when the mid-afternoon munchies hit. (I haven’t gone back and re-read the relevant section, but I don’t believe he just started interrupting his co-workers as they were trying to concentrate.) He successfully changed his cookie habit. You can also simply remove the cue, if that’s possible. So that bag of cookies in your pantry that tempts you every time you open the door should just go. If the cookies aren’t there, you can’t eat them.

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A Keto Case Study, Part One

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What I’m going to do in this post and at least a second one is what is called a “case study.” I’ll divide up the material because I want my readers to be willing to consume all of it. Sometimes I read others’ posts that are pages long, and if it’s a subject in which I’m interested I’ll probably at least skim it all. But I think it’s far better to write material that can be read in 5-10 minutes and then follow up with later posts. You don’t read blog posts the way you read a book, coming back to the place you left off. Instead, you usually just go on to the next post when it comes up. I want you to get the whole enchilada here and so always try to limit my individual posts to 1,000 words or less.

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Keto Diet Conniptions

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This is the first in a series of posts in which I present some common-sense rebuttals to the various fad diets out there; I picked the “keto” diet to begin with because it’s pretty hot right now. Something else is probably coming or has come down the pike already and I just haven’t gotten clued in yet. In reality, though, it doesn’t matter too much what the diet of the moment is, because all of these fad diets fall into some basic, broad categories: you can restrict fat, or carbs, or a specific food category (such as meat or gluten). Or you can just restrict calories in general. (Note that people with specific medical issues such as celiac disease or allergies, or people who eat a certain way as a matter of conscience, such as those who abhor the killing of animals, are not included in the fad diet category.)

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Three Human Drives that Feed (!) into Fad Diets.

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I’ve already talked about the human taste for drama, a characteristic that draws us into all sorts of extravagant and unsustainable announcements and commitments. The inherent weakness of drama as a long-term tool for change is this:

We think that the dramatic and public announcement (“I’m going keto!” “I’m joining a gym!”) will do the work for us. Now, to be clear, we don’t necessarily believe this consciously. If someone asked us, “Do you honestly think that saying you’re going to lose 50 pounds will somehow make you lose 50 pounds?” you’d say, “Of course not! What kind of nitwit do you take me for?” But we’ve all done it, haven’t we? We say, or think, “I have to do something about this! I’m going to . . . “ And the momentum carries us along, for a little while. Once that initial excitement wears off, though, so does our motivation. And what is motivation, anyway? Gretchen Rubin has a great article on her blog about this whole question. Sometimes when people use that word they really mean “desire”–”I want to do so-and-so.” Sometimes it means “reasons why”–”I know why I need to quit staying up late to play video games.” Sometimes it’s a statement of some kind of vague moral impulse–”I should spend less money on impulse buys.” As she puts it, people aren’t really motivated by motivation. That’s a tautology, in which you just go around in circles: “I’m going to do something because I’m motivated to do it and so I will do it because I’m motivated.” As I’ve said myself before, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” That’s what a lot of so-called “motivation” is—a wish. As the estimable Gretchen points out, you need a clear aim and and plan of action, not some vague motivation.

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Where are you on the food-choice pyramid?

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I plan to do a series of posts on some of the fad diets floating around out there, many of them on celebrity websites, but today I want to write in more general terms about what guides the food choices that many people make. Let me say a couple of things first:

1. Making choices is better than not making choices. If you just eat what’s in front of you without thinking, snacking on the candy bowl at the office, always getting the soft drink/chips/cookie combo with your sandwich for lunch, cleaning out the popcorn bowl as you sit in front of the TV, that’s just mindless eating. At least if you’ve decided to follow some strict regimen you’re paying attention.

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What I Ate for Lunch Today–And a Great New Recipe

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I have a subscription to the New York Times mainly because of Melissa Clark, a cookbook author and food writer who is absolutely the most charming, delightful, quirky, quirkily delightful, delightfully quirky . . . well, you get the picture. I periodically go onto her website to check out any new stuff. (It occurred to me while I was writing this post that I could subscribe to her updates, which I just did. However, the stuff she writes specifically for the Times goes over to their website, so not all of her stuff is available directly through her.) I asked for her recent cookbook The New Essentials of French Cooking for Christmas from my son, and he is now tasked with picking out a recipe from the book for me to make before he heads back to college. (I say “recent” because Clark is such a prolific producer of cookbooks and so if I said “new” or “newest” I would probably be incorrect by now.)

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In Which I Disagree with the New York Times and the Medical Establishment—Part One

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Oh my goodness! I don’t know that I’ve ever seen as much nonsense packed into two sentences as with these:

Only bariatric surgery reliably leads to long-term weight loss. Now scientists hope to duplicate the effects with a pill.

I mean to say, have you ever in your life read something so silly? I’m sure I haven’t, and that’s taking in a lot of territory. I have a New York Times subscription, mainly so I can watch Melissa Clark’s food videos, but I do take a look at their front page fairly regularly, and this little gem was lurking there:

“Why Are We Still So Fat?”

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