Archive for October, 2009
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Goodbye to all that
This weekend I threw out my sourdough culture, with sadness and some regret. I had finally learned to make really good bread, using just flour, water, and sourdough, the “no-knead” approach popularized by Mark Bittman, and baking it in a covered pot.
But over about the last 9 months, I’d also made three large changes in what I eat that ended up convincing me that bread-making is not in my future. This decision is made a bit easier given that my wife has a strong gluten-allergy and I always worried about causing her problems.
Around the time we moved to Ann Arbor, I put on a lot of weight and felt the associated problems of lethargy, poor sleep, etc. About 10 years ago, I’d lost enough weight to get below my “idea” weight in terms of BMI measurements, and got very involved in long distance running. I was able to keep the running up as I gradually regained weight (usually with big drops in the Fall as the reality of the marathons I’d run would hit me), but it got to the point that running wasn’t that much fun any more. It was not a happy situation, but I hadn’t had much success in various efforts to change it. I had a physical last winter and got some blood work done, which suggested that I wasn’t doing that great in terms of triglycerides and the ratio between HDL and LDL (high- and low-density lipoproteins). So I decided I really needed to address the situation.
In March, when I was in China, I read a book by Seth Roberts, a Berkeley psychologist, on what he calls The Shangri-La Diet: The No Hunger Eat Anything Weight-Loss Plan
. One of his key ideas is that by separating out eating (i.e., tasting and smelling food) from consuming calories (i.e., getting satiated), you can break the associations that were, in my case, causing me to get hungry around 4 in the afternoon and often consuming junk food from vending machines. I tried it, which in my case involved drinking ¼ cup of flaxseed oil with a swimmer’s nose clip on instead of having lunch. It definitely worked, quickly taking away my urge to consume junk food. One small behavioral change – in airports I used to try to stay as far as possible from the “Cinnabon” places, in fear that I’d be tempted to buy one of them. Now my behavior is just the opposite – they smell good, and I enjoy walking close to them and smelling the cinnamon and fat, knowing that I’m not going to be eating any of it.
The second change followed on reading a book, The Probiotics Revolution: The Definitive Guide to Safe, Natural Health Solutions Using Probiotic and Prebiotic Foods and Supplements
by Gary Huffnagle & Sarah Wernick. It provides a really interesting explanation of ideas about the immune system that are new since I last learned about this stuff (although the book could have used a better editor). Huffnagle is a researcher at the U of M, and as a fellow Ann Arbor resident, I was taken by his claim that he had overcome his seasonal allergies by eating many probiotics. I decided to check this out, and now am a daily consumer of yogurt, keffir, kombucha, and taking Saccharomycees Boulardii capsules (the last because it’s made from lychees and used in China, where I go fairly often).As far as I can tell, it worked. I had a very mild allergy season (although it was an unusual summer in Ann Arbor).
The basic idea is probiotics reduce inflammation in your body via a couple of mechanisms. That in turn lowers the chances that you’ll have an overly strong immune response to pathogens, which is more often what causes problems (because your body ends up reacting against things that are really not harmful). In addition, having colonies of stuff growing in your gut can help outcompete other things that might be less benign. My plan is to do this for a year, and then think about paring down the set of probiotic things I consume. I can make yogurt and keffir easily; kombucha sounds like a pain to make and I hate the idea of buying all the bottles it comes in, so that’s the one most likely to fall out of the set.The last book, and the one that led to the biggest change, is by Gary Taubes, called Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage)
. It argues, pretty convincingly, that nearly everything I thought about nutrition (the “food pyramid” in particular) is wrong, and should have been known to be wrong as it was widely promulgated. It’s a really interesting discussion of scientific error and the nature of error correction in public health. One of his basic arguments is that people don’t get fat because they’re overeating, but that they overeat because they’re getting fat (storing food as fat rather than metabolizing it). His claim is that insulin, produced by eating carbohydrates, favors fat storage, which then starves the cells of the body of food (hence the craving for more food). Americans eat an enormous amount of sugar and carbohydrate, compared to either the past or to the practice in other countries. I decided to test these ideas, so far with good effects, by giving up 5 foods/categories: bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, and beer, (and of course sugar), while trying to eat more protein and fat. The first several days were a bit rough. I didn’t feel hungry exactly, but did have a kind of hollow feeling that’s hard for me to describe, and also put on some weight the first week. After that, though, it’s been nothing but good. I’ve continued to lose weight and feel noticeably stronger. I sleep through the night when I didn’t before, and don’t need to drink as much water as I did previously.
I figured I’d do this until I got down to a target weight (10 lbs less than my “ideal” BMI weight to give me some breathing room) and then see about going back to a more “normal” diet. The thing is, I don’t know why I’d want to do that. My diet is certainly greatly changed (for example, a new favorite breakfast is a can of sardines with ginger pickle and mustard – don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it). When I go off the diet, I certainly notice it. For example, yesterday a student brought me a cupcake from one of the fancy cupcake places that have proliferated in Ann Arbor to apologize for forgetting about a meeting, and I felt obligated to eat it. I felt amazingly drowsy in a meeting a couple of hours later (although it was the University Senate), and didn’t end up with a sense that I’m missing anything.
Losing weight has been a slow process—just under a pound a week since I started in mid March, much slower than when I went through a weight loss project about a decade ago (that involved drinking “Slimfast” products and trying to fast one day a week, and also running a lot), but this project has been marked by much less of a sense of deprivation. So far I’ve lost about 25 lbs of the 40 I need to lose. I’ve found running is much more fun now, although I’ve also been busy and have less time to get out and run in the mornings than I’d like.
So the sourdough needed to go, but I do regret giving up a skill and a process that I’d finally mastered.
