Current low fat recommendations

I find it interesting to note how dietary recommendations have changed over the years.  It seems the more "low fat" the authorities recommend us to go the fatter we as a population are becoming.  Just today I heard a news report on the radio that commented on Australians now being as obese as Americans and that the rate of obesity has accelerated.  This has lead to calls for an obesity summit.  It does make you wonder if current dietary recommendations are working or are they in fact just plain wrong?
This leads me to compare three separate pieces of dietary information that I have encountered recently.
1. the High fat low carb diet I have been researching and experimenting with for the last few months;
2. a school newsletter article that came home yesterday stating current NSW Health and Heart Foundation dietary recommendations, and
3. An article from 1999 in a mothers' magazine that talks specifically about children's dietary needs of fat and the recommendations from the then Australian Dietary Guidelines for Children and Adolescence.

High Carb Low Fat

1. Low Carb, High fat flies directly in the face of current guidelines.  By reducing carbohydrates, specifically starchy and highly refined carbs we lose weight.  Sugars from all sources increase our blood sugar and trigger an insulin response.  Insulin's job is to process this excess blood sugar and shunt it off into the fat cells. Carbohydrates are digested more quickly than fats and proteins so don't provide satiety and lead to peaks and troughs in blood sugar levels and the resulting insulin responses. This is fueling obesity and other chronic conditions as many of us are developing a condition called insulin resistance by eating this way.  By increasing fat and protein content of our diet we are satisfied for longer so tend to eat less frequently. The fats are essential for satiety and for nutrients and actually assist with weight loss because they keep insulin in check.

2014 NSW Health and Heart Foundation recommendations

2. The school newsletter articles that came home from school yesterday are really interesting and encapsulate the current thinking. The accompanying flyer states a few  "facts" that I will list here:
Did you know?
* National surveys found that the combined level of overweight and obese children in Australia has more than doubled in recent years.
* A major study revealed that the number of overweight and obese children in NSW rose from 1 in 10 in 1985 to 1 in 4 in 2004.
* Healthy snacks help kids and teens meet their daily nutritional needs. Snacks based on fruit, vegies, reduced fat dairy products and whole grains are the healthiest choices. Limit snacks that are high in sugar or saturated fats - such as chips, cakes and chocolate- which can cause children to put on excess weight.
* Reduced fat milk for children over 2 years of age is a nutritious drink and great source of calcium.

And here is a recipe to make for your child's breakfast:
Ingredients
2 eggs
1 tablespoon honey
2 1/2 cups of low fat milk
3 ripe bananas, sliced
2 cups of self raising flour
2 tablespoons of sugar
2 tsp margarine
3 medium apples, peeled, cored and grated.
Method
In a large bowl beat eggs, margarine and milk. In a separate bowl mix flour and sugar, add grated apple and stir into the wet mixture until smooth.
Heat oil in pan over medium heat. Add 2-3 tablespoons of mixture. Flip when bubbles appear and cook until golden. Serve with banana and drizzled honey.
Makes ten.
The picture shows a serve as a stack of three with thick sliced bananas between each layer and a sizeable amount of honey drizzled over the whole thing.

Is it a coincidence that children are eating more often and are getting fatter?  At my child's Primary school there is a breakfast club where the kids can get a feed of cereal and milk or toast and a glass of juice before school.  Around an hour or so later the kids are encouraged to have 'fruit break' to maintain their energy and concentration levels.  Then another hour or so later at ten past eleven they have lunch.  Lunch has been pushed to earlier in the day and been swapped with recess because it was decided that the children's energy was flagging and they needed a nutritious lunch earlier in the day so that they could make it through the next session.  They then have a recess break, for another snack at 1.15pm.  That is a lot of the day focussed on feeding the kids so as to keep them mentally alert. Sounds like the peaks and troughs of a high carbohydrate diet to me.
Then we wonder why they are getting fat and now need to increase physical activity to counteract all the eating. I wonder what would happen if we fed the kids something substantial like sausages and eggs for breakfast.  How many of them would be needing fruit break or even that early lunch?  They'd be able to spend more time playing in their breaks rather than eating too.
A substantial lunch - at lunch time - and they wouldn't be rushing home from school absolutely ravenous and prepared to eat any junk that they could find.  Maybe just a small snack and then they'd be right until dinner.

Now number three, the dietary guidelines I found from 1999.

This article is in response to a mother asking how much fat she should include in her child's diet.  The article is from Nursing Mothers' Newsletter summer 1999 and quotes the then current Australian Dietary guidelines for children and adolescents.
The association between high fat intakes and diseases in adulthood has led to important public health messages urging Australian adults to eat less fat.  It is important to remember that children are not simply little adults and they have special nutrient needs related to their growth and development.
Fat is important for growth because it is a concentrated source of energy. Although children's growth rate slows down during toddlerhood and school years they still require a higher energy intake per kilogram of body weight than adults. A moderate amount of fat in the diet is important to meet those needs.
Fat not only provides energy but also other important components for growth, such as essential fatty acids for cell structure and central nervous system development and precursors for the synthesis of eicosanoids ( such as prostaglandins).  Fat is also a vehicle for dietary sources of fat soluble vitamins. For these reasons low fat diets are not suitable for children under five years......

So in the intervening years 1999 to the present low fat diets have become appropriate for the under fives.  We never hear about the positives to our nutrition of consuming fat.  Fat is labeled as just fat and hence bad for us.  No wonder people get confused about what to eat.  Our health authorities are not exactly being very honest with us. I also don't believe that all of those attributes of fat as an essential nutrient for our bodies cuts out at age five, either.

I am glad that I ignored the low fat advice for my children. I always believed that their growing brains needed fat ( I had never really considered all the other reasons they may have needed fat) and unless they showed definite signs of obesity I would not ever have thought to make them switch to low fat.  My children are 18, 16 and 12 and are slim.  They have never had or needed a low fat diet.  I am glad that I am more informed about fat now and just wish I hadn't spent years trying to adhere to a low fat diet for myself. My skinniest child is now 6 foot 3 and still a bean pole.  He loves his meat and fat.  If anyone is proof that a high fat diet doesn't make you fat, he is. His example is probably the reason why I thought that there may be something in this new way of eating and thus I decided to give it a try myself.

It's now more than two weeks since I have started eating low carb high fat again.  The transition has been much easier than when I first started in February. This time round the sugar cravings (so far) are less and my sweet tooth is greatly diminished, but like any good addict I'm sure it wouldn't take much to push me back to a life of debauchery. Already I have greatly increased energy, I feel lighter and have lost some centimetres around my middle.  I haven't weighed or measured myself, but my clothes feel looser.

Finally, I will end this blog post with some words of wisdom from Dr Seuss.  He has a quote for everything doesn't he? Ellie, my one year old loves the Dr Seuss' ABC book and every time I read this page I think of David Gillespie's Sweet Poison.....

The holiday is over

Yesterday was mothers' day and that marked the end of the reprieve from the new woe (way of eating).  Not such a good acronym in my opinion.  It has given me a chance to assess the low carb high fat diet, or way of eating (woe) as the proponents would prefer to say.  I have also stocked up on a couple of cook books in the intervening time, Pete Evans' Healthy Every Day and Christine Cronau The Fat Revolution; and started to cook with ghee in the hopes that it will be a more suitable fat for the dairy free members of the house hold.

So first.  What exactly happened?
Well with the Easter season upon me I relaxed the rules and ate whatever was going basically.  So no care for high or low carb/ fat etc.  I ate lots of chocolate Easter eggs, that at first didn't taste the best, but I soon developed a liking for them.  I also tried to keep my fat intake pretty high, so lots of butter on my bread and muffins, cream with dessert, that sort of thing.

How did I go, what did I notice?

The first most noticeable thing was after only a couple of days of increasing my carbs my nighttime leg cramps disappeared.  These had been quite debilitating and annoying.  I had heard that they were a side effect of going LCHF but would pass quickly.  Mine persisted, even when I tried various measures to combat them (high doses of magnesium, potassium, epsom salt baths, compression stockings).  This leads me to believe that perhaps my muscle glycogen levels were falling too low over night and causing me to cramp.  I have never read this anywhere, just postulating from personal experience.  But it does seem pretty clear that I need more carbs in my diet to stop me from cramping.

The second thing that I noticed was the skin eruptions that I was starting to have while on the diet did not improve once I increased carbs.  So there is something else in my diet that is causing them.  The muscle cramps seem to be caused by something lacking, the red itchy and scaly skin patches caused by something I am reacting to.  I used to get similar things on my face from using face creams that had chemicals in them that my skin didn't like.  These ones are occuring on my body, legs, neck etc, so are not related to an external skin product.  That leads me to assume that they are caused by something that is now in the diet that wasn't there in the past.  The most likely culprit is dairy.  I having been eating a lot of dairy in the way of butter, cream, cheese and yoghurt.  I was almost 100% dairy free before the diet. So I may need to consider limiting the dairy, either cutting it out altogether or trialing only fermented dairy and see if I can tolerate that.

Thirdly, yes I did put some of the weight that I had lost back on.  I could tell by the tightness of my clothes.  I have been dreading doing a weigh in, but this morning decided to jump back on the scales and get the tape measure out.  Here are today's measurements:
Weight 75kg
waist 92cm
ribs 85cm
hips 106cm

Compared to the measurements from week 8, they are not too horrible and still down on where I started.  Which makes me think that perhaps the initial stages of going sugar free may actually improve the body's state of insulin resistance.  Again another area that probably needs some research.  The more insulin resistant you are the easier it is to regain weight, perhaps.....
Just to compare week 8 (2 April, almost 6 weeks ago) figures were:
weight 73.5kg
waist 89cm
ribs 87cm
hips 105cm.
So a 1.5kg gain, 3 cm on my waist, I could feel that with the tightness of my clothes, a loss on my ribs (but that was probably dodgy measuring) and 1 cm on my hips.  Not as bad as I feared.  It will be interesting if renewed vigour in maintaining low carbs will have an effect or whether I will plateau at this size.  Around 75 kg does seem to be a bit of a default setting for me.
This week I shall focus on limiting sugar and ease back into low carb eating a bit more slowly and hopefully will find a sustainable woe (though we need a happier acronym for sure) that I can live with.

LCHF pikelets

This is a recipe I developed yesterday, but didn't get around to cooking and eating until today.  The mixture thickened considerably overnight. I needed to use up some dodgy sour cream and I remembered seeing a recipe somewhere on the web that uses sour cream and eggs to make pancakes.  Of course when I wanted to find it I couldn't.  I did find a similar one using cream cheese.  This is what I did:

LCHF pikelets

300ml sour cream
6 eggs
4 tablespoons psyllium husk.

Beat all ingredients together and fry in butter.  Put small dollops in a frying pan, cook until golden on one side and then flip.  They will be a little delicate, so flip with care. Fry until golden on the other side and then serve.  The mixture will initially be quite runny.  The longer you leave it the more it will thicken up.

I had both a savoury and a dessert version.  For the savoury version I made some homemade pesto and spread it on top of the pikelet along with avocado slices and tomato slices.

Pesto

Handful or two of basil leaves
tablespoon of grated Peccorino cheese
2 -3 garlic cloves
squeeze of lemon juice
splash of olive oil
2 tablespoons of pine nuts.

Roughly chop with a knife or mortar and pestle til it is at the consistency you like.  I like it chunky.  Just adjust the flavours to suit your palate.  I like mine pretty garlicky.  Fresh basil pesto is sublime.

The dessert version I had later in the day, so the pikelets were cold from having been in the fridge.
I had some chia pudding in the fridge already.....

Chia Pudding

To two tablespoons of Chia seeds add coconut milk, vanilla and cinnamon.  Leave to thicken in the fridge overnight.  How much coconut milk/cream depends on what variety you use.  Chia significantly increase in size.  My kids call them fish eggs.  You will need to experiment, but about a cup should be enough for two tablespoons of seeds.

To the Chia pudding I added whipped cream that had been flavoured with decaf coffee and vanilla, and ever so slightly sweetened with stevia.  The decaf coffee was brewed and I had it waiting in ice trays in the freezer for just such occasion.  Coffee flavoured whipped cream is also divine.  A gentle grate of dark chocolate into the coffee cream can also be an amazing addition.  I didn't do that tonight as I thought teaming it with the chai pudding would be good enough.

Savoury or sweet the sour cream pikelets were delicious and definitely a great LCHF recipe.

New figures

Following on from yesterday's post I decided to take it a bit further and redo my figures from day 1.

There has been a bit of a change and a significant loss of fat.  It would be nice to record that, before I hit Easter and break the diet.

On day one I compared my waist and hip measurements.  They came in at a ratio of 0.9.  The ideal for women is less than 0.8.  With a waist measurement of 89 cm and a hip measurement of 105.5 cm my ratio is sitting at 0.84.  That is a big improvement.

I also redid my lean body weight calculations.
On day 1 I had a body fat percentage of 33.7% or 26.6 kg giving me a lean body mass of 52.4 kg.

The ideal body fat range for a woman of my age (41-50) is 22%-28%.

Today I worked out that my body fat is 28.19% so I am sitting just a smidge outside the ideal range. That equates to 20.72 kg fat.

I worked it our like this:
Waist = 89 cm = 35 inches = 40.46 (according to the chart in Protein Power)
Hip    = 105.5 cm = 41.5 inches = 29.33 (according to the chart in Protein Power)
height = 175 cm = 68.5 inches = 41.6 ( according to the chart in Protein Power)

(40.46+29.33)-41.60 =28.19%

73.5 kg x 28.19% = 20.72 kg

73.5 kg - 20.72 kg = 52.78 kg lean body mass.

52.78 kg = 116.36 pounds

116.36/78 = 1.49 = 149 = 67.6 kg
116.36/72 = 1.62 = 162 = 73.5 kg

So my healthy weight range is 67.6 kg - 73.5 kg.  This has me sitting right on top of my healthy weight range.

At 116.36 pounds of lean body mass I can eat 70 g of protein / day. (116.36 x 0.6 = 70)  Divided by three meals that is about 23 g / meal.  Not that I have been particularly tracking my protein intake.  At a guess I'd say I have been going over that.

Finally, I shall compare BMI, not that I placed much stock in that measurement.
Day 1 my BMI was 25.
Today it is 24.  The site suggests a healthy weight range of 57 - 76 kg.  That is quite a big range really.

Come back wagon!

Yep I was naughty again this week.  I was presented with a piece of chocolate, a slice of Toblerone to be exact and it was in my mouth and melting deliciously before I even knew what i was doing.  So I ran with it and decided to enjoy it.  I could easily have had more too, but no more was offered.....luckily.

My guess before I even weigh and measure is that I have put on weight this week.  I still crave sweet stuff, chocolate in particular and find I am probably eating more than I should in order to distract myself from the sweet desires.  Perhaps if I move towards some muscle building exercises I might have more control over my weight.  I am still being extremely good with avoiding starching carbohydrates but suspect I am eating too much protein, and maybe too much dairy.  I am in two minds about dairy and trying to decide where I will go with it after Easter.  Do I go more paleo based and less high fat based and see if it is the dairy that is making my body retain weight, or do I carefully map and measure my specific carbohydrate,protein and fat needs verses actual intakes?

For the next few weeks I'll ease up on myself while I ponder these things.  I feel that the diet is close to being right, I just haven't quite nailed it yet.  Maybe it's the appetite caused by breastfeeding and waking several times throughout the night, but at week eight,
still wanting to eat between meals and still craving sweet carbs is a bit of a worry.  I had hoped that I had put in the hard yards and should be benefiting from my abstinence by now. Maybe it's the small amounts of fruit or the small amount of sugar in the soy milk which are keeping the sweet meters active. At any rate I need to take stock and decide where to go from here. Perhaps I need to read a bit more.......

Weigh in for the end of week 8:
weight 73.5 kg
waist 89 cm
ribs 87 cm
hips 105 cm

This is the first time that I have created a chart in word. I could probably make the losses look more impressive if I changed the values on the vertical axis, but I am a bit technologically challenged.  I might have a play another day.

That's better... always nice to learn something new, especially when you can work it our for yourself.

Next week is week 9. The last week of school for term 1 and then we start the term break.  Easter falls right in the middle of the term break and I will be going away for a week when I will be at the mercy of whatever I get fed by the people I am staying with.  That gives me exactly two weeks left of me being in control and then I leave the diet to rest until I get back and we have celebrated Steve's birthday in early May.  It will be really interesting to see where I fall on the graph in one month's time.

It was bound to happen

I fell off the wagon yesterday.

After 7 weeks one would think that my need for sugar would have passed.  But no.  I can not equate a beautiful dessert with a plate of broccoli which is what so many people claim happens once you boot the sugar addiction.  I have blogged for a few weeks now that I have really felt like something sweet.

Last night I caved.
I made banana muffins for my daughter who is going away camping for a few days.  It's those dreaded over ripening bananas that are the problem.  I can't stand seeing food go to waste.  So three weeks in a row now I have had to made something with them.  The last two weeks I tried to use a high fat paleo style recipe to add to the bananas in order to reduce their carb load.
This week however I made the banana muffins the conventional way, even using white flour (shock horror).
I added lots of eggs and butter, but I'm not sure that can mitigate the sweetness of the very ripe bananas and the white sugar I also used (eeek).  Anyway I HAD to taste the mix.  And then I had to lick the bowl.  And then I had to taste one of the cooked versions.  White sugar and white flour in one big whammo hit.

I shall climb back on the wagon, I just have these delicious banana muffins sitting between me and the wagon right now.

Before this little transgression I did have the feeling that my weight loss had slowed or reversed this week.  It's a weird thing to weigh and measure yourself each week.  Never before in my life have I bothered to do this.  So maybe weekly fluctuations are normal, I have no way of knowing.  This week however, my weight has stayed the same at 72kg, but my centimetres have increased.  Is there some fluid retention occurring because I have a period due next week, or have I put on some more fat?  No way to know really.

Last week my waist was 87cm this week it is 90.5cm.
Last week my ribs were pretty similar to my waist measurement so I didn't even bother recording it.  This week it is 86.5cm
My hip measurement has stayed constant at 105.5cm across the two weeks.

Wonder what these naught banana muffins are going to do to my stats for next week.  I'm now into week 8, my cravings shoulda been over, I hope this doesn't mean I have to go alllllll the way back to the start again. sigh.
Oh and that's it no more buying bananas, that's three weeks in a row that my carb loving kids haven't managed to eat them before they got all soft and mushy.  Maybe they are losing their carb reliance, hmmm.

Week six and navigating TEMPTATION

Oh this was a hard week.  Temptation everywhere.  It's so obvious I am still hopelessly addicted to the sugary stuff.  The carbs are generally not a problem, I can cope easily with no bread, pasta, cakes, bikkies or potatoes.  But Lollies are another matter.  I am still unequivocally craving sweet stuff. Dessert and lollies and chocolate. Yum.  I would just like to go crazy with some.
As I mentioned last post, my brother was here for a visit.  They stayed a few days in the area and popped over quite often to share meals with us.  They kindly brought all sorts of yummy sweet treats over to share.  There was a daily struggle for me to resist the temptation of a chocolate coated biscuit or some rich ice cream.  I managed it, but I think that I put on weight just looking at all that beautiful food.  Plus it also meant diving into some of my standby craving busters fairly often.  So I was eating to curb cravings brought on by temptation rather than eating to fill an empty belly.
I have also said before that I wonder whether the Stevia is maintaining my craving for sweet stuff. I have been eating a fair bit of fresh whipped cream and homemade chocolate that has been sweetened with stevia.  It addresses the immediate need for something sweet, but I haven't managed to kick the long term need for dessert or sweets after a meal.  This is one habit that is proving rather hard to break.  It basically amounts to additional calories that I am not even hungry for.  My tummy can tell that I am satisfyingly full, but my mouth is telling me to finish off with something sweet.


This week I did weigh myself and my dodgy scales decided that I had put on a kilo. My tape measure has showed me losing another centimetre and my ribs and waist are much in a muchness in size now. 


I'd like to see how I go next week with far less temptation placed before me and I will attempt to listen to my body's full signals a bit better.


Skinwise, I have decided this week that it is looking less dry.  After six weeks it appears that some of this saturated fat might be making its way towards the surface and affecting the upper layers of skin cells. Some sore looking sun spot type marks seem to be looking like they are healing.  I will keep an eye on this in coming weeks to see if this is a pattern that will continue.


I made a banana cake during the week, which is strictly a bit high in carbs but I needed to use up the bananas that the kids haven't eaten.  I didn't add any sugar and I kept it as high fat as I could:
Banana Cake
1 1/2 cups of my Paleo flour  (mix of LSA, coconut flour and psyllium husk)
3 teaspoons baking powder
3 very ripe bananas
6 eggs
1/4 cup coconut oil.


Mix together and bake in two ring tins.  It is quite nice loaded with butter, sour cream or whipped Cream.  I ate small slivers with lots of topping.


I also made (because we had guests) the red kidney bean cake.  For this one I used dextrose as the sweetening agent and again ate it with lashings of cream.
6 eggs
1 1/2 cups kidney beans
1 tablepoon vanilla
1 tablespoon coffee
7-8 tablespoons cocoa
125g butter
1 cup dextrose
Process 1 egg and the kidney beans with the coffee and vanilla.
Beat butter and dextrose together.  Add remaining eggs one at a time.  Add Kidney bean mixture and bake in a spring form cake tin.


This idea of lots of eggs and butter and a little bit of flour or other thickening agent could be worth experimenting with to make other cakes/breads.  It looks like the basis for a few of the paleo recipes I see around the net.


After writing this blog I am going to make another banana cake (yes more soggy bananas to use up).
I am going to use heaps of butter, coconut oil, eggs (three bananas as the sweetener) and I have some almond milk to use up.  Lots of coconut and my paleo flour with baking powder.  I'll see how it goes.  The Almond milk may make things too wet.  I will post a recipe if it is any good.


Okay another week and off we go, ahhhhh sugar if only you weren't so delicious..........