People, it's November. We need to have a serious talk about the eating season creeping up on us. But first... an analogy.

Weight management is a lot like money management. Your weight can get away from you just as easily as your finances can. One minute you're cruising along, enjoying life - eating, drinking, shopping and being merry - and then next thing you know you've racked up piles of credit card debt. Gaining the debt was easy; getting rid of it is the hard part. You make tiny payments, barely chipping away at the debt. The number never seems to go down. It takes months to make a dent! And all because of a few weeks of good livin'.

I'm not a big fan of credit. I don't think I ever have been. When I was 20 years old, my parents suggested I buy a house. I was making my first full-time salary, and I got pre-approved for a small mortgage. I bought a small house with my small mortgage, nowhere near my dream house. But, dream house or not, it was "important for me to build equity," I was told.

I came to learn that all equity got me was piles of credit. And when you have piles of credit, you can get into trouble.

To be truthful, I've never struggled with being very overweight like millions of Canadians do - although I have struggled with weight management in my own way. But I have struggled to repay financial debt. The financial struggles I had in my youth have made me the cash-junky I am today. If I don't have the cash, I don't buy the item. I know it's not the most luxurious way to live, but you have to admit it makes a lot of sense.

Why not apply the same logic to weight management?

Mmmmmmm.. I love Turtles
So here we are. Early November. In Canada, we've already had Thanksgiving. The sound of that electric knife carving the turkey was like the starter's pistol for the Big Eating Season.

Life becomes more festive as we cruise through the last couple months of the year: companies and acquaintances hold "holiday parties," workplaces become rife with home baking and boxes of chocolates, friends invite friends over for egg nog and appetizers. It's dietary mayhem... but it's also incredibly fun. It would be a shame to miss it.

Turn on the radio anytime in December and you'll hear some cheesy radio personality spewing the same tired statistic: "Hey-heyyyyyy! Did you know that the average person gains between 7 and 10 pounds over the Christmas holidays? Uh oh!" (Look, it's really hard to convey the "cheesy radio personality" voice in a blog. Cut me some slack...). But it's true. The big eating and the resulting weight gain are anticipated, almost joked about. But it's no joke when the bill comes in the mail in January.

We spend the early part of every year trying to work off all the pounds we gained over Christmas, with varying degrees of success. We spend that same amount of time paying off our Christmas credit card bills. For months after one of the happiest and most festive times of the year, we slave and struggle to repay all that fun we've had. Talk about a buzz-kill.

I'm a pretty big fan of the You Only Live Once/If It Feels Good Do It line of thinking, so I'd rather enjoy my holidays with reckless abandon. That's why this month, I'm overpaying my credit card so I start with a debit on my account before I start Christmas shopping. Even though I'll still spend a grotesque amount, it will seem less horrible.

And I like to do the same with my holiday eating. Because if I enter a room with egg nog in it, you can bet I'm drinking some of it. 18 grams of fat per cup be damned (I do not advocate "Light" egg nog; if I wanted egg-flavoured water I'd have stayed living on the farm and drinking out of the well!).

Egg nog has a very high, er... interest rate, but I have no problem adding that to my debt-load. Life's too short not to.

Your Q4 Fiscal Action Plan
November is your last chance to prepay your dietary credit card before the crazy eating season really starts. Start making smarter diet choices now, and see if you can cruise into the holiday season with a "debit on your account." If you were to lose even 2 pounds before December rolls around (no pun intended), you'll still be slightly ahead of the game in terms of the 7-10 pounds the average Canadian gains each Christmas.

But here's the other half of the puzzle: exercise. They say diet contributes about 75% of the work to a weight management program, and exercise makes up the other 25%. And I agree with that. But where earning calories is concerned, I suggest putting your emphasis on exercise starting right now in November. Here are a few reasons why:

November: With diet alone, you'll be able to make a nice small prepayment on your dietary credit card for the holidays. Exercise will help to increase the size of that payment. Imagine if you exercised enough in November that you waltzed into December with a 5 or 6 pound pre-holiday weight loss? Even after you gained the typical 7-10 pounds that Canadians pack on over Christmas, you'd come close to breaking even! Not only is that good for your physical wellness, but it's a great mental and emotional boost, too, to know that you've remained in control of your exercise and nutrition during the most challenging time of the year.  

December: The work you put into your exercise in November will not only afford you a dietary credit card overpayment, but something else will happen behind-the-scenes too: you'll have been establishing a habit. Not only will this habit help you earn even more treats during the big eating season but more importantly, that habit will hopefully continue on through the month of December - a.k.a., the month when all dietary hell breaks loose. Studies have shown that it takes 21 days to make a habit; that's what November was for. Once the calendar turns to the month of December, that habit will already be engrained and you'll be more inclined to exercise to earn or burn all those delicious Christmas calories. Go ahead. Envision yourself saying 'Yes' to a second glass of full-fat egg nog WITH rum, knowing that you spent 30 minutes earlier that day having a brisk incline walk on a treadmill. The few hundred calories you'll be racking up by drinking a few glasses of rummy egg nog will have already been paid in advance by your exercise habit. 

January: Cut your fitness-related New Year's resolutions off at the pass. Gyms bust at the seams with Resolutioners in January, February... March? Not so much. But chances are very good that you'll make a similar resolution. Will you stick to it? It's a heck of a lot of pressure to be one of the hundreds or thousands of new members at a gym trying to get inspired to build a fitness habit. But you could already have your habit built by then. Listen, you've got two months before you have to make that resolution, and you KNOW you're going to make it, right? So start your exercise plan now. Get the habit started early and beat the resolution crowd to the punch. By the time all those nervous, wide-eyed Resolutioners hit the floor in January, you'll already be on auto-pilot.

Ka-Ching!
If you start right now, and vow to exercise all the way through the holiday season, three times a week for 30-60 minutes at a time, burning an average of 500 calories each time, that's 1500 extra calories you can consume each week and still break even - because the holiday season is no time to try to lose weight, just as it's no time to try to save money. You can drink full-fat egg nog, you can have an extra heap of stuffing and gravy with your turkey dinner and you can have Turtles for breakfast, as long as you've made a little room on your dietary credit card.

When the New Year rings in and the holiday season finally starts to fizzle out on January 1, 2010, aim to be the same weight you were in October before all this eating madness started. And even if you do gain a few pounds, at least you've taken great strides toward creating your fitness habit. You've been making your minimum payments. And it's easier to avoid going into debt than it is to pay it back once you've gone into the red.

Building or continuing an exercise habit through the month of November will set you up to continue the habit through December, and into 2010 and beyond. Even with all the parties and the Turtles and the nog, as long as you've got a regular exercise habit under your belt (no pun intended) you'll come closer to ending the Christmas season in the black.

 

So, I started writing this rather self-righteous post about how I think it's foolish when people go to what I consider 'illogical extremes' with their diet. I tried to use a survival analogy to illustrate my point - referring to the fact that our ancestors, the mighty cavemen, didn't restrict their diets. They *couldn't* restrict their diets, in the name of survival.

As I was writing it, I started looking around for information to back up what I thought was a really great point. Instead I found some research that indicates that cavemen DID in fact eat a restricted diet - not out of choice, but because it was all they had access to. And their restricted diet may have rendered them a lot heathier than modern man.

Once I realized the research slightly contradicted my entire analogy, I thought about deleting this whole entry. Instead, I decided to shovel up a big ol' slice of humble pie and publish it anyway. Even if my original point is now somewhat moot, it's still interesting to learn about the caveman diet. 

More interestingly, this very contradictory post can actually help to illustrate a very real issue in the Wellness World: contradictions are everywhere. One person may tell you to that cardio is better for fat loss, another may tell you that weight training is. One may tell you that a vegetarian diet is the best way to keep your heart healthy, another may tout lean protein as the source of a healthy heart. It's very difficult for the average end-user to know what's true and what's hype, and it makes the whole journey down the wellness path even more winding and convoluted than it needs to be. We have to band together to wade through the muck. So that's what this convoluted, time-stamped post now represents: wellness muck-wading.

What started as a quasi-Darwinian look at nutrition soon evolved into something else entirely. 

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"If it doesn't make sense, it probably isn't true."
(Thursday, October 29, 10:12am)

Truer words were never spoken (and we have Judge Judy to thank for that gem).

Sometimes when I'm pondering an issue that affects us as a species, I think in terms of evolution.

In order for us to evolve into man, the one and only thing we needed to master was survival. To this end, man learned how to do a lot of things that probably didn't come immediately naturally to him. He learned to drink water. How did he learn to do this? Let's assume it was trial and error. Probably sometime very early in our existence, when our first single-celled ancestors emerged from the primordial soup, we lost a few generations of organisms because we were just so gosh-darned thirsty but didn't know how to satisfy our thirst. Or, for that matter, what "feeling thirsty" even meant. Eventually we learned that if we drank water, we could stave off that thirsty feeling and - as a bonus - we didn't die as much.

As we grew from plankton to monkey to man, we learned a lot of things in this way. We learned that we needed to eat. We probably expended a few generations' worth of ancestors just figuring out what plants and organisms were edible and which were poisonous - or which ones would fight back and kill us if we tried to eat them. We learned to make weapons to take down these bigger, more murderous meals. We learned that their skin and fur kept us warm when the temperature got cold. We learned to make fire to keep us even more warm and we figured out that if we cooked our meat over that fire, we lost even fewer of our kin to illness.

We figured all this stuff out. Of course. it took a really long time to get to where we are now. Now we live in a world with flying machines, smartphones and crunchy tacos INSIDE soft tacos (how do they DO that?). But it can't hurt to think back to where we came from and how we managed to get here.

Which - to sum up this neverending preamble - is why I shake my head when I hear someone say that he or she is trying some kind of new eating plan that eliminates {food item/macronutrient}.

The fundamentals of nutrition are relatively simple: the food we take in is converted and used in a very specific way in our bodies to keep us survivin'. Moreover, we've been honing the skill of survival for millions of years. In our history as a species, nutrition has played one of the biggest roles in our ability to thrive, reproduce and evolve. 

Scaling nutrition back to very simplistic terms, we have our macronutrients: protein, carbohydrates and fat. Water is sometimes tossed in there as a macronutrient too. We have the vitamins and minerals. All of these things work in the body to regulate stuff and help build the tissues and cells and things that we need to, you know, exist. I'm REALLY simplifying this...

What if I told you that I decided I was going to go on a low-calcium diet? You'd probably recoil in horror at the inevitable loss of density in my teeth and bones. You'd remember back to everything you learned in your life about how drinking milk is necessary for us to "grow up big and strong."

Or maybe I'll try a low-Vitamin C diet. Think of all the calories I'll save if I never eat another orange again! I'll look super hot in my swimsuit this year, if you can overlook the scurvy-induced bleeding gums and skin lesions.

Or, okay. Let's put this in terms that modern-day 21st-century man can understand: What if I said I was going to go on a low-protein, high-carb diet?

*stunned silence*

Somewhere in very recent history, carbohydrates have been labeled "really bad" and protein deemed "super good." Fat suffered this same fate a few years ago too, before everyone jumped on the low-carb wagon. In fact, they're all totally unique, equally-necessary macronutrients that perform important roles and tasks for the proper care and function of our bodies. Every macronutrient, vitamin and mineral is equally important, and shunning one of them makes absolutely no sense.

Our genetic code, dietarily speaking, is built upon simple, intuitive eating habits. Rather than obsessing about what to eliminate from your diet, spend less time thinking about it altogether, and let your body have a logical sampling of all the macronutrients. The building blocks of basic nutrition are not open to interpretation. We didn't get to where we are today by eliminating one or more of  our necessary dietary elements.

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Eating Crow (a Good Source of Lean Protein!)
(Thursday, October 29 2009, 11:26am)

Well now I'm a little bummed, because I just read this article about the caveman diet, which says that in fact cavemen *did* have a restricted diet, and that modern man is not equipped to consume and digest all the refined carbohydrates we've been eating since the advent of agriculture.

The article went on to indicate that some of the common diet-related diseases we see occurring more and more often as time goes on - such as obesity and Type 2 diabetes - are because, at the genetic level, our bodies have not kept up with the technological advances of agriculture and food preparation. We are not programmed to thrive on our modern diet.

Cavemen didn't have a means by which to process and refine the grains that modern man eats in such abundance today. Sugar and salt as we know them didn't exist. Even dairy was scarce or non-existent. As a result, cavepeeps probably had healthier hearts and narrower midsections than the average modern man.  

Cavemen ate only what they could kill or procure from the plants around them, so it meant a lot of lean proteins, fruits, nuts and berries. It sounds a little Atkins-ish, except that the caveman diet wasn't restricted out of some desire to look hot in a loincloth - it was simply because only certain foods were available. 

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So What have we Learned?
(Thursday, October 29 2009, 4:04pm)

I still feel confident that the best way to eat is to eat in a way that makes logical sense. But maybe it has to make sense 400,000 years ago.

400, 000 years ago, there was no white rice, no white pasta, no white bread, no sugary candy, no salt shakers on the table. Cavepersons intuitively ate the things that were available to them, things that existed naturally in their world, and they were probably healthier, nutritionally speaking, than man is today.

So we could say that we've learned that we should avoid eating refined grains... but I feel like we probably knew that already. Eliminating refined grains is NOT the same as eliminating all carbohydrates, and even the cavemen knew that. They ate lots of berries and as many whole grains as they could dredge up. If a caveman had decided to NOT eat berries, he would have been eliminating one of his vital sources of nutrients - a deeply illogical move, especially since a caveman needed to have as much energy as possible, since he spent much of his day battling sabre-toothed tigers and inventing the wheel. The caveman needed to eat all of the naturally-occurring foods available to him, and so do you. 

If someone suggests that you need to eliminate an entire macronutrient in order to be fit and healthy, tell them, "No thanks. I'm trying to keep our species alive here."