Author: Cian

What are carbs is not a silly question, many people get confused so let’s tease it out…

Carbs are short for carbohydrates.  Essentially a form of sugar that comes in many forms.  All are types of saccharide (a molecule), which is the greek for sugar.

There are basically 4 groups: monosaccharides, disaccharides, oligosaccharides, and polysaccharides.

The names give away a bit about the molecules, mono means 1 or very simple sugar, di means 2, oligo 2-10 and poly complex molecules.

Let’s forget about the chemistry and put it into layman’s terms:

• monosaccharides and disaccharides are known to us as sugar (which occurs naturally in fruits, berries, milk, honey ie anything sweet to taste). Most sugars end with ‘ose’ e.g. sucrose, fructose, lactose, glucose.
• polysaccharides are known to us as starch e.g corn, wheat, potatoes, some vegetables etc.

When either a sugar or starch goes through our stomachs, they get converted into monosaccharides like fructose and glucose, a simple, important sugar or monosaccharide, which then circulates through the bloodstream to be used for various purposes, primarily energy e.g. to fuel the brain, or to store in muscles as a polysaccharide known as glycogen.  The body releases insulin to deal with glucose.

The stomach can quickly process sugars and starches without fibre, they enter the bloodstream fast, these sorts of foods have a high GI (glycemic index ie a score of how fast it affects blood sugar levels). Fructose has a slightly different effect than glucose in terms of insulin response and so can also raise the GI of the food as the sugar is not absorbed as quickly as glucose.

In nature, starchy and sugary carbs are most often accompanied with fibre, both soluble (flesh of fruit), which is digestable, and non-soluble (bran of grain), which is undigestable.  Fibre often contains minerals and vitamins, slows digestion (lowering the GI of the food) and helps passing waste.  It has also been shown to reduce cholesterol.

These days, processed foods take the tasty sugar and fluffy starch from the food and discard all of the fibre, and so the foods have a very high GI and very little nutrient content.  Vitamin B1, Thiamine was discovered when polished rice (rice with the outer bran removed or white rice i.e. refined carb), was the main staple of people in south east asia. People got very sick and eventually it lead to the discovery of vitamins.  Today we get vitamin B in our diets, but it goes to show the importance of fibre above and beyond helping to pass waste and slow down digestion of sugars.  It typically serves many purposes, containing various vitamins and minerals depending on the produce.

Nature seduced us with sugars, it made the food taste good, but natural foods containing sugars are also delivery mechanisms for nutrients. Refined versions tastes bloody good though, because they are the bits that invoke our ancient, primal, survival instincts.    However, these foods have such a high GI, they cause pronounced blood sugar spikes a severe resulting insulin response in the body and can cause problems for the body in the long term such as diabetes, where your cells become resistant to insulin or the pancreas itself malfunctions. There can be other effects too such as leptin resistance caused by fructose, which can also accelerate weight gain.

We’re not designed to eat natural autumnal produce for the entire year, never mind their highly processed derivatives so…

…Don’t Eat for Winter!

(not all of the time anyway)

 

 

 

It might be a bit of a misleading title, because losing fat takes a bit of time and consistency, but here are my top tips on losing it as fast as possible in a safe way.

1. Do not eat large quantities of carbs (sugar, starch) with every meal: Your body has 2 batteries for sugar energy i.e. your liver and your muscles.  If they are constantly topped up and overflowing with sugar, your body never has a chance to burn fat.  Try and reduce the amount of insulin spiking meals/snacks you have per day. I see it every day here, people eat huge lunches and dinners in carveries and at home. Recently, I saw someone get 3 scoops of mash, some garlic spuds, a yorkshire pudding, and then carrots and turnips on the same plate.  That’s boils down to enough sugar for 3 days worth of energy.  I was there, I’ve eaten that sort of food but it’s not right.  In fact combine that with a breakfast containing carbs e.g. breakfast roll, and something like a curry with rice or spaghetti bolognese for dinner and a few snacks in between and you’ve given yourself no chance but to pile on the pounds and feel terrible. We’ve only got one shot here, your head is sitting on top of the ultimate ancient machine and it’s priceless.  If you treat it right it will perform amazingly well for you and you can turn things around no matter what stage you’re at.  Give yourself the exact amount of sugar energy per day that you need and you’ve taken the first step.
2. Exercise regularly: By exercising you utilise the sugar stores in your muscles and at high intensity you utilise the sugar flowing in your blood stream.  This means you are burning that fuel immediately by clearing excess sugar flowing in your system and emptying those buckets/sinks so that they can be refilled again.  The other main advantage of exercise, in terms of burning fat, is that your metabolism is raised while you are recovering, which means that you will be burning fat at rest at a much higher rate. It’s good to do various forms of cardio.  I suggest about 3 times a week and vary it between intense (shorter bursts / intervals), moderate and light recovery (walk, jog over longer distance keeping heart rate low, this burns a little bit of fat while exercising). Intense cardio can be very tough on the system, and as the heart is a muscle it requires time to recover and get stronger.
3. Have satiating meals containing protein and good fats:  When you eat protein and fat together with fewer carbs, you will feel fuller for longer.  Great sources which include both include eggs, oily fish such as salmon and mackerel, nuts and seeds, and wild game.  I like throwing an array of seeds on eggs in the mornings for example.
4. Avoid sugar and fats:  One of the concepts in Don’t Eat for Winter is that human breast milk contains the optimal formula for infants to put on weight.  It is the same practically the world over and is therefore a one-size-fits-all formula.  It is no coincidence that in nature, in autumn, the macro-nutrient ratio of foods begins to mimic this formula, whereas in spring the nutrient ratio mimics that of a bodybuilders diet.  It is also no co-incidence that the foods that taste really really good also mimic this formula e.g. chocolate, crisps, cakes and so on. We go ga-ga for mother’s milk!  Look out for foods that contain this formula of high carb, high fat and moderate protein.  It triggers primal gorge instincts and is designed, by nature, to deposit fat quickly.
5. Lift weights:  OK it’s exercise again, but weights will improve muscle tone.  Without taking drugs it’s extremely difficult for most people to put on lots of muscle through weight training.  It’s a myth that women should not lift weights.  All Hollywood stars lift for their movies to look great.  Women might want that rounded butt (squats) or a little definition on arms and shoulders (curls and flyes).  Men might want a bigger chest and wider back (bench and lat pulldowns). Unless you train several hours a day and take steroids, you’re not going to get big.  Lifting weights causes muscles to become more toned and solid and will be useful in day to day tasks.  They will cause you to burn fat faster while resting during recovery, make you less insulin resistant and thus become sugar guzzlers helping you to manage blood sugar levels and keep in fat burning mode.  I train 3 hours a week with weights and it has given me great results with supporting nutrition and rest.
6. Keep hydrated: Your body requires water and electrolytes to function well in every way and detoxify. There are 7 main electrolytes.  Sports drinks sometimes advertise electrolytes but often simply contain table salt or sodium-chloride.  A good electrolyte supplement can be better than these drinks as they contain the full array necessary in the right balance.  Our cells swim in saline solution, our bodies, which mimic the ancient ocean environment they evolved in, and potassium replaced regular salt as we evolved and moved inland. Potassium, therefore, is an important electrolyte that is contained in foods like bananas and in the past our ancestors, especially those living inland,  used to get most of their salts from natures produce, however today, we eat get plenty of regular salt (sodium choride) in comparison as additives etc. Electrolytes are lost through sweat, so make sure and replenish if you do sweat a lot.
7. Supplement: Body processes such as the mobilisation of fat, to burn as fuel, requires that you have essential nutrients present to support these functions.  A good multi-vit is important, especially if the diet is bad.  Try and eat and array of colourful, fibrous foods everyday to get a good array of vitamins and minerals, and supplement with a good mult-vit.
8. Sleep:  The most powerful anti-oxidant is sleep, your body does a lot of work to make sure you are in tip top condition when you sleep.  Make sure you get adequate sleep.  Also, sleep is the purest form of aerobic activity and your body wants to burn fat in this mode.  Keeping your blood sugars normal means your body will burn fat all night.
9. Don’t trust the scales: Don’t look at the scales every day. You can fluctuate by 1kg a day based on  salt levels, hydration, food in tummy and waste in bladder/bowels etc.   You cannot lose 1lb in a day of body-fat unless you create a calorie deficit of 3500 calories… maybe if you ran a 24 hour marathon you could, but most of us don’t do this so it’s impossible under normal circumstances.  If you see a diet promising that you will lose 10lbs in a week it won’t be fat you’re losing. I think 50g-100g a day is a lot of fat to lose and equates to 450-900 calories worth of fat.  They say 2lbs a week is safe and I would agree.  The trick is to be consistent and if you fall, don’t worry about it, you’re dealing with primal instincts here so try not to trigger them very often. Also, if you do lift weights, you may put on a bit of muscle, so body fat is the measure of how much fat you’ve lost.  The best method to check at home is using a body-fat calipers and taking measurements from around your body. People are spending a fortune getting weighed in at slimming weight loss clubs having someone tell them they lost a few lbs a week without fully appreciating the body’s processes and how to accurately measure progress.
10. Have a goal: What are you losing weight for?  A wedding, the beach, to get healthier, because you just want to feel more attractive.  Well, you’re already perfect, but we all want to be our optimal most-healthy selves and it’s great getting compliments when you look well and healthy.  I lost weight initially for kettlebell competitions and I didn’t realise the extent of compliments I’d get when I lost all the weight but it felt great having felt so bad about myself for years. Based on this, I set a target for my 40th birthday to get in the best shape of my life and I applied the Don’t Eat for Winter theory to assist with that and got incredible results and down to <8% bodyfat.  If I can do this having been overweight for 10 years so can you.
11. Don’t do it all at once: Don’t try and do it all at once, make a small change today, maybe cut out one carb-centric meal. I started by cutting out toast for brekkie and have eggs and rashers/salmon or almond flour pancakes, or an omlette, even walnuts and avocado, or a protein shake with peanut butter (if in a hurry) to start and it made a big difference.  I then cut out sugar in coffee, and eventually went from latte’s, to cappucinos, to americanos and then black coffee (which I now love).  If you do it all at once you might feel like you’re denying yourself and it’s not about self-denial.  My diet might be alien to many people starting out now, but it’s so enjoyable to feel great after every meal, no slumps, lots of energy and being as close as to the best I can be.
12. Treat yourself now and again: I have plenty of treats, and really enjoy them, maybe too many at times, but life is too short to be monk-like.  I enjoy going out to the pub, having a bit of take-away and having a nice little cake with coffee now and again.  The thing is not to have a 6 pack of crisps at home or a bag of chocolates available at the ready every day.  When I eat a bag of crisps, my pupils dilate and I become a sort of truffle snuffling primal creature and am not satisfied until the entire house is emptied of junk.  Before I know about the biological triggers, I used to blame myself for being someone with no will power, but it’s incredibly difficult to overcome primal instincts.  So now I have my treats outside the house.  That way if those urges come after the treat, I’m not in a position to gorge and I understand what’s going on now so I’m better able to deal with it.  Those urges pass relatively quickly and I’m back on the horse again pronto.

These are some simple ideas and tips, check out my book Don’t Eat for Winter, which contains The DEFoW Diet, for all the theory and fundamentals so you get a full understanding of the above and much more so that you can empower yourself with full knowledge of the instincts and processes going on, that are actually primal in nature.  Our bodies want to survive and so putting on fat was advantageous in autumn, in stone age times, in order to survive the Winter, but soon after the weight was put on it was lost, as mother nature’s autumnal produce dissipated over the winter months.  People got back into optimal condition for spring.  Nowadays all of these foods are available all the time in both natural and processed forms (I call it Autumn on Steroids), and so all those processes are triggered day in day out indefinitely. Don’t Eat for Winter is about tackling these instincts and processes in a way that suits today’s society.

Nature used to force us to eat seasonally in stone age times because we couldn’t preserve foods long enough to last into the next season.  Foods perished and decayed and so we simply had to forage and eat what was available.

In autumn, there are lots of carbs naturally available, sugars and starches in the form of fruits, grains, potatoes (though not indigenous) etc. and the premise behind Don’t Eat for Winter is to moderate them, because eating autumnal foods promotes storage of body fat in order for human beings to survive winter.  It was once advantageous for humans to put on fat quickly, but with the vast array of autumn foods available in every shop now it means we’re Eating for Winter indefinitely and so chronic weight gain is the result.

Moderation of carbs, therefore, means simulating other seasons.  This is simulated through the DEFoW Diet.

I felt it wasn’t possible in this day and age to seasonally eat when our diets are so carb intensive, so I thought, why not split the day into seasons and eat spring, summer and autumn meals during the day.  That way over the course of the year the net difference is the same as if you had eaten seasonally.

Chapter 5 of Don’t Eat for Winter – The DEFoW Diet – shows you how to do this and provides 10 guidelines on how to live in a more balanced way with nature, to combat the effects of the artificial eco-system we now belong to.

You might have asked why I didn’t mention winter meals above, winter is sleep/hibernation and so my evening autumn meal helps me sleep into the night, as eating protein with carbohydrates has been found to help with sleep…

From the Sleep Foundation Website:

“Certain foods contain an amino acid called tryptophan that causes sleepiness. Carbohydrates make tryptophan more available to the brain, which is why carbohydrate-heavy meals can make you drowsy. Proteins from the food we eat are the building blocks of tryptophan, which is why the best bedtime snack is one that contains both a carbohydrate and protein”

I tend to eat these meals later in the day as it kills two birds with the one stone:

• they support my recovery from training (as I train in the evenings)
• they help me to get a good night’s sleep

If you train in the mornings things need to be shuffled a bit, but that’s my personal preference.

The Launch of Don’t Eat for Winter by Cian Foley was held at PEAK fitness in Waterford City on the 10th of March 2017 at 8.30pm.

The night began with a meet and greet over some healthy food and drink including salmon and an array of healthy food platters.

Dr. Rowe gave a lovely speech about the bamboo tree taking 5 years to root before then growing to huge heights and applied the analogy to Cian.

Cian then gave his talk, thanking the key people in his life, who helped and encouraged him to produce the book before getting stuck into the details of the diet.

He explained how the human body is an ancient natural machine living in a modern unnatural ecosystem and how the cards are stacked against the population because low-fat diets have been incorrectly promoted for so long. He suggested that lower carb-diets are shown to work, the evidence is there, and with the current obesity crisis now killing three times as many today as malnutrition that we’ve gotten something incredibly wrong.  He quoted the phrase “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results” but has high hopes that things will change.

The night finished with a book signing followed by some drinks and conversation.

The feedback from the book has been incredible and some initial customer reviews can be found here.

Following is a gallery of some of the photos from the night taken by Paul Dower from Waterford in Your Pocket.

 

 

High-carb, low-carb, high-GI, low-GI etc.  That’s all you hear these days and foods are now being labelled with things like low-GI as if that means it passed some certification, the same way low-fat is used.

Here’s the deal.  If something has sugar or starch in it, it’s a carb and after it goes through your stomach it gets converted to glucose to provide you with energy for your brain, muscles and aerobic system (when you’re working hard). If you have an excess your body will store fat.  Eat fat at the same time and it will store it very effectively and make the carbs taste even better.

GI is a scale, a bit like celcius on a thermometer, except it measures how fast a food affects your blood sugar levels.  Where 0 would be the effect of something like a few scallions, and 100 would be the effect glucose might have on you.  Most other foods lie somewhere in between. You can see where foods appear on the scale here: http://www.glycemicindex.com.  If something like a vegetable isn’t in the database, it’s probably because it has a negligible GI.

It gets a little more complex though.  Low GI can be a bit of a misnomer because a head of brocolli or an onion has a low-GI but that’s because there’s very little sugar in it.  However something like fibrous brown bread may also have a low GI but it will slowly release sugar into your blood stream for hours. In this way, all low GI foods are not the same, so lowering the GI does not necessarily decrease your daily carb intake.  Low GI foods that are carb loaded are digested more slowly because of the non-digestable fibre in them. This slows the release of sugar so that you have energy slowly released into the bloodstream over the course of hours rather than minutes if you had a sweet glucose drink with a high GI.

A better measure is the glycemic load or GL of a food, this number is also available for each food on www.glycemicindex.com.

Insulin, of course, is the response your body has to the influx of glucose into the blood stream.  The higher the GI, typically, the more insulin your pancreas will produce to force your body to try and absorb sugar, protein and fat into it’s cells.

Low GI can be a good choice, but if your feeding yourself carbs all day long, low GI or not, you are going to have a sustained level of sugar in your blood and a sustained insulin response over a longer period of time.  Some High GI foods have a low GL also such as melons, so it can all be very confusing.

This is why I talk about controlled-carb and precise carb control.  What does your body require and when does it need it most.  This is covered in detail in Don’t Eat for Winter but let me summarise here:

1. You need 420 cals a day for brain, 60% of your body’s requirement at rest
2. A resting body needs about 40% more so lets say 800 cals in total

As part of a 2000 calorie diet then, someone with a desk job barely needs 40% of their diet from carbs, which is about 200 grams.  Even this small amount would be difficult to get in nature at this time of year (as “There’s no Starch in March”, there’s a chapter dedicated to this in the book).

If you divide that by 24 hours it equates to 8.3g an hour and that’s it, unless your are active. If you eat a bowl of porridge, or wholegrain bread it’s going to give you that sort of amount per hour, which is fine if you want sustained flow of sugar into your bloodstream.

Your body can store a bit of sugar in muscles and liver (in the form of glycogen), these are buckets that store sugar when they need topping up.  You can empty the muscles through exercise and the liver through fasting or not eating sugar. The liver fuels the brain from its stores when your blood sugar levels needs topping up.

The problem today, because we lead inactive lifestyles compared to our paleolithic ancestors, and are eating sugary and starchy foods all the time, these buckets are full to the brim most of the time, which means there’s almost always an excess of sugar. The sugar can’t go anywhere, so the pancreas is made to work to produce more insulin to try to do something with it.

By controlling the carb side of the diet, these buckets have a chance to function normally as short term batteries, to charge and discharge as designed.  The liver can fuel the brain, when blood sugars are low, and the muscles will always require a bit of topping up because of work.  This means when you do eat a bit of sugar, high or low gi, these stores are filled before the body has an excess to deal with.  You don’t want them emptied completely though or you won’t feel very good (unless you are on a very specific type of low carb diet).

This is what I mean by precise carb-control.  You give yourself enough each day, and then supplement based on activity.

If you lift weights, you burn glycogen so you can afford to supplement.

If you do intensive cardio, you cannot burn fat fast enough aerobically to generate the energy so you can supplement.

If you work all day with a manual job you may need more than the 8.3g an hour the desk job person needs so you can supplement.

Otherwise, there’s no need to supplement, have the precise amount you need, and try and get the rest of your energy requirement and your bodies nutrients from healthy fats & protein sources along with fibre.  Separating carbs from fats where possible means less overeating and less fat storage.

This has worked miraculously well for me and I look carefully at the carb side of my diet, and try get good protein and fat sources too for the rest. The DEFoW diet is a set of guidelines around this way of thinking, with suggestions about combinations and when etc.

Think about it, 10000BC, to get carbs was difficult, except for Autumn (unless you lived near the equator, in which case fats were lower).  The body is designed to work with a minimum of this type of food for most of the year, and when it’s available, it stands to reason the body will react differently.

We feast and get fat for Winter.

So Don’t Eat for Winter by controlling your autumnal carb intake.

Controlling carbs and avoiding carbs+fats together specifically means you control appetite and the amount of each type of fuel you injest.  What you eat can dictate how much you eat.

 

I’m absolutely overwhelmed by the initial response to the release of my new book Don’t Eat for Winter. The first batch of books are now winging their way to people all over Ireland and the world, including Denmark, Netherlands, UK, and the United States.

Thank you so much for your support and confidence. I cannot wait to discover what you all think of the book and hopefully it will help you in some small way towards attaining your goals in 2017.

The book is being launched next Friday night in Peak Fitness, read more about the launch here.

Best regards,

Cian