Did you eat one too many easter eggs? Yeah, me too! Once you start it’s difficult to stop, I was 41 the weekend too and so I had a proper blowout which means I’ve put on about 2kg over one weekend. It’s temporary weight, and mostly water as my glycogen stores have been filled to the brim (glycogen is sugar in a form that can be stored in muscles and they facilitate holding on to water too). My stomach is also processing what I put in to it, and there’s probably a bit of fat stored too. So what! I’m not going to beat myself up over it, I let my hair down and became the squirrel again for a couple of days. Human beings are entitled to celebrate.
The trick is not to celebrate every day, but unfortunately some of us do this and it’s because of powerful marketing and recipes that trigger primal instincts within us, that kick off an inner dialog that basically talks us into eating things we know aren’t great for us. That’s the challenge of modern society. Nature used to moderate foods for us by season, but nowadays we have everything available at all times, which is what I mean by the infinite autumn we live in. It is up to use to simulate the natural environment we are designed for, if we want to be the healthiest versions of ourselves.
Easter eggs, they’re lovely with coffee and I savoured them and the chocolate melted with each sup… yum! But why is this so nice, why does it make me feel so bloody good when I eat it? My understanding of this is the ratio of fat/sugar/protein, about 50/40/10 in terms of calories, which almost exactly matches human baby milk!!! I term this the squirrel formula because it also matches the food environment of nature in Autumn time which primes us for fat storage. There are so many processes kicked off by this formula, it makes you tired, makes you feel good, and makes you store fat. Think about this, when an infant is nursing in mother’s arms, they feel good, get tired and store fat. We might not be babies anymore, but we sure as hell are human beings and our brains and bodies are wired in a particular way, some things are fundamental.
In spring time, there are practically no carbs, we would have had to work hard to get food at this time of year, fishing, hunting, scavenging, even to pick leaves and whatever vegetation was around we would need to work. Nature made us so that we would be optimal to work with her during these times. It was easy in autumn, tough in spring, we became lethargic and put on weight in winter, and became active and humming machines in spring. Perfection.
The balance is lost today because we live in a permanent autumn where we don’t even need to exercise, so we must simulate our ancient environment through eating well and exercising daily. This does not mean torture, it should be fun, and nothing is more fun than looking good and feeling great.
So if you’re feeling bad after the weekend, don’t do that to yourself. Understand that it’s primal, and make a conscious effort now to put it behind you and get out there today and start afresh. I’m putting on my rollerblades now to go out for a skate and work up a little sweat while having fun and i’ll enjoy my food today.
My strategy for eating is eating seasonally every day, because all foods are available at all times, I give myself the perfect amount of carbs a day for my body’s requirements and then I can hear what my body wants other than that because I haven’t set off the autumnal instincts. Once the noise of sugar (and sugar is both starch and sweet stuff) is gone, I can hear the nutrients I want through my appetite. This is part of our design.
The word diet? If we were to play a game of word association what kind of words would you think of? Restriction, denial, hardship, misery, torture, pain, penance, starvation, unsustainable, rebound etc. Many diets aren’t fun at all and many involve calorie deficits, meal replacements, utilising a calorie counting or equivalent scheme, food exclusions, specific foods and so on. Some involve paying to get weighed in every week too, which is a good motivation to lose it.
Then there’s bad diets, which include those containing a lot of fast food and junk foods etc. I heard it said many times, “you can’t out train a bad diet,” but if you don’t know what a bad diet is, then how can you ever out-train it? You can’t out train ignorance and believe me, I tried. I thought I could out-train my diet but I was kidding myself and murdered myself trying. It was only when I became conscious of diet did my full transformation occur. I see others in this situation and I would like to see them get maximum results from their training too.
I couldn’t even out-train what I thought was a good diet, because I didn’t understand how fast some natural carbs affect blood sugar levels, and when combined with fats are lethal for clinging on to body fat. You have to remember, storage of fat is a survival trait, and the body is designed to hold onto fat under the right circumstances. My belief is that nature creates those circumstances naturally in Autumn with carbs as the trigger food. It works for squirrels and other animals, why not us too…
Then there are diets like keto, low-carb, fat-adaption, high protein etc. and it can all get very confusing. Which one is right, maybe they all have merits, maybe they suit some people better than others. I tried many of them and had some good success with them. The thing I noticed about diets is that the lower carb diets seemed to work wonders with me. This sent my mind racing, and chasing the why of it all, which is when I discovered the Don’t Eat for Winter premise, giving a fundamental reason why carbs trigger fat storage and as a result why lower-carb diets are so effective i.e.
Autumn carbs fattened up stone-age people up for winter
Through modern society, we’ve created an infinite autumn on steroids as autumn foods are now refined
This prepares humans indefinitely for a winter that never comes
Piling on pounds over years and years is the net result (chronic obesity in severe cases).
My take on it is this, always look to nature, nature always has the answer and if you mess with nature, problems occur. Nature wants us to be the perfect version of ourselves at any given moment because her own survival is dependent on her creatures adapting and evolving to work by her side. It might sound a bit cliche, but it’s true. We evolved with nature, and nature created us to survive and thrive, but today our food environment is totally artificial and this is causing us all sorts of problems. I find it ironic that our ability to store and preserve food for our survival has cursed us with a different set of health issues detrimental to it. We’ve essentially solved world hunger, but in the process we’ve created the obesity crisis and the resulting health issues have overtaken the mortality rates caused by malnutrition. It doesn’t help that there have been deceptions and so much confusion, commercial entities interested in exploiting our primal gorge instincts, and poor education and legislation, which is why it is so difficult to lose weight in modern society.
Don’t Eat for Winter or The DEFoW Diet is about remedying this situation. It allows us to become fully aware of what is going on, and through understanding the problem, we can then create a solution for ourselves. It’s a bit like Morpheus waking up Neo from the Matrix, only the world you wake up to is far better than the one left behind.
I personally don’t like restricting any type of food or food group from a diet, if you like it, and it doesn’t disagree with you then don’t exclude it. I think moderation is key and common sense especially when it comes to junk food, and to eat natural foods where possible. Of course this works best along with getting in some regular exercise. ‘Cut down on the junk and move’ is probably the best advice anyone can give but it’s a bit too blunt and it’s not as simple as that as some natural foods have a bizarre ability to sky-rocket blood sugar levels and combining with natural fats, can be just as fattening as something artificial.
Autumnal carbs are the big problem today (and refined versions such as fluffy white starchy foods and refined sugars). In nature, they spiked our blood for 3 months of the year, which means the pancreas was not under much pressure to produce insulin for most of the year, nowadays the pancreas is under attack and being put under pressure 4+ times a day, all year around, by the glucose flowing through our blood so it is no wonder so many people have issues with that particular organ and also no wonder that it can problems can be managed and even reversed in many cases through diet and exercise. Again, it just isn’t natural to be eating autumnal carbs all day every day 365 days a year, so, through the DEFoW diet, I propose eating seasonally on a daily basis, which results in just one or two less-pronounced insulin spikes a day (the protein in a diet will cause a milder insulin response too and invoke muscle protein synthesis).
The DEFoW Diet is therefore, essentially, a sort of stone-age simulation i.e. a more natural, healthy way of eating combined with exercise. It’s easy to maintain in the long-term too because you are not restricting or conscious of the amount of food you eat, you are just mindful in particular of the carb aspect of the diet and not to exceed your sugar energy requirements, especially in conjunction with fats. Over and above that, it describes combinations of foods to eat, when and why to eat them and suggested exercise plan for men and women too, but not only that, it explains the energy sources required for particular types of exercise, nutrients the body requires to recover and be healthy, and other lifestyle suggestions too so that you can construct the best version of you over the next phase of your life. In 2 years all your cells will have been replaced, you will be totally new, so why not begin constructing the best you 2.0 starting today and galvanise the only asset you have of real worth, your FAB Machine (flesh and bone machine), your body.
My theory on weight gain is based on the fact that foods produced in autumn, in particular carbs, cause brain and body processes that encourage fat storage in order to protect you from the food shortages and cold of winter.
In modern society we’ve essentially elongated and amplified autumn through food preservation techniques and refined versions of sugars and starches that contain no meaningful nutrition, yet invoke powerful primal fat storage instincts and body processes.
I’m not into making excuses about anything, but when it comes to chronic weight gain the world is in dire straits. We are designed by nature to be absolutely perfect, but something has gone drastically wrong considering so many of us are being broken. We’ve taken nature out of the equation with our current artificial eco-system and the entire world is paying the price with all sorts of health concerns as a result. I personally, think the game is rigged and the cards are stacked against us for various reasons outlined below. I was caught in this game but I won my battle. We’re in a war and I want to go back onto the battle field and pull my fellow comrades out of the trenches and get them to safety.
Here are 6 reasons why it’s not your fault if you can’t shed the weight and why there’s a constant ongoing struggle:
Getting fat is a survival talent: As stated, modern society has created an infinite autumn, so the feast famine cycle doesn’t occur naturally anymore and so weight gain is continuous and chronic. Mother nature used to moderate our carb intake by the season but now that she’s out of the equation, there’s no moderation. The feast is never-ending and the only way to simulate the famine is through diet. Of course restrictive diets can cause a rebound as the body’s metabolism slows during the diet, and once finished the pounds rebound. This talent is being preyed upon in so many ways now, but it’s no longer advantageous for us to store fat for a winter that won’t ever materialise so we need to use our brains to address the problem.
There’s been a huge deception: If you google Sugar Scandal you will find many reports of a scandal that happened in the 60s where scientists found in favour of low-fat/higher-carb diets as being healthier than low-carb/high-fat diets for the prevention of coronary heart disease. This ended the then debate and since then low-fat has been advised and we see such foods in every supermarket world-wide. The problem is the body requires good fats to be fully functional and healthy. Sugar taxes are now being implemented globally because high-carb is now seen as less healthy, this is a good thing but we need to look at it holistically as the problem is all sugars, not just the sweet stuff which leads me to point 3.
Governments don’t understand carbs: Carbs are both sugar and starch. Starch is a non-sweet form of sugar that the body can convert to glucose at unbelievable speed. For example a baked Irish potato has a higher gi than a 250ml glass of Soda! Yes we are being advised to eat low GI foods in their natural form, but the demonizing of soft drinks and sugary products does not address the fundamental issue of too much carbs in our diets. We eat them 3-4+ times a day, not including snacks and this leads to us having a constant stream of glucose and resulting insulin hormone circulating around our bodies putting our cells into storage mode, preventing the utilization of body fat for energy purposes.
Shops and manufacturers tease our primal instincts: Go into any shop and it’s like running the gauntlet trying to get out without buying a treat. Cakes, crisps, pastries, chocolates, bars, sweets they’re everywhere in our faces. All of these foods mimic approximate the baby milk macro-nutrient ratio, (high fat, high carb, moderate protein) and it’s no co-incidence this ratio is approximated by nature in Autumn time. I call it The Squirrel Formula, as it was more appropriate than calling it the booby trap for obvious reasons LOL. This formula invokes our gorge instincts, which is why foods that implement it taste so gorgeous. It’s called comfort eating because it reminds us of how we felt when we were suckling infants. Taste is one of nature’s sirens, a way of tricking us into eating something for a natural purpose i.e. the continued survival of both. Eat just one chocolate, or one crisp and see how they coax you into eating more. This inner voice is instinct in action.
Education is still not perfect on the subject: The food pyramid now has veg on the bottom rung, which is great, but it also contains bananas, apples, fruit juice etc. These foods are essentially high gi/gl carbs and those foods should belong on a rung of their own above low gi carbs. Most people do not know that having something like parsnips with potatoes means upping the overall sugar spiking aspect of the meal. Replacing high gi veg with low gi veg such as broccoli would help lessen the gi of the meal. This sort of information needs to be understood by parents and children so that we don’t continue to make the same mistakes. We are intelligent enough to understand these things. Don’t Eat for Winter makes it super simple.
Our lives are now sedentary. The body burns approx 700-800 calories a day of sugar when resting, the rest of our energy comes from body fat and fat in our diets. Since we are being encouraged to eat so much carbs from the food pyramid, it seems the potential to eat more that 200g of carbs a day is very likely with this approach and so we exceed our sugar supply every single day. Excess of anything leads to problems, in the case of sugar, it leads to obesity and related medical issues such as insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, CHD, hypertension, kidney issues and a lot more. Exercising can increase our sugar requirement and is very important that we all do some, however the excess is so great in many cases that there’s no way to out-train the excess. We must learn more precisely what our bodies require from this perspective.
The solution of course is to understand the problems first and then address them with a solution. This is what Don’t Eat for Winter and The DEFoW Diet are all about. Providing you with a sensible approach to beating the system. As stated earlier, I won my personal war with weight but there are so many still battling in the trenches. My wish is to help as many people struggling as possible with what I’ve learned and the best way I felt is through this book.
So many people out there pay a lot of money every week to get weighed in to find out if they’ve lost weight, or waste a fortune in january with good intentions regarding an exercise regime. This book may just give you what you need to set your course in the right direction towards becoming the best version of you.
The DEFoW diet is a healthy diet, not something you go on. It’s a change of thinking a way of understanding the problem fundamentally. I eat like a king all the time and I’m never hungry. It advises seasonal eating on a daily basis in order simulate nature as best as possible in a world where all foods are available always. You can get your hands on a copy of Don’t Eat for Winter here.
It really bothers me when I see people training really hard in the gym, pounding the roads, and putting their bodies on the line, through suffering and pain, but never seeing the change in body shape they deserve. People who work-out regularly like this should look like greek gods and goddesses, but instead they see very little change or progress is extremely slow and one slip up like a holiday or weekend of fun and that progress is lost.
Here are the kinds of things I’ve heard and some quick answers:
Q. I eat well and exercise but I can’t lose weight You can eat well but if the combinations are wrong you can be triggering fat storage… that doesn’t mean it’s not healthy but you can still eat healthy and put on weight. Many natural foods have a higher position on the glycemic index than sugary soft drinks!!!
Q. I work out every day and can’t lose the weight This is more than likely diet related. I would suggest that upward of 80% of weight loss is diet related and exercise can account for the rest if you train hard. You cannot out train a bad diet, however, and you certainly cannot out train a bad diet if you don’t know what a bad diet is, this is what I mean when I say in the book: you can’t out train ignorance. I was totally ignorant to diet, but to be honest, it wasn’t all my fault, the experts told us eating lots of carbs was healthy and low-fat became the de-facto standard. Has it worked? Is the world slimmer? No, it’s not because we’re doing something wrong but things are changing as now we have sugar taxes being introduced, and the food-pyramid has changed and there is a growing consensus that too many carbs in our diets are the issue. Our diets today are extreme-carb-diets and killing us slowly. If we keep doing the same thing we’ll keep getting the same results. Don’t Eat for Winter suggests sensible change, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Q. Why am I not seeing weight loss with exercise Same point as above really, you can train as hard as you like but if you eat incorrectly you simply cannot burn enough calories to lose weight. Exercise will increase your metabolism during recovery but eating certain foods retards the fat burning process. If you understand these processes you will be able to tailor a diet for your own body’s requirements.
Q. How much exercise do I need to do to lose weight If losing weight is your goal through exercise, then you will have to put in some serious mileage. I was trekking around a local mountain range 3 days a week for years along with my kettlebell workouts, doing a colossal amount of work and the weight would not shift until I changed my diet. I don’t suggest calorie counting or any form of denial, besides precise control of your carb energy supply.
Q. I’m on a low calorie diet but I’m not losing weight This is an interesting one, you’ve probably slowed your metabolism down and so any little bit of food your body gets, it tries to store on to for survival purposes. You have to keep your metabolism fired up and recent research suggests that a low carb diet causes your metabolism to increase by up to 300 calories per day… you’d have to work quite hard to burn that in a gym.
Q. I’m running, cycling, swimming but not losing weight If you’re not doing this sort of exercise intensely, you’re probably burning a little fat during the session and the recovery might not cause a pronounced metabolism increase. It’s well worth exercising in this way to get the lungs going and heart rate up, but again unless you are covering very long distances over a long time, you probably will not see significant body changes. Consider supporting your cardio with anaerobic resistance training on alternate days.
Q. Can I lose weight by not exercising The short answer here is yes, and personally, I think you should not perform certain exercises such as running if you are carrying a lot of weight in order to protect your joints. First look at your diet, how many times a day are you carbing up… do you need that much sugar energy (remember spuds, pasta, rice are essentially sugar too). Then tweak your diet slowly, making little changes at a time.
Support your weight loss with fun exercise, hill walking with friends, some resistance training with machines, and non impact cardio on bicycle, rower, cross trainer etc. Get out into nature where possible. Don’t kill yourself in the beginning or you will just end up seeing it the same way people see restrictive diets… torture, denial, pain etc. It should always be enjoyable, why would you do something you don’t enjoy?
With the correct supporting diet, you will change drastically and in a very short space of time. I know because I was that person and it happened to me.
As soon as I figured out that my problem was that I was Eating for Winter all the time, I came up with the Don’t Eat for Winter strategy to combat it: a set of guidelines known as The DEFoW Diet. Once I applied this things changed literally overnight (well a few months but metaphorically speaking). You see I had been training intensely for 4 years, the pinnacle of which was when I won the amateur long cycle event in the World Championships in November 2015 beating off 14 competitors from across the world, champions of their own countries. I trained 6 times a week and put my body on the line every time I trained. I got rewarded with a title, but my body was still meh… A lot of other kettlebell athletes are the same, they work incredibly hard but body shape barely changes over years and years. That’s because body shape change due to exercise requires a supporting diet.
As soon as I applied the solution I came up with, within 8-12 weeks I changed so much I had to pinch myself.
The pictures below will give you an idea, the first is me after 4 years of training almost every day, and my diet was pretty good. The second was a couple of months after applying The DEFoW Diet.
Once you hit your true form you’re there, it’s just tweaking after that and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 12 months and I’ve kept my shape and body fat levels low.
The idea makes so much common sense and the results were so drastic I felt compelled to disseminate the information, and so rather than advise people one at a time I thought, why not write Don’t Eat for Winter. A year later I’m still improving physically at 41, and I’m ready to help others who are stuck deep in the trenches of war, or those who are almost home free. It’s just a matter of tweaking a few things to suit your lifestyle.
So how do you do it:
a) Don’t push yourself until your wrecked, train, don’t strain. I see people doing circuits beating themselves up. Training should be fun and just that, training.
b) Rest and recover. After a tough session give yourself time to recover. I like to train resistance one day and cardio the next with no more than 1 intense cardio session a week. The heart is a muscle give it time to recover. I suggest if you work any muscle very hard it needs 5 days recovery. If you haven’t worked a muscle for a while you might get DOMs (delayed onset muscle soreness), typically this takes days to dissipate, don’t train on muscles in this state and try not to get them into that state in the first place. Yes your muscles should be tired after a session but not so much that you are debilitated (unless you’re a bodybuilder).
c) Hydrate. If you sweat like me you need to get adequate water and replenish electrolytes. Many drinks that claim to be electrolyte drinks just contain table salt and we get plenty of that already in our diets, look for the other electrolytes such as potassium and magnesium. Supplementing with these is no harm.
d) Vitamins and Minerals. Obviously get most of these from your diet, wholegrain carbs, fish and meat, plenty of colourful vegetables. Supplementing with a good vitamin tablet is also good, but don’t go overboard, you only need a tiny amount of micronutrients in your body.
e) Good fats are essential. Don’t beleive the low fat hype. Your body needs good fats to survive. I’ll blog about these but there’s plenty of information in Don’t Eat for Winter about these. The important thing is timing. The DEFoW Diet details what types of fat to eat, when to eat them and why.
f) This is the most important. Support your body around training with carbohydrates and protein in order to function well during training and to recover muscle fibre. A process known as Muscle Protein Synthesis happens when you eat particular amino acids found in many protein sources, and if you combine with exercise it maximizes muscle gain and maintenance (we lose muscle as we get older, resistance training is the best way to keep your body young). If you don’t feed yourself right at this point you can actually cause Muscle Protein Breakdown, where your body actually mobilises it’s own nutrients to assist recovery where it needs it.
The book will teach you how to do all of this right and not gain weight at the same time. Basic background of human energy systems, nutrients required for recovery and the types of fuels for various types of exercise. I was making mistakes here and it caused me to stop losing weight when I got to 85kg. By applying the DEFoW Diet I dropped over a stone more of fat that I didn’t think I had to lose, and my wife Nicola had the same experience and we both maintained and gained muscle mass. Now I lift heavier, am capable of more work, and my joints feel more supple because my body is getting the exact energy and nutrients it needs to construct the best version of itself. In 2 years almost every cell in my body will be reconstructed and if I treat them right i’ll improve further.
If you’re frustrated with your progress and can’t lose weight no matter what you do, get yourself a copy of Don’t Eat for Winter and learn how to train in a more clever way. Understand your body, what it needs for energy and recovery and why the human body stores fat so readily. It’s all covered within the pages of the book. I got very cerebral about it and found out a way to eat my fill and yet lose weight. I thoroughly enjoy my food, once the noise of the siren’s call of autumnal carbs leaves your body, you begin to enjoy and savour foods that fortify your body, your FAB (Flesh and Bone) machine. The results were more energy, mood improvement, better physique and drastic fat loss. That’s why the book’s tagline is Unlock Nature’s Secret to Reveal Your True Body.
I wanted to clarify that Don’t Eat for Winter, or The DEFoW Diet is not a low-carb diet. It is a precise carb diet based on human body energy requirements. Compared to the modern diet we have been subjected to by very many parties it is comparatively low, because I would now consider today’s diet to be EXTREME carb.
As stated in previous blogs, the premise behind Don’t Eat for Winter is that carbs spike in autumn time, for the rest of the year they simply do not exist or are difficult to get in nature, especially where there are pronounced seasons. We, however, have managed to become the ultimate squirrels and have developed every little nicety that causes us to get weak at the knees at the thoughts of it. WHY? Because they invoke instinct. Survival instincts that make us want to put on fat to survive an oncoming famine of winter.
Just look at our diets, and I think you’ll agree I’m not over-exaggerating about the fact they are extremely carby:
Breakfast
Cereal
Breakfast baguette
Tea & Toast
Fruit Juice
ALL AUTUMNAL CARBS!!!
Lunch
Carvery with potatoes etc.
Sandwich / Baguette / Wrap / Panini
Fries & Burger
Pasta Salad
ALL AUTUMNAL CARBS
Dinner
Spaghetti Bolognese
Slice of Pizza
Potatoes and 2 Veg
Pasta something or other
Bread
ALL AUTUMNAL CARBS
Snacks in-between / Supper
Biscuit
Cake
Fruit
Bar (including protein bar)
Crisps
Soft Drinks
Smoothie drinks (I bought one today and was horrified to read there was 9 spoons of sugar in it after I drank it, because I was wondering why I slumped in the afternoon!!!)
ALL AUTUMNAL CARBS OR SOME REFINED VERSION
As you can see, it is extreme carbohydrate… to find this stuff in nature even in autumn would be tough, but we love to invoke our autumnal instincts, it feels good… it feels like I’m being cuddled by my mother, but it’s a sirens call and it was once good to do this on a temporary basis in order to put on a little weight to survive winter back in the stoneage, but nowadays we have food all year around, and modern heating systems so we don’t really need to put on that fat layer anymore, and certainly not indefinitely.
Look, I don’t want to be a party pooper and choosing to eat an item from the lists above a day is probably OK in the right amounts (though I’d avoid the junky stuff), but having them 4-6 times a day, all the days of your life means you can’t be the optimal version of yourself.
But wait, weren’t we told it’s safe?
Well, the role of sugar in coronary heart disease (an obesity related disease) was downplayed in the 60s by experts, the result of which encouraged low-fat diets (which were high carb) over low-carb diets. If you Google the sugar scandal you can see for yourself. Until recently, autumnal carbs were on the bottom rung of the food pyramid (these are essentially sugars, it doesn’t have to be sweet to be a saccharide), that’s been shifted up now, so something has changed in the minds of the experts finally, however, there are still problems with it (such as bananas being moved to the bottom rung, which are high enough gi carbs), which I will discuss in another article .
In my article Soda vs Spud, I highlight the fact that starch is every bit as much a sugar as sweet sugars, but it will take time to get that message out to society, but we can do it together through social media sharing and so on. It’s worth it to save a the lives of our friends, families and children in the long term. To prevent unnecessary suffering and to reduce our long term health bill.
We now also have a sugar tax looming, a positive step perhaps to tackle the obesity crisis, but in a perfect world, I would prefer a free market for an educated society, where education promotes more healthy purchases forcing manufacturers to produce more healthy foods, based on demand. It would save millions of lives across the globe if we were all educated about foods and how they impact our sugar levels and what that does to the body, especially given the awful fact that so many of our children are now obese. Only through a combination of activity and diet can we solve this issue, with 80% focus on diet, which essentially is what the DEFoW diet is… a paleolithic prescription, just as S. Boyd Eaton and co. outlined in their excellent book with that name in the 80s.
Sugar (including starch), in and of itself is not the enemy, it is an energy source for our brain and bodies and used precisely, and obtained from the correct foods, is a great source of fuel for our minds and our bodies. It is also a brilliant tool to get the most out of our bodies for the certain activities such as weight training and higher intensity cardio exercise. It is an excess of this energy source, which causes problems for us, and an excess… even an extreme, is easy to come by today.
I am a firm believer that sugar spikes encourage fat storage through many processes which affect both our brains and our bodies (instincts, fat storage mode, lethargy, lower metabolism, all of which is discussed fully in the book Don’t Eat for Winter.
The DEFoW Diet is not low carb, it’s not like the atkins diet or ketogenic diets, I encourage people to eat carbs as they are a valuable source of many nutrients in natural forms such as wholegrain, fruits, veg and so on, however, the really high gi and gl carbs should be kept to a minimum.
I will be writing a blog soon called ‘The Carb Pyramid’ soon to help people understand how to chose the right carbs for the right meal.
What a beautiful day it was yesterday and today is Mother’s day another happy day when we will feast and celebrate our wonderful mammies.
Take a look outside though, beyond the comfort of modern society, do you notice that there is very little vegetation out there for us to snack on. In particular there are very few carbohydrates (what are carbs) to be found in nature right now.
– Find me an apple or other type of fruit in nature?
– Where are the potatoes, where are the grains like wheat and corn and oats, which are used to create breads, cereals, cookies and so on?
The answers of course are based on the following fact:
THEY SIMPLY DO NOT EXIST AT THIS TIME OF YEAR IN NATURE
THERE’S NO STARCH IN MARCH…
…or January, February, April etc.
Here is the bell curve I discovered when plotting the GI (how fast foods cause a blood sugar spike) of foods appearing in nature over the the course of the year, which lead me to the concept that it is these types of foods in particular that trigger processes in our bodies and brains to encourage fat storage in order to prepare stone-age people for the oncoming winter. Essentially they begin to appear in May and by September they peak in terms of sugar content, then by December, they’re back down to the low GI again.
I’ve often wondered about how I would survive in nature when the foods we have around us would become less available? What would I eat? I suppose I would be hunting fawn, fowl and fish and stealing eggs from nests most of the year and eating whatever was harvestable at that time of year.
Today we can eat for every season every single day. We are caught in stasis; a permanent amplified autumn, where not only natural autumnal foods are available, but also their more potent refined versions. As a society we are addressing the sugar concern now through taxation and education, but I think that starches are being overlooked, when you consider a spud has a higher gi than a coke!
I wish to help in the fight against the global obesity epidemic, especially childhood obesity and my book Don’t Eat for Winter contains a section called The DEFoW Diet, which gives 10 sensible guidelines to empower the reader with knowledge of what to eat and when, as well as other guidelines on exercise and getting out into nature in order to more closely mimic the environment we adapted to.
I don’t think it’s feasible to eat by the seasons as our ancestors did, when all foods are available at all times in our society (it is both a blessing and a curse). However, I do think it’s feasible to eat seasonally on a daily basis and that is encouraged through the DEFoW diet.
One of the major points in Don’t Eat for Winter is that in nature, in autumn, the macro-nutrient ratio of available foods tends towards that of human breast milk. The macro-nutrient ratio of foods is the ratio of fat, protein and carbs in the food. Carbs of course are both sugar and starch (see what are carbs for more).
At other times of the year, as there are so few carbs available in nature, the macronutrient ratio resembles the diet of a bodybuilder coming into their leaning up/cutting phase as the diet consists mainly of protein and fat.
Human baby milk is designed to give an infant the best start in life by making them ‘hardy’ in every way possible, some body-fat to get them started so that they have reserves in place to get them through the transition to solid foods and as an energy source in order to build up the strength to crawl and walk. It also helps them construct a bit of muscle too and gives them all the building blocks they need to develop bones, teeth etc. properly. Human babies are programmed to guzzle on this formula as the instincts are built in to gorge on it as much as possible in order to gain weight as quickly as possible to get an initial kick-start in life. Just ask mothers about the hassle babies give them when nursing, babies are simply insatiable.
It’s no co-incidence that foods that taste really, really good mimic this formula. It’s not a conscious thing that confectioners and manufacturers do (I hope), they just tastes good because it triggers those primal instincts within us to encourage us to put on weight for survival purposes. It also triggers an insulin response in the blood in order to promote storage of the nutrients contained within the milk.
As already stated, in autumn time, the food available tends towards this sort of ratio with the introduction of cereals, potatoes, squashes, fruits etc. into the existing daily diet of meat, fish, poultry, eggs etc. We began simulating the breast milk formula with the creation of pies and tarts, with cream, which taste really good, but as we developed technologies to create more refined and quick-hit treats we created crisps/chips, donuts, chocolate bars and so on… and in my opinion they trigger a little sensation in our brains similar to when we were babies, that feel good factor that makes us really enjoy it while we’re eating it… the same feel good factor carbs cause in autumn time, particularly in conjunction with fats in our staple foods such as meat, fish, eggs, but which also become more available in the form of nuts.
… the sensation is short lived however, and unfortunately, and we want more soon after, but it is the ultimate formula for weight gain 🙁
Let’s have a look at some of the similarities between breast milk and refined treats…
In 100g of Breast milk there is 4.4 grams of fat, 7g carbs and 1g protein.
There is 9 calories in 1g of fat and 4 per gram of carbs and protein.
This gives us 4.4X9=39.6 calories from fat, 28 calories from carbs and 4 calories from protein a total of 39.6+28+4 = 71.6
To get the percentages then we divide each individually into the total and multiply by 100 to get the macronutrient ratio percentages ie
39.6/71.6*100 = 55% fat
28/71.6*100 = 39% carb
4/71.6*100 = 6% protein
For simplicity’s sake let’s round them to the nearest 5 so that it’s easy to remember…
50% fat 40% carbs and 10% protein or 50:40:10
Before we get into junk food, a natural trail mix containing autumnal foods such as dried fruit, nuts and granola contains 29g fat, 45g carbs, and 14g protein. This yields almost the exact ratio of 50:40:10. An ideal formula for a really long hike feeding your muscles with glycogen or anaerobic fuel (climbing) and putting sugar and fat into the bloodstream for aerobic/cardio fuel (walking), however, if not active, this is the autumnal fat storage formula, or as I term it in Don’ Eat for Winter, The Squirrel Formula!
WARNING:I often see people eating healthy snacks with this formula such as nut butter and sweet apples together, which is a really healthy snack of course, or having oats and peanut butter in a smoothie etc. again really great nutrition but they are mimicking the formula, so be careful of it when trying to shift body-fat!
The follwing matrix shows the macro breakdown of some common tasties and the resulting macronutrient ratio, now wonder we go ga ga for these types of foods.
Let’s again round to the nearest 5
Dark choc: 50:45:5
Milk choc: 50:45:5
Doughnuts: 50:45:5
White chocolate: 50:45:5
Ice cream: 50:45:5
Danish Pastry: 50:40:10
Crisps: 55:40:5 (the exact ratio)
Notice a pattern emerging??? The carbohydrate aspect is slightly higher than breast milk in many of these foods, potato crisps (chips in US) have pretty much the exact same ratio!!!
Other examples with high fat/carb and moderate protein levels include fries, hot dogs, triple bun burgers, sandwiches with mayonnaise and bacon, tarts with cream, toffees, pizza, popcorn with butter and so on.
WARNING: A lot of junk foods up the sugars and saturated fat / hydrogenated fat, which make them even more appealing, this ratio is more difficult to achieve in nature but seems to put us further into overdrive. Watch foods with hydrogenated or trans fats in particular. It’s better to eat food with natural unsaturated fats where possible (even in treats). Natural saturated fats such as butter and coconut oil are far healthier than processed trans fats.
If supermarkets didn’t exist, besides autumn time, this formula would be nigh on impossible to replicate in nature outside of breast milk. Essentially, without autumnal carbohydrates, this formula cannot exist. This is a major factor in the obesity epidemic affecting our planet, and I managed to free myself from obesity through understanding this fundamental concept.
Don’t Eat for Winter, through the DEFoW Diet, backs up this theory and shows you how to combat this formula in today’s world through the 10 guidelines of the diet, without cutting out carbs, but using them as a tool for brain and body. You can still have a treat, but be mindful of The Squirrel Formula, it will make you go ga-ga like an infant calling out to their mammy for their next hit.
I’ve been thinking about a way to show the Don’t Eat for Winter theory visually and the graph outlined in this blog conveys it quite well.
As mentioned in my new book, I put an extensive list of natures produce into a spreadsheet and captured the total and average GI and GL of food (i.e. how fast and severe a blood sugar spike is caused by the food) by the season (optimal harvest months) and plotted them in a graph.
What I discovered was a bell curve appeared, showing that there is a huge spike in blood sugar spiking foods available in autumn, peaking in September. As our bodies evolved to work with nature, it was advantageous for stone age people to put on body fat in Autumn to survive the food shortages and cold of winter. Getting fat is a talent we attained through evolution and the carb (what are carbs?) foods of Autumn help promote fat storage in various ways…
Of course in today’s society, we’ve created an artificial everlasting autumn, in food terms, as we’ve managed to not only make ALL of nature’s autumnal produce available ALL year round, we’ve also refined it and amplified it’s blood sugar spiking abilities creating an autumn on steroids, that promotes chronic indefinite weight gain, preparing our bodies for a winter that NEVER comes. Our bodies cannot handle it, we simply did not evolve to cope with this deluge of sugar and now we are seeing the fruits of our abuse of this privilege as obesity is now killing three times as many people as malnutrition according to this report.
The graph below shows a depiction of nature’s sugar spike vs the current amplified indefinite sugar spike, but of course the amplified spike is much worse than the graph illustrates in reality, and nature would have only been a blip on the graph if scaled correctly, but for the sake of the graphic fitting on screen I had to limit it.
To find out more, get a copy of my book, Don’t Eat for Winter to discover why autumnal foods like wheat, fruit, potatoes, and refined derivatives, such as sugars, syrups and fluffy white starches are not designed to be consumed by the body multiple times a day all year long. They were designed to work with our bodies, an ancient machine designed by nature, specifically during autumn so that we would store a modest amount of fat annually, to get us through the winter, which we would lose again by spring time.
The book addressing today’s problems through The Don’t Eat For Winter Diet (or The DEFoW Diet for short), a set of healthy diet and exercise guidelines in the book, which gives you a strategy to get into to the shape nature intended for you!!! You’re designed to be perfect! This shameless selfie pic here is what happened to me (at almost 41 years of age the night of my book launch) after applying The DEFoW Diet thinking to myself. I wonder what nature intended for you?
Tonight we have a very special battle in store for you. With all this talk about sugar tax… let’s find out who is the champion in terms of blood sugar spiking mania between a popular soft drink loaded with sugar and a good old medium-sized Irish baked spud!!!
In the red corner we have a typical portion of SODA, weighing in at 250mls…
In the blue corner we have a medium sized Irish baked potato, weighing in at 150g…
SODA, the challenger, having come onto the scene mere decades ago, once a weekend novelty, now a daily treat to wash down lunches all over the world.
Potatoes, brought to these parts, in the 16th century by Sir Walter Raleigh, the staple food of Irish, until the great famine in the 19th century, where it suffered from blight, but is still part of the daily food food supply thanks to blight sprays.
Both carbohydrates (what are carbs?), one has gotten a bad rap lately and has been demonised as a main player in the obesity crisis, the other, seen as a friendly nutritious food, served in large portions in various forms in restaurants all over.
But which affects your blood sugars fastest and gives your pancreas a tougher beating?
LETS GET READY TO RUMBLE!!!
In order to find out which food has a higher glycemic index we go to the University of Sydney’s Glycemic Index Website. The glycemic index is a measure of how quickly the food is processed by your tummy, converting those carbs into pure glucose which then swims around your bloodstream forcing your pancreas to release the hormone insulin in order for the energy to be processed and stored. When your cells sense insulin, they open up to receive all that wonderful sugary energy YIPPEE!
It is a scale measured against using glucose as the reference, where 50g serving of glucose gives a GI of 100! BOOM BOOM lights out!
So back to our two contenders…
Fizzy soda pop soft drinks with various well known names are up first… from a search of the GI database, soft drinks gives back the following table:
University of Sydney Glycemic Index Results for Search ‘Soft Drink’
Amazing stats, let’s take Coca Cola as our reference in this match, it comes in with a GI of 63 for a 250ml serving (a typical small glass), and a glycemic load (or GL) of 16.
Aside: One unit of glycemic load is the same as the effect of consuming one gram of glucose. It is calculated by multiplying the grams of carbs in the food times the food’s GI and then dividing by 100.
In the case of a glass of “the real thing” this is 63*26/100 = 15.75
Next up is a good old fashioned irish baked potato, we all know about the reputation of the Irish as good fighters so let’s see what this old favourite yields from the glycemic index database…
University of Sydney Glycemic Index Results for Search ‘Potato’
As you can see from this, the stats of the solanum tuberosum are impressive, and not even the king of the spuds! But lets take it as a reference…
The good old staple of the Irish for the past 400+ years has a GI of 83 and a GL of 25!!! That a right jab and left hook combination causing a blood sugar level explosion that beats the fizzy contender by 20 points on the GI Scale.
Perfoming the GL calculation of 83 (gi) x 30g (carbs) / 100 = 24.9, beating Coke by 10!!!
That’s a KO for Coca Cola from the humble Irish Baked Potato!!!
Now imagine 3 of these on your plate, with a few chips, turnips, carrots, maybe some garlic spuds and sher throw in a yorkshire pudding, and followed up by a can of coke to wash it all down… talk about giving your poor old pancreas a daily kick on the cahunas, which over time will lead to it requiring serious medical attention!
The WINNER of this round: The Irish Baked Potato
Of course this is just from a pure sugar spike point of view. It seems hard to believe that a potato can affect blood sugar levels faster than a fizzy soft drink, but it seems the tummy has an incredible ability to break down the sugar starch (polysaccharides) in the potatoes. It can break these down quicker than the syrups and sugars used in soft drinks.
#MINDBLOWN
OK OK OK, I’m giving the potato a bad rap here, they’ll be calling me ‘the potato hating Irish man’ if I don’t redeem myself. There is of course more to it than this, a potato is naturally grown produce, a wonderful gift from mother nature, and so contains other nutrients that a manufactured drink does not.
As you can see from the table above, the potato is a great source of vitamin C, Calcium, Potassium, many B vitamins and much much more, so from an essential micro-nutrient point of view it is by far the healthier option.
Winner of Round 2: Potato
Potatoes are a rich carbohydrate energy source, and the GI of potatoes can be reduced by eating them with a meal full of fibre and protein e.g. brocolli and beef, even adding butter can lower the GI, but if you’re trying to lose weight, I would hold the fat with such a high GI food, and also make sure not to eat too much of them in one sitting.
Not all carbs are the same so be careful when eating spuds to choose your veg wisely with them, for example turnips or swede have a high GI of 70, although their GL is low enough as the amount of carb in swede per weight is a lot lower than a potato (only 10g per 150g), however something like brocolli has a very very low GI because of the low sugar content and high fibre content and thus will lower the overall GI of the meal, whereas the turnip may not.
Spud Verdict:
Spuds are a food bursting with energy, and should be used wisely. Remember excess sugar in blood will result in the energy being converted to fat, so eat in moderation. Any fat contained in the same meal will also deposit more easily because of the sugar spike and resulting insulin release.
For the active: They are full of good nutrients and a useful tool for people who are very active, especially when accompanied with fibrous veg to give their energy over a longer period of time. For short bursts of high intensity cardio a baked potato could be a good tool to have in a gym bag to load blood sugar not too long before exercise (as they are almost as effective as pure glucose at raising blood sugar levels), and also to quickly replenish glycogen levels in muscles and assist recovery after a tough, heavy workout.
For the office worker/school goer: Your requirement for carbs is modest, so be careful loading the plate up with spuds at lunch time if you’re going back to work and sitting at the desk for the rest of the day.
Soda Verdict:
Soft drinks are loaded with sugar and even though they have a lower GI than spuds offer very little in terms of nutrition. Have them sparingly or as a special treat.
For the Active: They are possibly useful for similar purposes as the spuds in the case of active athletes in order to utilise for energy purposes and re-loading glycogen, and the hit of caffeine in the likes of coca cola make them more of an energy drink over a staple refreshment. However, they offer no meaningful nutrition.
For the office worker/school goer: A can of soda offers the body and brain enough energy for approximately 4 hours without any nutritional value of worth. This should be considered by those sitting at a desk such as office workers and school children and thus avoided where possible. Energy should be consumed through nutritious lower gi foods where possible to supply the body with nutrients for function as well as just energy.
WINNER
THE SPUD!
From a blood sugar spiking point of view, shockingly, the baked Irish spud is the clear winner so should be eaten with caution from that perspective. Eating them alone will cause fast and significant rise in blood sugar levels comparable to eating pure glucose and even more than a glass of soda!
From a nutritional point of view, the Spud is also the obvious winner containing many essential nutrients both minerals and vitamins.
Suggestion: drink water, and avoid soft drinks, with meals containing high gi carbs like spuds and make sure they are combined with very low GI veg where possible to slow down the release of their significant sugar energy. Remember, potatoes are autumnal in nature and trigger processes in the body to promote the storage of fat for Winter. Since they contain so much sugar energy, keep the portions small and load up the dinner plate with veg and meat/fish etc. when you’re having them. This will keep your pancreas happy and healthy long into the future as it won’t have to deal with an intense rush of glucose. Applying this sort of thinking will help you get your body-fat down to prize fighter levels 😉
Order your copy of Don’t Eat for Winter today to discover the theory of how autumnal foods like spuds, and refined derivatives of autumnal foods such as sugars, syrups and fluffy white starches are not designed to be consumed by the body multiple times a day all year. They are designed to work with our bodies in nature during the autumn so that we store a modest amount of fat to get us through the winter. In todays society we are being prepared for winter every day of every month of every year and so chronic obesity is the result over many years of eating this way. Let’s give obesity the knock out punch and start considering what we eat, when we eat and why we eat.
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)
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The book addressing today’s problems through The Don’t Eat For Winter Diet (or 
