Food Snubbing: Corn and Potatoes

I want to apologize for taking so long to get to the next subject in my "Food Snubbing" blog series. Aside from my regular life of mother, wife, grandma, personal trainer, and homemaker, we've been dealing with the way-to-long installing of counters and back splash in a rather gi-normous kitchen (had no sink or counters in there for a week!), painting of said kitchen, plumbing emergencies, massive hail storm that required lots of insurance people and repairs, and trying to find a MIA ex-husband to get him to sign off so that my husband can adopt my teenage daughter. (After 5 years of virtually no contact, a small miracle occurred: He was located and signed the papers! Relieved is not an adequate enough word.)

Here is a picture of the beautiful daughter who is in the process of getting, finally, after 10 years, adopted by her REAL Daddy, the man who has raised her since she was 6:

And here is a picture of part of our newly countered, tiled, and sinked kitchen. I am SO enjoying it! (And yes- I am bragging a little. After the process taking 5 weeks, I feel entitled to show it off!)

At any rate, much of the above is still in the process of being worked out, but there is at least a bit of a respite for me to handle the next Food Snubbing Topic: Corn and Potatoes.

I'm not really sure that the snubbing of corn is all that common. I just heard someone at a Weight Watchers meeting once say that the reason Americans are so overweight is because we eat corn. Huh? My thought was that it probably has more to do with super-sized portions and eating too much processed foods than the sole introduction of corn into our diets.

I've also heard that corn is for animal consumption, not people consumption. Er...... How many plants do animals and people both eat? Yeah.... That one falls apart pretty quickly for me.

Besides: Wasn't it the Indians who introduced corn to us? Didn't they eat it? Weren't they pretty darned healthy?

Now, let's move on to potatoes. Actually, it's not all potatoes that have a bad rap. Sweet potatoes are looked at as the Holy Grail in the potato world. White potatoes are generally seen as too high in starchy, quick-digesting carbs. Well, yes... but this is starch the way God intended it to be. We've found time and time again that when we eat stuff the way God grew it, not the way man modified it to be, it's good for us.

Also, you know how many famines potatoes saw people through? Talk to the Irish.

So my short answer on potatoes and corn? As long as they are minimally processed, I'm eatin' 'em.

The trouble with both, I believe, happens when we start to mess with them: Same problems I listed about white flour waaaaaaaaay back when I did the wheat blog. We smash 'em up and mix 'em with things like white flour or sugar or shortening (or all!), and then fry them (with corn, this is called a hushpuppy), which makes them fatty and super-high-glycemic, and NOW you have a problem on your hands.

Ever had fresh corn on the cob? Or a potato baked to perfection with just a little salt sprinkled on it? Yum-o! But when you add butter and sour cream and bacon bits and cheese and... well..... you get the point..... When you do all of these things.... heck!..... you can no longer taste the food you used as a base to pile all this junk on. Just put the goo in a bowl to eat it, and save the poor, unsuspecting, perfectly healthy potato or corn from being guilty by association.

One thing I do want to point out about both of these foods, though (as well as peas), is that the body treats them more as a starch than a veggie. So if you have potatoes or corn with your grilled chicken, you need to add at least one more veggie to your plate for a truly nutritionally balanced meal. And potatoes or corn AND a roll? THAT truly is high-carb. Just sayin'.

So, minimally mess with them: Bake, boil until JUST done, steam, shuck, and grill. Then count them as a starch and not a veggie, and you can enjoy without guilt.

Binge Recovery

Okay, so you've done it- You ate way too much of the wrong stuff.  And in the middle of kicking yourself and wishing you could go back in time, you are wondering "Is there anything I can do to help reduce the negative effects of this?'  I have an answer for you, and that answer is "YES"! (And no, it does not involve the porcelain god and sticking a finger down your throat!)

This isn't going to be easy, no magic pill, but it will get most, if not all, of the garbage you just ate out of your system. There are basically three steps you will employ for the next 3 days:

1.  Drink water like it's going out of style!  This is NOT the time to shy away from water because you are afraid it will make you weigh even more in the morning.  It's time to guzzle.  It will give your cleansing organs a vehicle to carry all of that bad stuff (carbs, sodium, fat, chemicals) out of your body as fast as possible.  The sooner they leave the body, the harder it is for your body to store them as fat.  I'm not talking water toxicity levels, here, but make a concerted effort to drink more water than you normally would.  And water- not diet soda or any other kind of beverage you would rather drink. Water.  Water doesn't give your body one MORE factor to process and deal with.

2. Cardio like a mad person!  If you have any extra time for additional cardio over the next 72 hours, just do it, no questions asked.  I had a trainer friend of mine say that it takes the body 72 hours to turn unaccounted for carbs into fat.  You are trying to get 'em accounted for with cardio!  I have no idea if what he said was right or not, but putting as much time into cardio as possible for three days after a binge has helped me to keep the damage at bay.  Cardio uses glycogen, which is what the body turns carbs into, for fuel.  If glycogen doesn't get used for fuel, the body stores it as fat (future fuel).  You want to try to stop that from happening

As an aside- Don't abandon your weight lifting routine, though!  Lifting also uses glycogen, although not as much.  Keep up the lifting routine the same, but raise your cardio level. Two or three 30 or 40-minute cardio sessions a day is not too much right now, if you can squeeze that much in!

Oh! And expect the next day to have kick-butt cardio and lifting sessions.  With all of that glycogen now stored in your muscles you will be able to push harder than normal in your workouts.  (Proving that every cloud truly does have a silver lining!)

3. Focus your diet for the next day on protein, with only veggies for carbs.  It's Okay to have nonfat milk products.  My guess is that after the binge you aren't going to be wanting too many carbs, anyhow.  The next two days after that, go for small servings of things like oatmeal with breakfast and whole grains like 100% whole wheat or Ezekial breads and brown rice with lunch and dinner.

Why am I focusing on carbs?  Because I am almost certain you didn't binge on turkey breast.  You either binged on sweet carbs (cookies, ice cream, brownies), salty carbs (potato chips, crackers), or a combo (peanut butter, kettle corn).  None of these combinations is scale-friendly when done in excess, and the only way to get rid of the weight gain is to get rid of the carbs floatin' around in your body.

And the next time, if you can think about it before you immerse your head into that vat of peanut butter again, remind yourself that a binge is 3 days of hard work to (hopefully) undo the damage.  I've done this enough times that the thought of both the un-do process and the intestinal distress that is certain to arrive shortly after the binge has ended is almost always enough to stop me in my tracks.  It's taken a couple of years to learn my lesson, but now I can almost always say to myself "Ugh!  It's just not worth it!" and step away from the temptation.

Depending on your personality, when you get on the scale is up to you.  I make myself get on the scale the next morning because I can't stay in denial if I'm looking at the (temporary) damage I've caused.  Seeing a big jump motivates me to get right back on track!  I also like watching the numbers come down over the next couple of days- It's interesting to me.  But if you are the type it is just going to discouraged and want to dive into a bag of BBQ chips when the number is up, I'd advise waiting until after your 3-day recovery process is over.

If You Are Confused About Insulin and Fat Storage, Read This!!!

The past few years there has been quite a lot of hype about insulin and how it affects fat storage. It's super-confusing, but I think I've managed to whittle it down to something both understandable and practical for the every day person.

Here goes...... (Er, this isn't going to be real technical, so if you are into splitting hairs or are going to suggest I should have included more information, you may just want to skip this blog.)

Anyhow......

Carbohydrates make your blood sugar go up. Your body doesn't like this (high blood sugar is dangerous), so it sends out a storage hormone we call insulin to bring it back down. (BTW- the pancreas is what produces insulin, so that's why you hear so much about the pancreas when people talk about blood sugar.)

Insulin turns the carbs into glycogen and stores the glycogen in different parts of the body, namely the muscles and liver. BUT it also turns any excess glycogen that doesn't fit into the muscles and liver into fat and stores them in your fat cells. If there aren't enough fat cells to hold the fat that has been made, the body has to do something with it, so it makes more fat cells to store it in. And who wants more fat cells?

Okay, now lets add in one more thing Insulin does: It keeps another chemical, called hormone-sensitive lipase, from doing it's job properly. And that job is releasing fat from your fat tissues to be used as energy.

Sooooo..... when you eat a ton of fast-burning carbs (generally the kind that don't have much fiber in them), not only are you promoting fat storage because the muscles and liver can only hold so much, but you are also KEEPING the fat you do have from being burned off as energy. This is the main reason why low-carb diets work so well for weight loss.

Having said all of this, you don't need to run from carbs like they are the enemy. Slow-digesting carbs- like oatmeal, whole-grain breads (the real whole-grain stuff, not the kind that has white flour in it, too) and starchy vegetables- are just that: Slow digesting. They release the carbs slowly into your body so that you don't have an excess all at one time to be stored as fat.

Also, when you exercise heavily the body uses up the glycogen in your muscles very quickly. So you need to eat carbs to replace them so that you have power to not only get through your workout, but also through your day.

If you are anything like me, you are asking "So why do people go low-carb when they are exercising heavily?" The reason for that is another big, long technical explanation, but I'm gonna give the very-condensed-but-not-very-scientific answer: The body will turn fat into glycogen and burn it when your muscles and liver run out of it. And the process of turning the fat into glycogen burns calories in and of itself, so it's kinda like you are getting a little calorie-burning bonus when this happens.

The thing with this is that you want to be very careful: When I have gone too low-carb I have wound up with all sorts of not-so pleasant side effects, the scariest of which is that I started to lose my long-distance vision. It was to a point where I was beginning to question whether I should drive at night because depth perception was thrown off. Other interesting side effects for me were running out of steam very quickly, getting confused easily, feeling mentally "fuzzy", headaches, becoming incredibly irritable (my daughter thought this was the worst side effect- She'd of rather I be blind than a wench), tripping over things, falling down frequently when doing cardio (Once I fell off a bench when doing step-ups, making quite a racket. People were rushing from all of the gym to help me- embarrassing!), and general lack of coordination. Clearly, super-low carb (under about 100g a day) for me is not healthy. I think different people have different thresholds, but if you are experiencing things like this while on a low-carb eating plan, I'd suggest adding a little whole-grain, fruit, or starchy veggie into every meal. Non-starchy veggies ARE a carb source, but they are not a very condensed form of carbs and would take so much of them that you would no longer be practicing portion control, which I believe to be a key factor in losing weight and getting fit.

And as a final and fairly unrelated note, if you are working with a coach who is helping you with your eating and experience any of these symptoms, TELL THEM! Any responsible coach will alter your diet and get you out of the too-low-danger-zone. If they don't, dump them immediately and find someone else to help you. Your health is not worth having a super-svelte appearance.