In the desire to fit into the beauty constraints put forth by our media culture, I've started a diet to get "beach body ready" for summer. It's been working. I've lost 10 pounds and I'm feeling better than ever. Let me tell you what I ate yesterday:
Breakfast: two strips of bacon, two eggs fried in the rendered bacon fat.
Lunch: grilled chicken with fried peppers and onions with guacamole and sour cream.
Dinner: Bacon cheeseburger with chipotle mayo, lettuce, tomato, and onions, no bun.
Awesome, right?
The diet is called the ketogenic diet, and is basically Atkins on steroids.
Now, Atkins is a diet buzzword that was a big craze about 15 years ago that everyone made fun of. Because, really, what kind of diet allows you to eat a pound of bacon and not an apple?
The logic behind the ketogenic diet is not with what is healthy and what is not. The logic is in the science of what our bodies do with sugar.
Blood sugar is a pretty cool thing. Our bodies essentially milk sugar from the foods we eat and use the cardiovascular highway in our body to move it to all the cells. This makes it the most efficient biological machine you could imagine. Thinking of blood sugar as a taco truck is the best way to explain how your body works.
Now, if there is one taco truck in a city, everyone is happy, no one eats too many tacos and everyone is pleasant and does not have taco-induced stomachaches. This one-taco-truck city is the state of your body if you eat a limited amount of carbs - around 100g a day.
However, the USDA wants people to eat a tremendous amount of carbs - 300g a day. To get this many carbs, the fleet of taco trucks needs to be amplified. Think of a town with 50 taco trucks. Soon, tacos are all that anyone eats. Everyone is fat and sick because they are eating so many tacos.
The people in the houses who are sick are your body - they are your cells.
This is the state of your body when you eat cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and pasta for dinner. You become saturated with carbs and you feel bloated, tired, and worst of all, you get addicted.
I didn't select the ketogenic diet because it's a fad diet. It's so far rooted in a science I hadn't heard of until I got involved with online fitness communities. I elected to take this path because I realized I had a problem with carbs. I was addicted to them and they weren't rewarding me for my dedication.
I wanted to break the addiction.
I started really considering my health. Why do we wake up in the morning and spike our blood sugar with sweetened cereal? Why is that normal?
It wasn't 10,000 years ago. And that is why we are locked in the obesity epidemic. That is why so many people are looking for a change and are sick and tired of being sick and tired.
UB's own Mulchand S. Patel, Ph.D., released a paper about how in children as young as newborns can get into this addiction when fed high carb foods. That addiction will predispose them for many diseases, such as obesity, later in life.
Changing my diet so wildly has given me a bit of a transitioning period. It's called 'keto flu' and it's essentially carb withdrawal. You feel kind of sluggish and kind of out of it for a few days while your body realizes there are no more carbs to power it. After that, I now feel energized, and I don't get that sluggish, bloated feeling or 'carbo comas.' I actually feel my body is working the way it should.
And if I happen to lose a few pounds, you won't hear me complaining.
Email: meganlea@buffalo.edu
