A Lifetime of Diets and Fitness: Part 2

After abandoning fat restriction and food guide advice for body fat reduction (see my first diet article), I looked for a new approach.

I decided the next step was expert advice, so I met with a nutritionist from my health club.  She had me record what I ate for a week then, using the record as a reference, we discussed a personalized strategy.  The key points were:

• eat breakfast
• eat 5-6 times per day
• drink 2-3 L water/day
• always eat protein with your carbs
• avoid "white carbs" (flour, rice, potatoes, sugar, etc.)
• fats are bad

At the time I only ate lunch and dinner.  Eating when I got up took willpower for the first few weeks, as did the effort to snack after the big meals.  After a month or so though I didn't need to force myself to eat.  After another month I got hungry as meal time approached, which was weird.  I'd never understood why some people needed to eat at specific times, but now I was one of them.

That hunger was a good sign.  Eating this way geared my metabolism to expect frequent calories, so the food I ate was burned right away, rather than being stored as fat.

Drinking 2 L of water every day required an adjustment too.  Reaching a water consumption of 2 L water/day requires a pint with each meal and a cup with snacks.  I felt like a participant in Monty Python's Marathon for Incontinents and I eventually shifted away from that to the strategy I presented in my hydration article.  The biggest impact from forcing myself to drink 2 L of water/day was that it eliminated sugary drinks from my diet, which is a good way to establish a caloric deficit and hence, fat loss.

Take a look at ready to drink iced tea and water.  There's 85 kcal of energy in an iced tea can and 0 kcal in water.  Fat has 7700 kcal/kg (3500 kcal/lb).  If you replace three iced tea cans per day with water for a month, you'll lose around a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of fat.  I've found I don't miss sugary drinks much, so drinking water instead is a good flavour versus fat loss bargain.

Eating protein with carbs was pretty easy except for breakfast.  Taking time to eat breakfast at all was a challenge and I tended to eat quick toast or cereal breakfasts rather than cooking up eggs, bacon, etc.  I eventually settled on mixing whey protein into my milk and pouring that over cereal.

The no white carbs rule definitely hurt.  No rice, pasta, bread, cereal, potatoes ... I found myself eating plain lettuce with skinless chicken, canned tuna with a carrot, beef with no gravy and vegetables on the side, etc.  Not much fun there.  I never did completely eliminate the white carbs from breakfast.  Cereal was too important as a quick start to the day.

Then there is the last point again:  fats are bad.  No respite from blandness in this diet. 

With the fats gone and no simple carbs to take up the slack I was always hungry.  To see why, look at the caloric content of a cup of rice and lettuce:  675 kcal for rice and 5 kcal for lettuce.  The combination of a ramped-up metabolism and a huge drop in energy intake left my body yearning for calories.

So on the plus side I learned hydration skills, started eating several times a day and my body fat dropped 4.5 kg (10.1 lbs) over three months.  In the end though, eating this way is not sustainable, at least, not for me.  Opso raged away inside me and after three months I decided I agreed with him.  Lowered body fat with no respite from bland meals is a rotten bargain.  For awhile I resigned myself to living with larger belt sizes as the price of an enjoyable life.

Hassle-Free Hydration

We reviewed the concept of water balance last week and saw that the quick advice was "drink 2 L of water per day".  So what is the scientific basis for this?  Google searches give many hits but a concrete answer is elusive.

One line you'll see in the search results is "metabolism requires 1 mL water/kcal energy produced".  Since average caloric intake is 2000 kcal, this seems to be where the 2 L rule comes from.  This makes some sense because the water you need varies based on your size and activity level, but I'm not sure what "requires" is supposed to mean here.  As we discussed last week, metabolic reactions produce water, so you gain water this way rather than using it in metabolism.  

Another article maps water losses to standard values and standard activity levels.  The 1 mL/kcal rule is estimated using drinking and metabolic water balanced against loses and intakes for the day (see eat to stay fit and healthy).  This makes more sense, but deriving the water you need after assuming all the other inputs are "typical" isn't rigorous.

A half day's research didn't lead me to an obvious first principles answer.  It did suggest simplistic "drink x L/day" guidelines are useful for narrowing the target to somewhere in the liter range per day, rather than, say, milliliters or tens of liters.

So lets go beyond the simple rule and consider why you want to drink water.  Getting "enough" water means avoiding chronic dehydration.  When you lack water, your body rations how it's used, which in turn prevents optimal cellular function.  If you search for "chronic dehydration health effects" you'll turn up many issues:

• fatigue
• constipation
• high blood pressure
• respiratory issues
• eczema
• high cholesterol
• acid body pH
• digestive problems
• asthma
• weight gain
• skin disorders
• joint pain
• urinary problems
• premature aging

Some of the reasons given as root causes for these problems make little sense to me (the weight gain descriptions are baffling) but if even a few items are relevant to you, some basic steps to avoid chronic dehydration makes sense.

Since your body varies urine concentration to balance out highs and lows in water intake, the first sign of a problem is concentrated urine.  If concentrated urine is a clear signal, then you need to monitor it and drink enough to keep it dilute.  No need for chemical analysis here, you can just watch to see if it is a light yellow.

The way I go about balancing water intake is by:

• drinking a glass of water when I get up; this addresses sleeping respiration losses and gets the day started
• drinking a glass when I feel thirsty
• drinking some water with meals
• if I see my urine is darker than a very light yellow, drinking a glass when I finish in the bathroom

Those four rules keep things ticking over fine for me.  When you're getting started it is useful to follow these rules as well:

• because dehydration causes headaches, drink a glass when you feel one coming on rather than reaching for a painkiller.  This will help your liver and your wallet as well.
• drink a glass whenever you notice you have cracked or dry lips

Note: a "glass" for me is two thirds an Imperial pint glass, or 375 mL (1 1/2 cups).

That's it.  No need for timers or a personalized bathroom stall, just a little body awareness and establishing a habit when you get up.

Your Water Balance

As I said in my first article on diets, drinking enough water is an important skill for staying trim.  Sounds ridiculous put like that doesn't it?  How much skill does it take to drink water?

It is pretty tricky to determine the right amount of water to drink every day and then get yourself in the habit of actually drinking it.  Google searches and conversations with doctors or nutritionists give you a range of advice from drink "lots", 2 L (8 cups) per day, 3 L (12 cups) per day or 3 L (12 cups) per day and an extra glass for every caffeine or alcohol serving.

That is a lot of variability and even the low end represents a pretty challenging habit to establish.  Just try drinking two liters of water per day, let alone three and another 250 mL every time you encounter caffeine or alcohol.  You'll need to set up some kind of reminder system and start organizing your day around water drinking times, and that doesn't allow for the time to respond to the insistent need to eliminate all the water you poured in.

Where does this advice come from anyway?  Should we re-prioritize our days to follow it?

The goal of this advice is to get you to drink enough to maintain your water balance without putting undue strain on your system.  Water balance means what you ingest should balance out what you lose being alive.  You lose water through:

• urine
• feces
• "insensible" loses (perspiration, respiration, direct evaporation through skin)

On the flip side, you gain water from:

• drinking it
• the food you eat
• your metabolism

The second item is pretty obvious but not something you tend to think about.  Just look at spinach's water content, which is 91.4% by weight or a chicken breast's, which is 75.8%.  You drink water when you eat.

Water from food metabolism is a less obvious source.  Turning food into energy produces water.  This is a major input for some animals but a small one for us.  To better understand the concept, consider sugar metabolism where (CH₂O)_n (sugars are water bonded to carbon; cool, isn't it?) combines with O₂ to create CO₂ and H₂O.  Fats, starches and proteins have more complex reactions but do something similar, yielding water for use by your body.

The input and output complexity suggests simple rules like "drink 2 L of water per day" to maintain health are coarse at best.  The following all vary how much water you need:

• your mass changes the waste volume you eliminate
• environmental conditions change the insensible losses
• your food's water content changes the inputs
• the food amounts and types you eat vary metabolic water production
• your activity level changes your insensible losses

If a simple rule doesn't really work, what is the alternative?  We'll cover that next week.