Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Twas a nice weekend

I got in one shortish and one longish motorcycle ride this weekend. Good times.

I also started listening to "Why We Get Fat and what to do about it" by Gary Taubes. It is a lay version of his academic work, "Good Calories, Bad Calories". It is, at its core, a defense of low carb/no carb diets. He makes a strong case and cites many studies both contemporary and historic as well as a lot of biochemistry stuff. I don't have the knowledge to challenge him but he also states that exercise is not linked to weight loss. Lots of folks get upset with him because they think he is advocating not exercising. He is not. He is simply stating that the two are not linked. Having once trained for a half marathon while not losing a pound, this made sense to me.

The long and short of it is, I am giving the low-carb version a try. It is not terribly hard as I like meat, eggs, yogurt, cheese, enough veggies to make a go of it and some of the less sweet fruits. The only difficult part is that I really like bread and, out of habit and convenience, I eat a lot of sandwiches. Beer is a minor problem. I really like it but I tend to go in cycles of having it around and drinking it fairly regularly and not having any at all. Right now, I am not all that interested.

Other off-limit things include corn (I can take it or leave it), potatoes (not too bad, but I love fries), low fat yogurt (actually has more calories than regular yogurt and I prefer the real stuff), soda (not a big soda drinker and, sugar (I don't add sugar to anything anyway).

I just started so I can't say that I have noticed any changes, but I will update here occasionally.