That’s awesome. There’s also a little customization needed sometimes, depending on where a person is at health-wise and metabolism-wise. Raising the metabolism can often be done through flooding the system with nourishment so the body gets out of conservation mode. It’s often a good idea, as I’ve learned from researcher Matt Stone, to even gain a little weight at first by getting lots of rest and eating to appetite and even beyond with real food from all of the macro nutrient categories. Then the metabolism raises and the appestat mechanism should normalize with less sugar cravings and less of a desire to over eat. At that point when the body is out of a “famine-like” state, you start cranking up the activity as long as you can also keep up the rest and recovery to avoid sending the body back into conservation mode. As you keep up the real food, decent activity, get rest, your metabolism will maintain or raise and your appetite will not betray you like it did when eating crappy food.

With all of the disagreement though, there are still plenty of agreed upon points that are all the much more solid, the fact that such opposing groups actually acknowledge and agree on them. Eat real food. Avoid refined sugar and other refined carbs. White rice is probably the least offensive culprit of the refined carbs, not too much of a problem in moderation, especially after a resistance workout. Brown rice is better, especially for someone that wants to see fat come off quickly. I think you’d see your fat start melting off if you would commit to zero bread, flour, or pasta, or sweets, except for one cheat day a week. And maybe mix in some brown rice and moderate your white rice if you eat tons of it. Other than, eat as you normally do, getting a few more green veggies, and with your activity level, the fat will melt away. Homework on it’s way

There’s something we’re all missing. Fundamentally, I see that I ate fresh ingredients, fresh cooked. I didn’t have “bagged” or packaged foods. There’s magic in there somewhere.

For me, the only thing that will help is more swings.

Cheers,
The cook.

So I think there is something more to the story here and I’ve seen a study quoted which had an explanation for this. There is a nutrition camp that suggests it is not the carbs in general which are the culprit for the insulin imbalance but more specifically the refined carbs and they use some of these civilizations as examples that thrived on a starch centered diet. At the same time, there are as many ore more civilizations that thrived on a meat and dairy diet, so I concede that as well and am grateful to the low carb researchers for being the cause of all of the new cutting edge health research.

I am going on a tangent now. Fun stuff. Thanks for chiming in and for the onslaught of good info you put out on your blog. Officially I am staying somewhat nuetral on this. But what we agree upon is that the Food Pyramid is whack and that Saturated fats are not evil when they come from clean sources like grass fed beef and high quality dairy. The only real source of disagreement I see is around foods like carrots, potatoes, and brown rice .

The reason I eat tons of vegetables and limit my fruit intake is that vegetables usually have at least the same nutritional bang for their buck as fruit without any insulin spike to speak of. Sugar is sugar as they say.

Train with purpose,

Sandy Sommer RKC