August 2009 Club Email

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Here is the most interesting diet news that I’ve come across in the last month and an update on what I’m up to…

Three particularly interesting discoveries in July, from around the world:

1. I came across what could be the first calorie diet book in the world. (Please let me know if you find an earlier one). There are earlier diet books, but they tend to be (more sensibly) advice based on avoiding carbs (or ‘Banting’, as dieting used to be called, after William Banting – the first Atkins in reality). Anyway, back to calorie counting, Lulu Hunt Peters wrote a book called “Diet and Health” back in 1918. She was based in LA (where else) and she even spelled out the pronunciation of Kal’-o-ri, as people were not familiar with the word at the time (if only they had stayed blissfully ignorant, or at least viewed calories as simply fuel – which is what they are).

I managed to get a free e-book download from www.gutenberg.org (please leave them a donation if you get a copy, as they are offering a brilliant service), so I have the 51 page book, as if I were seeing it in 1918. It is incredible to read the advice from almost 100 years ago. Lulu tells her readers how to work out how many calories they need and then tells them “Now, if you want to lose, cut down 500-1000 Calories per day from that“. This is still the advice given to desperate dieters today, despite the fact that the obesity epidemic has proven that this simply slows our metabolism to the point that we manage on the lower calorie intake. How many of you were trying to eat somewhere between 1000-1500 calories a day, and not losing a single pound, before you discovered The Harcombe Diet? You should have been losing somewhere between 3 ¼ and 7 ½ stone each and every year according to the calorie theory.

Despite it being a calorie counting book, there are some Lulu comments that I love e.g. she says “I hope sometime it will be a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment, to display candy as shamelessly as it is done.” Spot on! What would Lulu think of the availability of ‘candy’, if she were alive today?

Also – Lulu says “It is practically impossible to reduce weight through exercise alone, unless one can do a tremendous amount of it. For the food that one eats is usually enough to cover the energy lost by the exercise.” Followers will know that I agree with this one – the importance of not eating ‘junk’ in the first place just massively outweighs eating it and then trying to ‘burn it off’.

2) Possibly even more impactful than (1) has been the discovery of Gary Taubes. I came across an article that Gary wrote for the NY Times in July 2002 (he’s an American Science journalist). I am currently reading his book “The Diet Delusion“. This is the UK version of the book “Good Calories, bad calories“, so you don’t need to get both (which I did by mistake).

Gary’s work is quite brilliant – very evidence based and underpinned by painstaking research. He traces diet advice from the French Diabetic doctors of the 1850′s (and what they tell us about carbs) through to British doctors working in colonies, who discovered no serious disease (cancer, heart disease, appendicitis, diabetes etc) until Western food was introduced to remote regions. He goes up to President Eisenhower’s heart attack (1955) and how this paved the way for the Ancel Keys cholesterol work to propose (wrongly) that fat is the enemy (saturated fat especially). Gary continues through the second half of the 20th century to show where Yudkin (very anti-sugar) came in and how the whole ‘eat fibre’ (Burkitt) advice came about and so much more (he has insights into salt, cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease and all aspects of health and diet).

Gary’s style is straight, factual and logical. His conclusion is essentially that there is no evidence whatsoever that a low fat diet will make us healthier or lighter. Furthermore – a low fat diet is by definition a high carb diet (as I also pointed out in “Why do you overeat“) and it is carbs and insulin that are the problem for health and weight. He is my new hero – I just wish we could wake up more people in the world to the fact that we’ve been eating meat/ fish/ eggs/ veg/ salad/ dairy/ fruit for tens of thousands of years and we’ve been eating sugar and refined carbohydrates for barely the blink of an eye, in terms of evolution. This fact alone should give us a prime suspect! (I have also found research in the past month showing the consumption of sugar in different national diets and the parallel incidence of dental caries. If sugar can rot something as tough as tooth enamel, in the brief time it is in the mouth, what on earth is it doing to our insides?!)

3) I got very excited when I saw a headline in the UK Daily Mail (21 July) “Why Calorie Counting makes you fat“. At last, I thought, someone else has realised that calorie counting is the cause of the obesity epidemic and not the cure. But no, the article was about a new report by Dr Geoffrey Livesey, one of a “growing band of scientists” who thinks we have got the way we calculate calories wrong. Wilbur Olin Atwater’s original ‘calorimeter’, from over 100 years ago, is apparently inaccurate (surely not!) and a glass of wine may actually have ‘only’ 115 calories and not 120, whilst a bacon sandwich may have 18 calories more than we thought it did.

When are we going to see calories for what they are – fuel – and not the enemy to be avoided?! Remember the Kekwick & Pawan article in The Lancet – detailed in the April newsletter? (http://membersblog.theharcombediet.com/2009/04/april-2009-club-email.html). As far back as 1956 we had all the evidence we needed that it is what we eat, not how much, that is the key to weight and weight loss.

If you want some inaccuracies – how about this: The calorie myth (sorry – theory) “To lose 1lb of fat, you need to create a deficit of 3,500 calories” is always noted as “an approximation”. The closest I can get to this is 3,555. Close enough you might think – however this would add up to 170lbs difference in 30 years, according to this mad formula! (And the difference is ‘in our favour’, so we should be, on average, c. 12 stone lighter than we were in 1979)! The body simply does not follow a mathematical formula in this way. If it did – every person on c. 20 weight watchers points would lose 7½ stone each year, every year!

What I’m up to:

1) The biggest personal change for July was, so sadly, having to put an auto response on for emails. I have answered every email sent to me for 5.5 years, since “Why do you overeat?” first came out, but it has just become physically impossible to answer them any longer. It’s a nice sign that the diet is becoming so well known, but I am really sorry that I can’t help everyone personally any more. I hope you understand.

2) We’re now on Facebook (www.facebook.com/theharcombediet) – so hopefully discussions may start, which can get people helping each other. We have posted videos on topics from Anorexia to Candida on facebook, to give headlines on key topics in 3-5 minute sound bites.

3) We got back on the Amazon best seller list in July – thanks largely to a wonderful front page banner and centre page spread in the UK Sunday Mirror. The diet book and recipe book have been number 1 and 2 best sellers on the Amazon diet & nutrition, men’s health and general lifestyle lists – ahead of Atkins and Patrick Holford and other people I have huge admiration for – it’s all quite unreal!

4) The next book is due at the publishers by end of August (no pressure!).

5) Look out for Glamour and Perfect Wedding magazines – the September editions should be out in August and we’re in both.

Don’t forget – if any of you have any before and after pictures – we’re really happy to get you payments from magazines for them (the bigger the difference, the more they pay)!

Thank you so much to those of you who have left book reviews on Amazon – you are so kind and it is much appreciated.

Last email I signed off said we were having a heat wave in the UK. Ha ha – I think even the garden pond has drowned after July’s weather! Here’s to a sunny August everywhere – in hot or snowy climates.

All the best – Zoë x