What (not) to eat

I am delighted with my membership at Weight Watchers. I am slowly and steadily losing weight (average 1.1 pounds/week); having a weekly place to weigh in and chat with people is helpful and motivating; the website and iphone app are terrific; and the points system is easy to learn and to use. But since Weight Watchers is essentially just a portion control plan, people use a very wide variety of paths to get to their daily allotment of points. If you follow their good health guidelines (which, though proprietary, accord with USDA recommendations: e.g. make sure to have at least 5 servings of fruit/veggies), then you will at least get some whole foods in your diets. But I've also heard all sorts of cockamamie suggestions for what to eat. I mostly bite my tongue because I'm not the leader, I'm not there to proselytize, and I know that not everyone is ready to lose weight and eat whole food. Still, some of bad advice I hear bandied about in meetings amazes me.

For example, at WW meetings you may well hear suggestions about eating (low points foods) at McDonald's. You might well be encouraged to eat (low point quantities) of highly processed, packaged foods--indeed, quite a few of them are sold by the WW corporation itself! I've even attended a meeting with a leader who told us that she eats ice cream (in a low point quantity) every night. 

So I need to say it here because I can't really say it in the meeting: "a point is a point" is just as much of a lie as "a calorie is a calorie"! Yes, from the weight loss perspective, it's very simple: create a calorie deficit, and you will lose weight. But if what you are trying to do is not just lose weight, but make positive lifestyle changes, prevent disease, and create for yourself a glowing state of health, then you need to do more than just eat less. You also need... and I'm going to tell you the big secret, so hold on tight...

You also need to EAT *FOOD*. Not--to borrow Michael Pollan's parlance--"edible food-like substances." But actual food. Eating a 2 point diet bar/protein bar/snack package/pick your laboratory-concocted food-like substance is not the same thing as eating a 2 point serving of actual food. And if you are diabetic or hypoglycemic, or if you want to avoid being one of these things, then for goulash's sake you need to eat meals made with whole foods in a reasonably balanced proportion of macro-nutrients. No one on earth is going to tell me that an avocado isn't healthier than some lower-point laboratory-concocted chemical cocktail that contains fat-simulating flavors. NO NO NO NO!

Now, in WW's defense, the point system does to a large extent take care of all this. If a food is higher in fiber or protein, it is lower in points (e.g. caloric impact) than a food high in fat or poor carbs (another food that is badly misunderstood: all carbs are not created equal, but more on that another time). So you are rewarded with lower points for a meal of garbanzo beans and green peppers than a meal of pork and tortilla chips. But the WW folks are not thinking about your blood sugar. The folks at WW also want to sell more 2-point snack bars of food-like substances. And so those of us who are hypoglycemic or diabetic must essentially follow two plans at once: mobilizing all the good health guidelines for blood sugar stability through the points system. This isn't nearly as hard as it sounds, but it does require tweaking the system in a few common-sense ways. For example: eating a filling, high-protein and high-fiber nutritious breakfast, rather than squeaking by on an English muffin and an egg-white and saving your points for that late-night ice cream. And: following the glycemic index carefully--e.g. don't munch down on high-glycemic foods that have low WW points (e.g. carrots), or only do so if you pair those foods with enough fat and protein to mitigate the high-glycemic impact. That stack of carrots might be a "diet" food for someone else, but it's only going to trigger a blood sugar crash in me.

In future posts I'm going to speak a little more extensively about what I am eating, and how I've modified my whole foods diet to work on the WW program, as well as how I'm tweaking the WW program when necessary to prioritize whole foods, low-glycemic eating. First up: breakfast.