As autumn sets in, this programme is getting easier. Specifically, it's a lot easier to make my body work hard to stay warm!
Letting the temperature do the work
For one thing, our boiler has stopped, so the house is a steady 16-17C. I'm deliberately not wearing a sweater or fleece in the house, as has been my habit in the past when it's chilly. I don't know how many extra grams of fat I'm burning to stay warm, but I figure every little helps.
Secondly, the cold bath is now a lot easier to arrange. Our mains is a thin pipe running under our front lawn, so the water tends to take on the temperature of the ground a few inches down. Right now it's running at 16C, so more or less the same as room temperature.
In a previous blog entry I measured the calories my body had burned to raise my bath water 1C. It occurred to me that I'd also like to know how much fat that might mean I'd burned (on the basis that I'm bathing after sleeping, and before eating, so I must be burning body fat or muscle, not food). Apparently there are 9 kcal in a gram of fat, so if I've burned 150 kcal in the bath, that would mean I'd lost about 16g of fat, or about half an ounce. So... lying in a cold bath doesn't result in high levels of immediate weight loss. I suppose I knew that. Still, over 32 days (just over a month) of cold baths, that would result in a pound of weight loss - could be worse.
Perhaps a better solution to using cold water for weight loss would be to go for a swim outdoors. Anyone who watched the triathlon at this year's Olympics probably enjoyed seeing the competitors taking on the Serpentine in London. Of course, not everyone lives near the Serpentine, but I found a UK organisation called the Outdoor Swimming Society who have maps of places to swim in lakes, rivers, lidos and so on.
Now, outdoor swimming has a certain appeal. One assumes there are no sharks (I gather you may get fish in some of these locations), and you get fresh air and an outdoor scene to look at. It's probably quieter than the local pool as well. Will I ever try it? I'm not sure, but it's mildly tempting.
In the meantime, I'm hoping that keeping the house cool and not bundling up will help me along a little with this diet.
Who needs carbs?
One surprising aspect of this regime is that when I eat a lot of carbs at once - for instance a packet of cashews - I now feel unpleasantly over-full. Why didn't I feel like that before? I don't know, but it's helping me to avoid eating a lot of carbs at one go. Who needs to feel ill after a meal? I hate it.
Another very odd change is that I used to have a lot of trouble with burping at bedtime. Who knows why - I'd tried changing all sorts of things in my diet but nothing got rid of the problem. Now I'm finding that it doesn't happen any more (hooray!) unless I've just eaten a lot of carbs. So I'm experimenting to see what I can eat last thing at night without getting all this air coming up when I lie down.
On a high
A less surprising but very welcome change is that I've had a lot of upswings in my mood - even when I'm hungry - but no downswings. This is undoubtedly making it easier to stay on the OMG regime. What could be causing it? Certainly not the exercise, which has been very gentle. Something is causing those endorphins to flow. I might do a little research at some point to see what could be causing it. Better regulation of blood sugar? That would certainly fit with the book's focus on improving the body's management of insulin. Who knows, but if it carries on like this, it should make continued weight loss considerably easier! That's always the hard part - staying slim once you've got there. I tend to start gaining weight again pretty quickly. But if I'm feeling cheerful about my new lifestyle (whatever bits of it I try to keep permanent), perhaps I'll find it easier to maintain my new weight.
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Sunday, 16 September 2012
Friday, 14 September 2012
Day 9: too long in the bath...
The trouble with technology is that you get used to it, and you assume it will keep working, the same as you keep assuming the sun will come up in the morning. The sun does indeed rise each morning, but technology inevitably fails.
Of course, it is often the fault of the human that this happens, and so it was on the morning of Day 9, my second day with the 19C bath. I've been using the timer on my phone. It has always been set to go black when unused, so I can't see the timer running down. Unfortunately, I had previously also set it to silent, and had forgotten to turn the sound back on. I didn't notice this with the 2- and 3-minute segments of the bathing programme - I saw the timer light up the phone. However, I saw nothing during the 10 minute full submersion, for the obvious reason that I was immersed in water, with a bathtub wall in between me and the phone. After a while, I began to wonder when the time would be up. And after a very long while, I decided to check the phone. Of course the timer was finished, and I realised the phone was on silent. I was also remarkably shivery. I'd got the bath temperature up from 19C to 20C just by being in it (the room temperature was below 19C, so it really was me).
The result was that I was shivery for more or less the whole day. Luckily it was a sunny day, and standing in the sun's warmth was very pleasant. I didn't mind the ordeal in any case - I survived it, and could think of all the fat I was burning! At any rate, I have now reset the phone so that it doesn't go blank until it has been ignored for 10 minutes.
The science of weight loss
I mentioned last week that most diet books turn me off - they tend not to work, or tell me what I already knew, or are badly referenced so I don't know whether they have real evidence for their claims or just personal experience (which worked for them but might not work for me). An exception to this is the articles and books by Dr. Briffa, a british doctor and journalist who writes on health generally, including the ever popular subject of diet and weight loss. He has a regular blog with commentary on recently published medical research, what it might mean, whether it's reliable, and how it fits with what he's said before. This week he has written about fasting and weight loss in a mouse study.
He is careful to point out that mice are not people, so you can't take all this as being definitely something that would work for our species. He also provides references to the research, and to other relevant research and commentary. This approach to writing diet advice appeals to me enormously. I am inclined to listen to what he has to say because I've been doing so for years, and whenever I've had any doubts, I've read the original medical research, and found that he is drawing sound conclusions. He also has clinical experience of working with patients who are trying to lose weight, and he is very good about saying when he is drawing on that clinical experience (which is interesting, but not scientific), and when he is reflecting on the results of proper research.
The interesting thing about the current mouse study is that it found a particular state in which fat was not stored, but rather used for energy. In this instance, mice were eating high fat diets, but their eating times were very restricted, and the result was that they didn't store as much fat as the mice who ate high fat diets but without any time restrictions.
How this fits with OMG
Fulton's diet also makes use of periods of fasting - in other words, restrictions on the times when you can eat. Everyone notices the advice to skip breakfast, the banning of snacks, and the regimented delay between exercise and eating. This mouse study is not the first to look at the impact of restricting eating times, but it does show that even on a high fat diet, mice gain less weight if their eating time is restriction (in other words, if they fast), than if they can eat whenever they want.
In short, when it comes to the various ways of restricting when you eat on the OMG diet, there is recent research to support the idea that this should help reduce the amount of weight that is stored as fat when you eat.
Of course, it is often the fault of the human that this happens, and so it was on the morning of Day 9, my second day with the 19C bath. I've been using the timer on my phone. It has always been set to go black when unused, so I can't see the timer running down. Unfortunately, I had previously also set it to silent, and had forgotten to turn the sound back on. I didn't notice this with the 2- and 3-minute segments of the bathing programme - I saw the timer light up the phone. However, I saw nothing during the 10 minute full submersion, for the obvious reason that I was immersed in water, with a bathtub wall in between me and the phone. After a while, I began to wonder when the time would be up. And after a very long while, I decided to check the phone. Of course the timer was finished, and I realised the phone was on silent. I was also remarkably shivery. I'd got the bath temperature up from 19C to 20C just by being in it (the room temperature was below 19C, so it really was me).
The result was that I was shivery for more or less the whole day. Luckily it was a sunny day, and standing in the sun's warmth was very pleasant. I didn't mind the ordeal in any case - I survived it, and could think of all the fat I was burning! At any rate, I have now reset the phone so that it doesn't go blank until it has been ignored for 10 minutes.
The science of weight loss
I mentioned last week that most diet books turn me off - they tend not to work, or tell me what I already knew, or are badly referenced so I don't know whether they have real evidence for their claims or just personal experience (which worked for them but might not work for me). An exception to this is the articles and books by Dr. Briffa, a british doctor and journalist who writes on health generally, including the ever popular subject of diet and weight loss. He has a regular blog with commentary on recently published medical research, what it might mean, whether it's reliable, and how it fits with what he's said before. This week he has written about fasting and weight loss in a mouse study.
He is careful to point out that mice are not people, so you can't take all this as being definitely something that would work for our species. He also provides references to the research, and to other relevant research and commentary. This approach to writing diet advice appeals to me enormously. I am inclined to listen to what he has to say because I've been doing so for years, and whenever I've had any doubts, I've read the original medical research, and found that he is drawing sound conclusions. He also has clinical experience of working with patients who are trying to lose weight, and he is very good about saying when he is drawing on that clinical experience (which is interesting, but not scientific), and when he is reflecting on the results of proper research.
The interesting thing about the current mouse study is that it found a particular state in which fat was not stored, but rather used for energy. In this instance, mice were eating high fat diets, but their eating times were very restricted, and the result was that they didn't store as much fat as the mice who ate high fat diets but without any time restrictions.
How this fits with OMG
Fulton's diet also makes use of periods of fasting - in other words, restrictions on the times when you can eat. Everyone notices the advice to skip breakfast, the banning of snacks, and the regimented delay between exercise and eating. This mouse study is not the first to look at the impact of restricting eating times, but it does show that even on a high fat diet, mice gain less weight if their eating time is restriction (in other words, if they fast), than if they can eat whenever they want.
In short, when it comes to the various ways of restricting when you eat on the OMG diet, there is recent research to support the idea that this should help reduce the amount of weight that is stored as fat when you eat.
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