[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

I have just lost 15 pounds and my weight has stabilised at 14 stone for around 4 weeks. The diet has been great, effortless and logical. This has been part of a fascinating experiment with eliminating what I believed to be the main culprit in our diet for obesity and you may be in for a real surprise. I had already elimiated a few items from my diet for another reason but found that my weight did not change dramatically until I eliminated the items that the majority of people take for granted as being part of a "staple food"

I am looking for people who are overweight to come forward and list the items and the quantity of items in their shopping baskets over seven days. Please try to be as accurate as possible and all will be revealed in due course.

Andrew

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Hmm not a single reply to a simple question? Thought someone would have been interested enough to hear what I did to lose 15lb in a few weeks without even trying to diet. All I did was cut out some basic foods we believe to be good for us and my body did the rest. Never mind, I won't bother you again

Andrew

[Karen W.]

Sorry Andrew I shop about once a month not weekly or daily..

[Alandriel]

I have rather the opposite problem I'm afraid and am 'fighting' to keep enough pounds on.

I would guess though that you cut out major on bread, cheese and red meats, plus also on anything that contains a lot of sugar and fat e.g. cakes, cookies, chocs, sweets etc. Am looking forward though to hear how you did it.
GO YOU btw - no mean feat to succeed  []

[kdlynn]

i eat whatever's on sale. never any red meat because it makes me gag... but i never buy more that what i absolutely need that day

[Carolyn]

Sorry Andrew. I rarely do grocery shopping.  I've been dieting since January, so I hubby does most of the grocery shopping and I rarely cook any more.  Would still love to know what you've cut out.

[another_someone]

Always do my own shopping, my own cooking (with rare exceptions), and my own eating.

Never deliberately tried to lose weight, and in general the trend has been upwards, although I have at times dropped as much as two stone over a couple of years (but that does usually reverse eventually).

Main thing that does cause an increase in weight for me is bread.

Main thing to help reduction in weight is state of mind (i.e. I will put on more weight if I am feeling depressed).

Have lost about ¹/₂ stone over the last 6 months or so, but that has been a general reduction in food, while doing my best to maintain fairly high fat levels (slight reduction in meat intake, but the reduction is from a high norm).

Don't say I can remember exactly what was in my last shop (it was approx 2 weeks since my previous major food shopping).  I did have about 9 litres of water, about 6 litres of various fruit juices, two portions of raw meat (about 300g each), a packet of bacon, some sausage, some cooked chicken slices, some ginger, some chocolate, two boxes of eggs, some double cream, some cheese slices, some mayonnaise, some ice cream, some frozen potatoes, some chicken liver pate, some grapeseed oil, some pineapple chunks, some tinned peas, a box of uncooked rice, some jars of fruit in syrup, some maple syrup, two boxes of cottage cheese.

That is about what I can remember (I also bought some milk and breakfast cereal the following day).

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Thanks for the replies.

A while back we had some lamb from a friend. It was covered in so much fat it got me thinking about what it's diet consisted of.

A while back I made a comment about this in another thread stating that grass based products like anything that contains flour might not be processed by the body as efficiently as other foods.

So I decided to give it a try. I don't have sugar or milk in tea, don't drink milk in fact because it gives me acid. Found this out after many years of suffering. Used to love a bowl or 6 of cornflakes rice crispies etc.

Anyways. as my weight had not altered much and I was carrying a little too much baggage, I began to postulate on whether it was the big Mac burger or the bread that was wrapped around it that made us fat.

I read about the Atkins diet, which made a fair bit of sense also. So I began to pay attention to people shopping in the supermarket, making observations of what was in the shopping basket of people who were morbidly obese and people who were slim. On one occasion a very large lady struggled past me with 12 loaves of white bread, dohnuts and other pastries. I made a point of telling my wife to take a look and she began to make the same connections.

So I decided to give it a try and stopped eating all bread and pastry products. Ironically nations that do not have obesity problems generally don’t eat these food items. And the term Man cannot live by bread alone began to ring a bell in my ear.

The weight began to fall off me. Even though I was probably eating more, fish fingers and fishcakes from Asda together with jalapeno chillies and the vinegar from the jar served to take my mind off the bread. Surprisingly, I did not even feel like I was on a diet. Also ate plenty of the frozen smoothies as a treat and fruit etc. Had normal dinners, ate plenty of sausages, boiled eggs, well plenty of pretty much everything except anything to do with wheat or bread. Cut out cheese also and butter, not much point with either if I am not eating bread.

Now my weight is stable around 14 stones fluctuating 1-2 lb which means I lost around 15 lbs of flubber and it was flubber, my muscles did not deteriorate and remained firm but I lost a fair few inches and saw my size 36” trousers fall on the floor constantly. I feel I have far more energy now I have reduced my fat.

Always wondered why I never lost weight effectively before without making life unbearably uncomfortable.

Hope this is of use to some of you guys

Andrew   

[kdlynn]

first off... how much is a stone? can't we stick with pounds guys? ha ha and second, make sure you're careful. i remember when the atkins thing was popular here people having all kinds of problems. everyone seemed to have swollen ankles here... and keep in mind, dr atkins did die of a heart attack....

[Alandriel]

first off... how much is a stone? can't we stick with pounds guys?

or metric please - I'll never get to grips with US or imperial no matter what..... []


Good to hear Andrew.
An MD friend of mine always said avoid the three deadly white powders: flour, sugar.......

There is wayyy too much bread in the modern diet which also leads to gut/skin problems due to the excess yeast. Pasta is less of a culprit e.g. look at Italy and their traditional diet. Lots of pasta and not that many obese Italians - but then their pasta portions are very different of what we often get used to.
Plus their more relaxed yet active life styled (plus a Med climate) also helps.

[another_someone]

A few comments about observation pertaining to myself.

Bread certainly is the biggest problem (if I eat bread more than once every fortnight, it does cause an short term adverse reaction - this is relatively recent, meaning the last few years; but the steady increase in weight was since I started working life, and lived off sandwiches, which is all I could easily go out and buy most lunchtimes).

Milk has given me problems, but what I have found is that a mix of one third double cream to two thirds milk does not give me the same problem (i.e. shift the lactose to fat ratios).  I don't drink this daily, but if I do maintain the mix, when I do drink it I do not have problems with my stomach afterwards.

As for Dr. Atkins' death:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Atkins_(nutritionist)

Around 2000, Atkins started to develop a heart condition, cardiomyopathy, which he claimed was unrelated to his diet. On April 18, 2002, Atkins suffered a cardiac arrest.

On April 8, 2003, Atkins slipped on ice and fell in front of his medical office in New York City and sustained major head injuries that put him in a coma. News of this quickly turned into rumors that Atkins had a heart attack while he was on his own diet. He never recovered from his injuries, and subsequently died on April 17 of kidney failure. By mistake, the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office released Atkins' medical records to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group associated with PETA and which advocates a vegetarian diet. The record stated his weight to be approximately 255 lb (116 kg) at the time of death. In terms of simple height/weight measure (BMI), this would mean he was obese; the apparent irony of a diet guru being obese caused the information to be circulated around the world by the media and animal rights groups, much to the distress of his family. The Atkins company released a statement claiming that he weighed only 196 lb (89 kg) upon admission to the hospital and that his apparent increase in weight was due to fluid retention following the failure of his major organs. William Leith interviewed him in the period between his cardiac arrest and his fall. Leith writes, "He looks to be just under 6 feet tall and around 200 lbs – not skinny, not thin, but definitely not fat. The jowls around his neck are fairly minimal, signs of age rather than excess weight."

I have known many people who have said that the Atkins' diet is the only diet with which they have successfully lost weight.  This is not to deny that it may well carry other health problems - but then I would suggest that any means of extreme weight loss cannot be without secondary effects (the human body is not designed to lose weight rapidly, and does so only under extreme stress).  This is not to suggest that taking aspects of the Atkins diet would impose severe stresses on the body, but merely that extreme diets, whether Atkins' or anybody else's, would inevitably cause stresses on the body.

I am certainly not trying to sell Atkins' (or anybody else's) diet, only to suggest that because something can be dangerous if taken to extreme does not imply it is bad in moderation.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Stone = 14lb   = 2.2 lb to a kilo

Many thanks for the information on Atkins. Kinda suspected there might be more to his death than we read about. My father suffered the same fluid retention problems and renal failure when he went into Russel’s Hall Hospital, also ended up in a coma with supposedly irreversible multiple organ failure, his urine was brown and tar like, his legs ballooned to massive proportions. Then we tilted his bed and he came out of the coma, his legs went rapidly back to normal size and his urine cleared, much to the astonishment of the doctors and nurses who had resisted tilting his bed for so long.

I suspect that flour based products might be worth removing from the diet and cause little problems if substituted for potatoes and rice/ Fish cakes in my case. I ate plenty of fruit plenty of veg. Can remember as a child wanting to eat the items on the sandwich and ditch the bread, but was told it was wasteful to do this.

As for pasta. There are unfortunately many Italians that are morbidly obese. I have worked in Italy and can remember many of the older people being obese.

 Finally, when we compared the data we obtained in
northeastern Italy with that collected in the same area 10
years ago (, the prevalence of overweight and obesity in
preschool children showed an increase of 10% to 15%
according to the national reference.
In conclusion, the results of our study suggest that 1)
there is as high a prevalence of overweight and obesity in
Italian preschool children as there is in the United States;
Source: http://www.obesityresearch.org/cgi/reprint/14/5/765.pdf


Went on holiday for a week and ate some bread for the first time in ages. Felt utterly bloated and uncomfortable in bed. Persisted eating bread and drank far too much, ended up donating my breakfast to the toilet 2 times and felt ill all the following day.

Conclusion: Think I’m giving bread the elbow permanently.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Went to Macro a few weeks ago and saw a Bullocks Heart offered for sale at a reduced price, which drew my attention to it as a treat for my dogs.

This led me to have a closer inspection and I quickly noticed the large amount of fat attached to it. Again the question as to how eating grass and grass related products can cause huge amounts of fat to become stored in the body of grazing animals and it's implications for people eating grass / grain related products sent shivers down my spine. Why? Because this fat was not like anything I have seen before. It was like hardened concrete and surrounded a large proportion of the heart. This must have severely restricted the performance of the Bullocks Heart because it would undoubtedly have prevented the heart from reaching full capacity!

Now one could argue that this may be because cattle these days are not fed on grass and allowed to graze in open fields as much as they have done in the past, and that this has led to feeding them on processed food, and I would not argue with this conclusion.
But and it is a big But. Are we not processing the same grain and grass related products when we make bread, cakes and pastries? Maybe we should feed cattle on such products to see if the Hardened fat that is heavily packed around the heart of Cattle and presumably sheep also would continue to form as it does with the current diet of these animals.

I did not purchase the Ox Heart for my dogs. But walked away with disbelief at what I had just observed.

This is not by any means the first observation with huge amounts of stored animal fats, but it is the first time I have observed so much Hardened fat around an animals heart.

In the US there is undoubtedly a pandemic of morbidly obese people. MacDonald’s Et Al  are pumping out masses of bread related products, anointed with beef that contains these hard fats. Pizza contains cheese, which again is a hard fat and a fair dose of dough, so do Jelly Doughnuts, Pasta and pancakes and pastries and biscuits and cakes. All of which are very hard for the liver to process and make use of, so the liver itself becomes impregnated with these hard fats. In addition to this we now have hydrogenated vegetable oils to contend with, again processed in a way that it becomes thickened.

Salmon is now farmed and farm fed salmon can be found with a huge helping of fat stored in the skin. These used to be lean mean fighting machines, now, like the Cattle have been reduced to stuffing their faces with harmful processed foods that contain grain related products and processed fat. I used to love salmon. Now I will not touch it with a barge pole.

I still see lots of Supersized people walking around the supermarkets with masses of processed grain products in their baskets, overflowing with bread, cakes, doughnuts, biscuits, pies, pasta and pastries.

Think very hard about what you put in your shopping basket and find alternatives.

We shop at Wall Mart, and while we do purchase the odd malted grain bread, we don’t eat anywhere near the amount of grain related products that we used to and seldom feel bloated as we used to.

Instead we eat fish cakes, fish fingers, jacket potatoes, Thai style foods, vegetables, salads, and pretty much anything else. We also indulge in the occasional cake and pastry but we are now aware of the consequences of over indulging in these products.

Prices of grain related products are now rocketing with grain reserves falling around the developing countries, it Might be worth remembering an echo from the past that 'Man Cannot Live By Bread Alone'

Andrew K Fletcher