Hi Gang! A couple of words from Dr.Ray
 

Hi there!
Let me first say that I am not a doctor, but that is my goal, to become a pediatric obesity specialist. I am in my last semester at Rowan University, this May I will have a BA in Psychology. However, first I have to finish the battle of the bulge(s), a battle I had beaten to a greater degree than those little numbers over there indicate. I had gotten down to just below 400, but the evil beast that is known as The Backslide has bitten me pretty hard.
But, I dont quit, The Big Guy hits hard and stays in for the count. I am in the countdown for my birthday, (#42 for the more inquizative of you!) and I am in an odd mood. Friday is hours away, and I enter the Elvis Year, who as you may recall didnt see birthday 43. Fame and fortune have thus far eluded me, but now fundamental health is eluding me as well. All my joints feel as if they are fusing. Walking itself is becoming profoundly difficult; not nearly as difficult as when I was 850 pounds at the age of 29, but my range of interests and activities is light years beyond those sleep apnea affected days of yore.
My system of high fiber and low fat, coupled with walking as much as I could worked well. The trouble is, it isnt working anymore. Ive focused as much of my attentional resouces as I can afford to the study of the glycemic index, and find that many of the foods I ate and eat score quite low in the index. Some of this was scientific deduction (barley is so high in fiber it HAD to be healthy!) to following the instinctive "gut" reactions (parboiled rice didnt seem too bad because it didnt taste starchy, and didnt clump together like its "starch bomb" breathern)'
Naturally, now in 2004, look up glycemic index and there they are, both scoring quite low in the ol index .
My questions are fairly simple, such as if you mix a high gly food (white potato) with a lower gly food like a sweet potato, does mashing the two together make for a lower gly food? Intuitively I think YES, but with any luck Ill find a knowlegeable dietician / nutritionist that can answer some of these niggling questions before I go INSANE!!!!!
(this would be bad; I cant afford me and I dont have a black couch to hang out on!)

Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me!

Say Hi people!!!

Helloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!

Hey, is it really your birthday? :bday:

So are you thinking of switching to low carb? If you are, check out "which low carb plan is right for me?" over to the right, under "quick links." :thup: Pick up one or more of the low carb books, and/or feel free to ask any questions if you're skeptical. ;)

Welcome aboard!

Happy birthday and welcome to the forum!!! You might want to look into the CAD forum on the board and join the Triple Digits club also.

Thank you! Yes its really my birthday, well, actually, its the third anniversary of my 39th birthday

:D

I think what the real problem is that I have to get back on the mountain bike and get rolling down the road again

From your stats I can see you are well on your way.

I am not sure the hi gly/low gly mix would work. If someone is going to eat something higher on the GI, most people here recommend eating it with some protein to slow absorption and slow insulin response.

:bday:

And best of luck to you!

Happy Birthday to a fellow aquarian!!!! :bday: And welcome to the boards.
Good luck on the low carb way of eating if that's what you end up doing. I have been on I think 732 different diets and like this one the best. I've found this is the one I seem to be able to stick to and this is the one that I've seen results with. (I'm doing Atkins).
And good luck with your career goal! As a former fat kid I know how important pediatric health and weight are!
Cheers,
Gypsy :roll:

Thank you thank you thank you!!!

today was a pretty rough day as b days go, I have a hellacious schedule this semester and I think my body is rebelling, lol, yo holmes! we aint lugging all three of you around any more! (according to the insurance charts, I should be 170- 180, even tho I have shoulders like a football player wearing his pads :D
I dont know whats going on, went to my doc and he said take tylenol ... must have stock in McNeil PPC, lol
My RN/BSN gf says take a fluid diet (slim fast, diet jello, broth, etc) for two weeks to crash some wieght off and then go to my Balance plan (Im writing a diet book in a house of junk food addicts, lol, holy shoot me now, batman!)

But ....

seriously ...

If I am going to go into a profession as an obesity specialist, I cant do it as a 500 pound dude, regardless of the 350 pound loss.

As a rocking, rough tough and nicely buffed 250 pounder, well, different story. Besides, as 39 plus 3 year old, Ive got a lot to live for, and I am sure sick of being fat. Fat totally ruined my childhood, and I dont want it to ruin any other kids life. So, if I save ONE KID from the hell that is obesity, all this work is worth it

Thanks again for the congrats!!!!

:D

Welcome doc, and happy birthday!!! I'm 39 too!! Well ok, 40.

Anyway, what you say is key, don't give up!! I have never had a serious weight problem, well ok, I gained 50lbs with each pregnancy, that's too much. However I have struggled with drinking and eating, so don't give up! Good luck to you!!-R.M.

Happy Belated Birthday :Party: and welcome to the forum. I found your intro quite entertaining, if the dr. thing doesn't pan out you could consider writing a column. I've been thinking about your glycemic index question. It reminds me of a question I had when the in thing was low-fat. For awhile the thing was to not count calories but count fat grams and never eat anything that was more that 30% of the calories from fat. So I wondered---If icecream has 50% fat and green beans are 0% then is green beans a la mode 25% fat and thus fits into a lowfat eating plan? :lol: I think your question is actually a little more logical becuase it is the basis of some food combining plans like Sommersizing (Did Susan Summers ever have a size problem?). I follow the Insulin Resistance diet and the idea behind this plan is to limit the amount of empty carbs and always eat them with protein to keep your insulin from spiking and your body from going into fat producing mode. For every 15 grams of carbs you eat you must eat 7 grams of protein, no more than 30 carbs can be eaten at a meal but the amount of protein, veggies, and some fruit is unlimited, you must wait at least 2 hours before eating carbs again, and never eat carbs without protein. So far, I am pleased with the results but I don't know how it will work in the long run. The one thing that I think is great about lo-carb eating is that it seems to control the need to constantly eat. I was always a binge eater and by keeping my insulin lower I seem to have better control over my eating.

Anyway, just wanted to say welcome and Good Luck!
Christy

Hi Doc-
Welcome and good luck on this leg of your journey.
The more you know, the better decisions your can make about what you are going to do.
There are some good books on the
Glycemic Index/Glycemic Load. The latest is
The New Glucose Revolution(2003)by Miller,Wolever,
Foster-Powell & Colagiuri.It will probably answer a lot of your questions.

Hi there~! Happy belated Birthday and welcome to the forum.
There's lots we could talk about but You gotta start a journal
first .. grins. It's one of the wonderful things about this forum.

For your hi/low glycemic question, my rather uneducated but based on experience answer would be "no" it doesn't happen like that. It doesn't matter what I eat cooked carrots with or in they still cause an insulin spike in me and cause me to
be ravenously hungry, usually all the next day. Carrots are one of my very favorite
vegetables and one of the few that they have available at restaurants that i actually like so i do eat them about once a month or so and then put up with the consequences of them the next day by snacking a bit more on low-carb fare. i live alone however and don't have the finances or the way to go get anything i might be craving and i don't live in a house with other people eating things that would tempt me so this probably wouldn't work for everyone. i also never buy them to cook at home. i treat them strictly as a treat-and it has gotten so that they taste incredibly sweet, almost dessert like since i have been away from refined sweet things for so long.

Thank you for the warm welcomes and the advice!

As per the hi gly thing, I should expand on that thought a bit more ...

My mind, mighty sieve that it is, catches tremendous amounts of information

However, my mind, aging sieve that it is, loses tremendous amounts of information, and the loss is acceleratiing at an exponential rate!

Which leave me with puzzles to ponder, bits and pieces of information to collate, a sort of cerebral connect the dots process

(trivial aside - Sylvio Tomkins, the noted affect psychologist, studied Einsteins face for affect (facial wrinkles indicating long term expressions, worn into the features ovef time. What he found was puzzling, anger and joy. Reflecting upon this, he deduced that the anger was merely the frown of intense concentration, and joy was the AH HA!!!! moment of triumph when the solution came to the forefront of his mind. Im sure in a few years my face will have those same lines, tho MY anger lines will be anger lines from not being able to remember all these things I keep forgetting!)

anyway, back to the train of thought, before it gets completely derailed.

(remember, things come to me in fragments, Im trying to put them together)

Fiber has a buffering effect on carbs, by binding with them as I recall, much the same as fat. So when I say high gly mixed with low gly, it is safe to assume a lot of fiber is in the mix .. I would use more sweet potato than potato, cause I know potato is so lethal a gly bomb ... and I would also mix in some ground flax seed to it

and anything else that I eat when following my program will be similarily enhanced, I try to keep the fats down, the sugar down and the fiber up

my fascination with fat is borne of two recurring thoughts ... cutting fat allowed me to lose wieght initally, and when I figured out the fiber angle, it came off really quickly

the other thought is one a bit closer to home, the Pritikin doc created his program after a diagnosis of heart diesease in his late thirties, so he ate 10% fat in his diet

His autopsy some 30 years later showed the heart disease to be totally reversed .. allowing him to drop dead in perfect health! :D

Fiber has all sorts of good things going for it .. and speaking of going, I cant imagine a diet of cheese and meat making for a happy happy time in ye olde outhouse, unless you are a masochist! (personally, I prefer concrete to come out of a big noisy truck, NOT ME ... tho with all the yelling and screaming, there would probably be a decibel difference of only 2 dB!)

Another thought crossed my mind, perhaps it is the case that with the profoundly obese, carbs are poison - especially with the insulin resistant. In reading these posts, I keep seeing the same thing, the cravings are gone, when I eat sugar, I have cravings again ...

I have to go get some veggies, but when I get back, Ill make that profile. I like FitDay.com for getting my daily nutritional profile, how many of you like that site?

Just a minor correction to your thoughts above, Sir .. smiles

We don't eat just meat and cheese all day long.
We (most of us) are quite certain to get our vegetables in
daily and get quite a bit of fiber. i've had only one day of
"trouble in the outhouse" since i began this way of eating
and it was after a dinner of eating OFF plan .. smiles.
We(most of us) just concentrate on getting the most
fiber and nutrition in the carbs we eat.
Also, fiber doesn't "count". Which means that if
a vegetable has 20 grams of carbs in it but
10 of those are fiber we only count the 10 grams
that are not fiber.

When i eat my carrots i eat them with vegetables high
in fiber. They still make me very hungry the next day,
BUT i am insulin resistant so that may well be the reason.