Taking off the pounds
Taking off the pounds
After losing nearly 50 pounds, Josh Mankiewicz weighs in with what worked for him.
By Josh Mankiewicz
NBC NEWS
July 16— Fad diets come and go. The one thing we know for sure is that if you eat too much and exercize too little, you gain weight. But eat too much of what? Suddenly we’re told by the “New York Times” that even some mainstream scientists (though still a minority) are beginning to ask — is it possible that fat isn’t the enemy afterall? ‘Dateline’ correspondent Josh Mankiewicz is not a scientist, but he has lost weight. And it wasn’t by cutting fat. He’d tells how he did it.
THIS IS DINNER. This is me. This is me having dinner. And for the last four years, this has been me losing weight.
See, for about 25 years I’ve had this love/hate relationship with food. I loved the eating part. I hated the way it made me look.
And I’m on TV, so millions see the way I look. Over the years, I tried just about every diet that came along. Some of them worked, but none of them worked for long.
Since diets were a failure, I swallowed my pride, along with just about anything else I could find, particularly if someone had taken the time to fry it. And I learned the hard way that if you stand next to certain people, you look even worse by comparison.
For about 25 years I’ve had this love/hate relationship with food. I loved the eating part. I hated the way it made me look.
Then I discovered the Atkins Diet. It’s been around for 30 years and it’s pretty simple. This is the way I used to eat: steak, salad, potatoes, bread, a Coke, and dessert. Subtract the bread. Lose the potatoes. Change the Coke to iced-tea, and do without dessert. But you keep the steak and the salad. It’s a high-fat, high protein diet. It’s exactly what we’ve been told not to eat for more than 20 years.
Dietary fat does not make you fat?
“That’s correct,” says Dr. Barry Sears.
That is a very, very difficult message for people in this country to listen to.
“It is,” says Sears.
Dr. Barry Sears is author of “The zone,” similar to the Atkins diet in that both believe the modern American low-fat, high carbohydrate diet — and all the sugar it contains — is responsible for a national epidemic of obesity. And that dietary fat —the fat you consume as part of your daily diet — is nothing to be afraid of.
There is this perception that to really lose weight, it’s got to be like taking castor oil, if not literally then figuratively.
“People think that ‘If I have to lose weight, it has to be a painful experience,’” says Sears. “But what if that wasn’t true? What if it’s a very, very easy experience?”
Fifty years ago, nearly every American ate a lot of animal protein and a lot of fat as part of a daily diet. In the 1970s, that started to change. Low-fat diets were held up as the answer to a lot of America’s problems, and bread, pasta, and grains became our best friends. Fast forward to 2002, and suddenly the rules are changing again.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to walk on the streets of America to see that it’s not worked,” says Sears. “We’re eating the same amount of fat that we did 25 years ago — but far more carbohydrates.”
And are we leaner as a nation?
“No,” says Sears. “We’ve become the fattest people on the face of the earth.”
And according to Sears, here’s why. Fat and protein make you feel full. They also take longer to digest. Carbohydrates like pasta and bread are digested much more quickly and raise the body’s levels of the hormone insulin.
If you have too much insulin, you store fat more easily? “Exactly,” says Sears.
If you have too little insulin?
“Then the nutrients to the cells aren’t being delivered,” says Sears.
And you get incredibly hungry.
“Exactly,” says Sears.
Which encourages you to eat more.
“That’s correct,” says Sears.
Which explains why, for years, my weight went up and down like an elevator. None of the diets I tried did anything to keep my insulin levels stable. The result — I was always hungry. I had no family history of heart disease or diabetes, so I decided to try Atkins.
When I gave up pasta and bread and replaced them with steak, I noticed some changes right away. First of all, I started losing weight quickly — 11 pounds in the first 14 days. I couldn’t believe it. This was what Atkins calls the “induction diet” — less than 40 grams of carbohydrate a day. Just by comparison, the government recommends you eat at least 100 grams.
The other thing I noticed was that I felt great — not just because I’d lost weight, but because I realized I could stay on that diet or something close to it for a very long time. Gradually, I added some carbs like green vegetables and salads, but I kept on losing weight. I lost most of the weight in the first three months, but at the end of a year, I was down 47 pounds.
And my cholesterol is about where it was before the diet. I looked a lot better. I started dating Janet Jackson. OK, that’s not true — but my affair with steak was hot and heavy.
So many of us have lost weight on low-carb, high-protein diets, that a lot of experts are re-evaluating the whole issue of fat in the American diet. The National Institutes of Health has never been able to prove a link between dietary fat and heart disease.
But let’s face it, even though I lost the weight, I was well, worried, because there are also plenty of experts who think that Dr. Atkins is slowly killing me with every forkful of steak.
“I eat high-fat foods on occasion, but I don’t delude myself into thinking that they are good for me,” says San Francisco doctor Dean Ornish.
Ornish is author of a number of books urging all of us to eat a very low-fat, plant-based diet instead of all that steak I’ve been enjoying.
I went on the Atkins diet four years ago. I lost 47 pounds. I don’t smoke, drink, don’t take any drugs. And now I don’t eat sugar, or refined white flour or potatoes or French fries and I don’t even like pork rinds. You telling me I’m living unhealthy?
“It’s great that you’re not eating sugar and white flour,” says Ornish. “And not eating pork rinds — I support that — we are on agreement in that. And I’d love to be able to tell you that sausage and bacon and pork rinds are good for your heart. But they’re not—”
So it was bad for me to lose that weight in that way?
“You can lose weight on phen-phen, on chemotherapy. That doesn’t mean it’s good for you,” says Ornish.
Ornish and many other doctors and nutritionists say a high-protein, high-fat diet isn’t just bad for your heart. It can also increase your risk of getting some types of cancer and that a low-fat diet carries many health benefits. Ornish admits I’m eating healthier now than I used to, but says I’d do even better on his low-fat regimen.
I looked at Ornish’s book. “Mexican Summer Stew.” Vegetables baked in parchment, bean burgers, tofu stew with sweet potatoes — I can’t live on that!
“Well sure you can,” says Ornish.
Oh, I can live on it — I mean, you put me on an island with just that, I’ll live on it — but I’ll be miserable.
“No you won’t,” says Ornish. “If you worked with me, we’d find the right balance so that you could have complex carbs, some animal protein, we’d talk about meditation and other ways of managing stress.”
Meditation?
“Meditation,” says Ornish. Yoga.”
OK, it’s not that meditation, bean burgers and yoga don’t sound good, because they really, really do. I could probably do that diet — for about three days. Then the cops would arrest me for breaking into a Sizzler.
You see, if steak is a religion, this is my church. If it’s an addiction, these are my enablers. You don’t have to love steak to worship at the altar of Dr. Atkins. It works just as well with fish or chicken.
For me, the Atkins approach of filling up on protein and staying away from carbs opened a door to another way of eating — a way I could live with. And it allowed me to cut out of my diet all those harmful things.
Today I work out three or four times a week. I didn’t do it at all during that first year on Atkins. I’ve kept the weight off. Stone Phillips clearly sees me as a threat and is trying to get me to eat more desserts. OK, that’s not true either, but I am eating more complex carbohydrates these days. My diet now is much closer to the “Zone” than to Atkins.
The truth is, I thought more than once about sharing some embarrassing photos with you. I decided to do it because this diet finally changed that relationship I had with food.
And here’s the headline. I did it without suffering. I hung onto the one food that made me think I was having a real meal, so I didn’t feel like I was on a diet. So Dr. Atkins, wherever you are, thanks, and — well done!
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My Bad; the program is Tuesday, 7/16, not 7/19.
Josh looked healthy, trim, vibrant and happy while Ornish looked like a bloated grey ghost exhumed from his grave.
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