I’ve Lost 7lbs (1/2 stone) in 11 Days, How’s Your Christmas Mince Pie Flab Doing?

by Colin McNulty on 14 January 2012

What a good start to the New Year’s efforts to loose the Christmas flab! This morning saw me break the 1/2 stone (7 lbs / 3 kg) loss mark, since I started being good again on Tuesday 3rd Jan, which is 11 days ago at the time of writing.

What’s even better is that includes a cheat day last Saturday, and as it’s Saturday again today, that’s another cheat day. Excellent! 🙂 To be clear here, that’s done without food restriction, without hunger, without low fat diet bars or shakes, and I’ve been eating 3+ times per day.

It’s one of the things that in some ways makes me wonder if it’s a good thing: eating mostly Paleo food, in Zone proportions, is such an effective way of losing weight, it can make you complacent. This happened to me last year, and after amazing losses over the first 3 weeks, I hit the dreaded plateaux. Fortunately it’s easy to over come that, but all that’s dealt with in my food diary from last year, which you can get on the How I Lost My Pot Belly post from last week, which includes details on handling cheat days.

It’s also the reason I have the weight to lose in the first place. Knowing that I can easily drop the pounds, with minimal effort, means that I don’t really care about not having what I want at Christmas. Whereas others may still be restrained, not wanting to balloon come Janurary, I know I can tuck into whatever I like (chocolate is my weakness, I must have eaten several large Toblerones all by myself!) and drop the excess without concern. To be honest, it’s probably not as healthy as just being good at Christmas… but where’s the fun in that! 😉

• Darren Cooper 23 January 2012, 9:49 pm

  Hey Col – One thing I’ve noticed in your food plan is that you seem to be eating a lot of red meat.

• Colin McNulty 24 January 2012, 11:40 am

  Yeah, good isn’t it! 😀

  If you look at tabloid headlines proclaiming that red meat is bad for you, you get the impression you shouldn’t eat it. But when you look closely at the actual research, you notice 2 important things:

  1) They always lump “red meat” and “processed meat” into the same category.
  2) They make no account for what’s eaten *with* red or processed meat.

  Where there have been a few studies to look at pure meat vs processed, they’ve shown the risk is associated with the processing (adding sugar, salt, extra fat, and often bread crumbs in the example of sausages for example). See here for more info a study that shows steak is fine, sausages not so much:

  https://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2010/05/19/sausage-not-steak-increases-heart-disease-risk/

  (I should point out that the sausage brands I buy are either 90% or 97% meat, not the 40% you get many “normal” sausage brands.)

  But as with all epidemiological studies, they can only show correlation, not causation. If you look at fat people coming out of McDonnald’s say, and you have a predilection to say that processed meat in the form or burgers is bad, that’s the conclusion you will draw. But no one goes into Maccy D’s and just has the burger; they have the carb laden bun too, plus fries (more carbs), plus a sugar laden drink. They have far more carbs than processed meat, but no one ever blames the bread do they?

  This is a good article about correlation vs causation and how it’s being shown that it’s not inactivity that causes fatness, but fatness that causes inactivity!

  https://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2010/07/08/fatness-leads-to-inactivity-but-inactivity-does-not-lead-to-fatness/

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