27 June 2000

The jet lag won't entirely go away!  I was up at 5:30 a.m. this morning, which is about 30 minutes earlier than usual.  That's okay, though, because it gave me time to put a cool search engine on the website.  Now, if you want to know how many times I've used the term "dumbass" or "blar" or what have you on the site, just click on my search links located on the main page, the main journal page, and, from now on, the monthly index journal page, and search away!

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For the first time in over a month (a little embarrassing to admit this, but work-related travel has interfered), I went to the gym after work today.  Thankfully I haven't lost any strength, really, although that amount of time is enough to start losing muscle mass.  No, the worst of the workout was the aerobic.  One can work for months on a bike, jogging, or however -- and then take off even a week and lose an unbelievable amount of conditioning.  So the bike ride was hard yesterday.  But the workout felt great.  I am expecting some serious soreness later in the week, though!

I've also gotten back to a full-blown Sugar Busters diet instead of the half-ass thing I was trying to do in Calgary (easier there) and London (it is damn near impossible not to starve there for Americans, let alone find Sugar Busters-friendly foods!).  I feel much better, although it's kind of funny, because the Sugar Busters diet is such that when one switches back to it 100%, one initially feels hungry a lot of the time -- and it's okay to eat that often, so long as the foods are low on the glycemic index.  And the body still drives itself towards an ideal weight.  It's quite remarkable really.

In London, I took along a fluff book called Sugar Blues for some occasional light reading.  It's not a very good book, actually, but it started me thinking about how and why Sugar Busters works so well.  It's been my experience that if one is diligent about controlling intake of pure sugar, pure flour, and other high glycemic foods, one can eat damn near anything that is regarded as "bad" by the health industry (fatty red meats, high fat -- but low sugar -- salad dressings, eggs, etc) and not have weight gain.  Part of this is simple metabolism -- high sugar consumption leads to a rise in blood sugar levels immediately, which leads the body to secrete insulin, which mobilizes fat storage.   That leads to this speculation on my part:  without the massive releases of insulin triggered by high glycemic foods, the body is not going to store fat actively.   Thus, perhaps it's not the high fat foods, meats, cheeses, eggs, etc. -- that make us fat, as many dieticians and health industry folks tell us.  Rather, it's those foods in combination with a high glycemic catalyst -- like pure white toast, for example, or sugar in one's coffee, or cocoa/chocolate milk -- that causes insulin to be mobilized and those calories to be stored as fat.  Otherwise, calories aren't that big a deal!  

Anyway, that's just an hypothesis that's formed in my mind about my experiences with the Sugar Busters diet.  I continue to believe that getting all of that pure, refined sugar as well as pure, refined flour (which raises blood sugar levels almost as quickly and highly as pure refined table sugar) out of one's system is a healthy thing to do.   And the energy boost is amazing after about a week's time, once the body fully adjusts.