Lots of sites are running stories about the Baylor study that suggested that drinking a glass of low sodium vegetable juice promoted weight loss in the subjects of a study.

I’m sure the sales of V8 have spiked in the last couple of weeks. But let’s dissect this…

1: The study was sponsored by Campbell’s, makers of V8 vegetable juice.

2: Campbell’s has been doing most of the media campaign to promote the study results.

3: Study participants who drank vegetable juice as part of a calorie-controlled diet for lowering blood pressure lost an average of just 4 pounds during a 12 week study, 3 pounds more than the people who didn’t drink V8 juice. Anyone who has dieted knows it’s possible for people to fluctuate nearly that much in a week (it’s less than 1.5 liters of water) and the high potassium levels in vegetable juice help you better regulate your bodily fluid levels, so a portion of that could merely be water weight from better potassium levels.

4: When I have contracted at Microsoft, they offer free V8 juice along with the free sodas. I’d drink 2-3 six-ounce cans of V8 juice a day when I’d be on contract there, but I’d still gain weight. I can probably attribute the weight gain to overall bad eating habits during those periods, but I also drank V8 five days a week during those periods too.

A problem with studies like this is that they try to make insignificant results sound significant. Three pounds over twelve weeks needs a bigger study with stricter controls and more stringent tests to prove that it’s 3 pounds of actual fat loss, not just water weight. It also needs to be studied in the context of a diet where people are trying to lose a pound a week or more, not where the “control” group’s weight loss rate averages out to four pounds a YEAR and the test group’s weight loss rate averages out to 17 pounds a YEAR.

Furthermore, unless everyone on the diet had to eat every morsel on their plate, there’s also the factor of all the diets where you drink a glass of liquid before a meal to fill up your stomach and help control your appetite. If the study group was drinking their V8 juice before a meal and then maybe not finishing the whole thing, while the control group didn’t drink a similar amount of water at the same time, that could skew results as well.

Remember when Snackwells came out? The public went nuts over fat-free chocolate cookies. People sang their praises and gained weight because they thought fat-free meant they could eat more cookies. Some people thought they could just eat a whole bag. It took people a while to realize they were still cookies, they still had lots of sugar, and they were still fattening.

My problem with this study is that people might think that vegetable juice is a magic bullet, much like “fat free” once was. IF there is a significant effect to be had from drinking vegetable juice, it’s as part of a low-calorie diet. You cannot substitute a V8 for good food choices, portion control, or exercise. If you’re doing all those things, then according to this study, you might lose another 1/4 pound a week. That could mean the difference between 52 pounds and 65 pounds over the course of a year. But you might get the same effects if you drink a glass of water before dinner or take a potassium supplement.

My view is that if you like V8 and would want to drink it anyway, go for it. But if you’ve never been a big fan, don’t go rushing out and buying a case at Costco. The study results just aren’t conclusive enough, in my opinion, to justify taking action based on a press release from Campbell’s about a study they sponsored.

Most diets recommend avoiding caffeinated beverages or cutting back on them because caffeine stimulates both appetite and insulin production. Generally, cutting back on caffeine isn’t a bad thing. But something that’s been even more on my mind is sweetened beverages.

I find that I don’t drink a lot of plain water, nor do a lot of people. If it’s not soda, it’s tea, or coffee, or iced tea, or lemonade, or a flavor packet mixed in with plain water, or “infused” water containing a hint of flavor via essential oils from citrus or herbs. And that’s just the various stuff I’ve been known to drink. When we expand it out to the general market, there’s caffeinated water, water with vitamins, water with fiber… you name it.

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When you’re just going to eat whatever you feel like, planning a menu and shopping in advance aren’t quite as important. I’ve always had an ability to look in the fridge and cupboard and figure out something I can throw together for a tasty meal. But when you’re planning to live the low carb lifestyle for a few weeks in a house with people who aren’t, the planning gets more complicated.

Even when you’re single or cooking for one, menu planning is actually a really good idea. That’s why many diets provide not just recipes, but day-by-day menus. The time many of us fall off the diet wagon is when we are standing in front of the fridge, hungry, and trying to decide what looks good, or when we’re tired and just want to hit the drive-thru or call the pizza guy. If you plan chili dogs for Wednesday and make the chili in advance, then come Wednesday night, it’s 5 minutes to warm the chili and the dogs, toast buns for the non-dieting household members, and get dinner on the table.

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This is me at 285 pounds or thereabout. For the past few months I’ve been fluctuating within a few pounds above or below 283. Actually, more like the past few years. I’ve occasionally dropped a few pounds, but I always came back to the 283 neighborhood, often hanging out around 285.

I haven’t been at 185 pounds since I was 18 and I had to lose some weight to get there. It’s been the battle of the bulge for most of my life for three simple reasons:

• I tend to inhale food.
• I tend to eat bigger portions than I need
• I like the feeling of a couch or desk chair against my butt (i.e. I don’t exercise nearly enough)

The goals of eat slower, eat less, and exercise more are simple. So they say. But the simplest things elude the best of us, and I’m far from the best. As the old saying goes, the best diet plan is the one you stick to.

These are the things my diet plan has to do:

• Be something where my diet meals can be adapted into non-diet meals for my wife and son with minor additions, so I don’t have to cook two separate meals. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. My son can’t eat eggs (we don’t have them in the house to prevent any cross contamination) and neither my wife or son like foods that are spicy hot (and a good tongue burn can make up for a lack of fat or carbs sometimes). Cooking two different dishes every shared mealtime is not sustainable.
• Be something where I can adapt on the fly. I’m not the best at keeping to a schedule, especially with a baby in the house, so the rules have to be simple and easy to apply in multiple places.
• Be a lifestyle change over the long haul rather than a short-term crazy way of eating that is unsustainable and will cause me to gain the weight right back.

For this reason. I chose the South Beach diet. I’m modifying it a bit. For example, in the recommended meal plan for “Phase I” of the diet, it has you eating eggs every single morning. No can do.

Basically, South Beach is Atkins with a more balanced approach to fats and carbs.

On Atkins, people have eaten stuff like hot dogs with cream cheese and bacon-wrapped pork chops. South Beach tries to cut down on or cut out saturated fat and trans fats, trying to get you to eat the “good fats” like fish oils, canola and olive oils, and other monounsaturated fats. Even then, bacon is not banned, but it is suggested that you eat bacon in moderation or try leaner cured/smoked meats like Canadian bacon.

TIP FROM GREG: If someone claims to be a foodie, ask them their opinion of Canadian bacon. If they can give it without laughing first, they’re an impostor and you need to run.

The more important thing about South Beach is that it defines carbs in two categories: good and bad. Good carbs are those intertwined with fiber and maybe locked up in more complex molecular structures so they release into your blood stream slowly and don’t jack up your body’s sugar response mechanisms. Bad carbs are the ones that enter your blood stream like a crowd of shoppers at a Wal Mart sale on the day after Thanksgiving.

Unlike Atkins where it feels like you’ve said goodbye to sandwiches for the rest of your life, with South Beach, sandwiches come back to the party much sooner than you might expect, and they’re not wearing that sawdust that passes for “low carb bread”. They’re just wearing whole grains through and through (some “whole grain” products wear them as a mask to hide lots of refined flour and/or high fructose corn syrup under the hood, so check those ingredients).

So, since I have 100 pounds to lose, I’m doing something that’s mostly South Beach, but we’re a little more tolerant of “bad fats”, at least in the beginning. That means no bacon-wrapped hotdogs with cream cheese on top, but we might be seeing those items appearing individually.

Add in some exercise and having to keep this blog to keep myself honest, I’m hoping to drop that 100 within a year or less.

Wish me luck… and stay tuned.