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.

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.

We have a passion in America, and possibly worldwide, to have our beverages deliver something more than mere water. We need flavor. And this is one place where savory just isn’t grabbing a foothold. We’re not seeing ads for Red Bullion, no chicken broth that gives you wings, no caffeinated consomme. If we’re doing more than a hint of mint or some fruit essence, we’re sweetening it.

Most sugared sodas and sports drinks deliver 1-2 grams of carbs per ounce. Energy drinks and juices deliver more. The Newman’s Own grape juice I get at Costco delivers 5 grams of carbs per ounce. Two cups of that a day and you drinking down more sugar than in a candy bar. A half cup of that grape juice and you’ve had all the carbs for a day on the “induction phase” of Atkins.

But are artificial sweeteners much better? There are a lot of agenda promoters on the web going back and forth on the topic. Each side in the debate makes their claims and debunks the other’s. If you read everything and don’t have a degree in biochemistry to sort it all out, it’s easy to believe that either every artificial sweetener you can get your hands on is the greatest invention since opposable thumbs or that the entire sweetener industry is led by maniacal greedy bastards who want nothing more than to kill you and your children.

I’ll trust the Mayo Clinic, which says they’re generally safe, but to use them in moderation. They also make reference to this study that demonstrated artificial sweeteners confusing the satiation and metabolic mechanisms in rats, though some opponents of the study say that it’s a big leap to translate that into humans.

Is it? One of the biggest health issues caused when Snackwell fat-free cookies were introduced was people pigging out on Snackwells because they mistook “fat-free” for “calorie-free”. While the issue in rats may be on a more basic level, some people see “fat-free” or “sugar-free” labels as meaning “eat all you want” and they gorge themselves.

Also some sweeteners, particularly sugar alcohols which are used in “low carb” and “sugar free” products, have known health issues when you consume too much. Basically, too much of sugar substitutes like these will act like a laxative. I learned this the hard way from scarfing down a bag of sugar-free jelly beans. The same goes for sugar free gum sweetened with sugar alcohols like Xylitol. There have been case studies where people who chewed too much sugarless gum got chronic diarrhea.

Yet I digress. Caffeinated, flavored, and sweetened beverages. How much should I have, which sweeteners are safe, etc?

I’ve decided that I’m going to do what I call “half and half and half.” That means I’m going to drink at least 1 liter of plain water a day. Aside from that, I can have four cups of flavored beverages, two of which can be caffeinated diet cola, coffee, or caffeinated tea, two of which can be decaf tea or other form of non-caffeinated sugarless soft drink.

But when it comes to sweeteners…

• Despite our benificent government letting them market Splenda as “zero calorie”, each packet of Splenda contains 3.3 calories from the dextrose and maltodextrin used to bulk it up and mask its aftertaste, meaning that each packet of Splenda is close to one carb gram. Since I like to sweeten my tea with 2-3 packets of Splenda, that could be half my daily dose of carbs right there if I used it 4 times a day. I won’t go nuts if there’s sucralose in my diet soda, but I’ve got to be careful with Splenda.
• Erythritol is getting a lot of good press, but it’s less sweet than table sugar and I find I use 3-4 teaspoons of table sugar to sweeten my tea, sometimes more. So even though it’s .2 kilocals per gram, I might use 20-25 grams in a single drink. Instead of straight erythritol, I’m considering trying Truvia, which mixes stevia extract and erythritol. According to the Truvia web site, I should be able to pick up Truvia at my local Safeway.
• Aspartame or Nutrasweet has been around forever and lots of natural foods people hate it. Even Atkins wasn’t wild about it and tried to get his patients to cut it out in favor of saccharin (yup, it’s not as bad for you as they used to think it was) or limited quantities of Splenda. I’m not worried about it in low concentrations within diet colas, but I’m not a huge fan of sweetening beverages with it.
• For the longest time, the FDA prohibited marketing stevia as a sweetener, so it had to be marketed as a dietary supplement. That changed late last year and there are a few stevia-based sweeteners already on supermarket shelves. There’s Truvia, noted above, which is from Cargill, and there’s “Stevia Extract in the Raw” (which looks like “Stevia in the Raw” on the packaging because the word “extract” is small) which is from Cumberland, the producers of Sugar in the Raw. Both products claim to have gotten past the licorice aftertaste that is a complaint among people who don’t like stevia.

I’m liking Stevia on principle, but I have to try it, so I’m going to do a “Stevia Shoot Out” and taste test a couple of the new stevia sweeteners very soon.

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.

Yes, it does require some advance planning and some advance cooking, and yes that means doing more work and the diet’s less easy. But it’s been taking the path of least resistance that got me here. No diet is going to provide lasting results unless I make some changes in my lifestyle. And one of those changes is planning ahead more and cooking ahead more so I don’t fall prey to convenience foods… like Al’s breakfast burritos in the Building 50 cafeteria at Microsoft. Al, much love to ya, brother, but when I’ve been on contract in Building 50, those burritos have been deadly to my waistline.

So, I’m planning out the first week. I need to plan 6 dinners, 7 breakfasts, and 7 lunches. The 7th dinner is the Tuesday night ritual I started with my oldest boy, which is to go to “the peanut restaurant,” a place where they give you a bucket of peanuts in the shell when you’re seated and you can throw the shells on the floor. Luckily it’s a very meat oriented joint.

Since Safeway’s got London Broil on special and it’s low fat enough for South Beach, we’ll do a curry. This is the one “I don’t have to worry about sharing this” recipe that I can do as hot as I like.

In fact, soups and stews are easy ways to fill up, so I’m also going to do a tomatillo chili. That will be mild. That I can serve straight, letting the wife and boy add crackers or bread while I eat it straight or use lettuce leaves and bell pepper sections to scoop it. Later in the week I can serve chili dogs and just go bunless while the wife and boy don’t.

If you look at a lot of the proposed diet plans, there’s not a lot of repetition, but it also means there’s not a lot of quick reheating and there’s a lot more prep time. I plan to get two dinners and a lunch out of my chili, a couple of breakfasts and a lunch out of my curry (yes, I like curry for breakfast). I also plan to get some lunches out of dinner leftovers.

One dinner is going to be tuna salad sandwiches for the wife and boy. I’ll eat the tuna salad piled into some celery ribs. I’ll also have that as a lunch.

Another dinner will be chicken breast, cut in bite size cubes and browned, then simmered in a sour cream enchilada sauce made with sour cream, some chicken broth, garlic, spices, onion, and frozen chopped spinach. The wife and boy will get some tortilla chips for scooping while I’ll use lettuce and/or peppers.

The last two dinners will be a Pesto chicken (still need to decide on the side veggie) and a chicken stir fry (over rice for the family, but straight up for me).

I like to let the ingredients speak to me as I walk through the store, but I also need to have an idea of what I’m going to eat so I make sure I have the things I need on hand. One of the easiest ways to rationalize myself off a diet is to have nothing I can eat in the house, then I don’t want to go out, then I fall prey to a convenience item. Planning my menu in advance means I’ll always have the food or fixin’s I need to ensure I can stick to it.

As I move from the early, super-low-carb phase into the more rational phase, I can play things a bit more fast and loose. But for the first few weeks, menu planning is going to really help me stick with it.

Anyway, no recipes yet, but I’ll record the recipes I create, and if one sings, I’ll publish it.

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.