In which I tell you all about my avoidance of refined carbohydrates.

As you may remember, I went on a traditional low-calorie, low-fat, semi-starvation diet on January 5th. I did this because I was so fat I could barely cut my own toenails and I felt uncomfortable in my own body. I was twenty pounds shy of obesity, and at the rate I was gaining I’d have been clinically obese in a year or two.

I lost both weight – mostly water, at first – and inches for about five weeks. The experience, after the third or fourth week, was nothing short of miserable (save the pride I felt in my accomplishment): near the end of the diet I was obsessed with food and calories, and I literally spent most of my time planning my next meal.

By the end of the diet, my body was buying and consuming entire bags of potato chips without my consent. I was hungry all the time.

Then I read Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, more or less by accident (someone must have recommended it to me, because I found the sample on my Kindle). It was astonishing, this book. Game-changing. Mind-blowing. It challenged every single thing I knew about diet and weight loss, and it did it with actual science. I decided that although a lot of the author’s conclusions were, by his own admission, anecdotal or theoretical at best, and needed more studies, I could do some experiments in my own lab: my body.

We all know that overweight is the gateway to a host of diseases, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and high blood pressure. And nobody wants to be fat.

So I quit eating the following foods:

• white flour
• white sugar
• white rice
• potatoes
• high fructose corn sweetner

This meant no bread, no soda pop, no sweetened juices. No candy, cakes, pies, or cookies. No hash browns or potato chips. No silly breakfast cereals. No sushi maki. No pasta.

But I did allow my fat intake to go back to where it had been pre-diet, and ate anything I wanted that didn’t contain any of the five things listed. Including entire wedges of brie, and olive oil, and daily whole milk lattes.

The result was no hunger, no food obsession, no starvation. No calorie-counting, no exercise.

And I started to drop inches like you wouldn’t believe.

After about 6 weeks, I could feel my spine, collar bones, and hip bones again for the first time since my very early 30’s. Slabs of fat I’d been packing on for most of my life were sloooooooowly melting away (and still are).

I noticed other side effects as well. The dry, scaly, flaky skin on my heels, knees, and elbows is gone. My anxiety is gone (save one brief attack that I think was related more to the horrific hangover I was experiencing than anything else). My generalized physical fatigue is gone. My gum disease symptoms are practically gone and I only need to see the dentist half as often. My joints make fewer noises and ache less. I don’t mind doing physical activity when I need to. I feel like me again; what I’d attributed to normal aging was mostly diet. I still have wrinkles on my face and sagginess where a 42-year-old woman will, but it turns out that exhaustion and disinterest and weight gain aren’t normal aging but perhaps instead the result of a lifetime of metabolic weirdness caused by blood sugar spikes.

The five foods listed above cause a complex metabolic condition in which blood sugar spikes alarmingly, and then insulin, which regulates fat, spikes, leading eventually to insulin resistance and weight gain and possibly adult-onset diabetes or other related conditions. Apparently, intake of dietary fat has never been scientifically implicated in any health or weight conditions despite what you’ve been told, and neither has calorie restriction alone ever proven to cause satisfactory, permanent weight regulation.

And exercise does not make you lose weight. The more work you do, the more you eat.

I am again capable of sprinting around the corner to the grocery store; a year ago I couldn’t have managed it. I mean, my normal disposition wouldn’t choose to – I’ve never been sporty – but I could do it if I wanted and I have.

I no longer get insanely hungry. If I’m hungry, okay, I’m hungry, but it’s not a crisis like it used to be. If I’m busy or traveling I can skip meals without feeling that bone-deep, desperate need to put something in my mouth.

I no longer feel like I have some sort of psychological failure (sloth and gluttony) causing me to be fat and lazy. I can sprint up and down stairs. I wake up less groggy. Walking and bike riding are enjoyable methods of transportation rather than slow, exhausting slogs to get from point A to point B.

I’ve lost five inches off my middle and three inches off my upper arms. My fingers aren’t fat. I can see the bones in the tops of my feet again. I can feel my kneecaps because they’re no longer covered in fat. My monthly water gain is 2 or 3 pounds instead of the 8 or 11 it had been. When I lie down on the floor, there’s light under my knees, the small of my back, and my neck again.

Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the results and intend to keep avoiding empty, processed, nutrient-free, blood sugar-spiking calories. I now believe that what’s making this nation fat isn’t the cheese or the burger, but the bun and the fries and the Coke. I now believe that calorie- and fat-restriction don’t cause weight loss. I now believe that overweight is not a failure of discipline but a failure of the food supply. Refined carbohydrates in the forms of white flour, white sugar, and corn sweetener are, I am convinced, the cause of our obesity epidemic and all the attendant diseases of Westernization.

I’d encourage everyone to self-educate (you don’t have to read Taubes’ book, there are tons of other sources for the same information) and try a similar experiment on their own bodies. I mean, it’s not like there’s any good reason to eat white flour and white sugar, anyway. And while there’s no reason to wish to live forever, there’s also no reason for the second half of one’s life to be full of discomfort and illness when much of it appears to be avoidable through a gentle and thoughtful moderation of the modern diet.

Before and after losing roughly 30 pounds (2.14 stone). And I’m still losing.