The Holy Grail of Weight Loss II

Interview continued from yesterday's post...

ME:  Beautiful... And I'm glad that whatever you managed to squeeze out of my materials worked out for you. As you know, not everyone loses weight when they go all 180D. In fact, many gain weight - at least for the first few months as their metabolism comes up towards normal.

What did you do that you suspect is different from others who haven't had such results? If you could give them advice, or share how you did things specifically, what would you say?

In other words what I'm asking is, what makes you so damn special!!??

SASHA:  180DegreeHealth often hurts my head (in a good way of course!) but I understood enough that I knew I was finding answers to my questions. There are reasons for the massive allure and subsequent failure inherent in the diet culture. I needed to know why and how I was going to do things differently. I think if people really want to succeed at fixing their metabolism using this method, above all they need to be persistent and consistent. Fixing your metabolism and eliminating cravings happens, but it takes time. It took me about three months to eliminate cravings and about two more months before my metabolism kicked in and I started losing the bulk of the weight. Many people don't have the patience for this, which is why fad diets are so popular. A lack of patience and a lack of food and body knowledge is how people end up as lifelong dieters who never reach a goal.

But I'm not special or even particularly intelligent or well-disciplined. I believe anyone can do this. Personally, I think it's most beneficial to restrict yourself to whole, traditional foods. Absolutely no fast food and no processed foods. I even go so far as to not eat breakfast cereals, I don't care how natural they claim to be, they're still processed and in a cardboard box and most taste like the box. One big mistake I see people make is that they fail to see the problem with eating at corporate/chain restaurants. You can't go to an Olive Garden and eat healthy. How do these restaurants maintain consistency from restaurant to restaurant? Much of their food is heat n’ serve. Obviously these types of restaurants are one of my pet peeves. I'm married to a professional chef who's worked in every type of restaurant imaginable and we avoid these restaurants for the plague they are.

Eat fat. When I tell my friends that I just ate a gorgeous piece of fatty grassfed ribeye or pork belly then lost a few pounds the same week, they think it's a joke. It's no joke. I'm proof of that. My body tells me when I need to eat more or eat fat and I listen. People don't listen to their bodies anymore. Train yourself to listen to your body and it will tell you everything you need to know.

Retrain your palate. On a regular basis I complain about how people have trashed their palates with processed foods. Source the grassfed beef, butter, pastured chickens and eggs. Cook with lots of ghee and coconut oil, buy vegetables in season, learn how to cook. After you learn to eat at home you'll find you're going to make better choices when you eat out. I've lost count of the number of people who are trying to lose weight that can't maintain any kind of consistency in how they eat. They're either eating some nasty chicken breast with lettuce and lite dressing at home or gorging out on really bad food at Applebee's or Chili's. The quality of your product at home should be consistent with the quality of product when you eat out.

Be physically active but don't exercise. I know that makes no sense but I hate exercise. I've only been to a gym once several months ago when my husband and I got a free one-month trial. It was dull, boring, my muscles were uncomfortably sore all the time and I stopped losing weight. We never went back. My advice to people is to find a few fun activities you like to do and enjoy. Bicycle, hike, run, kayak, do yoga, whatever you enjoy. Avoid massive amounts of useless cardio, overtraining with weights and silly fads (Zumba, yuck). I do a lot of bicycling, hiking and yoga but not to the point that it becomes loathsome.

(This is right in line with this conversation on exercise from early this year....)


Once your body finds its rhythm and your metabolism mends, the body's weight finds its own level, like water. I'm amazed at how almost effortless the weight loss has become. I say "almost" because sometimes I get thrown off balance, but the correction is always pretty simple. Every individual is different but what works for me has had an equal and amazing affect on my husband who has lost 88 pounds along with my 127 pounds. He ended up coming along for the ride, so to speak, when I started my new way of eating and understanding food and my body and he has reaped the benefits too.

ME:  Great answer - and I knew you were going to say something about retraining your palate and being really committed to eating unprocessed foods. My research has led me increasingly in that direction. I've found that there is a huge difference between a mostly unprocessed food diet and a 100% unprocessed food diet. And it has everything to do with retraining the palate.

You mention not doing exercise but being physically active. How much of a role did exercise play in you and your husband's weight loss? Were you really making a point to move your body more? If you had to estimate, what percentage of the weight loss do you think was attributable to getting more activity, and how much was the diet? Or do you really think it requires both to realistically succeed?

SASHA:  I like this question best because I think the distinction I made is important and deserves some clarification. Just like appetite, a morbidly obese person loses the ability to gage what is a normal activity level so we wind up terribly underactive while still thinking of ourselves as fairly active. How many times have you been told by a morbidly obese person, "Well, I'm pretty active for a big guy/lady, but I don't seem to lose the weight". It isn't because this is true, but because our perception of what normal activity is, is warped. I know my judgment of what it's like to be hugely overweight seems insulting, but it really is like being myopic in a fishbowl. You lose sight of so much.

At my heaviest when I started losing weight, I knew I needed to move more, but because I feel about the same toward the exercise/fitness business as I do about the diet/weight loss business, I wanted to do things opposite of what the mainstream would tell me to do. My plan, pick activities that I imagine myself doing at any weight and for reasons other than weight loss. Make sure it's something I enjoy and something that I can see myself doing for many years to come. This, for me, started with walking and evolved into hiking. I live in the Pacific Northwest so this was a natural evolution. Last winter I started running, then trail running and eventually I bought my bicycle. Every activity I've picked has evolved in some way, either in intensity or mileage, and this is important, because as your body fixes and repairs itself due to the obesity, your body will naturally want to move more.

So, my way of eating and losing weight and my physical activity are not mutually exclusive of one another. When you eat to appetite and eat what your body craves, your physical activity will naturally feel inclined to match that by either doing something more intense, less intense or by wanting more sleep. It's an almost 50/50% relationship between the two and I can't imagine one without the other. It is important to understand what kind of energy your body is "into". I'm more of a slow steady burn with more endurance while my husband has become inclined toward shorter, high energy bursts, which is probably why he enjoys mountain biking and running. Whatever it is, you're going to want to be active.

I know some people would argue that you can lose the weight without any of this, but how long will that last? I've seen enough people go the wrong route in both directions so it's easy to know what to avoid. I see the people who do nothing or very little, lose a few pounds or more, but beyond that not much changes for them physically. I have also seen people engage in frantic and large amounts of cardio, losing large amounts of weight quickly after which they burn out, gain some back and struggle, never to find that momentum again. I guess the bottom line is sustainability. What are you going to eat or do that will become a natural part of your life from here on out? I approach both my food and my physical activity with this in mind.

Continue to PART III...

The Holy Grail of Weight Loss

“I must agree that eating like a fiend cuts out all cravings -and- I've lost 100 pounds over the last year eating like a fiend. The weight is coming off naturally and I'm never deprived and I don't waste hours at a gym. People think I'm lying to them when I tell them how I lost the weight. :)”

-Sasha

This week 100% organic Sasha is on the menu. Pure, unadulterated, unprocessed Sasha.

Since the beginning I’ve known that dieting in the traditional sense is a counterproductive measure. Even if you do manage to starve yourself thin, your body and mind do not work properly. Libido gets wrecked. Hair falls out. Neurosis sets in. All the parallels to starvation and eating disorders are laced in there, even if you are still overweight after your weight loss.

So I knew there had to be another way. I knew that it had to possible to lose body fat without going into starvation. And I knew that, theoretically, neither fat nor carbohydrates nor protein needed to be restricted. After all, no macronutrient is inherently fattening. Healthy bodies of all species maintain weight equilibrium on any number of macronutrient blends.

And Sasha Garcia Degn and her husband have, and are, achieving that. The pair has lost more than 215 pounds combined without hunger, without counting or cutting calories, without intentionally cutting carbs or fats or going on some extreme diet, and without doing any unwanted exercise. This is the Holy Grail of weight loss.

Of course, not all that stumble across my information have magically had body fat pour off of them. Many have, but many have gained weight before the fat gain stopped, and then, despite feeling better in numerous ways indicative of a restored metabolism, adopted a small child that never made it to the delivery room (okay, that was kind of a weird metaphor – I’m talking about that swollen belly pregnant look thing – kinda sexy if you actually are pregnant. Otherwise not so much).

Anyway, I thought it was worth taking a close look at what Sasha did specifically, and examine what diet, mindset, attitude, exercise, etc. that she felt was the key to her success. I think we all have quite a bit to learn from her. Here is the first part of the interview – to be continued throughout the week…

Me: Sasha, many people have tried to follow the basic 180DegreeHealth approach to eating - that is, eating to appetite of nutritious foods, not exercising too much, and not restricting calories, carbohydrates, protein, fat - or any food group. Just eating basically, and letting the body "do all the accounting" as author Jon Gabriel says. To date, you have had the most successful weight loss, well over 100 pounds, with that approach since RRARF debuted a year and half ago. We'll get to why that might be, and what you did differently than others in a minute - but first, can you tell us how you got up to 375 pounds, and where you were when you first came across 180DegreeHealth?

SASHA:  I think I can speak for many people when I say that I don't know exactly how my weight got up to its highest. Generally, a person with that much weight will know in retrospect that they were consuming high numbers of calories, probably spending a lot of time on the couch and let's throw some heavy stress in for good measure but ultimately we don't know anything specific. One day we see a number on a scale astonished and think, "how did that happen?" That seems odd, but the part about not exactly knowing really is how it happens. For myself, I do know that my weight started going up just before I got married, eleven years ago. A lot of processed and fast food and little physical activity and later, taking care of my ill, elderly mother all by myself. After a few years of caretaking of my mother, a lot of stress and overeating, my mother passed away and the weight stayed. By that point I was well into the 300s and my metabolism was so completely bonkers that being that overweight felt almost natural.

Two years after my mother passed away, my husband and I moved from Los Angeles to Washington state where I spent four more years, not only suffering from my morbid obesity but from a severe vitamin D deficiency as well. After self-correcting the vitamin D deficiency, I felt much improved and also dropped about 20 pounds without any effort. Taking a clue from my vitamin D experience and tired of not being able to climb a flight of stairs or walk more than a quarter of a mile, I started to think that the body, when given the right things, might be able to correct itself. I knew the diet culture was a sham so this time was going to be different. I was going to fix my body so my body could fix itself.

First, I needed to know what a semi-normal daily calorie intake would be for me. I know that seems anathema to "eating to appetite," but a morbidly obese person, trust me, has no clue as to what anything close to normal is especially where their own appetite is concerned. There had to be some guideline for me. I still use that guideline, but now I use it to make sure I'm eating enough, which most people don't do while they're preoccupied with eating too much. I do not track fat, salt, or protein. My body tells me what it needs. I also started to gather as much knowledge as I could online. Weight Watchers, gastric surgery, Medifast, all of these were already out of the question, even Eating Clean was off limits because I knew the idea of eating only lean meats was not a sustainable way of eating long term. I was looking for something else even though I had no idea what that was. Eventually I stumbled onto the whole foods way of eating, including my personal choice, Weston A. Price Foundation and then, the site that was truly the catalyst of physical change for me - 180DegreeHealth. By this point I'd lost close to 45 pounds and was still well over 300 pounds.

CONTINUE to PART II...