Originally posted 12/12/2010

When I was home for Thanksgiving a couple of weeks ago, I got to spend time not only with my family, but also with some old friends I hadn’t seen for a long time.  This week’s mail brought some interesting questions from one of those old friends, who gave me permission to share them with you.

Dan wrote that he does not normally eat breakfast.  He’s not that hungry early in the morning.  He does, however, drink copious amounts of coffee.  He described himself as “very overweight,” and said that he’s considering going on a “very low carb diet” to drop the weight.  I asked exactly how much coffee he’s talking about, and he said close to 2 pots of coffee a day (7-8 mugs).  He adds only half-and-half.  No sweeteners.

Here’s what I say about skipping breakfast: Our bodies need a certain amount of energy to get through the day.  If we have not eaten that amount of energy (calories) by the time we get up from the dinner table, we will eat the rest AFTER dinner.  By and large, calories eaten after dinner are snacks, so they are not as nutritious as meals.  Also, the later you eat them, the less likely it is that they will be completely digested by the time you go to bed.  And then you aren’t hungry when you wake up.  So you skip breakfast.  Vicious cycle.

The way to put an end to this is to eat protein in the morning.  It sends a message to your body to turn on your daytime metabolism.  It doesn’t have to be King Henry VIII’s breakfast.  Just a cheese stick.  A hard-boiled egg, a leftover hamburger.  No time?  Eat a handful of nuts in the car on the way to work.

Now the coffee.  Dan said each 12-cup pot of coffee makes 4 mugs of coffee, and that he doesn’t quite finish the second pot.  So figure each mug is around 2 1/2 cups.  I have a couple of mugs that big around here.  American-sized.  One tablespoon of cream?  Yeh, right!   Let’s assume Dan puts 4 tablespoons of half-and-half in each mug of coffee.  If each tablespoon contains 2 1/2 grams of fat and 25 calories, Dan is drinking 700 calories of half-and-half every day.  Even though the fat is more nutritious than you might think, there’s no two ways about it: that’s a lot of food.  I’m guessing he eats at least a couple of meals, plus snacks, in addition.

One thing he could do would be to put cream in just the first cup or two of the morning, and drink it black for the rest of the day.  And remember to have a high-protein breakfast.   Or he could admit that he’s drinking one-and-a-half to two meals worth of calories a day, and factor that into what he chooses for lunch.  Celery?

Now to answer the very-low-carb diet question.  Do I recommend it?  No, I don’t.  At least not yet.  I don’t believe in sudden change.  I say he should take a careful look at the rest of his diet, and figure out the single largest source of processed carbohydrate – be it white flour, chips, high fructose corn syrup, or sugar.

His pants will get loose pretty fast once he identifies and decreases the amount of processed carbohydrate in his diet.  He doesn’t need to do it all at once.  He can pick one problem at a time, and see what happens.  Two or three months of eating peppers and cucumbers with lunch, instead of chips, would be a great start.  If he becomes a breakfast eater, a nutritious, high-protein breakfast instead of Frosty Crunchos would be a very good idea.  The best answer depends on the the biggest problem.  Soda/pop every afternoon?  Donuts?  The drive-thru for a sausage-on-the-go-go every morning?  Everybody has different issues.  At least we know Dan’s not ordering the extra-large sweet latte made with non-dairy whitener.

Next week (posted 12/19/2010) , we’ll be talking about another set of questions from Emily, who’s working on following Weight Watchers and my “Four Recommendations” at the same time.