The Banana Flip Diet

But first, my numbers for today:

• Fasting blood glucose:  108 mg/dl.  Right where it ought to be.  
• Weight:  189.  Stuck and I still have Christmas and New Years to get past.  Still I only gained a pound or two, so it's not all bad.
• Exercise.  45 minutes on the bike.  Back in the saddle again.  After a nine day hiatus over Thanksgiving, I was really feeling it at the 30 minute mark.  Still, I felt great when it was over.  
• Mood:  7.5. Have to break through the rut, drop off the plateau.  

Menu:

• Breakfast:  One banana, one tangerine, oatmeal with craisins.
• Lunch:  Whole wheat pasta with some of Cotten's barbecue sauce and bit of grated cheese.  I called it Pasta di Cotten.  Plus one apple. 
• Stuff and stuff night.  A bit of this, a bit of that.  It did include a lot of leftover roasted vegetables from last night. 
• Snacks:  A handful of Baked Cheetos and a bit of turkey jerky.  

Losing weight is really a matter of simple physics.  The energy used, calories, has to be greater than the energy ingested.  Do that with a sufficient deficit and there is weight loss.  I have hit a plateau, which means I am no longer using more calories than I am taking in.  Not sure what I am doing wrong, but I am not doing something right.  Sort of.  I am now consistently below 120 mg/dl now and most often below 110 mg/dl.  The BG is getting consistently better, yet my weight is staying pretty much in a narrow range.  So I guess I am do something right, just not enough of it.

Which brings me to the Twinkie Diet.   Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, confirmed that if the calories used is greater than the calories consumed, you, I, anyone, will lose weight.  He put himself on a junk food diet, was careful to limit his calories, about 1,800 per day. Every three hours he ate a package of Twinkies.  To add variety, had would substitute other Hostess or Little Debbie's cakes, Doritos, sugary cereals ( Captain Crunch? I love Captain Crunch), Oreos, canned green beans and a few celery stalks.  He also drank a protein shake and took a multivitamin.   By all standards, this was an unhealthy diet.

Yet the results strong suggest quantity to be more important that quality.  His weight dropped, his good cholesterol went up, his bad cholesterol went down, his triglycerides went down and his body mass index went from overweight to normal.   By normal measurements he is in good health, even if much of the food he ate is not consider food for good health. 

Numbers don't lie, right?  Any exam would consider him to be healthy. Maybe I need to change my approach.  Maybe it's time to give up the roasted vegetables for something...better?  different?  tasty?

I have never been a fan of Twinkies. My preferred snack cake of choice was the Banana Flip.  Sadly they are not made anymore.   Here is the only picture I could find of them.  As a kid I loved these things.  Spongy, sweet yellow cake wrapped around a creamy sweet gooey something and it all tasted like bananas, or the laboratory version of bananas.  They were also seemed a bit bigger than competing cake products for the same price, so it was hitting all of my big buttons for a guilty pleasures:  taste, size and value.  

Here is the only picture I could find of them.  My beloved Flip is in the back row.  I can almost taste it. 

Update:  Yes, my beloved Banana Flips are still being made by The Nickles Bakery Company.   Sadly, not available here in Texas, and that may be just as well.  For good measure, here is a recipe for my beloved Banana Flip.  No matter how good, this could never be as good as the original fresh from the cellophane package.