The Joys of McDougallism

I've been a vegan for ten years, and have always considered myself to be in good health. This year, however, I noticed in some photographs that I had a protruding stomach - not a beer belly, but the beginnings of one. I bought some scales and to my shock and horror, discovered that I weighed 82 kilos. I'd always assumed that I weighed 75-77 kilos.

I became determined to lose weight. I'd been aware for some time that Australia did have a growing weight problem and that Australians and Americans seemed to be more obese, or at least more pudgy, than they were decades ago - in the 1970s and 1980s. Watch any film or TV show from that period and you'll see how skinny the actors are. Being skinny came naturally to male actors in particular back then - look at how skinny Harrison Ford was in the first three Star Wars movies, for instance - but now male actors and celebrities, it seems, have to fight to stay in shape. I looked at some of the extreme diets taken by celebrities Matthew McConaughey, Jake Gyllenhaal, Patrick Bateman and Al Sharpton. If you want to follow any of these, you need get used to eating very little. Gyllenhaal subsisted on a diet of kale and chewing gum while filming Nightcrawler (2014). I tried a variant on this - I ate only two slices of toast for dinner every night, for example - and lost a few kilos. But as could be expected, this sort of self-denial proved to be unsatisfactory and unsustainable. So Hollywood methods didn't really work for me.

The work of Dr John McDougall turned out to be my salvation. I had read one of McDougall's books - The McDougall Program: Twelve Days to Dynamic Health (1990) - the year before and had attempted to put its recommendations into practice in a desultory way. I gave up coffee, and bought all the food in his 12-day diet program with the intention of eating it.

But I didn't have the time to prepare three different meals a day for 12 days - really, I needed a chef to do it for me - and I couldn't stay from coffee for long. I did introduce one permanent change to my diet, however: I stopped using vegetable oil and oily foods such as peanut butter and potato chips.

To find the easiest to read summary of McDougall's ideas, download this PDF of 'Doctor McDougall's Color Picture Book': "Food Poisoning" - How to Cure It by Eating Beans, Corn, Pasta, Potatoes, Rice, etc. here. I characterise McDougallism as the reverse of the high-carb, high protein Atkins-type diets. McDougall advocates a high fibre, high carbohydrate, low fat and low protein vegan diet. He likes 'starches' - bread, rice, corn, potatoes, squash, sweet potatoes, legumes and the rest - and doesn't like vegetable oil, meat and cheese (tofu) substitutes, dried fruits, nuts, avocados, caffeine, alcohol, fruit juice, processed food (especially sugary processed food) and vitamin supplements.

As stated before, I ditched vegetable oil, but really didn't follow McDougallism. Then I chanced across these chance comments from supply-side economist and blogger (and occasional raw food vegan) Nathan Lewis. When surveying the popular diets of today - including the Paleo diet, the raw food vegan diet and the McDougall diet - Lewis concluded that they worked for the following reason:

These strategies do work, and they work for much the same reason as the raw vegan approach works. It's not because "meat makes you healthy," and bananas and mangoes don't, or vice versa. It's what you're not eating.

If you take a "lotsa meat and nonsweet vegetables" approach, here's what you're not eating:

1) All processed foods, including all junk foods, soda, etc.
2) Foods made from the "white food" white flour, dairy, white sugar complex
3) All the GMO foods, including things made from corn and soy
4) Anything with nasty additives like MSG or artificial sweeteners
5) Possibly little or no dairy, depending on your diet strategy ("paleo")
6) Maybe less booze and coffee.
7) Probably a lot less salt, most of which is in processed foods.

I found this quote intriguing:

"Body fat" (actually a lot of it is water stored in the fat tissues) is affected by all kinds of things, including the amount of salt, alcohol, caffeine and other toxins in the diet. The body needs water to purge these toxins, so if you consume this regularly, the body naturally stores more water so that it has enough on hand. Douglas Graham says that he finds that long-term raw vegans generally have bodyfat well below these levels, even as people get older.

I wasn't absolutely convinced of the 'science' behind this, but I resolved to abstain from caffeine altogether for a few weeks and see what happened. I found this difficult: I needed to go from 1-5 cups of coffee and tea a day (plus fizzy drinks such as Diet Coke or diet V or Mother) to zero, and I experienced withdrawal symptoms straight away - headaches, pains in my legs, and flat moods. Caffeine seems to be the most addictive substance known to man. But I coped with the withdrawal symptoms by taking some paracetamol pills, and they disappeared after a week or two. I was rewarded with better sleep and an improvement in my temper - I became less irritable.

With some sadness, I also gave up beer, and stuck to drinking wine and spirits - also, fizzy drinks and processed foods such as tinned fruits (which come preserved in fruit juice). I generally stay away from pasta and spaghetti, even the high fibre kinds, because I seem to add on weight whenever I eat them.

My next step was to buy an online copy of McDougall's Starch Solution (2013), a much better book than the McDougall Program, and much more concise. Instead of trying to make all the recipes in his crash diet, I concentrated on making two or three of the meals over and over. The recipes seemed better than the ones in McDougall Program. I recommend them over 'normal' junk food - pizzas and the like - because one can't binge on them and overeat, as they're so filling. It's hard to imagine, for instance, anyone wolfing down bowl after bowl of his sweet potato Tunisian stew and rice.

The results speak for themselves. I'm now down to 71 kilos most days, and occasionally drop to 70 (in my adult life, the lowest I've weighed in 68-69 kilos). I have a flat stomach - my 'abs' are showing - and feel pretty good about myself. I seem to carry myself in a different way - e.g., I walk in a different way - and generally find that I'm much more comfortable in my body than I was before. It appears that women notice me before. I'm sure that most men will find that taking up the McDougall diet will improve marriages and relationships... McDougall, in Starch Solution, makes some interesting observations on the relation between physical health and attractiveness to the opposite sex.

The experience has made me reflect on the value of one's body and health. I see now that it's no use having lots of money, and living in a prosperous country, if you abuse your body and run it into the ground. You only get one body in life, and, after wrecking it, you can't trade it in for a new one. That's unlike a storyline - set in a dystopian future - in Jack Kirby's OMAC series, which explored the possibility of body trading: evil rich old people paid to have their minds transferred into the bodies of beautiful young people who had been kidnapped.

The tragedy of many people's lives in Australia and America is that their health has deteriorated significantly, not by the time they've reached 60 or 70, but by 30 or 40. This doesn't come about because of malnutrition and starvation but because of too much of the wrong food. McDougall's ideas can help us beat this scourge. Mark Hootsen signing off.