How to lose a few pounds/inches without any radical diet

[MsPony]

I agree. Vegetarian fed means the feed is vegetarian and does not contain, say, ground up cow brains. Good to know.

Pretty sure my hens would love those. I should actually ask around, could be a yummy treat for the chooks, you know??

I actually got offended when my egg prices brought the same as "free range vegetarian fed"...as mine are completely free and omnivorous...

 

[Wifezilla]

I was curious about the suggestion of eating more fiber however. In my experience with that method, I have ended up horribly bloated, so in actuality, I was needing larger size pants just to fit my swollen belly into. Not at all what I was looking for. On top of which, that painful feeling of gas cramps and the resultant rumble from down under both leaving me wondering what was so bad about the size I am already.

How do you folks who use higher fiber balance those unwanted symptoms?

A high fiber diet is not a healthy diet for humans. Cows and goats, who have special stomachs to help them digest fibrous materials? Yes. People? Not so much. Your intestinal pain is telling you that loud and clear.

"Over the last quarter-century, Burkitts fiber hypothesis has become yet another example of Francis Bacons dictum of wishful sciencethere has been a steady accumulation of evidence refuting the notion that a fiber-deficient diet causes colon cancer, polyps, or diverticulitis, let alone any other disease of civilization. The pattern is precisely what would be expected of a hypothesis that simply isnt true: the larger and more rigorous the trials set up to test it, the more consistently negative the evidence. Between 1994 and 2000, two observational studiesof forty-seven thousand male health professionals and the eighty-nine thousand women of the Nurses Health Study, both run out of the Harvard School of Public Healthand a half-dozen randomized control trials concluded that fiber consumption is unrelated to the risk of colon cancer, as is, apparently, the consumption of fruits and vegetables. The results of the forty-nine-thousand-women Dietary Modification Trial of the Womens Health Initiative, published in 2006, confirmed that increasing the fiber in the diet (by eating more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables) had no beneficial effect on colon cancer, nor did it prevent heart disease or breast cancer or induce weight loss.

Burkitts hypothesis got accepted pretty well worldwide, quite quickly, but it has gradually been disproved, said Richard Doll, who had endorsed the hypothesis enthusiastically in the mid-1970s. It still holds up in relation to constipation, but as far as a major factor in the common diseases of the developed world, no, fiber is not the answer. Thats pretty clear.

As we have seen with other hypotheses, the belief that dietary fiber is an intrinsic part of any healthy diet has been kept alive by factors that have little to do with science: in particular, by Geoffrey Roses philosophy of preventive medicinethat if a medical hypothesis has a chance of being true and thus saving lives, it should be treated as if it isand by the need to give the public some positive advice about how they might prevent or reduce the risk of cancer. This was immediately evident in a NewEngland Journal of Medicine editorial that accompanied back-to-back April 2000 reports on two major trialsone on fourteen hundred subjects of the Phoenix [Arizona] Colon Cancer Prevention Physicians Network, and one $30 million trial from the National Cancer Instituteboth of which confirmed that fiber had no effect on colon cancer. The editorial was written by Tim Byers, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Colorado, who said that the two trials had been short-term and focused only on the early stages of cancer. For this reason, they should not be interpreted as evidence that a high-fiber cereal supplement or a low-fat high-fiber diet is not effective in protecting against the later stages of development of colorectal cancer. Byers was wrong, in that the results certainly were evidence that a high-fiber diet would not protect against the later stages of colorectal cancer; they simply werent sufficient evidence for us to accept the conclusion wholeheartedly as true.

Burkitts hypothesis lived on, and it would continue to live, as the fat/ breast-cancer hypothesis continued to live on, in part because the original data that led to it remained unexplained: Observational studies around the world, wrote Byers, continue to find that the risk of colorectal cancer is lower among populations with high intakes of fruits and vegetables and that the risk changes on adoption of a different diet, but we still do not understand why. It would always be possible to suggest, as Byers had, that the trials could have been done differentlyfor longer or shorter duration, on younger subjects or older subjects, with more, less, or maybe a different kind of dietary fiberand that the results would have been more promising. The American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute continued to suggest that high-fiber diets, high in fruits and vegetables, might reduce the risk of colon cancer, on the basis that some evidence existed to support the hypothesis and so a prudent diet would still include these ingredients.

The media would also contribute to keeping the fiber hypothesis alive, having first played a significant role in transforming Burkitts hypothesis into dogma without benefit of any meaningful long-term clinical trials. Scientists have known for years that a diet rich in vegetables, fruits and fiber, and low in fat, can greatly reduceor eliminatethe chances of developing colon cancer, as a 1998 Washington Post article put itfour years after the Harvard analysis of forty-seven thousand male health professionals suggested it was not true."
-Gary Taubes

 

[abifae]

My mom purposely took extra fiber and laxatives to keep her weight down! It worked great.

By the way, she had her colon removed due to cancerous cells and now has an ileostomy.

 

[FarmerChick]

ABI I truly wonder about you
to laugh at that is just wrong -- honestly

 

[abifae]

ABI I truly wonder about you
to laugh at that is just wrong -- honestly

Wonder away!!!

 

[Wifezilla]

Abi laughs at all irony. Her mom eating fiber till it came out her ears to be skinny because skinny is healthy and then ending up with no colon is pretty ironic. Especially since her mom foisted a lot of her food obsessions on abi which led to her being a very sick girl for most of her teens and early 20's. Karma can be a bit of a wench sometimes.

 

[abifae]

Abi laughs at all irony. Her mom eating fiber till it came out her ears to be skinny because skinny is healthy and then ending up with no colon is pretty ironic.

THAT

And yeh... my brain cooties are this bad from her food in the house.

 

[Bubblingbrooks]

My mom purposely took extra fiber and laxatives to keep her weight down! It worked great.

By the way, she had her colon removed due to cancerous cells and now has an ileostomy.

My MIL ate high fiber for years too. Now she has diverticulitis.

 

[Bubblingbrooks]

ABI I truly wonder about you
to laugh at that is just wrong -- honestly

One generally has to laugh at irony. It helps

 

[abifae]

Yeh. I know a LOT of people who seriously think they can take a scoop of fiber with their junk food and flush it out >.>