I started training again to do a marathon next year. In case you didn’t know, distance running is a perfectly legal and culturally acceptable way to get stoned on opiates. You probably know these opiates by their street name, “endorphins”, which comes from the Greek words for “morphine from within”. They’re naturally produced by the pituitary glands and the hypothalamus in response to the stress caused by compound fractures, eating extremely hot peppers, having children and distance running.

So naturally I’d like to lose a few pounds to reduce the wear and tear on the body whilst pounding out the miles necessary to maintain my opiate high. Plus it should cut my finishing time as well. A rule of thumb is that every 10 pounds of weight lost equals nine minutes shaved off your marathon time. My last marathon on a flat course was about 3:40 and I’m guessing I was about 180 pounds at the time. The ideal racing weight for my height and build is probably about 160 pounds. Thus, I might be able to shave 18 minutes off my time if I lose 20 pounds. That should give me a finishing time of 3:22 plus the sexy physique of a guy who lacks the strength to use a push mower.

The problem was how to diet without all the side effects such as hunger, cravings, weakness, the shakes, sweaty palms, irritability, etc. And the diet itself needed to be real simple: no complicated recipes, easy to obtain and inexpensive ingredients, and it needed to support the dietary needs of a runner. So I did a little experimentation:

Experiment 1:

My first attempt was to limit my serving sizes at each meal time. Instead of a giant plate of spaghetti with sausages, I would eat a medium sized helping. The other thing I tried to do was not snack after dinner. A former co-worker told me her older brother, an ultra marathoner, did this. I was unimpressed at the time, but just recently I saw a study which showed that limiting when mice could eat to just one eight hour block of time each day dramatically improved their health compared to mice that could eat anytime they wanted. [1]

Results:

I was frequently starving between meals, and would start feeling tired and dizzy sometimes when standing up – a serious medical condition requiring immediate oral administration of Doritos™ if available. I was able to avoid food after dinner, however, so I’ve got that going for me.

Net weight loss: Zero.

Experiment 2:

I thought about going vegan or on a raw food diet because I’ve heard that these seem to always result in weight loss, and because a low carbohydrate, high plant protein diet may prevent cancer growth, [2] but I can’t see myself eating a plate of leaves and beans every meal. I am, however, strangely attracted to the idea of human chow (sometimes called “bachelor chow”) – scientifically formulated, nutritionally complete, food pellets containing all the nutrients needed for humans. If you were dieting, you would estimate how many calories you burn per day and then look up how many ounces of chow you get given the amount of weight you want to lose that day. Unfortunately, these don’t actually exist.

Then I happened across someone by the name of Rich Roll in a video mixing up fruits and vegetables in a blender. [3] He was stuffing in an entire beet plant, the root and leaves, followed by a bunch of celery stalks, a carrot, kale, an apple, a banana, blue berries, grass clippings, etc. He drank this down, and then rode his bike for twelve hours or whatever. He competes in ultra long triathlon events. He claims this vegan diet is how he converted himself from a overweight lawyer into an elite athlete.

I noted that this diet is also somewhat similar to how Kenyan runners eat. Many of them come from poor families who can’t afford meat, so they subsist- nay, thrive? – on corn meal porridge, green leafy vegetables, and beans.[4] (They also don’t develop a taste for sweets.)

Naturally this caught my attention. I thought this might be a way to eat healthy plant food that tastes like leaves and twigs – so I’ve got to check it out. Now, I have no interest in becoming a strict vegan, but I thought if ate most, but not all of my meals like this, I would be eating healthier and might lose some weight, and wouldn’t have to obsess about whether I’m getting enough omega-3′s, vitamin B-12, iron, and whatever else vegans worry about.

Then I discovered Roll uses a $420 blender. I complain about kitchen appliances if they cost $60, so this looked like a deal breaker. Luckily, I found an old KitchenAid™ food processor in our kitchen that’s hardly been used and I tried using it to emulate what he’s doing. It actually works just fine. Similar new processors are about $160 and I’ve seen cheaper ones online for under $30. (If you decide to buy, check out Consumer Reports first.)

So I started mixing up a green sludge for my three meals. A typical batch of sludge contained some combination of the following:

A finger length of raw carrot
A stalk of celery
A handful of baby spinach leaves
A small roma tomato
Fourth cup of canned red beets
Half an avocado
Quarter of a medium apple
Half a cup of frozen blue berries, raspberries, and blackberries
Half a banana
Two or three small raw kale leaves
Two or three small raw red chard or collard leaves
Eighth of a cup of garbanzo beans or kidney beans (canned)
Eighth of a cup of walnuts, pumpkin seeds or cashews
Either a cup of SO chocolate coconut milk or orange juice

At first I didn’t add any liquids and I ate the sludge with a spoon. After I starting adding liquid, I could use a straw to suck down the stuff like a milk shake. I didn’t necessarily down the whole sludge batch all at once – I would refrigerate what I didn’t use and suck it down later. Oh, and I didn’t eat after dinner.

Results:

Lost about a pound per day over one week eating just sludge, had greatly reduced hunger between meals, no hypoglycemic symptoms, no craving candy bars and just a little for tortilla chips and, although I didn’t feel fantastic all the time, I felt I could maintain this diet for an extended time. On the second day or so, however, my bowels were in an uproar and I remember having nausea all night once (though never actually puking), but it was gone the next day. Roll mentions in his book, “Finding Ultra”, [5] something about getting sick when adjusting to big changes in the diet, presumably due to the time needed for radical changes in the intestinal flora population.

There was some negative effect on my stamina, however. I would sometimes bonk after a couple of miles of running, so I started experimenting with taking a banana and a Balance™ bar with me and/or eating a bowl of rice cereal with coconut milk just prior to running. This evolved into taking a squeeze bottle of Hammer Gel™ and sucking down some prior to running and every mile or so for the first couple miles, and then all was fine.

The downside was flatulence. I mean it was so bad that I judge this diet to be unacceptable unless you work on a dairy farm and sleep in a barn.

Net weight loss: Went from 184 pounds down to 177 in a week.

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Experiment 2.1:

Obviously, the flatulence problem needed to be addressed. Many vegetables (legumes and cruciferous vegetables, for example) contain complex sugars that aren’t digested well. So I nixed the beans in the recipe. I also thought that steaming the green leafy vegetables (kale, collard, and chard) for 10 minutes might break down some sugars, so I started doing it.

Other modifications: I got rid of the raw beets, since they didn’t taste all that great, although occasionally I added some canned beets. If I used orange juice, I had to dilute it with water, or else cut back on the berries, banana, and apple, otherwise the mix is too sweet and I get a bit hypoglycemic. Also, the taste is improved if I add only half a celery stalk otherwise everything tasted like celery.

A finger length of raw carrot
A half stalk of celery
A handful of baby spinach leaves
A small roma tomato
Half an avocado
Quarter of a medium apple
Half a cup of frozen blue berries, raspberries, and blackberries
Half a banana
Two or three small steamed kale leaves
Two or three small steamed red chard or collard leaves
Eighth cup of walnuts or pumpkin seeds
Either a cup of SO chocolate coconut milk or a half cup of orange juice plus water

Note that this is just a representative formula and isn’t set in stone. I usually add something special or different for each sludge batch. Sometimes I added a few artichoke hearts, or fruit such as melon or pineapple. A mix could be as simple as an avocado, a banana, berries, walnuts and coconut milk for breakfast. The other change to the diet was that I ate a reduced portion of a regular meal each day with the carbs cut down. For example, if we were having garlic chicken with vegetables and rice for dinner, I would eat the chicken and vegetables with a little rice.

Results:

Dramatically reduced the gas production, but I got real hungry in the afternoons sometimes.

Net weight loss: None, weight stayed at around 177 to 178 pounds.

Experiment 2.2:

Saliva is essential to starting the process of digestion of starches and fats, but by watering down my sludge too much and drinking it through a straw I was bypassing this step, and perhaps leaving some sugars for my gas flora that they otherwise wouldn’t get. Thus I began adding less liquid and more nuts and eating with a spoon instead of using a straw. Even though the nuts are finely chopped by the processor, they provide something to chew on, like crunchy peanut butter, and I made an effort to thoroughly masticate the sludge before swallowing. The hope was that I would digest more of the food and starve the gassy flora.

I also added seedless red grapes, or turmeric (a spice) as these foods contain natural COX-2 (cancer) inhibitors, and turmeric has anti-inflammatory properties. [6] [7] (By the way, I don’t add enough turmeric to actually taste it.)

Finally, concern about excessive oxalate (which can lead to kidney stones) motivated me to reduce the amount of spinach and replace chard and collard with mustard greens. [8]

A representative list of sludge ingredients for experiment 2.2:

A finger length of raw carrot
A half stalk of celery
A small handful of baby spinach leaves
A small roma tomato
Half an avocado
1/4 of a medium apple
1/2 cup of frozen blue berries, raspberries, and blackberries
1/2 cup of red grapes and/or 1/4 tsp of turmeric powder
Half a banana
Two or three small steamed kale leaves
Two or three small steamed mustard greens leaves
1/4 cup of walnuts and/or pumpkin seeds
Either 1/2 cup of SO chocolate coconut milk or 1/4 cup of orange juice plus 1/4 cup water

As I felt comfortable that I could maintain my weight by eating sludge twice a day with one regular meal, I decided to see if I could lose another 7 pounds by eating three meals of sludge for a week, still avoiding food between 6 pm and 7 am. For snacks, I ate romaine lettuce salads, pumpkin seeds, and drank water or V8™ juice.

Results:

I was able to lose almost a pound per day on this diet. Drinking regular old V8 juice really helped to curb hunger between meals. This definitely has a negative effect on running stamina, however, probably due to the low carbohydrate content.

Net Weight Loss: Went from 177 down to 171 pounds in a week.

Conclusions:

I’m rather surprised at how quickly I lost weight on this diet considering how much food I ate. I wasn’t very hungry most of the time; many times I felt stuffed. Strangely enough, I think the reason this diet works is the same reason that the Atkins™ diet works – low carbohydrates. While the Atkins diet is mostly animal protein and fat, the sludge diet is mostly mostly plant protein and fat.

Now that I’m half way to my weight loss goal, I’m going to switch back to a normal diet for the most part so I can run harder, but eating smaller meal portions as needed to maintain the loss, and I’ll return to the sludge later to lose another seven pounds or so.

N. B. I wouldn’t stay on a diet consisting of only green sludge (or any small subset of foods, for that matter) for more than a week or so at a time unless a doctor approved it. You may find yourself forming kidney stones, suffering from some weird imbalance between calcium and magnesium or vitamin toxicity or deficiency. If you have serious kidney, liver, or insulin issues, a radical new diet could kill you. Always check with your doctor prior to trying something like this.

References

[1] M. Hatori, et al, Time-Restricted Feeding without Reducing Caloric Intake Prevents Metabolic Diseases in Mice Fed a High-Fat Diet, Cell Metabolism, Volume 15, Issue 6, 848-860, 17 May 2012

[2] J. Ho, et al, A Low Carbohydrate, High Protein Diet Slows Tumor Growth and Prevents Cancer Initiation, Cancer Research, July 1, 2011 71; 4484

[3] Rich Roll’s post-run Vitamix Youtube video, link

[4] T. Tanser, Train hard, win easy: The Kenyan Way, Tafnews Press, 1997, pp 67-70

[5] R. Roll, Finding Ultra, Crown Archetype, 2012, pp 232-233

[6] K. Chun, et al, Curcumin inhibits phorbol ester-induced expression of cyclooxygenase-2 in mouse skin through suppression of extracellular signal-regulated kinase activity and NF-κB activation, Carcinogenesis (2003) 24 (9): 1515-1524.

For an overview of Curcumin and Cancer see Cancer.org/Turmeric

[7] B. Aggarwal, S. Shishodia, Molecular targets of dietary agents for prevention and therapy of cancer, biochemical pharmacology, 71 (2006) 1397– 1421 [pdf]

[8] See [pdf], for example, for list of oxalate content in various foods