Elmari’s weekly Banting Diet Diary: Week 16

Leaving on a jet plane

What a wild week! After sorting out all the last little things, my bags are packed and I’m ready to leave for my holiday on Thursday! I am nervous and excited at the same time.

Back to Banting: Let me start off by saying that diet-wise, I am a little disappointed about this past week. I know I originally said in my first blog entry at the end of January this year that I wanted to lose 10kg before I went on my trip to Europe and Ireland, leaving on 27 April.

After I managed to do that within the first eight weeks of Banting, the goal posts shifted. Even though I haven’t said it out loud, I really hoped I would be able to lose 20kg by the time I left. Alas, after losing only 0,8kg this week, it is now only 18,5kg in total. I realise that is still fantastic, but I feel a bit cheated.

Yeah, I know, I am the one to be blamed. Nobody else cheated, just me. Because I have been able to lose so much, and so steadily, for almost four months now, I kind of started taking it for granted that I would keep losing weight at a steady pace. Therefore, I had the odd glass of wine, and sometimes added potatoes to my meals. So, it seems that has now caught up with me. But let’s let bygones be bygones. It doesn’t help to sweat the small stuff.

You won’t gain weight if you have a glass of wine every now and then, but it does slow down the weight-loss process. I knew that all along, and I know I will have to put my shoulder to the wheel again. But that isn’t going to happen right now, and I have made peace with that. I will pull out all the stops again once I am back from my trip.

I will be gone for three weeks, and I know I am going to eat the wrong things. As I’ve said previously, Paris is all about pastries and Ireland is all about potatoes. I want to experience each country’s culture and food, and therefore I am going to eat and drink things I wouldn’t do at home. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

The Big Banting Trial

On a different note, let’s talk about the outcome of the Tim Noakes trial this past week. For people who are even mildly interested in Banting, this is significant. On 21 April 2017, Noakes was found not guilty after the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) charged him with unprofessional conduct for something he said on Twitter in February 2014 to a breast-feeding mother. He was charged after Claire Julsing-Strydom, former president of the Association for Dietetics in South Africa, lodged a complaint.

The whole trial was about so much more than just his response to Pippa Leenstra’s question. Her tweet read: ‘@ProfTimNoakes @SalCreed is LCHF eating ok for breastfeeding mums? Worried about all the dairy + cauliflower = wind for babies?? [sic].’ His tweet read: ‘Baby doesn’t eat the dairy and cauliflower. Just very healthy high-fat breast milk. Key is to ween [sic] baby onto LCHF.’

So, basically, Noakes advised Leenstra to wean her child onto LCHF foods, which he called ‘real food’. He argued that that he did not give advice on breast-feeding, but on weaning.

The HPCSA argued that Noakes gave unconventional and unscientific advice, and was unprofessional in his conduct for dispensing the advice via social media.

Was that unconventional advice? Maybe, if you consider that it is widely accepted that babies should be weaned onto starchy foods. (That is a whole other can of worms that I won’t go into here.) Was his advice unscientific? If you take into account that Noakes is a medical doctor, and one of few scientists in the world with an A1 rating by the National Research Foundation, rated for both sports science and nutrition, I think not.

Was it harmful? According to advocate Joan Adams, chair of the HPCSA’s Professional Conduct Committee, the HPCSA had not proven any harm from his tweet or that he had breached any norms or standards of the medical profession. Out of her five-member committee, four ruled in Noakes’s favour.

Here is where it gets interesting. Noakes alleged that Julsing-Strydom’s complaint was not centred on breast-feeding, but on the diet that he advocates in his book, The Real Meal Revolution, of which she did not approve.

I won’t go into the merit of that, but this trial has definitely opened the doors to more critical thinking of the way we (and dietitians) have been – and are being – taught to eat. Hopefully more scientifically proven information will become readily available to more people about why a high-carbohydrate diet isn’t necessarily better for us than a high-fat diet, and that fat isn’t the enemy.