They are here, they are plain, they are numbers… And they are finally coming…!!! The physiological markers, the health parameters… All the geeky part of the experiment that will hopefully shed some “scientific” light on the adaptations of the body to a sudden and rather significant diet change. In this section, I will discuss the most relevant findings, in addition to publishing some of the raw (yep, even numbers can be used raw…!) data on myself (not on the other people in order to respect their privacy).
ANTHROPOMETRIC DATA AND BODY COMPOSITION
As you can see from my PRE-detox numbers, if there was a reason I wanted to try the detox diet, it was to see whether I would feel “refreshed” or “energised”, or what it would feel to be “detoxified” (I evetually ended up doing it as part of a group activity and an experiment on myself, but that is another issue…). I was not aiming at losing weight nor body fat, and in fact, I was more concerned about not losing fat free mass than anything else. Starting at 70.77 Kg (by 1.75 m tall, giving a BMI of 23.1 Kg/m2 for those who believe in it…), I ended at 67.46 Kg (BMI 22.03 Kg/m2), with a total loss of 3.31 Kg (or 4.68% of my starting weight). Considering that total body weight is a very poor marker of health or fitness (as is the BMI, on which so many guidelines are based…) my next question was: where did this weight come from? If the numbers don’t lie, 1.14 Kg were fat-free mass, while 2.14 were body fat.
Before celebratory parties get started, I would like to make a couple of considerations:
- I said if, for the simple reason that at such low level, minimal changes in the machine reading (the so-called reliability of the measuring device), would show as major changes in percentage points. Did my body fat really went from 9% to 6.8%? If I am sure I lost weight (I felt it, I could see it and the scale is much more “reliable” than the BodPod), I can think that most of it was fat, but certainty would need much more data (if it was ever to achieve…). And even then, was it a good thing? With minimum body fat recommended to stay above 5% in elite male athletes, I would leave the answer to you…
- As mentioned previously, I was not aiming at losing weight or body fat, but rather at maintaining fat free mass while feeling the benefits (if any…) of a plant-based, raw, juiced dietary regime. My fat-free mass went from 64.42 Kg (91%) to 63.25 (93.8%). Maintaining the same consideration as above, this was an unwelcome adaptation, that will lead me to the next part of my data analysis about energy deficit.
For those out there who love playing with numbers, we can indeed see that to lose over 3 Kg in such a short time, a few things need to happen. First and foremost, you must be kept in quite a significant energy deficit (more of that in a moment). This was somehow a pleasant surprise for my brain… I was not just a wimp (if you read Part 2 of my detox experience you will understand), my body was actually paying a rather heavy bill, on a daily basis… Secondly, considering that the mathematical idea of 2.14 Kg of fat equaling 19,260 Cal would give a daily energy deficit of 3,852 Cal (even ignoring the other 1.13 Kg of fat-free mass, a rather unlikely occurrence), my glycogen stores were likely to have been depleted carrying water away with them (pure speculation on this point, if you can suggest any other explanation, I would love to read it in the comment box…). Another pleasant surprise for my brain: my legs and arms were feeling so heavy for a reason!
On another note, I did indeed question the validity of the nutritional information I was given, and would surely recommend the Detox Delight nutritionists to double check their data. So, I lost weight… But how did the rest of my body adapt?
LIPOPROTEIN PARTICLE PROFILE
This was a big one indeed…! If there is one test I would recommend to anyone interested in looking at their cardiovascular disease risk (CVD, essentially the risk you have of suffering from a heart attack or similar, the number one causes of death in the Western World), it would be the LPP. Without going too much into details (I might in future posts, but if you cannot wait I would strongly recommend Dr Peter Attia’s blog) the LPP measures not only the classic total cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol (HDL-C), TG and LDL-cholesterol (LDL-C), but it also measures LDL particle number (LDL-P), LDL subclasses, HDL2b, insulin, high sensitive CRP (the most accurate marker of inflammation) and it gives you a Metabolic Syndrome risk score (what you should essentially be concerned about).
Considering the attention I pay to my diet and the amount of physical activity I undertake, I did not expect any major surprise here. And indeed my Metabolic Syndrome risk score started from 0…! And not just that, my HDL-C (the so called “good cholesterol”) was very high with an LDL-C (the “bad boy”) defined as “above optimal”. First sign that my usual lifestyle already works…
Unfortunately though, you might notice a flashy red number next to my LDL-IV particle number… If initially that was a surprise and a concern (recent studies have shown a much higher atherogenic risk of LDL-IV and LDL-III over the bigger LDL-I and LDL-II), it also sparked an almost insatiable hunger for more knowledge and understanding of this part of lipidology. Hours and hours of reading and discussing with other practitioners later, this ultimately let me understand the even higher importance of LDL-P (the actual number of LDL particles, rather than their size) over LDL-subclasses, and even more so, the importance of “concordance” between LDL-C (in my case low) and LDL-P (also low). In this situation, essentially, the mere size of my LDL was irrelevant, as there were so few of them, carrying so little cholesterol, that everything else did not matter…
I would strongly suggest you to refer to other websites and blogs here or from my links page (The Eating Academy or DocsOpinion to just mention a couple of the most useful in my opinion and in my personal journey to understanding these not so widely addressed topics) if you want to know more. It would be not just out of the scope of this page, but surely it would be way far from my competence and knowledge at this stage.
ORGANIX COMPREHENSIVE PROFILE
If I defined the LPP test as the one not to miss to measure your CVD risk, the Organix was supposed to be one not to miss to see the effects of the detox diet… If indeed changes in blood lipids and aminoacids might take some time to happen and be recorded, the Organix Profile measures a number of metabolic markers that can be affected by shorter dietary interventions. Not only this, it also measures markers for a number of situations relevant to the so called “functional medicine”, that discipline that deals with sub-clinical insufficiencies or higher concentrations of molecules and minerals that could potentially represent non-optimal health (as much as we know about it at least) or lead to clinical conditions if left untreated. I would like here to stress this point: I am now discussing about biomarkers used in functional medicine, a very different area from the more common concepts of medicine where abnormal indicators are almost invariably associated with a clinical condition or at least prompt some intervention. These biomarkers per se mean hardly anything. More than in other scientific fields, a clinical connection between these markers and clinical symptoms have to be made before considering an intervention. After this short intro, these were my findings, before and after my detox diet:
Wow, I thought after seeing this…! I don’t think there is much to explain when a rapid look at the summary shows such a marked change from various abnormal findings to an almost perfect sheet of “no abnormality found”… If as I explained in the previous paragraph, I and the consulting functional medicine practitioner were not concerned by the PRE findings anyway (I did not present any symptom that would require additional investigations or treatment anyway, as for example if I had sleeping issues associated with my high neurotransmitter metabolism markers), the “normalization” of almost all markers was still a pleasant surprise.
In particular, if the detox diet was meant to help my body somewhere, I should have expected to see some changes in the oxidative stress and detoxification processes… And guess what? My liver seemed to fully reap the benefits of the diet indeed…! My corrected levels of p-hydroxyphenillactate possibly meant a reduced cellular oxidative damage, while the improved detoxification indicators showed that my liver was now working under less pressure.
If until now the effects of the detox diet was just marginally showing some positives, the Organix profile test, surely tilted the balance towards its likely effectiveness, at least into doing what the name suggests: help the body detoxification system…
eatmovesleep 