Best of luck to you, SenorBeef! I’m a low-carb believer, and I don’t really have any questions, but since you mentioned pizza a couple of times I thought I’d chime in with thisrecipe. I just found this a couple of days ago, and I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, so I can’t say if it’s any good or not (although the picture looks yummy). But I thought you might be interested!
RTF, I plead guilty to implying too much about at least the usual cycles of weight loss/regain, although I must admit I am surprised by the lack of statistically significant adverse effect on body composition long term. And yes I was just yanking your chain. Five year 30 pound cycles down and up, lost without extreme methods, is perhaps not as good as losing it and keeping it off always, but is much much better than gaining it and just keeping it on or gaining more.
If I get pizza cravings, I usually make this one. I find it makes the most bread-like substitute.
And if you’re really dying for a hamburger bun, try this. It’s delicious. I never use the Splenda and it comes out fine.
As I said, I kept it unusually low carb throughout most of the diet. Most low carb diets recommend higher.
Most days started with 10 sausage links and 10 slices of bacon. Sometimes scrambled eggs - I try to force myself to eat more eggs because they’re basically nutritionally perfect, I just don’t like them.
I’d have a big salad at least once a day, but very calorically dense salads. Usually several layers of different kinds of shredded cheese, bacon, pepperoni, sometimes pecans or walnuts, a little bit of tomato, onions, peppers. Ranch or italian dressing - they’re the only things without much added sugar, and even then you have to be careful between brands and recipes.
The only kind of steak I like is sirloin, I’d cook that in little pieces and melt cheese over it and just eat it with a fork. Now I use low carb tortillas to make some combination of a fajita and philly cheese steak.
I’d chop up chicken breasts or hot dogs, mix it up with steamed brocolli and melt cheese on it.
Burger patties with some mustard/onions/pickles and normal condiments, just without a bun - eaten with a knife and fork.
I’d snack on cheese trays, or cheese cubes wrapped in pepperoni, or summer sausage, or beef jerky.
Basic stuff like that. I didn’t care to put much effort into cooking and I often just went with the easiest stuff (like precooked microwavable sausage) over and over again. Which in retrospect was a mistake - you get pretty tired of anything you eat over and over again.
When I upped my carb count towards the end… I liked to make taco salad - seasoned beef, sour cream, tomatos, cheese, and just a few tortillas crushed for texture. I found some low carb meatballs that used some sort of oat material as a binder rather than breading and I also found no sugar added speghetti sauce (hard to find, actually) and I’d melt mozerella over meatballs and then top it with marinara. I’d eat strawberries with heavy cream (whipped cream with less sugar), more nuts and other kinds of berries, low carb yogurt… there’s more that I just can’t remember at the moment.
Yeah, the yo-yo effect I think comes from starving yourself, losing lean body mass, lowering your basal metabolic rate, and hence, your previous level of consumption will make you gain weight at an even faster rate as before.
Obviously that wasn’t what happened with me - I gained lean body mass and raised the basal metabolic rate. I just got disinterested in staying in shape and went back to the same lifestyle that got me fat in the first place.
Which isn’t really a failure. I did what I set out to do, got there, decided it wasn’t worth the effort I was expending, and stopped. I certainly wasn’t any worse off than I was. If my normal lifestyle gains me 20 pounds a year, then I spent 18 at 200, 19 at 220, 20 at 240, 21 at 260 rather than, had I not lost the weight, 18 at 400, 19 at 420, 20 at 440… assuming it would’ve kept going up. I don’t know - maybe I’d have hit a hard ceiling at some point. In any case obviously there was value gained in what I did even if I didn’t stay that way for life.
This is among the more interesting threads I’ve encountered on the board; thanks for sharing, SenorBeef.
That said, here’s what bothers me about Atkins and other low carb diets: the long-term effects of such diets have not been properly studied and are, therefore, largely unknown.
Dr. Atkins has treated tens of thousands of people over more than 30 years, and he never bothered to conduct a study to analyze the long-term safety of his program (or, if he did do a study, he kept the results to himself). It would have been a relatively simple undertaking, and positive results would have surely caused the popularity of his program to skyrocket, legitimized him in the eyes of the medical community, and allowed him a big, fat, I Told You So.
My questions: Does it bother you at all, SenorBeef, that Atkins never published a study on the long-term effects of his diet? Are you concerned that we do not know what the long-term effects may be?
mmm
Man, you really are a bad cook! Do you have any new recipes or cooking skills to utilize this time around?
As opposed to the standard American diet, which has produced some of the highest rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes in the world?
No, as opposed to other more traditional establishment recommended plans, such as NIH’s DASH ones, and many others.
You seem to have a plan in place for losing weight.
What weight are you aiming for and once that weight is hit, what is your maintenance plan? Are you planning on being low-carb forever?
Whatever point you tried to make there, you didn’t make it.
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I apologize. I should really not participate in these threads, as I bring too much baggage* to them. My point was that often the people who are so concerned about the safety of low carb diets are themselves subsisting on the standard American diet, which is demonstrably unsafe. I was snarky and that was unnecessary, and I’m sorry.
And with that, I’m out of this thread. I wish** SenorBeef ** and anyone else struggling with their weight success and excellent health.
*I resent that I spent so many years of my life struggling with my weight because I thought low-carb diets were quackery, when all I had to do was drop flour and sugar to feel and look great, with basically zero effort. It drives me nuts that my mother, who eats like a bird–I swear that woman has been on a low-fat, low-cal diet for the past twenty years-- is obese, but won’t consider lowering her carbs because the USDA and such say not to.
I’ve been working on it slowly. My higher carb allowance this time around (20-40g per day) allows much more flexible use of other ingredients, although I do think it negatively affects the health effects of the diet. Not that the results are bad so far, but they aren’t nearly as extreme and effective as the last time around.
The biggest difference so far has been that I’ve found quite good low carb tortillas which I can use for pretty much anything - making sandwiches, wraps, quesadillas, burgers, whatever. I use them a lot.
I’ve been trying to eat a bigger variety of foods, but I don’t really want to put that much more work into it. I’m not eating for pleasure, I’m just eating to satisfy my need to eat. I generally won’t put a lot of effort into making something that might be really good because I just don’t really care about how much I enjoy it. My only concern is getting sick of the food I’m eating due to lack of variety, so I’m trying to incorporate more low-effort meals.
No, not really. I don’t really know the reason he didn’t publish his results. I would assume that he didn’t conduct early research in a way that was amenable to publishing. There’s been a lot of interest in low carb diets and no one seems to be interested in publishing long term health studies, so I’m not really sure what the problem is there, but the lack of them is universal.
As far as health concerns, no, not really. Low carb is really a health-oriented diet moreso than a weight loss diet. The weight loss essentially comes from restoring your metabolism to a more natural state compared to highly unnatural modern diets.
The idea that meats are bad for you only comes to us after centuries of living on diets that are based on a hugely unnatural carbohydrate intake that really hasn’t been with humans that long. Foods with lots of fats, high cholesterol, etc. are only bad for you when they are in addition to an extremely heavy carb-heavy diet. Being fat/having high cholesterol/diabetes/triglycerides etc. and then deciding to attack them from the dietary intake of fat/cholesterol angle rather than the exceedingly unnatural number of carbohydrates angle is counterproductive. Usually when you go with a low fat, low cholesterol diet, you end up replacing them with even more sugar and simple starches, making the problem worse, which is why you sometimes see studies that dieters are eating “better” than ever, putting in more effort, and yet being less and less effective.
Most modern metabolic problems and diseases stem from a carbohydrate intake several times larger than pretty much any human ever consumed in a pre-agrarian environment - and even moreso compared to the last 50 years where we’ve just decided to load everything with sugar to make it palateable with mass production. The result is that we’ve got vastly more insulin in our systems at any time to counteract that level of blood sugar spikes. Since insulin regulates so many things, this leads to a lot of crappy side effects. Insulin triggers the liver to produce more cholesterol, so we all get high cholesterol. It triggers the kidneys to store excess water and some other things I can’t recall which raise blood pressure. Insulin levels are so out of range that your body gradually becomes less and less receptive to it, which is how you develop type 2 diabetes.
The idea that you’re doing something very wrong by eating dead animals and vegetables, and you need to return to the right way the human body works - by eating tons and tons of processed grained and sugars that don’t really exist in nature - is actually the counterintuitive thing if you seperate yourself from your bias of what you consider normal.
So no, no health concerns at all really.
I’ve only commited to losing 50 pounds yet. It seems like the lowest number that seems significant. I don’t want to overwhelm myself right off the bat by making it seem like a huge, imposing task and committing to losing a ton. Once I lose 50, I’ll see how I’m feeling and re-evaluate.
I’ve considered going to a low carb maintenance plan - finding out what my personal tolerance is before I start to gain weight again, and staying within it - but it’s probably too much of a pain in the ass to consider doing long term. More likely just trying to eat less and excercise more at that point would be more practical.
But I don’t really care that much, to be honest. I want to give this a go to see if it alleviates some of the medical issues, and because I’m in such bad shape right now that it interferes with some of the stuff I want to be able to do physically (like hiking for photography). If it ends up not helping medically, and I’m in good enough shape to do the things I want to do physically, then I don’t really care if I stay fat. I’m not trying to impress anyone, I don’t care what I look like, I don’t really care how I’m treated.
On the other hand, if it does alleviate the problems, and I start to feel good about working out, and I find different stuff I don’t mind cooking and eating, then I’ll stick with it until I’m in good shape.
So I’ll lose the 50 and see how it goes from there.
I know this is an “ask the..” thread but for low effort, maybe consider crockpot meals (with a large one, you can make several meals in one shot.) Google “low carb crock pot recipes”, I just did and got lots of hits. Here’s my favourite slow cooker blog:
I think your plan of losing 50 lbs to start with is a wise one!
How does a diet high in sodium affect weight loss? I’ve found chickens stuffed with spinach and cheese which stave off hunger for 3 hours and contain:
150 calories, 4.5g of fat, 70mg of cholesterol, 510mg of sodium, 2g of carb and 25g of protein.
So it’s great except for the sodium content.
There are likely several very good reasons there is a paucity of long term data on health outcomes on “low carb diets.” First many do not stay on many of the low carb diets long term. They lose weight on it (and it indeed is a very good choice for that purpose for some … and other approaches for others) and either go back to eating as before, or they come up with something else or something modified in some variety of ways that they can stick with as a longer term lifestyle. (Not saying no one stays on a proscribed low carb plan as a long term approach, just fairly few.) Second, there is no single “low carb” plan. Third, it takes a sizable n followed for a significant time to determine many of those longer term outcomes. Put those things together and it seems highly improbable to collect a big enough group doing a homogenous enough of a plan to be able to collect meaningful numbers.
We are left with what we know: diets high in fruits, vegetables, and fiber, diets high in natural (whole food) sources of antioxidants and other phytochemicals, are associated with many good long term outcomes. Those diets can be fairly high in protein, high in MUFAs and PUFAs, and low in refined carbohydrates. Whether or not that is of concern or interest to any individual is up to them.
I will strongly disagree with the position that a high saturated fat diet is any less unnatural than a high refined carb diet.* Neither is natural.* The meat that Paleolithic humans ate was much leaner than is modern beef and often included lots of fish and birds. It also included more organ and marrow which is of a different fat profile than modern beef (much higher in monosaturated and various polyunsaturated fats). A high saturated fat diet was just not done. Note, even the Eskimos, eating blubber, were not high in saturated fat; blubber is rich in MUFAs. Diets that have equal amounts of fat but replace saturated fats with MUFA and PUFAs have better proxies of long term outcomes (e.g. lipid profiles). There may indeed be something to replicating the more ancestral macronutrient profile, even if modern beef does not do it.
Strongly agreed that ancestral humans ate a diet higher in protein than is standard Western fare (more often closer to 25 to 30% of calories eaten) and that the quality of the carbohydrate source was very different. The modern diet high in highly processed refined and simple carbohydrates that are also low in fiber is clearly not what ancestral humanity ate either. And mainstream medicine is increasingly recognizing how much that quality of the carbohydrate matters.
High sodium will cause more water weight to be retained but, to the best of my knowledge, not effect fat loss. OTOH its impact on long term health outcomes is significantly adverse.
Those items stated, I will return to the intent of the op, “Ask the …”: Are your unstated medical concerns exclusively ones of short term function, or are you concerned about your long term health at this point?
Again, best of luck on meeting your goals and on finding whatever long term approach works best for you.
I think this is the part that gets me-I just don’t get how eating excessive quantities of processed meats high in chemicals and sodium (like hot dogs!) mimic a caveman diet. And wouldn’t truly mimic-ing a caveman diet require more of a feast-famine cycle of getting lots of meat at once, maybe once a in a blue moon, eating lots of it for a few days and then going into a para-famine cycle while engaging in a lot of physical activity (like setting out to find the Zelandoni with a handful of nuts, dried berries and a piece of dried hide or something)? Were cavemen capable of hitting Whole Foods every single night to pick up 3 lbs of bison for dinner or was it like, when they actually spent 4 days hunting a bison that they got to eat that way for 2 days? I’m not being snarky, I am just genuinely baffled by this directive about eating like our ancestors when our ancestors had no predictability to what they’d have to eat during the day. I’m seriously not giving up my job to spend my time scavenging and showing up Jondalar’s ex-girlfs.
I am myself a low(er) carber* so I don’t hate on low carb diets but I find it bizarre to say that an accurate version of a paleolithic diet involves eating 10 pounds of animal meat by dinner. Not to mention hot dogs, which seriously, are chock full of nitrates.
*can’t eat red meat for religious reasons, raised in pescatarian culture, try to keep vegetarian 4 days out of the week. I rely mostly on legume proteins.
If I might make a personal recommendation, I have found that setting a fitness goal (in my case, running a certain distance, but it could be anything; ability to hike X miles comfortably, or lifting a certain amount of weight or whatever) and reaching/maintaining it is a lot easier long-term than keeping to a strict diet. Not least because when I am maintaining my fitness, I find that it’s easier to eat well. Sitting on my ass on the sofa seems to have a direct correlation with how much junk food I eat.
Anyway, good luck to you! I’ve never gone extreme low-carb but as a type 2 diabetic I do find that when I overindulge in processed carbohydrates, I have some pretty immediate physical effects, mostly drowsiness and feeling mentally sluggish. A diet consisting heavily of proteins and fats with carbohydrates coming mainly from fruits and vegetables seems to work best for me. I don’t eat that way all the time, but when I do, I feel better.
Here’s where I’m coming from: You seem to be taking two, equally challenging steps.
Step one: Put your body through a grueling workout regime and starve it of calories for several months.
Step two: Create a modest workout regime and eat a healthier diet.
Now, it seems to me that you could just avoid step one and simply jump to step two. It would take a lot longer, but you would be creating a healthier lifestyle that you would be able to stick with throughout your life.
You are clearly a driven and focused person as witnessed by your previous success, but previous experience also seems to indicate that once you lose the focus of attaining a specific goal, you tend to drift back to old habits.
It’s not as dramatic and exciting, but it leads to true change that can be maintained for life.
I wish you all the best in your goal, but I encourage you to think about the long-term and making change that you can expect to maintain indefinately.
Sodium doesn’t affect weight loss as far as I know. It’s generally restricted due to blood pressure and other health concerns. I think the concern is a little overblown unless you’re already struggling with high blood pressure, but I’m obviously no expert. The other stats on that make it a great snack so I’d just go with it. FWIW, sodium intake levels are recommended not to exceed 2400mg per day.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I would say that the differences in the various types of fat is somewhat nebulous and inconclusive and a constitute a much smaller difference from a paleo diet compared to raising your carbohydrate intake probably 10x as much. Insulin regulates a whole lot of systems that get out of whack with modern diets. While saturated vs unsaturated vs monounsaturated etc etc may have health effects, it certainly isn’t as significant as the difference between a diet where 10-20% of your macronutrients come from carbs and 70-80% do.
You’re right, that is a better way to measure health. I’d rather weigh 300 and be strong and be able to do all the things I want to do, than to be 230 but weak and out of shape. But in extreme cases - where you’re over 100 pounds overweight for example - so long as you aren’t starving yourself, losing weight and getting strong/in shape is pretty strongly related. You really need to build a lot of muscle to be able to lose that much weight.
I’ve got a long way to go in both the fitness and the weight departments, so it doesn’t really matter which way I measure them at this point… weight is easier to track.