Actually, if you read the article, it’s not saying exercise isn’t effective - it’s saying that it’s totally effective, but people slack off. But, we’ve debated that a billion times on this board, and this is GQ, so…
I have a question - why have you (or any others) chosen Atkins? Did you look into just regular nutrition and calories restriction plans? I started with Dieting for Dummies, learned about BMR and how food is structured, and went from there. What pushed you into Atkins?
I look at it very simply. You compare how much you eat (calories consumed) vs. how much you exercise (calories burned)
More calories consumed = more weight gained
Fewer calories consumed = less weight gained
More calories burned = more weight loss
Fewer calories burned = more weight loss
If you consume more than you burn you will gain weight. If you want to lose weight you either consume fewer calories or burn more, or both. That’s it.
Of course, that’s not an absolutely complete picture. What foods you eat, when you eat them, how many meals you have over the course of a day, etc…all these things factor in to the equation, but they serve only to shift the equation slightly one way or the other.
The question “are all calories equal” is an interesting one, and worthy of discussion, but for most people I think it’s ultimately irrelevant. 1500 calories split 50% carbs, 30% protein and 20% fat is going to be close enough to 1500 calories split 60% protein, 30% fat, and 10% carbs for the vast majority of people. As has been noted above, 1500 calories comprised of 90% Twinkies and 10% ‘other’ will still allow you to lose weight, provided you burn more than 1500 calories a day.
If you’re trying to lose weight, the most important thing about your ‘diet plan’ (other than “it must be medically sound”) is that it is one that you can stick with for a long time…basically for the rest of your life. And the problem with most plans is that they are too complex, too time consuming, too tedious for people to stick with long term. Something simple like ‘count your calories and don’t worry about anything else’ is ultimately much more sustainable, because it’s much less work. Maybe it’s not quite as efficient as maintaining the optimal mix of carbs/fat/protein, or making sure you eat 12 meals a day to optimize your metabolic processes, but if you can stick with it for years, rather than months, then it’s going to be ‘better’ long term.
And of course, the other side of the equation is exercise. Again, it’s pretty simple: more is better. If that means going to the gym for an hour every day, that’s great. But it can also mean walking up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, or parking at the far end of the parking lot so you have to walk farther. Buying an old-fashioned push mower (also better for the environment :)). Anything that makes you move your body more than you were moving it before.
Eat less, exercise more, and you will lose weight. The concept really is that simple. The execution unfortunately is a but harder, which is why people spend millions of dollars on weight loss plans, but if any of those were a ‘sure thing’ then everyone would be doing it by now. The reality is, it takes discipline and some hard work, but it’s not complicated. Eat less, exercise more.
I am only 5’2" 35, and I work at a sedentary job. Experience and diligent tracking have shown me that If I want to lose weight, my calories have to be below 1200 on a daily basis (that is for a 1-2lb/week loss; I exercise 2-3x a week for an hour at time: mostly karate and pilates).
Atkins seems to be the way I can reduce calories to a level where I can actually lose weight, without feeling sick from hunger, and while eating foods that I generally enjoy. Within the guidelines you don’t have to measure every bite of food, which I find I have to do if I just “cut back on calories,” and I find that more convenient.
Those are some of the reasons for me. I do not, and never will, say it is right for every person.
Although it is true that “calories count” and the only way you can lose weight is to reduce overall caloric intake, it is not true that all calories are the same. Surreal has already mentioned TEF, which is a measure of how efficiently your body can uptake and convert food into calories (although the values are somewhat arbitrary, as they vary with individual physiology). The glycemic index (GI) is another thing to look at; it is basically how readily a starch or other saccharide can be converted into glucose (dextrose), which is the simple carb that your body uses to function. Foods with a low GI convert very rapidly, which spiked blood sugar and results in a rapid insulin response. This means you feel satisfied and flushed for a very short period of time until the sugar is absorbed, and then you are hungry again. It also means that much of the absorbed sugar is converted into body fats for long-term storage unless you are doing some immediate aerobic activity. High GI foods like whole grains and many vegetables will tend to take longer to break down, giving a more moderated insulin response.
Proteins and fats are harder for the body to break down, and if you have significantly restricted carbohydrates (which are the body’s primary energy for digestion of complex proteins and lipids) then a substantial amount of this may pass through without being absorbed. Hence, you can eat the same amount of net calories as measured by a calorimeter, but actually convert less to energy. Fats, while calorically more dense than carbs or proteins do not directly make fats that is stored in the body; except for very limited instances, they have to be broken down and then reconstructed as body fat. The same for proteins. Excess carbs, however, will readily convert to fats; hence why all the low-fat but carb-heavy diet food is really not good for you.
As for Atkins and similar low-carb, high protein diets, they were originally developed for quick weight loss of the morbidly obsese or people suffering from diabetes. The long-term Atkins-type diet, which includes a lot of complex carbs and lean protein isn’t a bad diet (though it seems difficult for many people to sustain) but many ill-informed “Atkins-type” diets that are heavy in saturated fats and low on carbs are simply not good for you. The induction period is trying to force your body to change its insulin-production pattern (basically, stop producing so much insulin that makes you hungry for carbs) but I’m not persuaded that it is very healthy thing to do.
However, if you are passing a lot of excess fats and proteins through your body without absorbing them–in essence, calorie starving yourself–you also stress the kidneys and other organs of the endocrine system. It is really better to maintain the correct balance of carbs, protens, and fats–somewhere around 50:30:20 or 45:30:25 (depending on who you read) and focus on keeping highly processed or simple carbs to a minimum. If you are weight training or doing a lot of athletics then you might change the ratio as recommended by training guides and/or a nutritionist, but you need carbs to process proteins; eating 50 grams of proteins five times a day on a low-carb regime just means you are probably shitting out 100 to 200 grams of protein.
To lose weight and sustain the loss, you need to have both the appropriate amount of caloric intake, the correct balance of macronutrients, and enough food bulk to provide satiety (a feeling of fullness). That dictates eating a lot of vegetables, an appropriate amount and variety of polyunsaturated fats, and a moderate amount of lean protein.
Stranger
Most diet sites that track calories also track carbs/protein/fat. I use www.fitday.com, but The Daily Plate is also good, as is Sparkpeople.
I lost about 45% of my body weight in 14 months counting calories. However, I did not ignore nutrients: I found my appetite was easier to control and I had fewer cravings if I went out of my way to eat protein (I shot/shoot for about 40% a day). However, everyone is different: some people find small amounts of good fat (like 14 almonds) to be very filling. For me, that just makes me want more almonds (the 140th almond makes me want more almonds).
My point was that even the Atkins people believe it all comes down to calories. (At the time, I was really frustrated because the “Diet Revolution” Atkins book said, “eat to your heart’s content” of the approved foods, but I obviously couldn’teven eat until I was full, let alone to my heart’s content.) That isn’t to say, though, that the process is as simple as eat-fewer-calories-than-you-burn, simply because it’s not easy to accurately determine how many calories you burn. Your metabolism determines a whole lot about how fast you burn up calories. I used to date a guy who consumed an incredible number of calories per day, didn’t exercise much, and was thin as a rake. (No, no tapeworm or thyroid problem.) He lucked out.
As for the question, “Do carbs contain salt?”, well, some carbs do because salt is added to them (like potato chips). I don’t know exactly how carbs can lead to retained water, but there does seem to be something to it. I’ve read that some of the initial weight loss on Atkins is due to water loss, but that’s true with many types of diets.
If Atkins works for you, great. It didn’t for me, and nobody followed it more faithfully than I did. I think my body chemistry was just such that I needed the serotonin from carbs. I am at my ideal BMI and have less than 17% body fat. I exercise a lot (30-60 minutes a day, every day), eat fewer than 1700 calories a day, and rarely eat food high in fat or sugar. But that’s what works for me. A lot of people lose a lot of weight on Atkins, but studies show most people find it too restrictive to stay on it long-term, so the weight comes back.
Gary Taubes, the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, has the following blog enty that addresses this topic very well.
I see no one has addressed this. I did the South Beach diet on the advice of my doctor. More to reduce the amount of particles in my bloodstream (triglycerides? lipids? hellidon’tknow) It worked. I also lost weight.
Without going too much into IMHO territory, I did not count calories, in fact the book tells you to eat as much as you want. I also did not exercise more. In fact, I exercised less this year.
My wife did the diet too and lost weight also. One of the guys at work noticed I was losing weight and asked about it. I told him what I was doing and he did the SB diet too and lost 30 lbs.
We all agreed that a low-carb diet reduced the food cravings.
It does seem that all three of us have plateaued at 30-40 lbs. But I don’t see it being very hard to lose more weight by exercising more and restricting calories now that I have somewhat of an understanding on how to control food cravings.
Water is necessary for the breakdown of glycogen to glucose. This glucose, when used for fuel, will release carbon dioxide and water as the end result. Also, glycogen has water of hydration associated with it that roughly triple the weight of the glycogen. So, when glycogen is reduced then water is released and removed from the body.
Interesting enough, but it seems to me that he merely argues that studies showing that all diets work about as well as each other are flawed. He doesn’t actually put forward any evidence in this article that carbs are more significant than other sources of energy (no doubt he does make that argument in his book and elsewhere, but not in this blog entry).
Atkins (or pretty much any controlled-carb way of eating) is the only thing that got my triglycerides under control.
Having been a ‘fat kid’ all my life, I’ve been through damn near every diet plan you can think of and some you can’t imagine. Experience and research has brought me to this conclusion;
Calories count, but not as much as the food the calories come from
Cutting out one thing (or group of things) will make you crave whatever that is, even if you didn’t want it before
Humans are not meant to consume, long term, the overly processed foods that we’re ingesting today. This includes everything from bread to diet pop.
You can change NOTHING about how you gain or lose weight until you change how you THINK about how you gain and lose weight.
That last statement is the most important, and may have been mentioned upthread but the reality is that ‘diets’ don’t work because they don’t change your brain. Attempts to modify behavior on a simplistic level as diets do (eat this for a while, not that etc) will almost always fail because the body will do what the brain wants to every time.
So, if the brain wants pasta, the brain gets pasta, because pasta makes you remember your mom and you loved your mom, even though she took up with that musician after your dad left, she was still really cool about your girlfriend staying at her house while she followed her boyfriend on tour. But I digress.
It’s not the gut, it’s the brain. For some folks, processed sugar has a chemical effect similar to heroin or cocaine, for others, they can handle sugar with no problem but perhaps have a sodium ‘addiction’.
It boils down to this; Eat naturally, stay active, avoid processed foods, preservatives and chemicals. When you DO eat those things, enjoy them and just get (and keep getting) back on track. Life would be awful without the things we love being in our lives, even a little bit.
The more you exercise, the more weight you will likely lose. Don’t worry at all about heart rate zones and that bullshite, just walk, run if you like, bicycle, treadmill, whatever. The more you do, the longer you will likely be able to do it. Most of all, enjoy yourself.
From the blog:
Because it’s quite possible that the only meaningful way to lose fat is to change the regulation of the fat tissue, and the science of fat metabolism strongly implies that the best way to do that, if not the only meaningful way, is by reducing the amount of carbohydrates consumed and/or improving the quality of those carbs we do consume.
It’s very subtle, but it’s there.
It’s 20 net carbs, not 5.
Where? “The science of fat metabolism strongly implies”? That’s his opinion, but he presents no evidence. In this article, at least.
Sorry, you are absolutely correct.
Originally Posted by Ximenean
Interesting enough, but it seems to me that he merely argues that studies showing that all diets work about as well as each other are flawed.
I was trying to show that he puts forth the argument that one needs to control carb intake.
You are correct in that the article does not show the science behind it.
You can say that again and again and again. I’m from a long line of physicians, most of questionable weight, all of absurdly terrible eating habits. My uncle just lost 50 pounds (into a size 34" waist at 6’ tall, so doing well) just by eating 2000k calories a day, walking on the treadmill, and NOT ordering the pork florentine at Olive Garden :smack:.
Any good nutritionist will tell you basically to write what you eat and come back in a week, then tell you to cut the shit. It’s pretty evident where “the shit” is. Like tonight, I had (instead of leftovers) a grilled tuna salad and water. All good. I also had 3 damn breadsticks. When I write it down tonight, it’ll scream “you are a moron, why the hell did you eat the empty calories?”
If I want pudding and am trying not to gain weight, would I be better off choosing the fat free pudding or the sugar free pudding? Actually I choose the fat free because I don’t perceive the artificial sweetener as sweet, but I always wonder which one is the better nutritional choice.
Yay pudding!
Here’s what Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, one of the world’s leading epidemiologists, had to say about this particular topic:
The article goes on to explain why a high-fat, high-saturated fat, high-cholesterol diet is much healthier than a high-carbohydrate diet.