Not enough fiber. Walnuts are ideal, if you want a low carb colon blow.
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A lot of snacking is based on the sudden blood sugar drop after an insulin spike, or so the theory goes. Once blood sugar is stabalized, “false hunger” caused by blood sugar spikes go away.
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Well, personally, I made pretty much everything for myself, and I ate tons.
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Actually, fat satiates you. Protein is fairly neutral as far as satiation goes, I think.
I never really counted calories, but I’d have to guess that I was eating a lot of them, given the majority of what I ate was fat, which is calorically dense. If you do eat less (and I ate less in terms of number of meals, but more in terms of calories), it’s because having stable blood sugar removes premature or false hunger. Actually, anecdotally, the feeling you get when you’re hungry when low carbing, at least for me, can be completely different than high-carb hunger. I’m guessing it’s the difference between blood sugar induced false hunger and real hunger.
OK, look, I know that lots of people lose weight on Atkins eating more than they eat on any other diet. I’m just sayin’ that everyone I’ve personally seen who lost weight on Atkins ate less than they were eating before they started trying to lose weight. A lot less. (They were satisfied with the amount of food, though.) And everyone I have personally seen who tried to lose weight on Atkins, and ate more than they were eating before, failed. You may be doubling your caloric intake and losing like crazy, but that isn’t the experience that my friends and I have had.
For me, fat tastes good, sure, but protein is more filling. That’s why potato chips (fatty) don’t fill me up but lean meat does.
Sorry, don’t care for walnuts.
I would probably be better off overall (and might even lose some weight) if I laid off the sugar, bread, and starches, but kept the fruits and veggies. I know those are carbs, but I’m not willing to hit the Ex-Lax just so I can go back on a diet I didn’t like.
I’m happy that you have found something that works for you, though.
Well, it worked great for me, but I didn’t bother to continue it. I actually lost around 200 pounds of fat - I went from pretty severely obese to in good shape. It’s hard to say how much fat I lost, because I gained a significant amount of muscle mass - so the actual weight loss was something like 150-160 pounds, the loss in fat was more like 200-220.
When I got there, I decided that my life wasn’t really any better in any meaningful way, and the effort I was putting in wasn’t worth it if I wasn’t getting anything out of it.
Random anecdotal story that no one wants to read, but I’m up too late and I’m blabby :p.
Another Atkins follower here. I’ve lost 70 lbs since April of this year, 50 of which in the 1st three months.
Couple of hints for new or potential low-carbers
As Fenris recommended, Splenda is the sweetener of choice. You have to count each little packet as 1 carb though. The Maltodextrin is a corn starch based “filler” and needs to be counted. If you are lucky enough to find liquid Splenda (not available in the US I think) then you don’t have to count it at all.
for people starting low-carb diets. It’s a free service where you can enter the food you ate for the day (selecting from their database), and it can generate all sorts of stats such as if you are meeting your vitamin/mineral RDA, how many carbs you ate, calories, etc. Just a dandy site for keeping track of your diet.
Flaxseed - Flaxseed is 100% fiber, and perfect for keeping the mail moving (so to speak). My body has adapted to the new lifestyle now, but for the first month or two is was pretty rough on the ol’colon.
If anyone wants more info, just email me!
Oh, and when people ask you why you are taking the bun off your burger, or not eating cake at the office birthday party (and they WILL ask) I always tell them that I’m allergic to XX… “It makes me break out in FAT”
Good points, AC, I was meaning to recommend Fitday when I was talking about calories.
And ** Theo, ** I respect that this was not the diet for you, but what is your sampling when you talk about “all the people you know” who didn’t lose when they went on Atkins and ate alot? 3? 9? 20? And how heavy were they? And how much did they eat? And how closely did they follow the program?
I continue to be puzzled by people who are so completely unwilling to accept the evidence, no matter how many times, ways, and in what quantity it is offered. I know people resist change, they resist what doesn’t make sense to them personally, but still…thousands of people have lost weight eating high fat, high calories, high protein diets, so long as the carbohydrates were severely restricted. It’s a fact. It is reality. Denying it doesn’t make it go away, and your personal experience does not negate it.
Are you referring to the weight you lost, or working out and getting muscular?
And you know, don’t you, that you are getting a great deal out of both that may not be readily apparent in your day to day existence, but will become so when you don’t keel over of heart failure when you’re 50. And that maintaining the muscle helps you sustain the weight loss?
That new study is, to the best of my knowledge, the first scientific evidence for the benefits of a low-carb diet. And there are still a lot of unanswered questions. Is a low-carb diet more effective for one gender? What are the long-term health risks? How effective is a (reasonable) low-carb plan at keeping weight off in the long run? Will it lead to deficiencies in any vitamin or mineral? What about the benefits of phytochemicals?
It may work, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the best. Compare it to Dr. Ornish’s low-fat plan, which has been pretty well studied, has significant benefits, and doesn’t appear to have any long-term health risks. Both require the dieter to learn totally new ways of eating. Why is one so much more appealing than the other?
I still think that the largest benefit of either plan is that they significantly cut back on the amount of processed sugars that the dieter eats.
Also, there’s one other thing. I’ve heard, only anecdotally, that the effectiveness of a low-carb plan seems to increase as with the fat of the dieter–IOW, that people who start off with more fat are more likely to reach their goals (not just that people with more fat lose more fat–that wouldn’t be odd). Any backing for this?
I continue to be puzzled by people who are so completely willing to attribute weight loss from fad diets to anything other than basic physiology. There is no mysterious process at work here: eat less, exercise more, lose weight. Simple metabolic economics.
I’m not familiar with Dr. Ornish’s diet. But IME, the advantage of the Atkins diet in terms of being able to stay with it, is that you could eat as much fattening food as you want, as long as you kept the sugars and starches tightly limited.
Most diets may allow you to eat, say, all the leafy green vegetables you want. But Atkins allows you to eat all the steaks you want, and all the burgers you want - as long as you skipped the catsup and the bun. I was losing weight while eating three hefty cheeseburger patties for dinner. ‘Regular’ diets all put limits on all the food that most of us really crave. But not Atkins.
I was about 190 (about what I weigh now, and you’ve seen me lately; I could stand to lose 20 pounds, but I’d want to stop there) when I went on the Atkins diet, and I was able to get down to 175 quickly.
From DF’s quote:
Maybe it was an illusion, but I had the sensation of pigging out, all the time I was on Atkins. (I’m not kidding about those three-cheeseburger dinners.) Some diets feel like starvation, and others feel like only mild denial. But the appeal of the low-carb diets, for those of us who relish meat, cheese, eggs, and such (plenty of variation there :)), is that we can go hog-wild, and somehow we still lose weight.
And whether I’m actually consuming more calories, or simply having the sustained illusion of eating all I damned well please, it hardly matters. Other diets don’t even provide that illusion.
Fenris - I’m going to have to check out Splenda. Are there any diet sodas that use it as a sweetener?
Actually, it’s not. Far from it. There have been all kinds of scientific studies done, all over the world, for decades. Atkins cites some in his writing, the book Syndrome X is very enlightening, the other low-carb books all refer to different studies. Just because the nightly news hasn’t talked about it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
You aren’t really serious in asking this question, are you? Because if you are, I can only conclude that you are one of that tiny percentage of people on the planet who are fortunate enough to look upon food as a necessity for their survival, and nothing more. The majority of humanity is much more invested in it than that, and lumping Ornish and Atkins together as simply “learning totally new ways of eating” is just, well, wrong. Ornish is a new way of eating for most people who have real weight problems, Atkins is a modification of the way they eat already.
Human beings as a species prefer fat in their food. If this were not so, we would not eat so damn much of it. It is a built-in preference which exists because it increases our chances of survival. We also have a built-in preference for sweet food.
I am pretty familiar with the atkins diet and have done it for extended periods of time. I personally have never made any claim that there is some magical “atkins enzyme” or something. Ketosis occurs in low fat diets too, it is a byproduct of fat metabolism. I had success with atkins because the style of the diet fits my eating preferences. If I can have a soup and a sandwich or a steak I would rather go with the steak. My main problems being on the diet were time. Multiple jobs made it difficult to cook for myself to make “atkins compliant” food making it difficult to stay on the diet. I am back on now and loving it. I dont make any major effort to count my carbs because I know I can go about 55 grams a day without gaining weight. Since I got into a mode of avoiding carbs its pretty easy for me to live an under 50g carbs lifestyle. I do take 1 day a week that I eat anything I want but I dont find myself craving carbs after that. I take a generic multivitamin every day, no trick supplements.
Atkins is also not designed as a “lose 10 pounds so I look better in my swimsuit” its intended as a change in eating habits overall. Just by being more aware of your food intake it makes it easier to make educated decisions about your weight.
Quack quack quack is right. Tell Senor Beef he lost 150 pounds of water.
I lose weight eating 2000-2800 calories per day if I restrict my carbohydrates. Other people report weight loss eating 3500 calories or more. I gain or maintain eating as little as 1500 or 1600 calories a day low fat with high carbs. I know, because I count every bite. I’m not imagining it, i’m living it.
You can stop now. We heard you. We tried it. For some of us, it didn’t even work. For others of us, it worked, but we weren’t able to sustain it. So now we’re doing something that DOES work. Does that bother you?
Is there anyone else here from the South who might have encouraging words for me with respect to giving up biscuits and gravy and such? The only thing harder for me than the sugar might be the bread. Is there some substitute?
Let us remember that one single study, whatever the indication, is hardly ‘proof’ that anything works or does not work. Many of the replies to this thread have shwon that there may be other factors at work besides any ‘evolutionary attunement’.
** Lib, ** one of the benefits of the plan is that once you’ve been on it a short while (1-5 days, depending), it does a bang-up job of killing cravings for carbs.
The only diet that is truly 100% comfortable is the “eat-whatever-the-hell-you-want-and-never-gain-an-ounce” diet, which only the gentically blessed get to be on. So you have to find a way to say no to some things. Low-carb is the easiest say-no plan I’ve ever heard of.
Also, there are other ways to do low-carb. Atkins is the most severe, and generally will produce the fastest weight loss, but it’s also the toughest to maintain over the long haul. I find the lack of fruit pretty painful (but strawberries and cream helps. ) Since I can’t imagine giving any particular food group up for the rest of my life, and I absolutely must make a permanent change in order to get and stay healthy, I do a modified low-carb plan that includes the same thing that drachillix is doing. I take Sundays off. Completely. It certainly slows me down, but it keeps me sane. (Next week Sunday will fall on Thursday. I will thoroughly indulge myself in potatoes, pie and stuffing. Yum.)
You should also look into Protein Power and Carbohydrate Addicts. There’s lots of ways to make low-carb work for you, and all of them are far less painful and more sustainable than fat and calorie restriction.
And why do none of the naysayers acknowledge that aspect, by the way? The sustainability factor? Eating nothing works, but who can do that for long? Living on spinach and rice cakes would work, but who can stand it? Almost anything will work if you can make yourself do it, but if fat people were all that good at long term deprivation, they wouldn’t be fat, would they?
Was SenorBeef exercising? It certainly sounds like it because one does not generally gain muscle mass simply by dieting.
And how much exercise do you do? Because I can guarantee that if you sit on your ass (and I’m not implying that you do) after eating that many calories, even if they’re all from rice cakes, you won’t lose weight. Except maybe as a result of malnutrition.
All the Atkins diet provides is an alternate method of calorie reduction. Many have cited higher energy levels, which I would guess translates to higher activity levels as well. Net effect: calories out > calories in, resulting in real weight loss (as opposed to water loss).
There is certainly nothing to indicate it is “healthier” than any other form of diet (and there is, in fact, much concern over health effects later in life resulting from a high-fat diet). It simply caters to peoples’ love of fatty foods. But don’t be misled by the belief that it is because you are specifically eating fats and proteins (while excluding or limiting carbohydrates) that you are losing weight.
) Since I can’t imagine giving any particular food group up for the rest of my life, and I absolutely must make a permanent change in order to get and stay healthy, I do a modified low-carb plan that includes the same thing that drachillix is doing. I take Sundays off. Completely. It certainly slows me down, but it keeps me sane. (Next week Sunday will fall on Thursday. I will thoroughly indulge myself in potatoes, pie and stuffing. Yum.)