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I did excercise strenuously, but towards the end, I took a week or two off from the strenuous excercise, and still low carbed. I still lost 2-3 pounds a week, and I was only 30-40 pounds overweight by that time. Of course, with excercise, it was more like 6-7.
As for the rest of the post, I learned this stuff years ago, and I never had a degree in biology, so forgive, and feel free to correct, any technical errors.
I think you all might be looking at this the wrong way. Low carbing doesn’t provide a magical way to lose weight so much as provides a way for the body to fix itself after mistreatment through a ‘normal’ diet.
Insulin is known as the master hormone because it controls lots of bodily functions, not just blood sugar levels.
In a normal civilized diet in a society with agriculture and processed foods, we consume an ungodly amount of carbs compared to what we’d see in a natural environment. The fact that insulin controls many different biological processes means that it has to be kept in a certain range for everything to function correctly.
The ridiculously high amount of carbs we eat requires our pancreas to output an accordingly high amount of insulin. Higher than you’d see in a natural diet (that is, whatever we’d eat without agriculture). This happens at almost every meal, year after year. And after time of being blasted with more insulin then they’d expect, day after day, year after year, the insulin receptors in cells begin to become tolerant/resistant to insulin. This is known as insulin resistance, or Syndrome X.
This forces the pancreas to release even more insulin, in order to achieve the same response in cells with insulin receptors. Which, in turn, causes the receptors to become even more tolerant, which in turn causes more insulin to be released, and so on. At the extreme, there comes a point where your insulin receptors are so tolerant of insulin that your pancreas physically can’t produce enough insulin to control blood sugar. This is how one becomes a type 2 (adult onset) diabetic.
And if insulin were only responsible for blood sugar regulation, the only risk of insulin resistance would be diabetes. But it isn’t - the master hormone is responsible for all sorts of stuff, like regulating fat storage, cholesterol production, water storage, etc.
All of the processes it regulates need to be in a certain range in order to function properly. When the blood sugar issue (insulin resistance) forces the pancreas to output insulin way out of it’s range, the other processes are accordingly overstimulated.
Insulin controls cholesterol production in the liver, or at least stimulates it. Most (something like 85%, IIRC) of the cholesterol in the body is made by the body - dietary intake is only a small factor. So eating something like speghetti all the time will spike insulin production, and hence spike internal cholesterol production - and the net result is having more excess cholesterol in your body from speghetti than from eggs. It’s funny that the “accepted” response to high cholesterol is to reduce dietary cholesterol - the tiny minority that it is - and eat foods that will spike internal cholesterol production.
This one my memory is a little sketchy about, so feel free to correct me. High amounts of insulin in the blood encourages fat storage mechanisms to go into overdrive, taking whatever energy/glucose they can find and converting them to fat, at a higher rate than you’d see without high insulin levels. It also makes the body less likely to use fat stores as energy, IIRC, but I can’t recall the actual mechanism.
High insulin levels also encourage the kidneys to hold onto excessive amounts of water - more than they’re really designed to store. This, among other things, puts some pressure on the blood vessel system, encouraging high blood pressure.
Anyway, there are more effects of out of whack insulin, but those are the big ones I can think of at the moment.
Essentially, what I’m trying to say is, with a normal ‘civilized’ diet, with lots of processed foods and ridiculously high carb intake, forces the body to operate out of it’s normal range of operation. Over time, the problem becomes worse and worse (due to increasing insulin resistance), and so we get fatter, have more cholesterol in our blood, higher blood pressure, and eventually some of us get diabetes (depends on the degree of genetic predisposition towards insulin resistance as well as lifetime dietary habits).
And so the Atkin’s diet isn’t just a matter of eating less, but it actually corrects all these problems. We’re designed (by evolution or God if you’d prefer) to store a good amount of fat, in case of famine, but we’re not designed to become really obese, and of course none of the other problems that come with insulin resistance. So when you begin to feed your body the sort of food it was designed to work around, it loses the ‘burden’ of operating at high insulin levels, and simply begins to correct itself. If you’re 20-30 pounds overweight, you’ll probably stay the same or lose slowly, because it’s natural to be at least a bit overweight (by chart standards), but if you’re 100-200 pounds overweight, you’ll lose weight like crazy, because that’s an unnatural condition.
The body no longer has out of whack insulin to cause excess cholesterol production, and so your body produces a healthy amount of cholesterol, and dietary intake is pretty much irrelevant. In my case, I went from, IIRC, over 320 cholesterol to 180, with improvement in HDL levels. My triglycerides, IIRC, went from about 700 to 50.
The body no longer stores all that excess water (and there’s another mechanism I’m forgetting), and so blood pressure levels out.
The body no longer sends the fat cells signals to collect all the fat they can, and so you find it easier to lose the weight.
In my experiences, not only did I drastically lose weight, but I became physically better in every imaginable way. I could not get sick - I even tried taking long walks in cold rain and stuff just to get sick, to test my immune system. I had a lot more energy and endurance - and this is within 3-4 days of starting low carbing, not after I’ve been working out for weeks. I gained muscle faster than I would’ve otherwise, my blood lipids went from horrible to perfect, I was almost never sore (and I worked out a LOT), even my mind seemed to function better.
This is consistent with the idea, to me, that our body is completely out of whack due to our unnatural diets. Low carbing allows the body to have the proper fuel and proper insulin ranges, and it nearly instantly begins to correct all of the conditions that the unnatural diet induces.
So, as I said, I don’t think the atkins is a magical way to lose weight, so much that we really fuck up our bodies with what’s considered normal eating habits, and low carbing allows the problems created that way to be fixed.
And so I don’t think it’s merely a “less calories, more excercise” thing - but other biological things are at work which allow one to lose weight, improve blood lipids and blood pressure, etc. disproportionately (or in contradiction) to what normal calorie in/calorie out methods would tell us.
Longest. Post. Ever.
Btw, this is the second time I was writing this - stupid IE erased my first draft :(. I was frustrated when I wrote this one, so it’s a bit shorter and probably less well written than my first. Sorry.
Feel free to ask anything or make any corrections to what I said.