Uh, sorry 'bout that. Mine was a typo that I didn’t catch until I had already submitted.
:smack:
I could have written this entire post. I’d get those sugar crashes at 10:00 am and 3:00 pm and 8:00 pm, where I felt like I could just fall on the floor and go to sleep. And I was hungry. I’d eat, and have coffee. I was killing myself, in a way. I was up to 250-something. I started on Atkins, and eventually got down to 170. I ate mostly chicken, fish and veggies. I have regular meals, and keep refined white sugar and excess carbs out of my diet. Sure, I splurge every now and then, but I’ve completely changed the way I eat.
I don’t think that people who’ve tried doing a low-carb diet correctly think it’s easy. In fact, it’s not easy. I tried South Beach for a week because, well, I figured that I can’t knock something 'til I’ve tried it. So I tried it, and, in addition to making me exhausted, it just didn’t make sense to me.
I mean, after reading the South Beach book and checking out the Atkins Web site, it seemed that the “lifestyle” phase of both diets was fairly consistent with a diet any physician would recommend - heavy on the vegetables, not quite so heavy on the fruits, eat only whole grains, and lean meats and dairy (though, if I recall correctly, Atkins actually earned its reputation as an extraordinarily fatty diet because, originally, fatty meats and whole-fat cheeses were in the “eat all you want” category).
In the end, it didn’t make sense to buy into it because, other than the induction and maintaining weight loss phases, it just seemed to point me back in the same direction any other doctor would have: try not to eat much sugar or refined foods and eat lots of veggies. Now retailers have further bastardized these diets by offering low-carb versions of foods that ought to be on anyone’s “limited intake” list anyway.
Seriously - and I’m sorry if I’m hijacking this thread - am I missing something big about these diets? Wouldn’t any physician say, “Hey, eat more veggies, and cut back on the sugar and white flour?”
As a post-op gastric bypass patient, I’ll argue that last sentence. But that’s for another thread 
I will say that as said patient, I do appreciate low-carb foods at this time because they do help me manage my allowed foods.
That being said, some things should be left alone and I did try low-carb pasta before my surgery. I hated it. I’d frankly rather not have it than use that as a substitute.
VCNJ~
I totally agree. Proper diet, and proper exercise are ESSENTIAL. And really, it’s not the phrase itself that I hate so much, as the attitude of so many that “it’s just THAT simple morons (snap snap)”.
No, not you, and not most in this thread, who seem to be reasonable thinking beings who underSTAND that within that change has to come attention to education on HOW to eat right and exercise right, but just as importantly, get to the emotional reasons people overeat in the first place.
As a fitness instructor, it always amazes me that even fit young women (slim merely because they’re metabolism has not yet slowed and the starve/binge thing has worked for them so far) know very little about nutrition.
Such as, an apple IS a carbohydrate. A lot of people think that carbs are cakes, cookies and the like PERIOD.
That so many uneducated people (frequently those raised by obese parents who never taught them and are now themselves on the way to obesity), don’t realize that there is a LOT of successful area between cakes, burgers, pizza and ice cream every day, and having to subsist on lettuce and other rabbit food, never ever to taste a single morsal of chocolate again.
That like the above, so many think that “exercise more” means hours upon hours at the gym.
That it takes many, many weeks of the proper type, amount and intensity of exercise (and too much is just a detrimental to success as too little) to see VISIBLE results.
The refrain among most obese people is “I’ve tried everything, and nothing works”. And to tell someone who truly HAS tried everything “Oh, eat less, exercise more, it’s THAT simple” is really an insult.
There truly ARE a lot of people who don’t think “it” (where it is exercising and dieting) works, because they worked out and starved for 3 weeks and didn’t lose a pound or an inch.
Right, that’s it takes a LOT of discipline, tweaking, readjusting and most of all, patience. For a lot of people, especially females over thirty who are significantly overweight and have a history of yo-yoing, it is somewhere around 2 months before they see OUTWARDLY visible results (that doesn’t mean nothing is happening, it just means that the scale hasn’t moved, and the pants haven’t gotten any less tight). And that, to the uneducated (fitness wise) can mean “I’ve tried everything and nothing works”.
To these people, this mantra is just adding insult to injury. Yeah, with SOME people a kick in the ass works, but human nature being what it is, for far more of these people education and mostly patience and understanding, and getting to the root of WHY they overeat is going to be more effective.
And lastly, this is just my own opinion, not factual. I think that our whole society has WAY too damn much emphasis on the workaholic thing, in my observation, and humble opinion, that has a lot to do with our country’s obesity epidemic.
But isn’t it pretty much a universal truth that everybody who has lost weight in a non-surgical way has done it primarily, or even exclusively, by following the mantra of “eat right, exercise more”?
Many people will say it’s not that simple, but it is. The problem seems to be that people tend to misunderstand the mantra. That doesn’t make the mantra wrong; it makes the people who thought they tried it (but in reality, didn’t) wrong in their assumption that they really did try it.
Take a hypothetical. A 30-something woman with a history of yo-yo dieting tries a severe starvation diet couple with extreme exercise. After a month of torture, she gives up, and gains back more than she started with.
Later that year, she consults a physician and nutritionist, who put her on a reasonable diet and exercise regimen that fits much more readily into her lifestyle. After keeping with it for a year, (because it was much easier to maintain), she has lost the 30 pounds she wanted to and feels great about herself.
In this hypothetical, the holy grail of weght loss for her was indeed the simple mantra of “eat right, exercise more”, which worked like a charm as expected. What didn’t work was her misinterpretation of that mantra. Her bastardized concept of it certainly didn’t work, but that doesn’t mean the mantra itself was flawed; her understanding was.
Just like if somebody wanted to learn about theoretical physics, and was told to “study hard”, and they spent a year studying as hard as they could about romance languages, you can’t really fault the mantra of “study hard” for the failure.
I would say even the surgical patients lost weight this way, as the point of gastric bypass surgery is to shrink the usable size of the stomach to the point where tiny tiny quantities of food is all that can be eaten.
I think the point is that it’s simple but not easy.
Well, I certainly never said it was easy. I think the ‘idea’ of Atkins (don’t eat carbs, eat as much fatty food as you want) is relatively easy to follow, but that true Atkins is hard (as any diet is hard).
I just think the ‘myth’ that you can be healthy and a healthy weight just by following a diet is what’s killing folks. Diet alone is not enough to change you from a non-healthy to a healthy person, period. People need exercise.
I totally agree. Atkins and South Beach wouldn’t work for me. What does work for me is exercise. There are some people, though, who may have reached the point where they can’t exercise until they lose weight. I’d like to think those people are few and far between, but that’s just it - I’d like to think that, but it’s probably not as true now as it used to be.
My whole point is, though, that every time I knock a low-carb diet, a lot of people come back at me yelling, “It’s NOT all about meat and cheese! I eat mostly veggies, and eventually I DO add carbs back - they’re just not refined ones.” Okay, so I read the book, and what the book brings you back to after all those phases is a point where you’re eating exactly what you’re supposed to be eating anyway. So the gimick seems to be in the first three phases.
Also, like CanvasShoes, it drives me nuts that the word “carbs” is being bandied about like it is. Everything with the exception of meat has some sort of carbohydrate contained within it. It’s something I was taught in public school during the third grade. Broccoli has complex carbs in it, plus lots of cellulose, fiber, and gum, which makes it harder for your stomach to digest, which is why eating broccoli will make you feel fuller longer than a piece of bread. A piece of white bread also contains carbs, but many of those carbs are simple carbohydrates that break down faster, leave your stomach more quickly, and leave you feeling hungry far faster than the piece of broccoli.
I’m one of those people who yells at you when you knock the low-carb diets. It worked very well for me, and I have to defend it when I see it bashed or misrepresented. Sorry 'bout that.
And yes, I’m also sick to death of seeing “LO-CARB” bandied about. I’ve even seen it in a sugar-free cough drop ad now. :rolleyes:
Quite right, that. I was thinking more along the lines of liposuction, but in re-reading my post in context in the thread, it sounds like I’m talking about gastric bypass. Good catch. (Gastric bypass does indeed involve eating less.)
Rick: Redneck rumaki sounds like a grilled orgasm. I love jalapeno poppers, and that just sounds so much better.
[hijack] recipe for Redneck Rumaki AKA Atomic Buffalo Turds
Note: You can also just cut off the top of the pepper, and hollow it out.
Any meat can be used, beef, pork, shrimp little smokies, whatever you got.
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This is exactly it, though. What pisses me off is not people who are sincerely making an effort to lose weight but all these weird foods and misleading ads.
I just gets these visions of someone eating heaps and heaps of “low carbs” strange pasta and making sure there’s no gasp carbs in their cough drops and then thinking they will lose weight.
It’s such a screwed up relation to food that is being promoted by companies jumping the bandwagon. I really do believe that it’s completely possible to cook healthy food that is very tasty (with or without “carbs” as you choose) without all this strange and pointless foodstuffs.
I’ve seen it when I was sharing house, where people were obsessing about “carbs” and eating lo-carb ready meals that looked just horrid and were expensive. Then they would often fall off the wagon and get chips later as they hadn’t really had a proper meal. I was thinking if they only learned to cook a nice meal for themselves, nothing fancy, like some pasta with some veg and ENJOY it that would be so much easier and nicer then this carb counting business.
That’s a different thing from Atkins working for someone personally as a way of cutting out stuff that’s perhaps not helping. In my opinion it’s not the most pleasant or healthy way of doing it, but I can see how that could work for some. I just object to people having no notion about food and then buying all this “low-carb” crap and someone thinking that this is somehow “scientifcally” going to burn fat off them. Then the manufacturors jump the bandwagon, produce and market the stuff and someone who just want to cook an tasty dish like tomato soup with beans and pasta finds their soup pasta replaced by low carb cardboard.
Come on. Really, how often does this happen, if it ever does? I was shopping yesterday. Yes, I saw a couple of brands of ‘low carb’ pasta. There also were about 12 linear feet of at least a dozen brands and a zillion individual shapes.
The low-carb stuff is an ‘add-on’, not a replacement. Even if we ever see the ultimate horror – a low-carb twinkie! – it will be on a shelf with the regular versions right beside it.
All in all, there must be twenty special ‘low fat’ varieties of foods for every one ‘low carb’ offering. Why don’t you lay off the Atkin dieters for a while and carp at those on the no-fat bandwagon?
As I wasn’t making it up, it happened at least once. I’m guessing you might be in the States where supermarkets are enormous and offer a huge amount of choice, but my local supermarket is really quite small and they really do have to take things off the shelves to make room for other things. There also was no fresh Parmesan cheese at all this week due to Christmas cheese selections. Nothing to do with Atkins, of course, but it just goes to show that I’m not exaggerating.
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All in all, there must be twenty special ‘low fat’ varieties of foods for every one ‘low carb’ offering. Why don’t you lay off the Atkin dieters for a while and carp at those on the no-fat bandwagon?
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I personally feel low fat makes a little more sense in the weight loss/health field, though I’m not keen on those either and don’t buy them. I prefer a smaller portion of the “normal” food, than a larger one of the low fat food. I feel it is possible to cook healthy and tasty food using “normal” food varieties.
Even though I am annoyed at finding my pasta gone, the underlying point is really this idea that we need all this weirdness to be thin rather than enjoying cooking and eating well. I don’t pick my food for health reasons but the majority of it is healthy because most healthy food tastes really good. No really, it does.
Of course chips, chocolate and the like and great and tempting to snack on, which I won’t pretend I do not do. What I’m saying is that I believe it to be better to cook a lovely meal with “normal” food, than to eat low fat crisps or drink low carb beer because normal food would be “bad for you”.
Ah, okay. Yes, American, and the ‘local’ grocery store is a Super Stop & Shop, with an obscene variety of anything you want to name on offer.
To the point of overkill. Do we REALLY need to have cans of coke in 6/12/18/25 packs? All sizes in reg w/caf, reg w/o caf, diet w/car, diet w/o caf? And, of course, some of those are duplicated to factor in lemon or lime or cherry or vanilla flavors on top of that. Which gives us…16 choices, unless you want to contemplate horrors such as Vanilla/Cherry/diet/no caf…