They seem to work better than many diets for a little quick weight off, like if you need to lose 10# or even more. They are just as worthless as any “diet’ in keeping the weight off.
However, that being said, let us say you really wanted to get back in shape, exercise, eating right and so forth. If so, then a ‘quick start” with 6 months of low carb could really work.
DSeid makes some good points.
This brings up a related observation; the “standard” 2,000 calorie diet is actually 1,985 calories according to the RDA guidelinesfor fat (585 calories), protein (200 calories) and carbs (1,200 calories); the latter includes fiber, which isn’t digested and therefore the actual number of calories in a “2,000 calorie” diet is 1,885 calories, and that doesn’t say anything about protein (which, if removed, would mean 1,685 calories of actual food energy, although as DSeid explained, proteins are used for muscle growth and repair but are also being recycled; you can increase protein stores by eating more and building muscle but that isn’t a preferred way to store energy, your body will convert excess protein to fat).
I did. See Post #9. I see you have since “gotten” it. Good.
I was only discussing the balance between calories in and calories out. Calories out is widely variable, based on attributes like activity, size, and metabolic rate.
My understanding is that “starvation mode” is wildly over stated. Say someone needs 2000 calories/day to live “normally”. What could the body do to save calories? Some ideas come to mind, like dropping internal body temperature or reducing muscle. However, this isn’t going to magically drop calorie usage to 1000 calories/day.
Agreed.
Remember though that we are talking about more than the very short term of 4 days, and that Total Energy Expended (TEE) is the the sum of basal metabolic rate (BMR), digestion and subsequent processing of food [thermic effect of food (TEF)], thermoregulation
and activity energy expenditure (AEE). The BMR is usually the largest componant but AEE is the most variable. AEE is partly that which is due to that which gets labelled as exercise, and partly that which gets labelled as “Spontaneous Physical Activity” (SPA) or “Non-exercise activity thermogenesis” (NEAT). See here for details.
There is also some interesting work that suggests those prone to obesity are less likely to compensate for an overfeeding state with increases in NEAT than those not so prone.
So while “starvation mode” may indeed be overstated, the body’s metabolic adaptations on the energy out side are very real. NEAT alone varies from 15 to 50% of TEE; it can vary by over 1500 KCal between similarly sized individuals.
Put simply “what does a body do?” Over time (longer than the stress reaction forst several days) it lowers BMR and to a greater degree it does not move as much when not exercising.
And since the suitability of a “low carb” diet for the op’s purposes has been pretty roundly agreed upon, allow me get some reaction here to an article that gives me some pause. I say pause because my bias has been that a nutrition plan relatively high in protein (20 to 30%) is a good idea.
From your link:
So the sources of the carbs and proteins are important.
My wife went from 145 lbs to 116 lbs over the course of four months by basically avoiding breads, pasta and fat. From my understanding it is a lot like the Paleo Diet.
Indeed; that study notes that meat raises the risk of CVD, but a large meta-analysis (1.2 million people across 20 studies) found no such link - except for processed meat. In fact, the study (posted by DSeid) even says:
Well, of course; few people would ever say that bacon is part of a healthy diet, or a doughnut.
The authors speculate that the source matters (at least animal vs plant, no analysis attempted visavis processed foods) but they found only some “suggesion” that such was true.
Honestly I was surprised. Yes it is possible that high protein low carb correlated with more processed meats consumption while high carb low protein did not correlate with high amounts of similarly harmful processing, but such seems like a little bit of a stretch to me.
Well, it also has to be taken into account that the study involved just 43,000 women, while the meat study I linked to involved multiple studies (20) adding up to 1.2 million men and women. And of course, the one I have previously cited about dairy (an animal protein source) actually reducing CVD risk (also involving a very large number of people over numerous studies, with the number of studies being just as important, since one bad study wouldn’t throw the conclusions off as much). And anyway, what in animal protein, which has the same amino acids, would make it harmful to health? What about groups like the Inuit and others (not just those who ate fish; see the Paleo diet) who enjoyed relatively low rates of CVD until they started eating a Western diet?
Another possibility is that even unprocessed meat may contain preservatives according to this more detailed discussion on the study I mentioned above:
Not “contains preservatives”, but “50 percent more preservatives” (so does this mean that a “100% beef/no preservatives” label, and/or nothing other than meat listed in the ingredients, isn’t telling the truth?).
Ignore this reading as impedence body fat measurements basically don’t work.
As to low/no carb diets, these work for three relatively obvious reasons:
(1) Your body needs a certain amount of protein and fat to operate correctly. Assuming you are relatively close to consuming the correct levels of these nutrients, all that’s left to cut are carbs.
(2) Most junk food is high in carbs. Ice cream, cookies, chips, candy, and basically anything most people snack on is high in carbs. If you cut these out you are going to reduce your calorie intake which will lead to weight loss.
(3) Lean protein has some of the highest satiation to calorie ratio of food. 400 calories of chicken breast is going to leave people feeling fuller than 400 calories of cookies or cheese.
I’m generally dubious of any claims about altering biochemistry. Anything that results in a less efficient use of calories would be heavily selected against from an evolutionary perspective. While I’ll acknowledge the possibility, you need to have some damn good evidence that something is happening.
What made it a miracle cure in my case (and I realize this is personal, and may vary, but also fairly typical) is that the diet in itself acted as an appetite suppressant, so I ate a lot smaller portions and lost all cravings for snacks and junk food. So I wound up eating a lot less and a lot healthier with virtually no effort.
I agree mostly. I think a large part of why low carb works is thay so many snack foods are carb based. Once you cut them out, what do you have left? Beef jerky?
And, it appears, gut flora may have a big impact. I haven’t read the study but this shows we really have a lot to learn about how the body extracts energy and utilizes calories.
Maybe that muffin does have a different effect on you than it does on me.
I can’t access the full study, but the abstract says:
If I’m reading that right, the abundance of bacteria was independent of weight change, which seems to be a rather big blow to a cause/effect relationship.
As I said before, there are two pretty big arguments against a biologic cause for current obesity rates.
(1) If people are obese due to biology, then it means thin people are that way due to biology. Which means for some reason thin people can’t put on fat stores in a time of abundance. This would be selected very, very strongly against by evolution and likely would be weeded out of the population.
(2) It doesn’t explain why Obesity rates have risen dramatically over the last 30 years around the world. It’s extremely unlikely that such a significant genetic or biologic change has happened so rapidly across such a broad population.
By far the simplest explanation is that food availability and lifestyle cause the majority of cases of obesity. Any other explanation has to bring some really good evidence.
There are always people who claim to never gain weight regardless of what they eat, but I wonder how much off that is due to them not actually eating as much as they think, or exercising/NEATing it off (and of course there’s the opposite, but again probably due to eating more calories than they need).
For the interested, we’ve had a brief thread on interaction of various gut microbiomes on obesity before, provoked by an observation that use of anitbiotics in infancy is correlated with later obesity risk. The Economist article cited and linked to there is the most accessible of the reviews linked to even if it does imply more than the current research completely supports.
It is a bit of a complex subject being teased out. Without question though gut microbiomes change with obesity to weight loss and different biomes transplanted transfer a predisposition to thinness or fatness.
My attempted summary of some of the more detailed literature I cited in that thread was this:
Meanwhile Tries, looking around you and the paucity of thin people, the relatively few people who are completely resistant to our obesiogenic environment, the conclusion that such resistance was subject to a strong evolutionary pressure to be selected against is quite well suppported. That said it likely is not so simple.
You are completely correct however: changes in food availability (and type) and lifestyle … what gets labelled an obesiogenic enviroment … is the major factor. The evidence that that environment effects different people differently based on genetics, epigentics, microbiome, early life and even prenatal experiences, etc. is also indisputable.
I don’t think you are reading that right. I can’t access the full article but I think the point they are making is that the change in gut flora occurs before major weight loss (i.e. weight loss is not the cause of the change in gut flora)
Also from the abstract: