Are you eating low in fat as well as low in carbs? If so I’d bet a lot of money (if I had it) that’s the entire reason you’ve been feeling poorly. Especially if you don’t have a lot of body fat to lose. All weight loss diets are high-fat diets.Most weight loss regimens, which involve cutting down calories, or fats or carbohydrates in particular, will make you miserable - even ill - once you run out of body fat to live off.
Humans have to get most of their calories from either fat or carbs - we don’t do well at all trying to live on protein. If you can’t have carbs, you must eat fat in order to get enough food. Please do so your own sake!
I hope that, along with the book, you have also read criticisms of the book, because there are plenty of them out there.
There are a few warning bells when I started reading it:
The author never refers to himself as an expert in diet or nutrition, and positively sneers at “experts”.
The author says that the entirety of science and government is ignoring all that obvious evidence.
The author makes several conclusions that are quite transparently correlation, not causation.
The book follows the format of lots of self-help or “miracle” books by building up its argument before actually commencing the argument - this will “change your life” if you just take into account what the book says, it’s awesome, wonderful, you’ve never heard anything like it. When the modern scientific community actually listens to the author’s message the world will change! Then in chapter three (or whatever) it may go into specifics.
Honestly it reads like a load of tripe, but people do fall for that garbage, so there you go.
Wow, if I had the belief that we should never feel hungry, I’d weigh a hell of a lot more than I do now. Did hunger tolerance end up making things easier for you to cope with? Being hungry isn’t that big of a deal to me most of the time, but I can imagine it sucking a lot more if you usually ate at the first sign of hunger.
I don’t know specifically about how Stoid reacts to hunger, but we are both ADD, so I think this is relevant. Being ADD is probably one of the biggest problems I have with losing weight because being hungry is distracting. When I’m in a situation where I need to focus on what I’m doing, that is an extra level of stress that I just don’t need, and often can’t afford.
When I was laid off for a year, I lost fifteen pounds. A lot of that was access to healthier snack options, not wanting to spend money on eating out and more activity, but some of it was definitely because I was not stress eating.
Thanks for your concern - yes, I’m eating enough fat. I learned early on that fat is a scapegoat - my nutritionist told me point blank, ‘‘fat doesn’t make you fat, sugar makes you fat.’’ Obviously if you’re eating too much fat, fat can make you fat, but sugar doesn’t send those same ‘‘I’m full’’ signals and can trick you into thinking you need to eat more.
Yes, practicing hunger tolerance made it a LOT easier to cope with being hungry. I was really helped tremendously by that book (The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain To Think Like a Thin Person) in dealing with stress eating and hunger panic and all that other emotional/impulsive stuff that often takes over dietary choices. A lot of the battle is psychological, and unless you arm yourself cognitively I think it’s a losing one.
Of course, now I’m supposed to be eating 6 small meals a day and am never hungry. I now have the opposite problem and am struggling to get in more than 1200 calories a day, which just isn’t working with my intended workout regimen. Eventually I just got used to eating less and I think it’s part of the reason I feel so crappy.
Yes, I was aware, very aware - just not aware of the degree to which the facts have actually been proven and makes sense in light of the complicated and specific ways that the body actually works, which I was also not familiar with. That was the revelation in it.
Do any of them include refutations of the science? Because if they don’t, they are completely worthless.
Battle the facts. As he repeatedly states: the scientific facts are not in dispute. So if you or anyone else disagrees and can show that they are, by all means bring it.
I really hope you read the book carefully and start to see what works for you. I think you’ll end up doing very well once you figure out what you need.
OK, Stoid, I’m completely 100% with you that what you eat may be key. It may be THE most important factor. And I know for a fact that an obese person is not likely to permanently get thin on sheer willpower alone. But you contradict yourself, even within this one post, about what it is that makes people fat. In your first paragraph, you state:
[QUOTE=Stoid]
…carbs make us fat, not excess calories.
[/QUOTE]
Then, in your second paragraph, you say that the book explains the biological processes that drive fat people to eat more or move less or both. Which is an admission that it IS, in fact, excess calories that make people fat.
In addition, you have stated over and over that you had a compulsive eating problem for years, which while it may be under control and not a causative factor for why you can’t lose weight, is certainly the reason that you are overweight to begin with. Gluttony is an ugly word, that implies an intent that isn’t there. Compulsive eating is a lot more descriptive of the psychological issue that may be going on, but what you call it doesn’t make you any more or less overweight…in the end, it’s all overeating.
Dissing Gary Taubes’ books without actually going to the trouble of reading them is wrong. When people try to describe the books, they often come across as foolishly faddish. They’re not. Start with Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s about how our accepted ideas on diet came about, and what the science is behind the studies that have been done. Taubes is a highly respected science journalist who wrote Good Calories, Bad Calories as an expansion of an article he wrote for the New York Times. He has a firm science background. From Wikipedia:
He’s not a faddist. He spent something like 5 years researching Good Calories, Bad Calories, and has 100 pages of endnotes in it. He pored over literally hundreds of actual studies, trying to determine whether the conclusions reached were actually borne out by the evidence. In many cases, they were not. He has a real issue with poorly designed diet studies, and begs for better, randomized controlled trials.
The main point of his book is that much more scientific study on diet needs to be done. From a review on Amazon:
Yes, but not so much excess calories as excess carbs.
It’s well known that Type 1 diabetics who don’t produce insulin can’t gain weight at all, no matter how much they gorge. Without enough insulin, they will continue to lose weight. In non-diabetics, keeping the insulin levels low enables us to eat varying amounts of food and still keep our weight at an equilibrium. Too much insulin, and the food we eat will become body fat.
What Taubes says is that obesity is a problem of fat storage. With the right foods, people will not store excess fat, even when eating well over the number of calories that is supposed to be the correct amount. Eating carbs causes too much insulin and insulin-related growth factor to circulate, which causes the body to burn carbs and store fat, instead of burning the fat. It also makes you crave more carbs to produce more insulin.
No, it isn’t. Not if you read the book, which explains that fat people “overeat” in the same sense that a growing child “overeats”: they are growing, so their body tells them to eat more to accommodate the growth. They don’t grow because they eat so much, they eat so much because they grow, and the same thing applies to fat people -the fact that it’s fat that is growing vs. bone and muscle makes no difference. READ THE FREAKING BOOK.
And at no point in any of this have I said that emotional eating is a fantasy. It’s not. People can turn to food as a means of pinging their pleasure receptors in the brain, and they can behave addictiely around it (particularly and specifically carbohydrates!). I havent’ denied it and I’m not now. But that’s behavior, not fat accumulation! I know and have known lots of people who over eat and eat crap and never get fat.
The issue at hand is that the body isn’t receving signals that it’s full, before it eats more than it needs. I can go through a whole freekin’ bag of Doritos (carbs) and still hunt around for more. Those Utz Cheeseballs from Costco in the jar bigger than my head? Same way.
Or I can have a single egg, and a small chunk of cheese, and be full from 7am til 10am. Eat a small snack at 10, a small lunch at noon, another snack at 2, and dinner…and not feel appreciably hungry.
Then at 7pm think “I’m hungry”…then think AGAIN “No, I’m not. I’m bored. Find something to do.”
Daily Calorie Intake: 1400-1600 calories.
OR
I can have a doughnut for breakfast, a 600 calorie Macciato, overeat for lunch (at ANY restaurant, all portion sizes are too big), A snickers in the afternoon, A Martini when I get home (450 calories), A hungryman Dinner, and a low fat Ice Cream for dessert.
Daily Calorie intake: 3500
Do EITHER for a period of time and I GUARANTEE your weight will change.
You’ve hit on part, but not all of it. It’s more complex, in that it’s more than simply your body not getting the message that it’s full, it’s also about what the carbs are genuinely doing in your body, in your cells, that’s driving you to eat, not simply failing to tell you you’re full. And once more: it’s not the fact that you’re being driven to eat more calories that’s making you fat. You’re fat and getting fatter, so you’re being driven to eat more calories.
Calories are not the issue, and if you cannot imagine how that might be possible, then get the book and go straight to Chapter 4: teh Significance of Twenty Calories a Day. Then read the rest of the book. From that chapter:
I again strongly encourage anyone who has a weight issue to read it themselves. The information is comprehensive. Reading it won’t stop you from wanting the donuts and bread and potatoes, that’s still your challenge, and it’s not a minor one. But you will be armed with a far better understanding of what’s going on in your body, and when you start to make changes, the response you get will make more sense to you.
And if you don’t have the time or inclination to get the book today, follow my link a few posts up to the Youtube video of the vegetarian Stanford research who found it a “bitter pill to swallow” that low carb was the only diet that actually seemed to work, and which also made statistically significant differences in LDL, HDL, triglycerides, and blood pressure.
Oh…I just found on my hard drive the original 2002 NYT article that was the jumping off point for Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories, which was the heavier version of of Why We Get Fat. If anyone wants it, PM me and I’ll email it to you.
I haven’t read it myself, but I was just glancing at it, and back then even Taubes himself was still thinking that total calories counted, while recognizing the carb problem. His research for the book changed that, for sure. And I found this as part of it, in relation to my response above:
and here’s a few tidbits referencing how it happened that THE TRUTH got ignored while the LIES became “well-accepted”:
:eek:
Hey now, that’s some impressive scientific inquiry!
Ah, if only…
And as for all of this being some “new fad” that people mindlessly embrace:
I don’t want to anger the copyright gods, so PM me…
I havent’ committed to low-carb yet: I’ve invested too much money in the food I have in my house! I can’t really afford to throw it all out and start from scratch. But I’m beginning the turn in that direction…
It’s not easy, as I’ve said repeatedly. I just hope I get some solid results quickly once I’m fully committed, and I’m sending prayers to the Food Gods that a relatively mellow program of carb reduction is possible for me, because Atkins induction-level carb restriction is tough going.
Taubes said in his book something I really respected as more honest than you usually see regarding losing cravings, and that is, if it’s really necessary for a person to avoid carbs entirely in order to avoid triggering addictive behavior, that it takes 12 to 18 months to genuinely change that desire, which sounds much more believable to me than the usual 6 weeks/21 days/90 days that you hear for killing cravings. I just don’t find myself forgetting how much I LURVE nutmeg cake and handmade tortillas after a few weeks of going without!
I think animal domestication pre-dates plant, especially grain, vs. vegetables. And if you have ever seen the Masai or the Mongols squirting milk directly from the udders of goats and cows, you can see how dairy probably came first.
I can confirm that I have a lot fewer cravings now that I eat better.
I used to do a lot of restless kitchen searches. You know, you go into the kitchen, open the frig, open the cabinets, looking for something. I don’t do that anymore.
I have reduced (but not eliminated) carbs in my daily life. When I do eat them, it’s nearly always complex carbohydrates (whole grains, corn, beans, sweet potato, etc). I don’t have to give them up completely, because I have apparently found the right amount for me.
My whole life, I thought I had a problem with food, I was an overeater, a binger. I was fat. I found out almost by accident that I only have a problem with some foods. When I made a decision to eat more whole foods back in 2004, I pretty much gave up empty carbs by accident. And it was like a miracle happened for me. I had more energy, I quit binging, I quit craving. After 20 years of being fat and struggling to lose weight, I lost weight easily and have kept it off ever since.
If you had told me 7 years ago that I would live without chips, pretzels, scones, muffins, cookies, I would have thought you were insane. Those were my favorite foods! Turns out, it’s easy for me to live without them.
:eek: