Nutrition, Diet and Low Carb diets

In My Humble Opinion
1

I am trying really hard to understand how diets work or don’t, and what is happening chemically to the body under various circumstances. I’ll detail the “facts” I think I know, and ask to be corrected where wrong, and add some questions perhaps. The more I read, the more contradictory information I see and the more confusing it gets. I’d like to “try” to separate fact from fiction.

Conventional wisdom for the overweight is, the human body burns x number of calories per day. If the human body takes in less calories than it burns, it is bound to lose weight. This is obvious and logical.

Additionally, fat does a lot of bad things to the human body, therefore reduce your fat intake. Ditto for cholesterol.

Somewhat conventional wisdom is that the above does not go deep enough in it’s analysis. Of course the body won’t add “weight” if you consume fewer calories than you burn. But as anyone who has dieted knows, you feel hungry on a low calorie diet. Therefore, sooner or later, you will go back to a normal lifestyle. But you will be in for a surprise when you do. Because a low calorie diet causes you to lose both fat and muscle. But unless you are producing a fair amount of growth hormone, which you probably are not, you will gain back almost pure fat. So you may weigh the same as you did before and look worse, or gain even more weight back for some reason…

The only way to somewhat alleviate this side effect is to exercise. If you do aerobic exercise (running, biking, swimming stuff that makes you really sweat), then you will burn more fat than muscle. You may even somewhat build muscle, but not too much.

If your exercise is anaerobic, ie, in the form of weight lifting, it’s even better. Why? Because every pound of extra muscle you have in your body burns fat hour after hour even at rest.

If that is how you lost your weight, WHEN you stop exercising and gain it back, your body may look better than it did before you started exercising. So at least it didn’t harm you…Although you will gain back almost pure fat, and you will lose some muscle due to lack of exercise, you may also keep ome of that extra muscle and wind up with more muscle than you had before you started exercising…

In summary, conventional wisdom certainly does not make you lose weight over the long term, and although exercise is worthwhile over the long haul, you are probably better off not dieting than dieting, although you may lose weight in the short term.

If you go to the booksore, you will see tons of diet books. Virtually all of them share the diets of conventional wisdom in that they only work for the short term. Some of them are low calorie in principle and the same rules apply to them as the paragraphs above. Others result in water loss which does not help in the long term. They espouse all kinds of fancy ideas, but at the end of the day, it is low-calorie based or water loss. And the worst are those that offer quick weight loss, because besides being water loss, they are short term and may even be very dangerous…

What is sad about these books is that the authors are well aware of what they are doing, but they are doing it for the money. They don’t believe it for a minute and probably know enough about nutrition to put in some fancy words to fool a lot of people.

So when I heard over the years of the Atkins diet, I thought it was another one of these gimmicks. And I ignored it. Until a few days ago when someone recommended a book called Protein Power. This was writen by a couple, they are Dr.s and one is a Chemist too. They specialize in nutrition and have been in the business apparently for a long time. They don’t seem to be fly by nighters.

Although I haven’t read Atkins, it seems to be in the same vein. There are a few things that scare me. The name of the book sounds like a salesman came up with the name rather than a scientist. Their website is even worse. I think its http://www.proteinpower.com feels like an infomercial…

And the worst is, because of their background, if they wanted to fool people, it would be easy to do so. I’m not a chemist, so who am I to argue? And if they fool you long enough to read the book, lose some water weight and tell your friends to buy the book, they can get very rich…

On the other hand, a lot of their information is very detailed and seems to make a lot of sense. The conventional science has done a very poor job in their recommendations and when I read some of their books criticising the low carb high protein diets, it lacked detail and had couched wording. So I thought I’d ask you folks.

The basic premise of protein power is that you have 2 hormones controlling the sugar in the blood. Glucagon and Insulin. Glucagon burns stored fat and puts more sugar (glucose) into the blood. Insulin takes glucose out of the blood and causes fat to be stored.

They say that high carbohydrate diets are bad because carbohydrates promote insulin release and therefore fat storage. They say that we eat so much carbs that our insulin receptors are so desensitized that they require a LOT of insulin to even feel it anymore. They advocate taking in only up to 30 grams of carbs per day for awhile so that your insulin production goes down and your insulin receptors become sensitized again and then gradually building back carbs into your diet but in severely reduced amounts.

Critics of this diet say that you only lose water and that weight loss is caused by ketosis, which creates ketones, which is bad for you. This what the Mount Sinai Nutrition guide said.

But protein power claims that there’s nothing wrong with ketones. Ketones are not bad for you, they are merely incompletely burned fats. If you don’t put carbs into your system, they will go out in your urine, breath or stool.

What’s weird is that at the end of the book they refer you to other good books, including The Zone, which contains a section about how bad ketosis is.

Some other things I’ve seen about ketosis is a friend said that ketosis is what those instarvation with big belly’s went through.

Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw said that ketones are free radicals (in their book “Life Extension”) and that free radicals are bad for you. But I think overall those two probably are not too much against the low carb diet…

Here’s a link debunking the critics of ketosis http://www.lowcarb.org/ketosis.html
but I don’t know if this is right or not, and you would expect that lowcarb.org would have a bias, but that doesn’t make them wrong…

So, to you experts, is ketosis bad for you? Can you stay in ketosis indefinitely with no ill health effects? Are carbohydrates required in your body? Do low carb diets only cause water loss or is their truth in their insulin theories and you lose fat fast too?

The critics say when you go back to a regular diet you will gain back the weight. But to me that isn’t a good enough criticism since their low cal diets offer the same problem. Plus, the low carb folks say clearly that you need to change the way you eat. It’s less of a diet but more of a lifestyle of cutting back carbs. Although I don’t relish the idea of cutting out most of my usual carb intake for the rest of my life, if steak, fish, chicken and turkey are a part of my staple diet, I can deal with cutting out fries cakes bread etc except for special occasions. But I KNOW that I can’t keep up a lifestyle of working out or of low cal diets. So if this low carb diet is not dangerous, I’m ready to change my way of life in exchange for a healthier slimmer me. But I just dont trust anyone right now and would like some guidance backed up by fact.

THANK YOU ALL!!

2

Just to throw another monkey wrench in the mix: sometimes calories don’t count!

http://health.excite.com/content/article/1671.52151
“The latest findings offer one last surprise, and perhaps the best news of all for nut lovers. Despite being high in fat, cashews, almonds, pecans, and other nuts don’t seem to make people fat. When volunteers in the Loma Linda study added a snack of almonds totaling 320 calories a day to their normal diets, for example, their body weight remained the same. Furthermore, in the Nurses’ Health Study, Hu and his colleagues found that women who ate nuts frequently actually tended to weigh less than those who didn’t.”

3

Before starting this thread I did a search for this topic and found nothing. Thinking back I figured I must have done something wrong. The default search is for the last 5 days. Duh…

Anyways, I got some questions answered and now have more questions.

1 interesting link is http://www.gladwell.com/1998_02_02_a_pima.htm

this seems to indicate that the reason these diets work is because they turn out to be a combination of water weight loss and low cal diets. Is this really true? Is that your experience? He didn’t give enough scientific backup for me so although it’s interesting, especially about the DR. expert on insulin who laughed at Barry Sears on insulin, I want a real scientific analysis…

So from reading other threads, here’s some specific questions…

  1. Does mainstream science dispute that carbohydrates promote insulin release?
  2. Does mainstream science dispute that the weight loss on low carb diets is more than just water but also fat and the muscle gain happens as well?
  3. Is there proof that this diet is hard on the kidneys? Do even the proponents admit that ketosis is bad for the kidneys?
  4. Although I’m skeptical, which is the primary book for the blood type diets? This may have some merit since it does make sense that different blood types may have different metabolisms…
  5. glycemic index. Protein Power had a bizarre statement about this saying the problem with glycemic indexes is that it compares apples to glucose instead of apples to apples. Then they state that they get around the glycemic index by deducting the fiber from the carb count. HUH??? This was very confusing and incomplete explanation. Does anyone understand what they are saying?
  6. I did start this low carb diet a couple of days ago. I just found an atkins enzyme supplement which apparently provides the enzymes needed to break down protein and dietary fat into glucose. Acc. to protein power, you feel sluggish (I did), and they claim it’s because you have tons of enzymes in your body used to storing fat, not to deal with protein and it takes a few days to produce these other enzymes. Has anyone taken these supplement enzymes when starting this diet and how were the results for you?

–
another note on glycemic index. It’s a great idea, but other than things like fruit and veggies, it’s erratic since food prep varies and they aren’t reliable based on diff food manufacturers or methods of prep.

Another interesting thing is that protein power says that 95% of low cal dieters gain their weight back and more after a couple of years, a high carb advocate says that if the high protein diets work then why do 95% of them gain their weight back in a few years (is this stat based on anything?), then in the link http://www.gladwell.com/1998_02_02_a_pima.htm it says 95% of ALL DIETERS no matter WHAT diet they are on gain it back in a couple of years. Sounds like each side uses the same statistic on their opponent and ignores it for themselves. That’s why I’m a heretic. I don’t trust the mainstream OR the contrarians.

4

From a low carb viewpoint:::

I am trying really hard to understand how diets work or don’t, and what is happening chemically to the body under various circumstances. I’ll detail the “facts” I think I know, and ask to be corrected where wrong, and add some questions perhaps. The more I read, the more contradictory information I see and the more confusing it gets. I’d like to “try” to separate fact from fiction.

Conventional wisdom for the overweight is, the human body burns x number of calories per day. If the human body takes in less calories than it burns, it is bound to lose weight. This is obvious and logical.
true in the conventional sense but ketosis also wastes some caloried via urine

Additionally, fat does a lot of bad things to the human body, therefore reduce your fat intake. Ditto for cholesterol.
** (mainly refined) Carbs not fat are bad for you, raise bad cholest. and triglicerides robs body of nutrients. Fat is good and needed for good health - lowers bad choles. and raises good c. Except for trans fat**

Somewhat conventional wisdom is that the above does not go deep enough in it’s analysis. Of course the body won’t add “weight” if you consume fewer calories than you burn. But as anyone who has dieted knows, you feel hungry on a low calorie diet. Therefore, sooner or later, you will go back to a normal lifestyle. But you will be in for a surprise when you do. Because a low calorie diet causes you to lose both fat and muscle. But unless you are producing a fair amount of growth hormone, which you probably are not, you will gain back almost pure fat. So you may weigh the same as you did before and look worse, or gain even more weight back for some reason…
true but a low carb diet (lcd for now on) is a lifestile change too

The only way to somewhat alleviate this side effect is to exercise. If you do aerobic exercise (running, biking, swimming stuff that makes you really sweat), then you will burn more fat than muscle. You may even somewhat build muscle, but not too much.
** not ness true on a lcd but it helps **
If your exercise is anaerobic, ie, in the form of weight lifting, it’s even better. Why? Because every pound of extra muscle you have in your body burns fat hour after hour even at rest.
**anarobic builds muscle, arobic burns calories - more muscle = more burn potential **

If that is how you lost your weight, WHEN you stop exercising and gain it back, your body may look better than it did before you started exercising. So at least it didn’t harm you…Although you will gain back almost pure fat, and you will lose some muscle due to lack of exercise, you may also keep ome of that extra muscle and wind up with more muscle than you had before you started exercising…
** like the lcd it’s a lifestile change**
In summary, conventional wisdom certainly does not make you lose weight over the long term, and although exercise is worthwhile over the long haul, you are probably better off not dieting than dieting, although you may lose weight in the short term.
** if you can’t make the lifestile chane then don’t diet**
If you go to the booksore, you will see tons of diet books. Virtually all of them share the diets of conventional wisdom in that they only work for the short term. Some of them are low calorie in principle and the same rules apply to them as the paragraphs above. Others result in water loss which does not help in the long term. They espouse all kinds of fancy ideas, but at the end of the day, it is low-calorie based or water loss. And the worst are those that offer quick weight loss, because besides being water loss, they are short term and may even be very dangerous…
** lcd are critisized as water loss diets - it’s true that the 1st 2 weeks alot of water weight cmes off but then the fat starts **
What is sad about these books is that the authors are well aware of what they are doing, but they are doing it for the money. They don’t believe it for a minute and probably know enough about nutrition to put in some fancy words to fool a lot of people.
** depending on the diet**
So when I heard over the years of the Atkins diet, I thought it was another one of these gimmicks. And I ignored it. Until a few days ago when someone recommended a book called Protein Power. This was writen by a couple, they are Dr.s and one is a Chemist too. They specialize in nutrition and have been in the business apparently for a long time. They don’t seem to be fly by nighters.

Although I haven’t read Atkins, it seems to be in the same vein. There are a few things that scare me. The name of the book sounds like a salesman came up with the name rather than a scientist. Their website is even worse. I think its http://www.proteinpower.com feels like an infomercial…
www.atkinsdiet.com too
And the worst is, because of their background, if they wanted to fool people, it would be easy to do so. I’m not a chemist, so who am I to argue? And if they fool you long enough to read the book, lose some water weight and tell your friends to buy the book, they can get very rich…

On the other hand, a lot of their information is very detailed and seems to make a lot of sense. The conventional science has done a very poor job in their recommendations and when I read some of their books criticising the low carb high protein diets, it lacked detail and had couched wording. So I thought I’d ask you folks.
** I can tell you that it does work (atkins from my personal exp about 6-7 years) but you must be able to stay on it, if you have a sweet tooth forget it**
The basic premise of protein power is that you have 2 hormones controlling the sugar in the blood. Glucagon and Insulin. Glucagon burns stored fat and puts more sugar (glucose) into the blood. Insulin takes glucose out of the blood and causes fat to be stored.

They say that high carbohydrate diets are bad because carbohydrates promote insulin release and therefore fat storage. They say that we eat so much carbs that our insulin receptors are so desensitized that they require a LOT of insulin to even feel it anymore. They advocate taking in only up to 30 grams of carbs per day for awhile so that your insulin production goes down and your insulin receptors become sensitized again and then gradually building back carbs into your diet but in severely reduced amounts.
** it is a basic principal of the lcd**
Critics of this diet say that you only lose water and that weight loss is caused by ketosis, which creates ketones, which is bad for you. This what the Mount Sinai Nutrition guide said.

But protein power claims that there’s nothing wrong with ketones. Ketones are not bad for you, they are merely incompletely burned fats. If you don’t put carbs into your system, they will go out in your urine, breath or stool.
** if you do some all day activity that is fairly strenous you probally are in ketosis, it is a normal release of energy when glycogen is depleated**
What’s weird is that at the end of the book they refer you to other good books, including The Zone, which contains a section about how bad ketosis is.
** the zone is not a lcd from a low carb viewpoint - it is at best a carb regulating diet 40/30/30 has it’s largest part carbs - so put that critisism with the rest of the non-lowcarb diets**
Some other things I’ve seen about ketosis is a friend said that ketosis is what those instarvation with big belly’s went through.
** not sure about the spelling but that ketoacidosis caused by the breakdown of muscle as food (not dietary protein).**
Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw said that ketones are free radicals (in their book “Life Extension”) and that free radicals are bad for you. But I think overall those two probably are not too much against the low carb diet…
** don’t know about this one, have to go now, I’ll try later to finish. and NO I’m not previewing it so whatever happens, happens **
Here’s a link debunking the critics of ketosis http://www.lowcarb.org/ketosis.html
but I don’t know if this is right or not, and you would expect that lowcarb.org would have a bias, but that doesn’t make them wrong…

So, to you experts, is ketosis bad for you? Can you stay in ketosis indefinitely with no ill health effects? Are carbohydrates required in your body? Do low carb diets only cause water loss or is their truth in their insulin theories and you lose fat fast too?

The critics say when you go back to a regular diet you will gain back the weight. But to me that isn’t a good enough criticism since their low cal diets offer the same problem. Plus, the low carb folks say clearly that you need to change the way you eat. It’s less of a diet but more of a lifestyle of cutting back carbs. Although I don’t relish the idea of cutting out most of my usual carb intake for the rest of my life, if steak, fish, chicken and turkey are a part of my staple diet, I can deal with cutting out fries cakes bread etc except for special occasions. But I KNOW that I can’t keep up a lifestyle of working out or of low cal diets. So if this low carb diet is not dangerous, I’m ready to change my way of life in exchange for a healthier slimmer me. But I just dont trust anyone right now and would like some guidance backed up by fact.

THANK YOU ALL!!

5

I don’t have the time to go into all the details or give you links to medical sites, but I will tell you this. If you want to be healthy, you have to live and eat healthy. It requires a lifetime commitment to a healthy lifestyle. There are no shortcuts or easy ways. If you are not willing to do that, then being healthy is not that important to you.

A healthy lifestyle includes exercise. You will not be able to exercise on a low carb diet. Carbs, per se, are not bad for you. Excess weight is. From what I’ve read, it is obesity that causes loss of sensitivity of the insulin receptors, not carbs as such.

Moreover, if you eat complex carbs, such as salads, you are not as hungry. Complex carbs fill you up, as your hunger is caused by a lack of glucose in the blood and the fiber gives you a feeling of being sated. Complex carbs will increase your blood sugar slowly so there is no insulin rush. If you don’t have enough blood sugar, the hormonic actions will keep you hungry.

Fats is too general a term. There are saturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated fats, as you probably know. Trans fats can be any of the unsaturated, as it refers to the position of the carbon molecules at each end. You should reduce saturated and trans fats, but not the others. Polyunsat and monounsat have been shown to have good effects on the body, such as lowering LDL and increasing HDL.

I really have to get some work out now, but health is a very complex topic and there are no easy answers. As I said, if it’s not important enough to you to change your lifestyle and exercise and eat healthy, nothing can be done for you. There are no easy ways. Life is hard. Death is easy.

6

I did want to say, but forgot, is that some of your statements are not true. Most egregious is that muscle burns fat. Muscle does not burn fat. It burns calories. The more muscle you have, the more metabolicaly active you are and therefore the more calories you will burn even when doing nothing compared to some one who does not have as much muscle. Weight lifting is important for that, but so called “aerobic” exercises also make you more metabolically active. Running increases your leg muscles as well as other muscles. I read that you have to run at least 30 miles a week before your metabolism is increased. This is probably due to other mechanisms other than the muscle.

7

The LC debate has been covered a lot. [ http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=64271 ] It belongs in GD, in my opinion, because, frankly, human beings STILL don’t know very well how their own bodies work. Rather pathetic, but that’s the state of nutrition science.

The final analysis: some ways of eating keep some people at a healthy weight, other ways of eating keep other people at a healthy weight. Some people eat too much. Some exercise too little. Some exercise a lot, eat very little, and are still fat. Some never exercise, eat constantly, and yet can never seem to gain weight. For every “rule” of diet and exercise, there are thousands of exceptions walking around.

So it all comes down to personal anecdotes and opinions in the end.

8

Thanks all for the info. Very helpful.

What I’m most interested in here is what everyone definitely agrees on. Also, what do they disagree on.

For example, One thing universally agreed that I got out of this is that weightlifting is definitely one of the most effective ways of losing weight. If you spend a year building muscle, it will take some time to lose it and your body will look better after you stop then it will after you stop going on a low cal diet.

I think I can maintain a lifestyle change with a low carb diet. I won’t know for sure until I try. But I wonder if the critics of this diet who have actually looked into it, agree that the mechanism of weight loss on lcd (after water weight is done), ie lack of insulin release, works. People with high caloric intake seem to be losing weight? Even anectdotal evidence is important. Why? Because if it’s a fact that dietary calories > calories burned = fat gain, then how can a high calorie diet result in fat loss?

9

Thanks all for the info. Very helpful.

What I’m most interested in here is what everyone definitely agrees on. Also, what do they disagree on.

For example, One thing universally agreed that I got out of this is that weightlifting is definitely one of the most effective ways of losing weight. If you spend a year building muscle, it will take some time to lose it and your body will look better after you stop then it will after you stop going on a low cal diet.

I think I can maintain a lifestyle change with a low carb diet. I won’t know for sure until I try. But I wonder if the critics of this diet who have actually looked into it, agree that the mechanism of weight loss on lcd (after water weight is done), ie lack of insulin release, works. People with high caloric intake seem to be losing weight? Even anectdotal evidence is important. Why? Because if it’s a fact that dietary calories > calories burned = fat gain, then how can a high calorie diet result in fat loss?

10

How can a high caloric diet result in “fat” loss? It doesn’t. Calories in - calories out = net calories. It can result in fat loss if you work out and expend more energies than taken in. That’s the only way. If you have a well documented scientific evidence to the contrary (not anecdotal, chat, message board, etc.) evidence, I’d like to see it.

11

Hey Barb,

First a word on anecdotal evidence. I think it’s important. Why? Well, when the first plane was invented, that one plane was ANECDOTAL evidence that heavier than air flight was possible. There were plenty of devices that tried to fly and didn’t.

How many airplanes do YOU need? A Harvard study with a thousand metals all trying to fly at the same time? Let’s say all thousand of them don’t fly, is that a better proof than the one that did fly?

BTW, I agree that anecdotal evidence has it’s limitations. It can be faked is just one of them. But so can (AND DO) “scientifically-backed” studies. For one example, did you see 60 minutes on Sunday? Follow the money…and the money is with pharmaceutical companies who could care less about human life and all about selling drugs. They will fund anything that they can market successfully. It’s politics…

>How can a high caloric diet result in “fat” loss?<

Good question. Read protein power. They give some reasoning that sounds logical.

What can happen to the “extra” calories. Breathe it out, piss it out, or fecus it out.

>It doesn’t.<

In your words, provide well documented evidence that this is true in ALL cases. You cannot because there are so many hormones, enzymes, body chemistries, workout routines etc etc that you cannot prove that under no circumstances can a high caloric diet result in fat loss.

>Calories in - calories out = net calories.<

Right. But as above, calories out can happen in various ways.

12

sigh AnotherHeretic - the place to debate things is called (surprise) Great Debates. As toadspittle has pointed out, we already have a debate about this issue.

Just to address a couple of the things you have said - from what I have read, people who only eat when they are hungry don’t tend to gain weight. It is people who eat when they aren’t hungry, or continue to eat after they are full (or don’t exercise at all) that gain weight. IMO, you have to be hungry occasionally to lose weight, but you do this at night, when you are asleep and it is no big deal.

Secondly, it is not inconceivable that switching from the normal American diet to a low-carb diet can actually reduce calorie and fat intake. For instance a large fries from McDonalds has 540 calories (nearly as much as a Big Mac at 590) and 26 grams of fat. A super-size fries has 610 calories and 29 grams of fat. Therefore just eliminated the fries has significantly reduced both your caloric and fat intake.

13

Zyada. No need to sigh. I’m not even interested in debate. I want to lose weight. As long as it fits my lifestyle I’ll sit with my fingers crossed while watching the news for an hour every morning if it’ll help me lose fat. I want info.

As I mentioned, I only saw the other threads after I fixed the 5 day limit in the search box. But I have a lot of questions that haven’t been answered. I don’t want to hear pro and con fight it out. I started the low carb diet, and I HOPE it works even if it’s magic. You and some others seem convinced that low carb doesn’t work. I’m still open to it and evaluating all the arguments but far from “SOLD”. There seem to be some good arguments on both sides…

Where I stand so far:

Cons:

  1. I hear Dr. Atkins is 50 pounds overweight. So it clearly doesn’t work for everybody :slight_smile:
  2. Atkins/protein power/sugar busters/ The Zone, sound like cheerleaders and marketers. So although they may have some value, I can easily see them accentuate the positive and “omit” the negative.
  3. Kidney problems potential. Even pro lcd’ers don’t seem to argue this point.
  4. Bad breath :slight_smile:
  5. Can’t eat too much cake

PROS:

  1. Does insulin promote fat storage? Since the critics are silent about this, either they don’t know or it’s true.
  2. I KNOW my body is out of whack. I feel tired all the time. I get fat.
  3. I can much easier maintain this style of life than eating 1700 calories a day over the long run.
  4. Despite critics that say you only lose water weight, 40 pounds is not water weight. Critics say that it is conceivable that these people are on a low cal diet disguised as a low carb diet and that is why they are losing weight. THIS IS SOMETHING I’d like to know for certain. But in the end, if it’s a low cal diet I can maintain, WHO CARES? The high carb low cal diets don’t work for me so if low carb low cal works, fine…

NO SURES:

Is the insulin idea that causes the weight loss? Or is it the disguised low cal diet that causes it.
The mainstream guys don’t even seem to want to study this properly and that’s what I don’t like about mainstream. This diet works for some people. You can learn from it. So instead of relegating it to great debates, try to squeeze every last bit of info from this as possible.

Myself, I’m skeptic of both sides…advocates of none. To me, that is real science.

14

By the way, I just had 1000 calories in one sitting. :slight_smile: :slight_smile: Yum…

I’ll be checking my fat percentages so if in the end a high caloric lifestyle doesn’t work the way they say it does, and doesn’t reduce my body fat, I’ll report back…

:slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

15

On the other hand, I am a VERY infrequent visitor to this place and maybe didn’t pay enough attention to the structure. Are you saying that the Great Debate section is not like being sent to the corner? Do regular discussions happen there? How was I supposed to know this would become a debate? Can I move this thread myself now that it’s here?

This started as a question. To me a debate (at least after following too many elections) is where you have advocates of opposing positions state their side of the argument, ignore the positive comments of the other side, twist words around, and no one changes their mind about anything. :slight_smile:

What I’m looking for is info.

16

Everyone knows all about diet, and the long term, short term, health, and fitness consequences of eating each and every item known not to be deadly poisonous. Trouble is no one agrees about even one single point in the entire plethora of wisdom on the subject.

Fat is bad. Everyone knows it. It’s a well known scientific fact that you die young if you eat fat. Trouble is that the science supporting the anti fat legion is lean indeed. In this week’s Science Magazine there is a very interesting article examining the absence of real evidentiary rigor in the rush to save us from fat in our diets.

Genes are in, as an answer to why fat folks are fat. Trouble is, some people are able to change their overall weight trends, and they obviously did not change their genetic heritage. The same goes for early development of some magic type of fat cell, which was popular as a demon object a few years back.

The fact is that a human being is an incredibly complex thing. Changing something as basic as total body weight by a major fraction takes a complete reorganization of the body’s metabolism, the person’s habits, and the social interactions that created the habits that made the person the weight they are now. It took the entire lifetime of the person to stabilize at the current weight, and choosing and stabilizing at a new one will be a process of the same order of magnitude.

Exercise has many benefits, and so long as some cares in avoiding injuries from overstraining, overexhaustion, and repetitive impact are kept in mind, it has few drawbacks. Changing your weight almost has to include changing your habitual exercise habits. It also must be a long-term change. Muscle mass, and tone levels will increase the body’s base caloric needs, but it will not be enough without control of intake, as well. Other than the extremes of muscular hypertrophy experienced in competitive bodybuilding, there are very few reasons to worry about developing too much muscle mass. Truly excess muscle mass will atrophy very rapidly when the extreme regimen necessary to sustain it is stopped. However, over muscled bodies do often experience secondary health issues, and reduced flexibility. Just keep yourself well stretched, and aerobically exercised fairly well, and you can even maintain flex for show levels of muscle without any real detriment to your health.

All that said, it is not likely that an obese person is going to go directly into the levels of anaerobic training necessary to develop such a body, nor is it likely that gains toward that would be long maintained if they did. You have to keep yourself at the level you can maintain, and increase your fitness over a long period. Summer swimsuit fitness programs are not the answer. Changes to diet, changes to non-gym, and non-sports exercise patterns will do more for you in the long term than all the ab-rollers ever sold. Walk when you have to go less than a half mile. If you work on the bank of a river, row to work! Make exercise a part of your life, and take eating out of your social habits.

Love yourself, now. That doesn’t mean you decide not to change anything, it means you don’t set yourself up to judge yourself in pounds.

17

Not true

calories in - calories burned - = calories stored - calories out (via ketones)

As for is a low carb diet a low cal diet here’s my food intake today from getting up to 6:20 pm (and I’m planning more)
early morning Bacon 6 slices & 3 eggs
mid morning 3 egg omelet w/ side of sausage
lunch salad including about 4 slices of ham, salami, and Swiss w/ Caesar dressing
1st dinner chicken and broccoli (1 bowl) and another 3 egg omelet with 3 bacons and 3 sausage (I get on these omelet kicks).

I don’t watch the calorie count but that must be over 2000
eggs alone are 90 a piece so that’s 890
bacon is 90 for 2 slices so there’s another 405
Sausage is about 150 for 2 = 300
So there 1595
now my estimating is getting more fudg’ie but I don’t know the oz I ate:
Cheese = 105 / 1 oz which I probably had 2 = 210
Ham/sal meats maybe another 200
So that’s 2005 cals and the day’s not over and I didn’t count the chicken and broccoli and the salid dressing.

18

I think they are saying that when you are counting carbs that you can deduct the fibre because it doesn’t affect your insulin levels. So a half cup of avocado has 8 grams carbs but 3 grams of those carbs are fibre so when you are counting your carbs for the day the avocado would only count for 5 carbs. That’s how us low carbers can get away with eating certain cereals and breads that are super high in fibre. So while the avocado has the same number of carbs as a few M&Ms they ultimately are not the same carb-wise.

I’ve been low carbing for a while now but I’m not really comfortable giving anecdotal evidence on this hard-facts only board. Feel free to e-mail me if you want to know anything about my experience.

19

nice reply tris.

I hate working out :slight_smile:

Maybe I’ll try arginine supplements like durkpearson and sandy shaw suggested instead of working out. I guess I can down some pills every day for the rest of my life…easier than working out :slight_smile:

20

Thank you k2dave. I was waiting to see if a response like your would come up. The mainstreamers don’t want to accept that there is another formula other than consuming fewer calories than you expend. So you prove them wrong ANECDOTALLY, for what it’s worth, but ONLY if you are not new to the diet. If you’re on the first week like me, it doesn’t count. What’s your whole story? How long on the diet? How much did you lose?

Another thing I haven’t seen mentioned, has anyone on the diet started with a before count of their body fat % and AFTER body fat % and if so, can you both post it and also add your daily caloric intake?

Thanku.