Ah, the Onion…
I lost 90 pounds in two weeks… and DIED!
I briefly discussed this with a rather brilliant physician friend of mine, not because I’m interested in dieting, but just for curiosity’s sake.
He says the strict Atkin’s diet is extremely effective. Hopefully, somebody with a little more medical knowledge could chime in with the detail, but as he explained it, carbohydrate intake governs insulin level, and your insulin level governs how your body processes your food. According to him, you could chug Mazola all day, but if your body is completely deprived of carbs, you’re not gonna gain an ounce.
That said, he said the Atkins diet places a lot of extra stress on your kidneys, and would never recommend it to his patients unless other health concerns warranted it. He is a proponent of any of a number of modified Atkins diets, but pure Atkins is not so good in his opinion.
Perhaps one of our resident physicians could chime in with something a little more substantive.
Small study on low carb diets, including Atkins comparing caloric intake, suggesting that low carb weight loss is NOT from lower calories.
Couple of things: First, I didn’t mean “stop eating bread” literally; I know it involves more than just that. I was just trying to give the short version, which now has backfired on me since I’ve had to type much more just to explain what I meant. Oh, well.
Second, my comments were specifically in response to ultrafilter’s post about the study. I was trying to get at exactly what the study proves, if anything. It was not a general indictment of Atkins, but merely questioning whether that particular study proves that Atkins has any merit. Jjimm made the point that Atkins reduces cravings for food, and I don’t know if that was within the scope of the study.
Since anecdotal evidence seems to count here, a friend of mine who went on Atkins said she had “extreme cravings for a donut”.
Hmmm… but don’t you think switching to a diet that’s high in green vegetables and fairly low in fatty meats would produce results whether it included carbohydrates or not? Your story reminds me of a group of people I used to work with who all went on the “Fit for Life” diet. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a “food-combining” theory where you can’t eat certain foods together at the same time. But when these guys followed the diet, it required them to eat only fruit (maybe bread too; I can’t remember) for breakfast, and only salad or vegetables for lunch. Well of course you’re gonna lose weight if you do that; I don’t think the food-combining theory had anything to do with it. The quasi-scientific part just provided a rationale for keeping them on the regimen.
First, I wasn’t picking on you or flaming or whatever, I was just giving my own POV. I’m sorry if you thought otherwise.
I was trying to get the refined sugar out of my diet first off, to reduce my migraines. I haven’t had a soda in over two years.
In my experience with Atkins, it has reduced my cravings for most carbs like potatoes and pasta. I don’t miss the sweet stuff like donuts anymore, either.
We used to eat LOTS of carbs in my house. My husband sees nothing wrong with having bread and mashed potatoes and rice with dinner. :eek:
I don’t miss pasta or potatoes at all anymore. I don’t care if I ever have spaghetti again. I still make it for my family, but I have a small fish fillet or a turkey burger those nights. I do miss bread, though. I buy a low-carb whole wheat bread for myself.
I don’t deprive myself, either. I love chocolate, and I like beer. (I don’t drink wine because of my migraines.)
If I want a little bite of a candy bar or a beer or two, I have it. Then the next few days, I’m just careful. The Atkins-brand “candy bars” are really expensive (around here, they’re $2.00 or so each). They also contain maltitol (sp?), which can cause some people to stall on their weight loss or cause gastrointestinal upset. I’d rather have a “real” candy bar like a Snickers (I’m satisfied with half of one now, or one of those bite-sized ones) and just be careful for the next day.
Aside: Isn’t the “food combining” theory the diet that Suzanne Somers shills on one of the Home Shopping channels?
No. Your story is interesting, but not worth pitting the scientific method, to the extent that there really is one. One of the reasons we have controlled experiments is because cases like this can be very deceptive. It is perfectly reasonable for you to say this is interesting and that you wish there were more evidence out there.
The fact is that people get fat and people get thin. Let’s suppose that Atkins, etc. are all ineffective but benign. The odds that one of those people getting thin while being on a diet is high, and you just happen to be that lucky guy’s brother. There’s going to be a lot of those lucky people out there, and they have compelling and entirely sincere stories.
[hijack]
Atkins works via metabolism, right? If you’re burning more fuel, you are producing more heat as a by product. Furthermore, you have to increase this fuel consumption before losing weight, otherwise you wouldn’t lose weight, so initially we should see your fuel cosumption jump without a change in your volume to surface-area ratio. So your heat loss shouldn’t change. So do people who go on the Atkins diet see an initial jump in their body temperatures in numbers above chance? If not, why not?
[/hijack]
Atkins works by putting your body into a state of ketosis. Not to be confused with ketoacidosis which is what happens to diabetics when their insulin is out of control, and (IIRC) which can lead to coma and death. Many people confuse the two, and that’s why they think it’s such a dangerous diet.
Normally, your body would use the carbs you eat for energy. That’s why Power Bars and sports drinks are so high in carbs. Many athletes will talk about “carbo-loading” before a big event.
By reducing the amount of carbohydrate grams you eat, your body goes into ketosis and burns fat for energy. By burning excess body fat, you lose weight.
You can buy little strips to pee on to see if you are in ketosis or not. It turns purple when you’re in ketosis.
To somewhat answer ultrafilter’s question to me, and try and clarify further.
I would like to know why so many are seeing good resultst from Atkins diets, when scientific research hasn’t either
a) shown simmilar results,
b) come up with an explanation why the results we are seeing are illusionary.
( For such things as alternatice drugs b) would be the placebo effect if the alternative drug had no medical value. )
I would also like to know if such diets are risky to those with removed gall bladders, or risky in causing gall stones. Both strongly related to fat digestion.
No scientific studyresults, none, ignore it all… it can go on like that for a long time.
The problem we have here is that Atkins runs counter to what people believe so think it must be incorrect. This isn’t religion people, there are studies to back it up.
Bippy, I’ll be back a little later with some thoughts. I’m staying busy today.
See? I had no idea. Thanks.
Is the it still true that, theoretically (what do I know?), you can go on the Atkins diet, consume the same number of calories and burn more fat? Do you poop more unused calories?
My thinking is that if you don’t poop it or store it as fat, then you burn it. So if you consume the same number of calories and lose weight, then you’re either burning more calories or pooping more calories.
My understanding of the mechanism was way off. Is my question still on?
With all the discussions of ketosis and Atkins and low-carbs, has anyone here factored exercise into the equation? Wouldn’;t your fat loss accelerate if you went to the gym regularly? After all, if a fat flabby person becomes a thin flabby person, he or she is still goign to be out of shape–just out of a smaller shape.
As for pooping more unused calories - I dunno. If you’re burning it off as energy or excreting it in your urine or poop, it’s coming out of you somehow.
I remembered from the book what the ketosis thing was, and how people get it confused with ketoacidosis.
(That’s why you gotta read the book!)
You excrete ketones in your urine; that’s what makes the little pee sticks turn purple when you’re in ketosis.
As I mentioned before, I have no idea how many calories I was consuming when I was on it. I never counted calories or paid any attention to how many calories were in what I ate; all I looked at where carbs.
(Technically I’m still on it, but I slipped off the wagon a bit, so to speak, over the holidays. I’ve started back on a little mini-induction this week to jump-start the ketosis process so I can start losing weight again at a good rate.)
As for exercising, well, yeah, if you’ve been really heavy and you lose a lot of weight without exercising, you’re going to still be flabby, or loose. I do exercise to tone up. I walk and have an exercise bike. Since I’ve lost a chunk of weight, I feel better and riding and walking are a lot easier. I have a recumbant bike, where I sit up and slightly back, rather than leaning forward, which is easier on my back. I can sit and have my headphones on or read a book for a good long time.
Atkins for Life, p. 24
From the study’s conclusion:
Also, it was a study of diabetic people. If we’re going to evaluate the effects on non-diabetic people, shouldn’t the study group include them?
Funded by the Atkins Foundation.:dubious:
This study had no controls.
You do realize that a study has to have controls to be valid, don’t you? I’m sure the rabid Atkins lackeys here are going to interpret this as Atkins-bashing, but that’s not what I’m doing. I’m asking if there are any properly-controlled, unbiased studies that we can look at. Maybe there are, but the examples you provided are not.
But are any of them good studies?
Check out this guy’s blog, because he gives a pretty good explanation of what a properly-contolled study would need:
http://www.catallarchy.net/blog/cgi-bin/archives/000536.html
I’d like to see a study that has a control group consuming the exact same number of calories as the Atkins group. Only then would it be possible to determine if the percentage of carbs was the deciding factor.
Maybe because I GAINED five pounds while on it. ANd my BP went throught the fucking roof from all the sodium.
I have however lost TEN pounds from good old fashioned EXERCISE! And the BP is down as well
YMMV
Krisfer, what exactly were you eating that caused your BP to go up? What had so much sodium in it?
I ate chicken and fish and lots of green veggies. Not so much sodium in those. Were you eating lots of processed lunch meats?
Also, Krisfer, how much weight do you really need to lose? If it’s only 10-15 pounds, doing induction on Atkins is probably not the best thing for you, anyway. It doesn’t work for everyone. And where did all that sodium come from? If you followed the book to the letter, you’d know that you should have been eating whole, unprocessed foods for the most part. So, I ask the same questions as BiblioCat.
I’ve been very successful so far on the Atkins program. I follow the diet to the letter, eating whole foods as often as possible, counting the amount of carbohydrates I consume, and adding exercise several times a week. After 3.5 months, I’ve lost 30 pounds and 8 inches off my waist. But, more importantly, there’s been some amazing changes in my body. I sleep better, my menstral periods are the most regular they have been in all my adult life (this has been the biggest thing, as I suffer from PCOS), and my skin has cleared up.
But, that said, I’d be the first one to say that it wouldn’t be for everyone. It’s not a fad diet, not a quick fix. It’s meant to be a lifestyle.
Being an ex-pastry chef, I used to say, “there’s no way I could live without bread and sugar!” Of course, I realized when I was 100 pounds overweight, with achy knees and on the road to diabetes, that maybe I could live just fine without the refined carbohydrates.
Another thing about Atkins - you need to drink plenty of water! I want to say 64 ounces a day, but I may be wrong.
Going back to the very obese woman mentioned on the first page who tried Atkins and ate a dozen eggs and a pound of bacon every day and died - I wonder if she was drinking enough water.
You need to keep yourself hydrated, and sodas are just liquid sugar.
You can have coffee and tea, and use real cream if you want. You’re not supposed to use Equal for some reason (I can’t find the passage in the book, and I have it right in front of me), but rather Splenda or Sweet & Low. In the book, I seem to remember that he discouraged drinking diet sodas.
I don’t even drink diet sodas. I drink water almost exclusively. I drink coffee in the morning, and sometimes have a cup of tea in the afternoon, but otherwise, I’m sucking down plain old water like there’s no tomorrow.
Bibliocat, Atkins doesn’t recommend diet sodas with asparatame–the sweetener for most diet sodas, and the one in Equal and Sweet ‘N’ Low–b/c it’s so similar to real sugar that it may negatively impact ketosis. His website basically says that in his research, “some people” have experienced delays in weight loss due to asparatame. (My mother is one of them.)
As for me…I decided to try Atkins because I had gradually put on an extra 20 pounds over the past couple of years that I was tired of carrying around. And because of my work schedule and lifestyle, traditional diets never seemed to cut it. And I hate the idea of “dieting,” because in reality it just means you can’t eat when you’re hungry.
So I started doing Atkins about six weeks ago.
I have lost 17 lbs.
Granted, I only did “strict induction Atkins” for about two weeks. After that I allowed myself more carbs and a few indulgences…like a lunch out at a Mexican restaurant, a couple of slices of pizza, etc…but I have still experienced steady weight loss since then.
And honestly I think Atkins works–for me at least–because I know that I can eat whenever I want. But because of what I can eat, I don’t find myself overindulging. Ever. I eat smaller amounts because I’m full sooner. I don’t ever want to snack. I don’t ever eat “just to eat.”
So I’ve stopped eating heavily-processed convenience foods, b/c of their carb content, and I’ve started eating more fresh foods. That in itself is healthier than the average American diet; people who have issues with Atkins seem to forget that most Americans don’t eat what they’re supposed to regardless of its carb content. We eat a lot of highly-processed junk; even if it says “low-fat,” that doesn’t mean it’s good for you.
So, IMHO, any diet in which you eat more fresh vegetables, more nuts, more fresh meat, less pre-packaged crap, less preservatives, etc., has to be an improvement.
And FTR, I couldn’t give up my beloved Diet Coke, and I haven’t had to. Nor have I given up alcohol, which Atkins recommends as well.
But I have managed to lose 17 lbs in less than two months, and I feel pretty damn good about what I’m eating, and have no intentions of going back to my old careless ways. Either way you slice it, I’m eating higher amounts of fresher, healthier foods, and I feel better because of it. (No heartburn, stomach-aches, or indigestion, either. Ever. My digestive system has never been happier.)