As far as the National Weight Control registry goes, a lot of those success stories involve some sort of carb reduction, and my own pretty extensive informal research into this shit seems to bear that out. The people that I know that have been successful in keeping weight off have shifted what was a very carb-heavy diet into one that was less carb-heavy. But they have all also counted calories.
“Use Super Fat-Burner Capsules and Lose Tons Of Weight!! Guaranteed To Work when used in conjunction with a calorie-restricted diet and exercise.”
Is there any evidence for this? i.e. a study where low carb dieters were checked for their hormone levels?
Yes! Now you’ve got it! Knowing and doing are different! See how simple that is?
Well no, lets not, since diets don’t fail. People have a harder and harder time maintaining weight loss as a result of changes in their bodies caused by semi-starvation (aka calorie-cutting) diets, leading to lower calorie needs than before the diet, greater hunger, more obsessive thoughts about food and reduced self-control, among other things, all of which make people who have dieted even more like to get fat, and fatter, than people who haven’t.
. Pardon? Do you mean to imply that there is a way to undo the things that dieting does, and i do not have knowledge of it, or that there is some particular way to succeed in spite of all the additional obstacles that have been placed in my path and I don’t have knowledge of what it is? Or do you mean to say that I still fail to do what needs to be done to maintain the loss? Please be specific.
And for the record, I am eligible to be part of the National Weight Control
Registry, as previously described. As of this date, i have kept 50 pounds plus off for over two years.
The evidence is the long - known facts of how different nutrients are handled by the body. Carbs drive blood sugar spikes and hunger, calories notwithstanding, protein and fat do not. Basic human biology.
Oh, theres also anecdotal evidence - any low carb dieter will tell you that calorie restriction led them to endless hunger and cravings and made them more obsessed with food than ever (as did ancel keyes study) while carb cutting satisfied their normal, even sub-normal hunger and removes the kind of cravings and food obsession they experience even without dieting. In other words, avoiding carbs normalizes their appetites, even depresses it. Cutting calories drives it further out of control.
Let me ask you this: Did those people substantially reduce the amount of fruits they were eating?
No, I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Depending, of course, on how you define “knowing” and “doing.” There seem to be at least 3 aspects of dieting:
(1) Knowing what to eat, and how much, in order to lose weight and maintain the weight loss;
(2) Knowing how to psychologically approach your diet so you can stick to it; and
(3) Internalizing (2) to a point where you do it pretty much all the time.
Of course, there is interplay between these things, since different foods can and do have different effects on one’s psychology.
If someone has all three, then chances are they will be reasonably thin indefinitely. Of course there are also people who are reasonably thin indefinitely for other reasons. If someone is fat – or constantly yo-yo dieting – it strongly suggests that they lack (1) or (2) or both. Because if they had (1) and (2), they could achieve (3) through practice.
It’s also possible that (2) does not exist; that there is no general psychological approach to dieting which, if practiced, will result in successful weight loss.
At best (perhaps) you have (1).
Again you are just playing semantic games. You know perfectly well what I mean when I talk about diets failing.
I mean that you (perhaps) do not know how to consistently and constructively handle your urges to eat.
That’s why I have said “perhaps.” I concede the possibility that you do know how to stick to a diet. But I am skeptical since you (apparently) continue to yo-yo.
I think somehow we are losing the big picture, and not focusing on the right question. I think it has been adequately determined that losing weight is hard, and keeping it off is even harder. The root of the problem is how do we keep people from having to face this battle at all? What makes people gain weight in the first place? If we answer that, then this other question becomes moot.
There does seem to be ample evidence that weight gain comes from overeating simple carbs, like sugar and flour. I’ve never met a person who told me they have a problem overeating meat, or vegetables, or eggs. Or got fat because of overeating those things. Obese people got fat eating too much bread, too much dessert, too much soda. There definitely is something very compelling about simple carb foods that causes people to overeat them.
I am about 50 lbs overweight. I’ve lost it several times. I’m back up to the weight where I don’t battle hunger every day. Hunger is like sleepiness, you know? You can only live with it/fight it for so long before your willpower dissolves and you do what your body wants you to do - sleep, or eat.
I do eat very healthily - modest portions of meat, lots of vegetables, miniscule amounts of sugar, no bread or pasta. But I will not lose weight on this healthy diet unless I am willing to suffer. And calorie deprivation is suffering. And the suffering doesn’t go away when all the excess weight is gone. No, you just keep feeling hungry until you manage to regain all the lost weight (and usually a little bit extra).
So the BEST thing would be to just figure out WHY we get fat and solve the problem there. And I do think it is the excess consumption of sugar and simple carbs.
I have 2 daughters. They are both healthy and slim. But I made sure as they were growing up that sugar was an infrequent treat for them. If they had toast for breakfast, then lunch and dinner were wheat free. I did not keep juice or cookies in the house.
It may be too late for me. I’m afraid I will be heavy for the rest of my life. But its not too late for our children. And I think THAT’s where the research needs to be. The horrible school lunch program is just one reason why I know we’re not there yet.
And what does basic human biology say about carbohydrates and the hunger hormones referred to in the previously linked study?
I haven’t heard that (uniformly) from low carb dieters. Except of course for low carb dieters who are in the water loss stage.
Can I also say that I am angry. Very very angry that I followed the food advice given freely in the 80s to eat grains. 6-11 servings a day. And I just got fatter and fatter. Fuck you government and your advice that was based on weak weak science.
Would you mind describing a typical day’s eating for you back in the 80s?
Sure. The message was fat-free. Eat fat free and you’ll not be fat. I was in high school, so I didn’t make the best choices, but I ate what the other girls ate.
My healthy breakfast was a bowl of grape nuts cereal with skim milk. Sometimes I’d heat it up and put sugar on it.
Lunch is a baked potato with salsa. Or a big pretzel with a mini-cup of cheese. Or a packet of Doritos and a Diet coke. Yes, those were lunches purchased at school.
I would be very very hungry after by 3:00 p.m. Would come home from school and just EAT. A packet of ramen noodles. Or toast. A huge plate of fat-free pretzels. Maybe all three.
Dinner would be pasta with fat-free marinara. A salad (usually iceberg) or some plain broccoli.
Ugh. What a horrible diet. And we thought it was good, fat-free you know?
I was hungry all the time.
So it’s the Government’s fault?
I grew up in the 80s also, and I freely admit that I’m fat because I just eat too much and exercise too little.
The USDA put out the recommendations, didn’t they? Fat should be limited, eat 6-11 servings of grain, right? Why would they do that? I don’t know. Was it to support grain farmers? There were posters at school touting the food pyramid. Is that the government giving eating advice? I sincerely thought I was doing the right thing by replacing fat & meat in my diet with heart-healthy-grains.
Well it wasn’t fat free. Doritos; ramen; and cheese all have a good deal of fat.
Of course I am not arguing that eating fat is what makes you fat, just pointing out that carbohydrates per se might not have been the culprit either.
In fact, you may be trying to hit a moving target. Because the food industry is constantly trying to sell junk foods which comply with the latest health fad.
I’m not an expert, but this seems to me like the attempt to create an opium derivative which kills pain but is not addictive. Of course no such substance has ever been created because the mechanism by which opiates kill pain is exactly what makes them addictive.
In the same way, I doubt that simply avoiding food component X is very helpful any more.
How many carbs does a hat have? 
I blame Obama.
But WHY do you eat too much? We have signals in our body that when working correctly turn hunger off and on. When you are a teen and growing, you are hungry because your body needs the calories. A pregnant lady is hungry because she’s using more calories. So what is it that is driving people to crave extra calories? The low carb school of thought is that excess insulin keeps your fat stores locked away and unable to be accessed by your body for fuel, and your brain then sends out the “hungry!!!” signal.
I am an n=1, but when I don’t eat simple carbs, that “hungry!” signal is in statis with my current body weight. I don’t overeat, I have adequate hunger to maintain that weight in a very remarkably narrow range. And that is how it it supposed to work BEFORE we got fat. That’s how it works for thin people.
I suspect part of it is that fat used to be a pretty good proxy for the sort of unhealthy foods to avoid. Ice cream, cookies, potato chips, fried chicken, pizza, etc. all have a high fat content. So it was reasonable to believe that fat is unhealthy.