I wouldn’t be so sure…I’ve been having success with my semi-paleo diet. I call it “semi” because I still have some carbs, and some fruits.
But most carbs? no thanks. Potatoes? nope. I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t even miss french fries. I’ve stopped with the soda, even the zero ones. I avoid sugar when I can. And as little bread as possible.
Here’s the thing: I’m losing weight, I’m feeling good, and I’m not hungry all the time like I was before.
IRA Darth Aggie:
It’s not about losing the weight, it’s about keeping it off. The recidivism rate is high for all diets.
Thanks for the link to this article. I’ll stop beating myself up now that I know that my body and my brain may be working against each other.
After I successfully lost 35 pounds, it became more difficult to keep it off than to lose it in the first place. I weighed, measured, counted, exercised, to so little avail that the deprivation hardly seemed worth it. No, I haven’t given up, just realized that somethings may not be worth extreme efforts and sacrifice.
Moderation in everything, my friends, even moderation.
About ten years ago, my wife, who has always been heavy, OK, fat decided to lose wait. she went from 300 lbs to 115 over a period of a couple years.
For her it’s will power.
Good thing she’d stubborn.
She can actually eat just one potato chip.
Take a look at classroom pictures from the early part of the Twentieth Century. There are almost no fat kids. In a class of thirty there might be two. Check our WW II photos and newsreels of the troops and pilots. There are almost no fat guys.
I assume there has been no genetic drift in the last 100 years.
Yes, it is almost impossible to control weight in a culture that rides everywhere, has lots of money, lots of restaurants, and junk food for pennies or food stamps.
As a middle class child in the 50’s we never ate between meals, dessert was rare, snacks were for parties, and I walked or rode my bike everywhere.
Initial impression: I don’t believe it. Two of my associates have inspired me precisely because they both lost a lot of weight. One is now nearly a professional bike rider. He cut carbs. The other was a young women who just stopped compulsive eating and started exercising. Her face, especially, lost weight and she got a Jennifer Aniston haircut. Wow. What a difference. Both persons are higher in energy, higher in optimism, and much more lovely to look at.
And as to continual eat urges: Bullshit. I’ve twice fasted for a week and both times noticed that after three days the initial demands subside. Each time, the breaking of the fast was much less satisfying than I anticipated.
I think there’s something wrong witht the study. Like evolutionary biology, it wrongly assumes for the whole from only a biased and prejudiced part.
Our current system of worship of those who have talent and intelligience relieves you of hard and useless effort. You have no ability or chance to become a superstar so quit trying to improve yourself. You may now freely engage in glutteny, lust, and sloth. I have set up a system where you may be delivered an incredible amount of goods and services for that end. Please enjoy someone whose achievements you can never hope to achieve. Enjoy!
This message brought to you be your friend, Satan.
Mr. frank is right. Back in the day (1900 to about the 1960s) people had to do more things physically and high calorie, high glycemic index food was not as easily available as it is today. Not to mention most people didn’t have the extra cash to spend on that food.
I could easily weigh 300 pounds. I have weighed as much as 245 pounds. My appetite has always been too good. I never leave the table feeling full – even after a Thanksgiving/Christmas feast. My adult life has been a struggle against putting on weight. My ideal weight is 180. I have managed, except for one run up to 245 (during the first two years after I retired), to stay under 200 pounds since leaving high school when I weighed 175. I have had an incentive other than vanity to keep my weight down. My job as a pilot depended on passing regular physicals. Keeping my weight under control was one step toward passing those physicals. For all those 38 years as a pilot I would go on a form of high protein/low carb diet whenever my weight got 15 – 20 pounds above ideal.
After retiring I could have let myself go (and did for two years) but got involved in masters body building. During those five years I learned more about my body and the science of weight management than I ever believed possible. Maybe I should write a book. Except many books have already been written about why we get fat. Gary Taubes has written two good books about the issue. (Most of it has to do with the extreme availability of a lot of high glycemic index carbs and the fact we have not evolved to eat such a diet.) For me it was about eating to live, rather than living to eat. High protein, low carb eating is not easy in this society. Knowing how much to eat is also very important if you want to get as lean as a body builder.
Anyone who is overweight has my sympathy. I know how hard it is to not pack on the pounds. It takes motivation that lasts for the long haul, not just for 90 days of dieting. That’s hard.
Oh, yes, there are people like me who can gain weight quite easily. Then there are the thin people. I worked with a Marine Captain while instructing at Pensacola. He ate a dozen doughnuts for breakfast, greasy cheeseburgers and sugary malts for lunch, then ate a big dinner every night. I could gain weight just watching him eat. Eat as he did, he never gained an ounce – bastard! We humans run the gamut from those who don’t gain easily to those who can gain weight while eating very little. When medical science figures out how to overcome those genetic differences, maybe we can all be slender and healthy in a world with easily available, cheap, high glycemic carbohydrate calories. I’ll be gone before that happens. So, I’ll just keep on boringly eating the same foods that are low in high glycemic carbs and of which I know the calorie count with some precision. :>(
I am the cook in the family. I eat approximately half what my husband eats. He is thin as a rail and I am overweight. We weigh almost the same although he is 6 inches taller than I. His cholesterol is 175 and mine (without meds) is 275. He eats 1-2 bags of potato chips a week and I eat none. We eat salads, vegetables, low-fat meat, no fast food. We both exercise. Hmmmm.
Those whose life revolves around exercise and constant food analysis are to be commended. I have done that and am tired of it. I plan to live the rest of my life with a little more relaxed attitude toward my diet since the super-dedicated attitude did little to help me. BTW, I am not obese, just overweight.
Gary Taubes’s work has been referenced before on this blog, but I thought I’d just mention it again with a link to this article from two months ago. As JJ and Mr. Frank point out, a large part of the problem people have is the “standard American diet” which is high in sugars, refined carbohydrates and starches. Many people who adopt a paleo or low-carb lifestyle are amazed at how quickly and easily the excess weight seems to fall off, and many who do stick with it because they don’t get hungry as often or feel the need to eat as much, similar to IRA Darth Aggie’s observations above. And because they feel better, many of them stick with it.
I can’t say this is my personal experience, though. I’ve never had an issue with my weight. I’ve got an ectomorph body type, and my only complaints are that at times I’ve had a little more fat around my middle than I would like, and when I was working out regularly and trying to build muscle, it was very hard for me to put on more bulk.
Nevertheless, about a year and a half ago, I started including a lot more fat in my diet and cutting back on sugars, refined carbohydrates, and starches. I wouldn’t describe my manner of eating as low-carb, but it is certainly reduced carb. I still eat bread, but most of the time, only whole-grain sourdough bread that I make myself, and only about two (or sometimes three) slices a day. I eat few other grains most of the time–usually only when I go out to eat. Within a few weeks, I noticed that my pants were looser and some of the stubborn belly fat had melted away.
Curtis, you have an amazing ability to find interesting links. Mr. Locks has the idea. Eat to live. Nuts are very good for you, but I need some chicken, turkey, salmon, beef or whey protein – to each his own.
Thanks for that link, Kurt. I’m a big fan of Taubes. I lucked onto the idea of high protein, low carb eating in the late 50s in a book, “Calories Don’t Count,” by Herman Taller. It worked for me, so it became my way to lose weight.
I learned while dieting and pumping iron for body building that diet was 70% of the job. Pumping iron correctly is 20% or maybe even 10%. (Genetics is the other 10-20%) There are amazing things you can do with diet. But it means treating yourself like a lab animal. The controls that are necessary -selecting the right nutrients, measuring, timing feedings, and getting enough rest – do not lend themselves to the average person’s daily schedule.
Want to lose weight quickly? Buy a bottle of 1000mg predigested protein tablets. Every three hours take seven protein tablets along with 75-150 calories of vegies (spinach, brocoli, cauliflower etc.) or fruit (apple, orange, berries, etc) Drink plenty of water. That will provide roughly 800-900 calories with high quality protein, very little fat, and many low glycemic carbo nutrients from the fruits and vegies. Do not do this for longer than a week. If you eat this way too long, your body will down regulate your basal metabolism to meet your new caloric intake. At this point you need to eat at least your basal metabolic rate (BMR) in calories times 1.25 (Say your BMR is 2000 calories: that means eating 2500 calories) for two days. Then back to the protein tablets and vegies/fruit for another five to seven days. Then eat more for two days. Continue until goal weight has been reached. This is how some bodybuilders get very lean for contests.
If you want to bulk up you need to eat about 1.15% of your BMR each day in 40% protein, 25% fats, and 35% low glycemic carbs. Eat those calories in six small meals every three hours. Workouts are concentrated on heavy weight, low repetition lifts. The workouts should not be to failure – just to near failure. And the weights must be progressively increased. If you do it right, you can gain anywhere from 10 – 25 pounds of muscle (not fat) in four months depending on your genetics.
Yes, I know. Few people want or are able to spend
their time that way. It does show, however, that you are what you eat – even if you have poor genetics.
A new attitude toward food and a new food pyramid is needed if we are ever going to get control of the “obesity epidemic.” I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Few are listening to Taubes and others like him.
Food is yummier now. In the 1940s my mother used to serve plain fried beef liver. No one asked for seconds.
I also encourage folks to check out Gary Taubes books. There is some fascinating information in them about how our body metabolism works and also about how the scientific community (in general) has really screwed up in the last 50 years with their push of carbohydrates. Even the “good” carbs need to be a much smaller proportion of what we eat than they are now. Carbs should be the side dish, not the main course.
It’s really about insulin and how it works to convert food either to energy or to fat. Insulin is required to both convert carbs to glucose (for energy) and to create fat (out of the excess). No other hormone in the body makes fat.
All endocrinologists know the role insulin plays in converting food, which is why Type 1 diabetics, such as my son, are taught to count carbs, not calories, in order to know how much insulin to give themselves per meal.
Insulin reacts most strongly to carbs, and very little to not at all to protein and fats, which is why a low-carb diet works so well – your body produces less insulin and thus less fat. Right now, the amount of carbs eaten in a western diet has our pancreas in overdrive and has created a severe imbalance in the whole metabolic system.
And the overage of insulin in the system reacts like an addiction by increasing our cravings for the very thing that is sending us into imbalance. It requires a rest and reset of the pancreas to address it.
If you lose weigh by reducing carbs in your diet and yet maintain adequate protein and other nutrients (in other words, don’t starve yourself, just eat to full of the right foods) you should lose mostly fat and very little lean mass.
Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and other like them simply reduce portion sizes and the weigh lost is far too much lean mass, which leaves you with a high body fat percentage (also known as being skinny fat), less “engine” in which to burn what you eat from then on (because your lean mass is way down) and does NOTHING to address the metabolic imbalance that got us fat in the first place. Of course the weigh comes back!
In order to both lose effectively AND maintain the loss, you must learn a new way of eating that is not carb-dependent or starvation-dependent or exercise-dependent. Once you’ve learn it, use it for life and the weigh either doesn’t pile on at anywhere near the rate before (less than 10 lbs a year which can be dealt with once a year with a short stint of very low carb eating to “reset” the pancreas again) or stays off altogether.
But if you approach the whole thing as a temporary restriction (what I can’t eat) or temporary hard labor (gotta work my butt off exercising all the time) and you psychologically expect to go back to the old ways, you will get the old results.
Atkins was on the right path and so is the Ideal Protein method, which is also based on the science of Blackwell’s work. It’s the same science you find reviewed in Gary Taubes’ books.
Melatonin is a HUGE factor.
The human body needs SUNLIGHT for more than just bone health.
The fact that our latest form of illumination DRASTICALLY reduces natural melatonin levels is scarcely studied.
It is the reason, though, why we have such sex differences in weigh gain: the gals are indoors far more than the guys.
Weigh control starts and ends with neural control, nee hormones.
When these are FINALLY addressed astounding things can happen.
NancyB: It sounds to me like your mother just didn’t know how to prepare the liver. There are ways of preparing it to make it more appetizing. Liver is very nutritious and a great source of vitamins and minerals. It used to be eaten much more regularly in American homes, but it started disappearing from tables (and many grocery stores) after the great cholesterol scare of the 80s and 90s.
I’m usually a lurker here, but would like to chime in with my own experiences. I’m currently expecting my second child, and so of course have “gained weight.” Perhaps I would be counted as having failed at long-term weight loss, according to the studies.
I know my body well enough to understand that losing it again will be challenging. Eleven years ago I weighed as much as I do right now and probably more prior to having had kids. I lost that weight through dieting and exercise, and even after plateauing for years had finally managed to drop down to a “normal” BMI (almost effortlessly, it seemed) by reducing carbs and not calories. It was only my first pregnancy that finally causd me to gain weight again. Having read Taubes since then, I know that while the process is slow for me, it is absolutely possible to lose weight and keep it off.
I don’t buy the linked studies at all. Losing weight and keeping it off is hard, it’s true, and I have deep sympathy for everyone who struggles this way. But it’s not impossible, and being told that it essentially is does people a grave disservice. I’m stubborn, but I also know that my body is even moreso – and yet I was successful, and have no reason to think I won’t be again so long as I take care of myself as I ought. There is no reason for me to think I am one in a thousand as those studies suggest. I’m just one who considers a healthy diet – for me, lower carb, higher fat, moderate protein – to be a lifetime proposition and not simply a quick fix. I’ll never look like a supermodel, but I don’t have to be fat. Being told that it’s hopeless is just a way to excuse myself from taking good care of myself. And that is almost certainly a guarantee of failure.
I’ve written several times before about my experience with low-carb diets. I’ve tried several types.
The summary version is that they don’t work for me in terms of weight loss, and they also make me ill. There are a lot of people like that. I’m firmly convinced that people’s heredity and physiology are different, and although a certain percentage do well on those diets many many don’t at all.
I think you’re right about the individual differences, Neo, which was why I added the qualifier “for me.” Others do far better eating more fruits and fewer fats, etc. I suspect, however, that the modern diet of foods that are highly processed doesn’t do many people any favors, regardless of what the macronutrient breakdown may be.
It strikes me as patently ridiculous that everyone’s body responds to foods in exactly the same way, so I think the key for most people is to consider where their ancestors came from and what they thrived on, food-wise. And of course, there are plenty of people who really do have a heavier build and there isn’t much they can do about it. However, I don’t buy for a moment that that is the case for virtually everyone. I disagree strongly that weight is destiny, as the article suggests.
I know too many people who have had long-term success at losing weight and mostly keeping it off to believe that there is nothing that can be done.
The issue of losing weight and keeping it off reminds me of Mark Twain’s crack about smoking. “It is easy to quit smoking. I have done it hundreds of time.”
My experience with losing weight and keeping it off has led me to this conclusion. 1) If you do not exercise, you will not maintain the weight loss. 2) Walking 2 miles a day will maintain the weight loss. Very simple.
While I weigh more than I did 20 years ago, I weigh less than I did in high school.
I think once you are really overweight, it is difficult to return/stay thin. The key is not getting there to begin with. But otherwise, it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change. We’re in a world with infinite calories available for the taking for the rest of our lives; we’re constantly making diet decisions. I think Gary Taubes’ diet makes sense for these folks.
LJ-
As an internist, among my other certifications, I must correct you about how insulin works. Insulin does NOT convert carbs to glucose. Bowel enzymes do that. All carbs-All- are polymerized sugars. Sucrose (table sugar) is a very small polymer of two sugar molecules hooked together.
The reason your son counts carbs, as I do for the same reason, is to figure (indirectly) how much insulin to take to deal with the (polymerized sugar) carbohydrate load he’s fixing to eat.
Insulin is the key that allows entry of glucose (a sugar) into cells. Without insulin, such diabetics’ organs are starving in the midst of plenty; their blood sugars are high,high. Exercise has the same “key” effect; thus insulin-dependent diabetics will become hypoglycemic, indeed dangerously so, after substantial exercise if they have not lowered their insulin intake or boosted their blood sugar first.
Further, carb counting counts grams of carbohydrates-which are converted to sugars.
Calories counts energy per gram, which proteins and fats and carbs all yield. But ingested fats and proteins have no need for insulin to supply their metabolic values. 1 calorie raises the temp of 1 gram of water 1 degree C.
For anyone who’s bottomed out: try Overeaters Anonymous. Seriously. Patterned on AA, and it’s free. My sister was able to stay comfortably abstinent from compulsive eating for 28 years.
Key word there: comfortably. Took her a while to get traction, but once she did, she never looked back.
Hi Don Carlos – Thanks for the clarification. We might be talking apples and oranges, but I think we are aiming at the same fruit salad! 🙂
As you mentioned, insulin is necessary for the glucose to get into the cells and it is also necessary for fat storage. I think you would agree that while the whole metabolic process involves more than just insulin (such as the bowel enzymes), insulin is the key (dominate) hormone in both the body’s successful use of energy and (over-)storage of fat.
Type 1 diabetics clearly must control insulin intake for good health since they are deficient in insulin. But what about folks on the other end of the spectrum, who are producing too much insulin? They need to try and control how much insulin is in their body as well.
So, the idea I was aiming at is that the control point needs to be regarding the body’s production of insulin, because it is such a dominate hormone.
Since proteins and fats don’t trigger insulin production, one way to bring insulin over-production under control (and potentially regain insulin sensitivity in cells which have become insulin resistant – such as in type 2 diabetics) is to make fats and proteins a larger percentage of your diet and reduce the carbs so less insulin production is triggered. The weight loss is really just a side effect of correcting the metabolic imbalance.
Ok, I love Cracked.com. I really do. They’re hilarious, they’re pitch-perfect in mixing irreverency with pointed remarks and making gut-bustingly funny points. I often get lost in their site for hours at a time.
But one thing they’re not is accurate.
The article came out and said “incurable”, but that’s a lousy term to use. That’s actually contradicted by one of the very links the author uses:
Wing says that she agrees that physiological changes probably do occur that make permanent weight loss difficult, but she says the larger problem is environmental, and that people struggle to keep weight off because they are surrounded by food, inundated with food messages and constantly presented with opportunities to eat. “We live in an environment with food cues all the time,” Wing says. “We’ve taught ourselves over the years that one of the ways to reward yourself is with food. It’s hard to change the environment and the behavior.”
One of the cited sources contradicts the premise. The state of being fat is not “incurable”. It’s merely very, Very, VERY difficult to fix permanently.
The ultimate problem is not that biology absolutely dictates that a person cannot do anything about being fat. It’s that dieting has n incredibly high rate of failure. Like Neo here said: Recidivism. The crux of the problem is behavioral. We’re all too undisciplined to keep up with it, and we’re all too surrounded by pressures contrary to losing weight.
This is not to diminish the problem. The issue of discipline and pressures is indeed real and immense. I myself have troubles eating properly and exercising regularly, and I have a medical reason (diabetes) to be diligent about such control. Even with the added stick of health issues, I do find it painfully hard at times to do things right.
But that said, I also recognize that the fault is a conscious, behavioral one. So it’s one ultimately in my control, even though said control is difficult in the extreme at times. It’s not a real impossibility, it’s simply a practical difficulty, albeit a large one.
So, what’s the answer? I don’t know; again, I said I myself fail frequently. My point isn’t that there’s any answer, it’s that there’s an exaggeration and a misleading argument in the article. The only real point the author made is that being fat has in the past proven to be statistically incurable. But we know the reasons why this is so, and we know that it’s not actually biologically, physiologically incurable. We know that it’s simply an extremely high rate of failure to keep with the ongoing regimen. In short, in medical terms, the high rate of failure is due to noncompliance, and that’s not the same thing as being truly “incurable”.
LJ-
You’re mixing your apples and oranges! When talking Type I diabetes and how insulin works, don’t veer off target!
Persons with high energy input needs benefit from fats more than proteins or carbs, for the reason that fats yield 9 cal/gm, while proteins and carbs yield only 4.
E.M.H. has it exactly right: Non-compliance.
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I wouldn’t be so sure…I’ve been having success with my semi-paleo diet. I call it “semi” because I still have some carbs, and some fruits.
But most carbs? no thanks. Potatoes? nope. I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t even miss french fries. I’ve stopped with the soda, even the zero ones. I avoid sugar when I can. And as little bread as possible.
Here’s the thing: I’m losing weight, I’m feeling good, and I’m not hungry all the time like I was before.
IRA Darth Aggie:
It’s not about losing the weight, it’s about keeping it off. The recidivism rate is high for all diets.
Thanks for the link to this article. I’ll stop beating myself up now that I know that my body and my brain may be working against each other.
After I successfully lost 35 pounds, it became more difficult to keep it off than to lose it in the first place. I weighed, measured, counted, exercised, to so little avail that the deprivation hardly seemed worth it. No, I haven’t given up, just realized that somethings may not be worth extreme efforts and sacrifice.
Moderation in everything, my friends, even moderation.
About ten years ago, my wife, who has always been heavy, OK, fat decided to lose wait. she went from 300 lbs to 115 over a period of a couple years.
For her it’s will power.
Good thing she’d stubborn.
She can actually eat just one potato chip.
Take a look at classroom pictures from the early part of the Twentieth Century. There are almost no fat kids. In a class of thirty there might be two. Check our WW II photos and newsreels of the troops and pilots. There are almost no fat guys.
I assume there has been no genetic drift in the last 100 years.
Yes, it is almost impossible to control weight in a culture that rides everywhere, has lots of money, lots of restaurants, and junk food for pennies or food stamps.
As a middle class child in the 50’s we never ate between meals, dessert was rare, snacks were for parties, and I walked or rode my bike everywhere.
Initial impression: I don’t believe it. Two of my associates have inspired me precisely because they both lost a lot of weight. One is now nearly a professional bike rider. He cut carbs. The other was a young women who just stopped compulsive eating and started exercising. Her face, especially, lost weight and she got a Jennifer Aniston haircut. Wow. What a difference. Both persons are higher in energy, higher in optimism, and much more lovely to look at.
And as to continual eat urges: Bullshit. I’ve twice fasted for a week and both times noticed that after three days the initial demands subside. Each time, the breaking of the fast was much less satisfying than I anticipated.
I think there’s something wrong witht the study. Like evolutionary biology, it wrongly assumes for the whole from only a biased and prejudiced part.
Our current system of worship of those who have talent and intelligience relieves you of hard and useless effort. You have no ability or chance to become a superstar so quit trying to improve yourself. You may now freely engage in glutteny, lust, and sloth. I have set up a system where you may be delivered an incredible amount of goods and services for that end. Please enjoy someone whose achievements you can never hope to achieve. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkQ1QBaXa5k&feature=related
This message brought to you be your friend, Satan.
Mr. frank is right. Back in the day (1900 to about the 1960s) people had to do more things physically and high calorie, high glycemic index food was not as easily available as it is today. Not to mention most people didn’t have the extra cash to spend on that food.
I could easily weigh 300 pounds. I have weighed as much as 245 pounds. My appetite has always been too good. I never leave the table feeling full – even after a Thanksgiving/Christmas feast. My adult life has been a struggle against putting on weight. My ideal weight is 180. I have managed, except for one run up to 245 (during the first two years after I retired), to stay under 200 pounds since leaving high school when I weighed 175. I have had an incentive other than vanity to keep my weight down. My job as a pilot depended on passing regular physicals. Keeping my weight under control was one step toward passing those physicals. For all those 38 years as a pilot I would go on a form of high protein/low carb diet whenever my weight got 15 – 20 pounds above ideal.
After retiring I could have let myself go (and did for two years) but got involved in masters body building. During those five years I learned more about my body and the science of weight management than I ever believed possible. Maybe I should write a book. Except many books have already been written about why we get fat. Gary Taubes has written two good books about the issue. (Most of it has to do with the extreme availability of a lot of high glycemic index carbs and the fact we have not evolved to eat such a diet.) For me it was about eating to live, rather than living to eat. High protein, low carb eating is not easy in this society. Knowing how much to eat is also very important if you want to get as lean as a body builder.
Anyone who is overweight has my sympathy. I know how hard it is to not pack on the pounds. It takes motivation that lasts for the long haul, not just for 90 days of dieting. That’s hard.
Oh, yes, there are people like me who can gain weight quite easily. Then there are the thin people. I worked with a Marine Captain while instructing at Pensacola. He ate a dozen doughnuts for breakfast, greasy cheeseburgers and sugary malts for lunch, then ate a big dinner every night. I could gain weight just watching him eat. Eat as he did, he never gained an ounce – bastard! We humans run the gamut from those who don’t gain easily to those who can gain weight while eating very little. When medical science figures out how to overcome those genetic differences, maybe we can all be slender and healthy in a world with easily available, cheap, high glycemic carbohydrate calories. I’ll be gone before that happens. So, I’ll just keep on boringly eating the same foods that are low in high glycemic carbs and of which I know the calorie count with some precision. :>(
Your my hero, JJ. And this guy:
http://www.mpaths.com/2012/07/oh-nuts.html
I am the cook in the family. I eat approximately half what my husband eats. He is thin as a rail and I am overweight. We weigh almost the same although he is 6 inches taller than I. His cholesterol is 175 and mine (without meds) is 275. He eats 1-2 bags of potato chips a week and I eat none. We eat salads, vegetables, low-fat meat, no fast food. We both exercise. Hmmmm.
Those whose life revolves around exercise and constant food analysis are to be commended. I have done that and am tired of it. I plan to live the rest of my life with a little more relaxed attitude toward my diet since the super-dedicated attitude did little to help me. BTW, I am not obese, just overweight.
Gary Taubes’s work has been referenced before on this blog, but I thought I’d just mention it again with a link to this article from two months ago. As JJ and Mr. Frank point out, a large part of the problem people have is the “standard American diet” which is high in sugars, refined carbohydrates and starches. Many people who adopt a paleo or low-carb lifestyle are amazed at how quickly and easily the excess weight seems to fall off, and many who do stick with it because they don’t get hungry as often or feel the need to eat as much, similar to IRA Darth Aggie’s observations above. And because they feel better, many of them stick with it.
I can’t say this is my personal experience, though. I’ve never had an issue with my weight. I’ve got an ectomorph body type, and my only complaints are that at times I’ve had a little more fat around my middle than I would like, and when I was working out regularly and trying to build muscle, it was very hard for me to put on more bulk.
Nevertheless, about a year and a half ago, I started including a lot more fat in my diet and cutting back on sugars, refined carbohydrates, and starches. I wouldn’t describe my manner of eating as low-carb, but it is certainly reduced carb. I still eat bread, but most of the time, only whole-grain sourdough bread that I make myself, and only about two (or sometimes three) slices a day. I eat few other grains most of the time–usually only when I go out to eat. Within a few weeks, I noticed that my pants were looser and some of the stubborn belly fat had melted away.
Curtis, you have an amazing ability to find interesting links. Mr. Locks has the idea. Eat to live. Nuts are very good for you, but I need some chicken, turkey, salmon, beef or whey protein – to each his own.
Thanks for that link, Kurt. I’m a big fan of Taubes. I lucked onto the idea of high protein, low carb eating in the late 50s in a book, “Calories Don’t Count,” by Herman Taller. It worked for me, so it became my way to lose weight.
I learned while dieting and pumping iron for body building that diet was 70% of the job. Pumping iron correctly is 20% or maybe even 10%. (Genetics is the other 10-20%) There are amazing things you can do with diet. But it means treating yourself like a lab animal. The controls that are necessary -selecting the right nutrients, measuring, timing feedings, and getting enough rest – do not lend themselves to the average person’s daily schedule.
Want to lose weight quickly? Buy a bottle of 1000mg predigested protein tablets. Every three hours take seven protein tablets along with 75-150 calories of vegies (spinach, brocoli, cauliflower etc.) or fruit (apple, orange, berries, etc) Drink plenty of water. That will provide roughly 800-900 calories with high quality protein, very little fat, and many low glycemic carbo nutrients from the fruits and vegies. Do not do this for longer than a week. If you eat this way too long, your body will down regulate your basal metabolism to meet your new caloric intake. At this point you need to eat at least your basal metabolic rate (BMR) in calories times 1.25 (Say your BMR is 2000 calories: that means eating 2500 calories) for two days. Then back to the protein tablets and vegies/fruit for another five to seven days. Then eat more for two days. Continue until goal weight has been reached. This is how some bodybuilders get very lean for contests.
If you want to bulk up you need to eat about 1.15% of your BMR each day in 40% protein, 25% fats, and 35% low glycemic carbs. Eat those calories in six small meals every three hours. Workouts are concentrated on heavy weight, low repetition lifts. The workouts should not be to failure – just to near failure. And the weights must be progressively increased. If you do it right, you can gain anywhere from 10 – 25 pounds of muscle (not fat) in four months depending on your genetics.
Yes, I know. Few people want or are able to spend
their time that way. It does show, however, that you are what you eat – even if you have poor genetics.
A new attitude toward food and a new food pyramid is needed if we are ever going to get control of the “obesity epidemic.” I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Few are listening to Taubes and others like him.
Food is yummier now. In the 1940s my mother used to serve plain fried beef liver. No one asked for seconds.
I also encourage folks to check out Gary Taubes books. There is some fascinating information in them about how our body metabolism works and also about how the scientific community (in general) has really screwed up in the last 50 years with their push of carbohydrates. Even the “good” carbs need to be a much smaller proportion of what we eat than they are now. Carbs should be the side dish, not the main course.
It’s really about insulin and how it works to convert food either to energy or to fat. Insulin is required to both convert carbs to glucose (for energy) and to create fat (out of the excess). No other hormone in the body makes fat.
All endocrinologists know the role insulin plays in converting food, which is why Type 1 diabetics, such as my son, are taught to count carbs, not calories, in order to know how much insulin to give themselves per meal.
Insulin reacts most strongly to carbs, and very little to not at all to protein and fats, which is why a low-carb diet works so well – your body produces less insulin and thus less fat. Right now, the amount of carbs eaten in a western diet has our pancreas in overdrive and has created a severe imbalance in the whole metabolic system.
And the overage of insulin in the system reacts like an addiction by increasing our cravings for the very thing that is sending us into imbalance. It requires a rest and reset of the pancreas to address it.
If you lose weigh by reducing carbs in your diet and yet maintain adequate protein and other nutrients (in other words, don’t starve yourself, just eat to full of the right foods) you should lose mostly fat and very little lean mass.
Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and other like them simply reduce portion sizes and the weigh lost is far too much lean mass, which leaves you with a high body fat percentage (also known as being skinny fat), less “engine” in which to burn what you eat from then on (because your lean mass is way down) and does NOTHING to address the metabolic imbalance that got us fat in the first place. Of course the weigh comes back!
In order to both lose effectively AND maintain the loss, you must learn a new way of eating that is not carb-dependent or starvation-dependent or exercise-dependent. Once you’ve learn it, use it for life and the weigh either doesn’t pile on at anywhere near the rate before (less than 10 lbs a year which can be dealt with once a year with a short stint of very low carb eating to “reset” the pancreas again) or stays off altogether.
But if you approach the whole thing as a temporary restriction (what I can’t eat) or temporary hard labor (gotta work my butt off exercising all the time) and you psychologically expect to go back to the old ways, you will get the old results.
Atkins was on the right path and so is the Ideal Protein method, which is also based on the science of Blackwell’s work. It’s the same science you find reviewed in Gary Taubes’ books.
Melatonin is a HUGE factor.
The human body needs SUNLIGHT for more than just bone health.
The fact that our latest form of illumination DRASTICALLY reduces natural melatonin levels is scarcely studied.
It is the reason, though, why we have such sex differences in weigh gain: the gals are indoors far more than the guys.
Weigh control starts and ends with neural control, nee hormones.
When these are FINALLY addressed astounding things can happen.
NancyB: It sounds to me like your mother just didn’t know how to prepare the liver. There are ways of preparing it to make it more appetizing. Liver is very nutritious and a great source of vitamins and minerals. It used to be eaten much more regularly in American homes, but it started disappearing from tables (and many grocery stores) after the great cholesterol scare of the 80s and 90s.
I’m usually a lurker here, but would like to chime in with my own experiences. I’m currently expecting my second child, and so of course have “gained weight.” Perhaps I would be counted as having failed at long-term weight loss, according to the studies.
I know my body well enough to understand that losing it again will be challenging. Eleven years ago I weighed as much as I do right now and probably more prior to having had kids. I lost that weight through dieting and exercise, and even after plateauing for years had finally managed to drop down to a “normal” BMI (almost effortlessly, it seemed) by reducing carbs and not calories. It was only my first pregnancy that finally causd me to gain weight again. Having read Taubes since then, I know that while the process is slow for me, it is absolutely possible to lose weight and keep it off.
I don’t buy the linked studies at all. Losing weight and keeping it off is hard, it’s true, and I have deep sympathy for everyone who struggles this way. But it’s not impossible, and being told that it essentially is does people a grave disservice. I’m stubborn, but I also know that my body is even moreso – and yet I was successful, and have no reason to think I won’t be again so long as I take care of myself as I ought. There is no reason for me to think I am one in a thousand as those studies suggest. I’m just one who considers a healthy diet – for me, lower carb, higher fat, moderate protein – to be a lifetime proposition and not simply a quick fix. I’ll never look like a supermodel, but I don’t have to be fat. Being told that it’s hopeless is just a way to excuse myself from taking good care of myself. And that is almost certainly a guarantee of failure.
I’ve written several times before about my experience with low-carb diets. I’ve tried several types.
The summary version is that they don’t work for me in terms of weight loss, and they also make me ill. There are a lot of people like that. I’m firmly convinced that people’s heredity and physiology are different, and although a certain percentage do well on those diets many many don’t at all.
See this for my story.
I think you’re right about the individual differences, Neo, which was why I added the qualifier “for me.” Others do far better eating more fruits and fewer fats, etc. I suspect, however, that the modern diet of foods that are highly processed doesn’t do many people any favors, regardless of what the macronutrient breakdown may be.
It strikes me as patently ridiculous that everyone’s body responds to foods in exactly the same way, so I think the key for most people is to consider where their ancestors came from and what they thrived on, food-wise. And of course, there are plenty of people who really do have a heavier build and there isn’t much they can do about it. However, I don’t buy for a moment that that is the case for virtually everyone. I disagree strongly that weight is destiny, as the article suggests.
I know too many people who have had long-term success at losing weight and mostly keeping it off to believe that there is nothing that can be done.
The issue of losing weight and keeping it off reminds me of Mark Twain’s crack about smoking. “It is easy to quit smoking. I have done it hundreds of time.”
My experience with losing weight and keeping it off has led me to this conclusion. 1) If you do not exercise, you will not maintain the weight loss. 2) Walking 2 miles a day will maintain the weight loss. Very simple.
While I weigh more than I did 20 years ago, I weigh less than I did in high school.
I think once you are really overweight, it is difficult to return/stay thin. The key is not getting there to begin with. But otherwise, it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change. We’re in a world with infinite calories available for the taking for the rest of our lives; we’re constantly making diet decisions. I think Gary Taubes’ diet makes sense for these folks.
LJ-
As an internist, among my other certifications, I must correct you about how insulin works. Insulin does NOT convert carbs to glucose. Bowel enzymes do that. All carbs-All- are polymerized sugars. Sucrose (table sugar) is a very small polymer of two sugar molecules hooked together.
The reason your son counts carbs, as I do for the same reason, is to figure (indirectly) how much insulin to take to deal with the (polymerized sugar) carbohydrate load he’s fixing to eat.
Insulin is the key that allows entry of glucose (a sugar) into cells. Without insulin, such diabetics’ organs are starving in the midst of plenty; their blood sugars are high,high. Exercise has the same “key” effect; thus insulin-dependent diabetics will become hypoglycemic, indeed dangerously so, after substantial exercise if they have not lowered their insulin intake or boosted their blood sugar first.
Further, carb counting counts grams of carbohydrates-which are converted to sugars.
Calories counts energy per gram, which proteins and fats and carbs all yield. But ingested fats and proteins have no need for insulin to supply their metabolic values. 1 calorie raises the temp of 1 gram of water 1 degree C.
For anyone who’s bottomed out: try Overeaters Anonymous. Seriously. Patterned on AA, and it’s free. My sister was able to stay comfortably abstinent from compulsive eating for 28 years.
Key word there: comfortably. Took her a while to get traction, but once she did, she never looked back.
Hi Don Carlos – Thanks for the clarification. We might be talking apples and oranges, but I think we are aiming at the same fruit salad! 🙂
As you mentioned, insulin is necessary for the glucose to get into the cells and it is also necessary for fat storage. I think you would agree that while the whole metabolic process involves more than just insulin (such as the bowel enzymes), insulin is the key (dominate) hormone in both the body’s successful use of energy and (over-)storage of fat.
Type 1 diabetics clearly must control insulin intake for good health since they are deficient in insulin. But what about folks on the other end of the spectrum, who are producing too much insulin? They need to try and control how much insulin is in their body as well.
So, the idea I was aiming at is that the control point needs to be regarding the body’s production of insulin, because it is such a dominate hormone.
Since proteins and fats don’t trigger insulin production, one way to bring insulin over-production under control (and potentially regain insulin sensitivity in cells which have become insulin resistant – such as in type 2 diabetics) is to make fats and proteins a larger percentage of your diet and reduce the carbs so less insulin production is triggered. The weight loss is really just a side effect of correcting the metabolic imbalance.
Ok, I love Cracked.com. I really do. They’re hilarious, they’re pitch-perfect in mixing irreverency with pointed remarks and making gut-bustingly funny points. I often get lost in their site for hours at a time.
But one thing they’re not is accurate.
The article came out and said “incurable”, but that’s a lousy term to use. That’s actually contradicted by one of the very links the author uses:
One of the cited sources contradicts the premise. The state of being fat is not “incurable”. It’s merely very, Very, VERY difficult to fix permanently.
The ultimate problem is not that biology absolutely dictates that a person cannot do anything about being fat. It’s that dieting has n incredibly high rate of failure. Like Neo here said: Recidivism. The crux of the problem is behavioral. We’re all too undisciplined to keep up with it, and we’re all too surrounded by pressures contrary to losing weight.
This is not to diminish the problem. The issue of discipline and pressures is indeed real and immense. I myself have troubles eating properly and exercising regularly, and I have a medical reason (diabetes) to be diligent about such control. Even with the added stick of health issues, I do find it painfully hard at times to do things right.
But that said, I also recognize that the fault is a conscious, behavioral one. So it’s one ultimately in my control, even though said control is difficult in the extreme at times. It’s not a real impossibility, it’s simply a practical difficulty, albeit a large one.
So, what’s the answer? I don’t know; again, I said I myself fail frequently. My point isn’t that there’s any answer, it’s that there’s an exaggeration and a misleading argument in the article. The only real point the author made is that being fat has in the past proven to be statistically incurable. But we know the reasons why this is so, and we know that it’s not actually biologically, physiologically incurable. We know that it’s simply an extremely high rate of failure to keep with the ongoing regimen. In short, in medical terms, the high rate of failure is due to noncompliance, and that’s not the same thing as being truly “incurable”.
LJ-
You’re mixing your apples and oranges! When talking Type I diabetes and how insulin works, don’t veer off target!
Persons with high energy input needs benefit from fats more than proteins or carbs, for the reason that fats yield 9 cal/gm, while proteins and carbs yield only 4.
E.M.H. has it exactly right: Non-compliance.