If you've never seen someone actually make the case for this stuff, but only let other people diss it for you, I encourage you in the strongest terms to actually listen to the case directly and make up your own mind. These are not the rantings of people who think fire can't weaken steel or that insist immunizations cause autism; indeed, they make a very strong case that the people who insist on the "calories in/calories out" model should be lumped right in with those folks.
(Oh, guess I missed the party 18 days ago. Well, nobody linked that video that I saw. If you are interested in Good Calories, Bad Calories, but don't want to buy it, that video is a reasonable substitute for the scientific explanations in the book, which is very similar to the linked video. You don't get the huge sheaf of references in the back or the long exposition of history explaining how we got where we are, but if you're interested in that after the video I'm sure you can find the book.)
Also I don't think we should "make up [our] own mind" the biology on this is way beyond the layman. Hacker News has a pervasive conceit that somehow as programmers we can see the obvious truth that people with decades of experience are apparently (or deliberately) unable to. In fact it's the reverse most subjects are substantially more complicated than they appear. You can't encompass the biology of obesity in a pop-sci best seller.
I wanted to come back and thank you for the link to Taubes' lecture. I watched the whole thing (on an exercise machine, ironically) and it was definitely worth it. I'd never heard of Taubes, but he's an unusual and formidable character. Whoever heard of a science journalist thinking for himself!? I got a lot out of both his talk and Lustig's and am going to try out what they each say (they both agree and disagree).
I don't find it hard to believe that Taubes is the only person who ever bothered to go back and thoroughly read the last hundred years of literature on this subject. Most specialists already "know" what's true, so why would they bother. Besides, it takes a very long time; Taubes spent five years doing it, and that only because he got a huge advance for his book. It's interesting to me that it took someone outside the scientific establishment to do this.
Incidentally, there's a clip on youtube of Lustig asking Taubes a question at one of his lectures. Whoever posted it gave it the asinine title of "Lustig yells at Taubes about fructose". He doesn't in the least "yell", he simply asks a question politely (it's clear the two know each other). Kind of a fun crossing of streams.
Particularly noteworthy was the excerpt of how the government propagandized reduced fat and increased carb consumption starting in 1982, and the resulting behavior changes in the general population tracks so well with weight gain.
And yet some people still believe that a handful of Congressional staff lawyers and lobbyists (that's who really write the legislation) should be trusted to engineer the entire health care industry.
I've struggled with weight my entire life. After trying every diet and exercise plan under the sun, just to watch the pounds come rolling back. At the end of November I said enough was enough and had bariatric surgery (an adjustable gastric band, or lap band to be more specific).
While it has only been 8 weeks, I'm already deeming it an overwhelming success. I can't tell you the feeling of utter relief when I feel completely satisfied after eating a single cup of food (8oz). It is almost euphoric. Living in my body before the op was almost like living in a prison, I was shackled to my ravenous hunger. It didn't matter how much I ate, I was never satisfied. I still have 80% more of my target weight loss to go, but I'm 100% confident I can make it there with this tool.
If you've struggled for a long time and feel hopeless, please at least take a look into bariatric surgery. Don't feel hopeless. Don't blame yourself, morbid obesity is not something that 98% of people can handle on their own, there are factors that are simply out of your control.
If you have any questions that you'd like to ask to a fellow hacker, please don't hesitate to contact me. I know what you're going through and would be more than happy to talk to you.
The title is horrible. This should be called "How a diet rich in fructose makes us fat, poisons us slowly, and wastes billions of dollars on health care for self-inflicted chronic diseases, and what you can do about it NOW.
Here's a brief summary of the salient points:
1) Consumption of fructose, sucrose (which is a glucose-fructose disaccharide), or alcohol (ethanol is metabolized by the same pathway as fructose) should be extremely limited. That includes HFCS and most fruit juices.
Why? Because the way your body metabolizes fructose, eating a lot of it results in insulin resistance (type II diabetes), hypertension (high blood pressure), high triglycerides, high LDL cholesterol (the bad kind), and weight gain due to inability to self-regulate hunger. The combination of these effects is known as Metabolic Syndrome.
There are two notable exception to this fructose prohibition: 1) it's ok to eat as long as it's in fruit because there's not much of it and it comes with lots of fiber, which makes it even more OK, and 2) if you're in the middle of (or have just completed) some seriously epic exercise and your are glycogen-depleted, fructose actually helps you restore glycogen much faster than regular carbs. See: Gatorade.
2) Do eat "food" as Michael Pollan would say. The closer to it coming out of the ground, the better. Google "paleolithic diet".
3) His research shows that you can begin reversing Type-2 Diabetes in a short number of weeks by eating an appropriate diet.
4) His research shows that the #1 factor causing most diets to fail is cheating on fructose consumption (even worse than cheating on exercise!).
4) Exercise is good for you, but not primarily due to calorie burning. It barely burns any calories relative to food intake. It's good for you because it reduces stress and helps your body maintain a "fast metabolism" on an ongoing basis.
5) Fructose is a major part of our food supply due to politics. It will take a while before the corruption that propagates the problem is broker. Thus, don't trust the government on this one.
The full video is an amazing presentation by a talented presenter. It is worth watching the full thing especially if you struggle with obesity or don't understand how the body metabolizes food.
The lecture is by a MD and/or PHD talking to a bunch of MDs and PHDs, so it's pretty high level. He covers a lot of biochemistry, but in a way that is pretty accessible.
After watching this all, I think the take-home-message was that, for fairly complex biochemical reasons, fructose (which is also a component of sucrose) is a particularly bad sugar. For one thing, it doesn't cause satiety very well, and for another, it does some damage directly which glucose, nature's preferred sugar, does not.
Everybody always treats science as if it's a sure thing. But you can have every statement you make be true, and still be wrong overall, because you missed something important.
Like the 7 Countries study, where the author didn't regress with fat-vs-sugar. Everything he said was true, but he was wrong in the end.
(Oh, yeah, and fructose is awful and mass food producers are poisoning us. But I knew that already.
Many restaurants, not just fast food restaurants, even put high-fructose corn syrup in meat.)
While making his case against fructose, Lustig makes a few offhand positive comments about glucose -- but it's not clear if he'd actually recommend ingesting it from nearly-pure sources, or using it as a sweetener instead of sucrose/HFCS. (Others with similar dietary recommendations often view pure glucose as bad as any other sugar.)
Sweettarts, Pixie Stix, Lik-m-Aid, and a few other brightly-colored super-sweet candies are almost entirely d-glucose, aka dextrose -- often with no other sugars listed as ingredients. I wonder if according to the Lustig analysis, these are relatively OK, or still have other problems (like triggering rollercoaster blood glucose/insulin levels) and so should be avoided.
I have been wondering the same thing since watching the video a week ago. Specifically, would it be good to use corn syrup (the old-fashioned glucose kind, not HFCS) as a replacement for fructose/sucrose?
I mentioned this video to my wife, who is a registered dietitian and a PhD in nutrition science (the RD / PhD combo is relatively rare). She said, "Yeah, I'm uncomfortable just saying 'calories in / calories out' because human metabolism is just way more complicated than that."
She's interested in watching the whole video herself; I'll post her thoughts if she does.
First, until there are comprehensive notes, it's worth watching the video. It really is excellent.
That being said, here are the notes I've taken so far. I started these back in December, but didn't have time to finish the video. If anyone wants to continue where I left off, please feel free to.
16:30 - Introducing HFCS.
17:20 -Why use fructose? It’s sweeter. (Also, cheaper.) Should be able to use less. But drink manufacturers use it more. (Shows chart with different types of sugars and their positions on a sweetness index.)
18:20 - Chemical composition of fructose versus glucose versus sucrose. Fructose and glucose are not the same. Fructose and sucrose are exactly the same from a body processing perspective. Both dangerous.
21:50 - Slide: Secular trend in fructose consumption: Natural - 15g / day WWII - ~20g / day 1977 - ~37g / day 1994 - ~55g / day Current adolescents - ~73g / day It’s not that we’re eating more (although we are). It’s that we’re eating more sugar.
23:30 - How did this happen? Why did this happen? The politics perspective: three political winds that swirled at the same time, creating the perfect storm. 1. In 1972, Nixon makes food prices a “non-issue.” 2. 1966, HFCS invented, introduced to the US in 1975. This makes sugar CHEAP. “High fructose corn syrup isn’t evil because it’s metabolically evil, but because it’s economically evil. Because it’s so cheap, it’s found its way into everything.” 3. In the late 70s, the USDA, the AMA, and the AHA all call for the reduction of fat in diets. Why? To stop heart disease. Did it work? No. So why’d they tell us to stop eating fat? In the 1970s we discovered LDL. In the mid-1970s, we learned that dietary fat raises LDL. In the late 1970s, we learned that high LDL correlates to cardiovascular disease. So, the conclusion was that if A leads to B, and B leads to C, then A leads to C. But the premise is incorrect. Why? It suggests that it’s transitive. That isn’t the case.
John Yudkin - Pure, White, and Deadly.
Keys - performed multivariate regression analysis (running data to filter out what really caused what) on cardiovascular disease. Showed calories from fat correlated highly with cardiovascular disease. But he didn’t run a complete regression analysis. He showed that sugar comes along with the fat, and that if you hold saturated fat constant but increase sugar, it doesn’t show results. But he didn’t go the other way, holding sugar constant and showing that fat still has an effect. (around 35:00) So his results aren’t actually reliable, but we’ve been basing 30 years of nutrition education and policy on this incomplete study.
I think this is a bit of a misleading title. At one point in grad school, I had broke 225 @ 6'3 with little muscle mass and I've changed that to 188 with much more muscle mass. My understanding is that fat is used for storing food energy and that each pound of fat stores ~3500 calories. So, something like dFat/dt = (f(calories in) - caloriesBurned())/3500 = amount of fat gained for some period of time. f might include something about the structure of the calories coming in, but it makes sense and my experience supports it.
I'm guessing you didn't watch the video. Sure, the lower your net caloric intake, the less weight you will gain. However, the types of food you eat have different effects on how much you want to eat. Therefore, if you eat different foods, you'll be more likely to lose weight.
To be credible, you should not try to dispute the simple truth that derives from conservation of mass and conservation of energy. Cal in = cal out; however, I do agree that our bodies are wired in such a way that particular substances trigger 'calories in' without a concomitant immediate increase in 'calories out', thus leading to increased weight and a new homeostatic baseline. This is not merely a pedantic point: it is the difference between making a credible statement about human nutrition and looking like someone who rejects chemistry.
It's worth noting again that this should reflect on the credibility of the submitter who chose the headline, not on the original presentation - which makes a different point entirely.
It might be just me, but watching this felt like watching 'The Inconvenient Truth of the food industry'.
So all we need now is a meeting of the leaders of the world in Copenhagen to ignore this huge problem with the processed food everybody buys and consumes for at least another 20 years. (potential problem, if you're not convinced something is wrong with the massive amounts of sugar in our processed food)
The guy seems pretty sensible in his explanations earlier in the video series, but his style is inflammatory. If he left out the bitterness toward the industry players that he's arguing with, he'd be more convincing.
He thinks he's uncovered a major medical emergency that affects maybe a third of American citizens, to the profit of giant corporations, with government agencies in collusion. I would doubt him more if (given his claims) he didn't feel strongly about it.
You will lose weight on calorie restriction as long as you go low enough. Though I've been fat my entire life, after college, I was 150 pounds overweight. I lost the extra weight by eating 900 calories a day for a year and a half or so.
At my normal healthy weight, I was starving. And weak as a kitten. I took up running, and stopped watching my diet. I literally could not keep up the willpower necessary to continue a 3000 calorie diet, even though 900 had been doable for so long. Despite running for an hour a day, I immediately started gaining 10-15 pounds a month.
So I was convinced that it was all about calories. I was fat because I ate too much. Why my body was so hellbent on eating 4000-5000 calories a day, I didn't know. I seemed to have a lot more willpower than anyone else I knew. It was sort of confusing. Then about a year ago, I read Taubes' book.
What if the human body is actually sort of complicated? What if hormonal regulation controls fat? What if the "trash bin" theory of body fat is actually a humongous oversimplification or just wrong? What if, after getting to a "healthy" weight by starving fat, muscle, and vital tissue, I wasn't healthy at all? What if it had also made me malnourished (hence the amazing hunger at my "healthy" weight)?
Anyway, I cut the carbohydrates out of my diet last December. I made zero effort at calorie restriction. In fact, I ate a lot. I made very little effort to exercise more. After a year of this, I'm almost 100 pounds under my max weight. I recently started running again, for fun, not weight loss, and am up to 2-3 miles a day.
And I am stronger than I've ever been in my life. Eating steak every day is probably more expensive than building the same muscle mass with steroids, but I'm pretty happy. I wasn't expecting it. It's good being a carnivore.
What little I've read on obesity research seems to require that both excess sugar and fat are consumed to overcome homeostasis.
Sugars can ignore homeostatic regulation for hedonistic reasons and fats don't have the same day to day correction that carbohydrates do.
So the part that might be working in your diet might be the no-sugar part of no-carb.
Overall it's quite amazing that many people can consume something like a million calories per a year and end up within 0.5kg (3500 calories) of their starting point.
I'm about halfway through Taubes' book (Good Calories, Bad Calories), and I also recommend it. So far, he has made a very strong case, and the theory that he supports seems to have better predictive power than the mainstream theory.
Going from 4K-5K calories per day to 900 is an extreme swing. These type of diets are shown not to work. There is also some evidence they convince your body it is living in feast/famine time which triggers a fat accumulation response. I do not believe that it is healthy to remove carbohydrates from your body. The body is a complex machine indeed, but we have a pretty good understanding of how it works regarding nutrition. Most structures run on glucose, muscles are made of protein, fiber helps digestion and micronutrients are used all over the place. The bottom line is that fat is used for storing extra glucose. The function of protein in nutrition is very interesting. If you don't get enough, then your body will cannibalize muscles to get it. Proteins can be broken down to provide glucose, but it's inefficient and generates toxins. Carbohydrates break down to glucose much better. I would suggest you try a conventional approach : Checkout nutritiondata.com or one of the numerous calculators and for your weight and height calculate your daily needs. Pay particular attention to the grams of fiber needed and setup a plan that leads to 1-2lbs of fat loss per week - a deficit of only 500-1000 calories per day. Changing habits faster than that is generally not practical, it certainly never was for me. Make sure you are getting enough protein without overwhelming calories, supplementing with a protein shake if necessary. Try that out for half a year or a year with daily measurements and diet recalculation every 10 lbs lost. Never, ever deviate from the selected diet (you accomplish this by leaving wiggle room in your estimates), weigh yourself daily and keep careful records. I really don't think carb free living is either sustainable or healthy.
You should be very careful on carb restriction. It can cause acid levels to build up in your blood which can be exceedingly dangerous. One side effect: the acids can crystalize in your bloodstream and collect at your joints. In short, you get gout/pseudogout/other gout-like conditions (depending on the exact composition of the crystals).
I know someone who did this; she was bedridden for a month and couldn't turn her head for 2 months.
Just out of interest, have you had any tiredness from cutting carbs from your diet? Many people on who restrict carbs, such as on the Atkins diet, experience this from what I've read.
[+] [-] jerf|16 years ago|reply
If you've never seen someone actually make the case for this stuff, but only let other people diss it for you, I encourage you in the strongest terms to actually listen to the case directly and make up your own mind. These are not the rantings of people who think fire can't weaken steel or that insist immunizations cause autism; indeed, they make a very strong case that the people who insist on the "calories in/calories out" model should be lumped right in with those folks.
(Oh, guess I missed the party 18 days ago. Well, nobody linked that video that I saw. If you are interested in Good Calories, Bad Calories, but don't want to buy it, that video is a reasonable substitute for the scientific explanations in the book, which is very similar to the linked video. You don't get the huge sheaf of references in the back or the long exposition of history explaining how we got where we are, but if you're interested in that after the video I'm sure you can find the book.)
[+] [-] glymor|16 years ago|reply
Also I don't think we should "make up [our] own mind" the biology on this is way beyond the layman. Hacker News has a pervasive conceit that somehow as programmers we can see the obvious truth that people with decades of experience are apparently (or deliberately) unable to. In fact it's the reverse most subjects are substantially more complicated than they appear. You can't encompass the biology of obesity in a pop-sci best seller.
[+] [-] gruseom|16 years ago|reply
I don't find it hard to believe that Taubes is the only person who ever bothered to go back and thoroughly read the last hundred years of literature on this subject. Most specialists already "know" what's true, so why would they bother. Besides, it takes a very long time; Taubes spent five years doing it, and that only because he got a huge advance for his book. It's interesting to me that it took someone outside the scientific establishment to do this.
Incidentally, there's a clip on youtube of Lustig asking Taubes a question at one of his lectures. Whoever posted it gave it the asinine title of "Lustig yells at Taubes about fructose". He doesn't in the least "yell", he simply asks a question politely (it's clear the two know each other). Kind of a fun crossing of streams.
[+] [-] jackfoxy|16 years ago|reply
And yet some people still believe that a handful of Congressional staff lawyers and lobbyists (that's who really write the legislation) should be trusted to engineer the entire health care industry.
[+] [-] antipaganda|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charliepark|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chipsy|16 years ago|reply
But it's such a huge PSA I'm upvoting anyway.
[+] [-] viggity|16 years ago|reply
While it has only been 8 weeks, I'm already deeming it an overwhelming success. I can't tell you the feeling of utter relief when I feel completely satisfied after eating a single cup of food (8oz). It is almost euphoric. Living in my body before the op was almost like living in a prison, I was shackled to my ravenous hunger. It didn't matter how much I ate, I was never satisfied. I still have 80% more of my target weight loss to go, but I'm 100% confident I can make it there with this tool.
If you've struggled for a long time and feel hopeless, please at least take a look into bariatric surgery. Don't feel hopeless. Don't blame yourself, morbid obesity is not something that 98% of people can handle on their own, there are factors that are simply out of your control.
If you have any questions that you'd like to ask to a fellow hacker, please don't hesitate to contact me. I know what you're going through and would be more than happy to talk to you.
v o n a t n i t r i q d o t c o m
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|16 years ago|reply
(Even if I don't particularly subscribe to the point of view promoted.)
[+] [-] neilk|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apinstein|16 years ago|reply
Here's a brief summary of the salient points:
1) Consumption of fructose, sucrose (which is a glucose-fructose disaccharide), or alcohol (ethanol is metabolized by the same pathway as fructose) should be extremely limited. That includes HFCS and most fruit juices.
Why? Because the way your body metabolizes fructose, eating a lot of it results in insulin resistance (type II diabetes), hypertension (high blood pressure), high triglycerides, high LDL cholesterol (the bad kind), and weight gain due to inability to self-regulate hunger. The combination of these effects is known as Metabolic Syndrome.
There are two notable exception to this fructose prohibition: 1) it's ok to eat as long as it's in fruit because there's not much of it and it comes with lots of fiber, which makes it even more OK, and 2) if you're in the middle of (or have just completed) some seriously epic exercise and your are glycogen-depleted, fructose actually helps you restore glycogen much faster than regular carbs. See: Gatorade.
2) Do eat "food" as Michael Pollan would say. The closer to it coming out of the ground, the better. Google "paleolithic diet".
3) His research shows that you can begin reversing Type-2 Diabetes in a short number of weeks by eating an appropriate diet.
4) His research shows that the #1 factor causing most diets to fail is cheating on fructose consumption (even worse than cheating on exercise!).
4) Exercise is good for you, but not primarily due to calorie burning. It barely burns any calories relative to food intake. It's good for you because it reduces stress and helps your body maintain a "fast metabolism" on an ongoing basis.
5) Fructose is a major part of our food supply due to politics. It will take a while before the corruption that propagates the problem is broker. Thus, don't trust the government on this one.
The full video is an amazing presentation by a talented presenter. It is worth watching the full thing especially if you struggle with obesity or don't understand how the body metabolizes food.
The lecture is by a MD and/or PHD talking to a bunch of MDs and PHDs, so it's pretty high level. He covers a lot of biochemistry, but in a way that is pretty accessible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
[+] [-] gort|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahoyhere|16 years ago|reply
Everybody always treats science as if it's a sure thing. But you can have every statement you make be true, and still be wrong overall, because you missed something important.
Like the 7 Countries study, where the author didn't regress with fat-vs-sugar. Everything he said was true, but he was wrong in the end.
(Oh, yeah, and fructose is awful and mass food producers are poisoning us. But I knew that already.
Many restaurants, not just fast food restaurants, even put high-fructose corn syrup in meat.)
[+] [-] gojomo|16 years ago|reply
Sweettarts, Pixie Stix, Lik-m-Aid, and a few other brightly-colored super-sweet candies are almost entirely d-glucose, aka dextrose -- often with no other sugars listed as ingredients. I wonder if according to the Lustig analysis, these are relatively OK, or still have other problems (like triggering rollercoaster blood glucose/insulin levels) and so should be avoided.
[+] [-] gruseom|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teach|16 years ago|reply
She's interested in watching the whole video herself; I'll post her thoughts if she does.
[+] [-] dejb|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charliepark|16 years ago|reply
That being said, here are the notes I've taken so far. I started these back in December, but didn't have time to finish the video. If anyone wants to continue where I left off, please feel free to.
16:30 - Introducing HFCS.
17:20 -Why use fructose? It’s sweeter. (Also, cheaper.) Should be able to use less. But drink manufacturers use it more. (Shows chart with different types of sugars and their positions on a sweetness index.)
18:20 - Chemical composition of fructose versus glucose versus sucrose. Fructose and glucose are not the same. Fructose and sucrose are exactly the same from a body processing perspective. Both dangerous.
21:50 - Slide: Secular trend in fructose consumption: Natural - 15g / day WWII - ~20g / day 1977 - ~37g / day 1994 - ~55g / day Current adolescents - ~73g / day It’s not that we’re eating more (although we are). It’s that we’re eating more sugar.
23:30 - How did this happen? Why did this happen? The politics perspective: three political winds that swirled at the same time, creating the perfect storm. 1. In 1972, Nixon makes food prices a “non-issue.” 2. 1966, HFCS invented, introduced to the US in 1975. This makes sugar CHEAP. “High fructose corn syrup isn’t evil because it’s metabolically evil, but because it’s economically evil. Because it’s so cheap, it’s found its way into everything.” 3. In the late 70s, the USDA, the AMA, and the AHA all call for the reduction of fat in diets. Why? To stop heart disease. Did it work? No. So why’d they tell us to stop eating fat? In the 1970s we discovered LDL. In the mid-1970s, we learned that dietary fat raises LDL. In the late 1970s, we learned that high LDL correlates to cardiovascular disease. So, the conclusion was that if A leads to B, and B leads to C, then A leads to C. But the premise is incorrect. Why? It suggests that it’s transitive. That isn’t the case.
John Yudkin - Pure, White, and Deadly.
Keys - performed multivariate regression analysis (running data to filter out what really caused what) on cardiovascular disease. Showed calories from fat correlated highly with cardiovascular disease. But he didn’t run a complete regression analysis. He showed that sugar comes along with the fat, and that if you hold saturated fat constant but increase sugar, it doesn’t show results. But he didn’t go the other way, holding sugar constant and showing that fat still has an effect. (around 35:00) So his results aren’t actually reliable, but we’ve been basing 30 years of nutrition education and policy on this incomplete study.
36:30 - Two types of LDL. Large/buoyant, and ...
[+] [-] rsheridan6|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackchristopher|16 years ago|reply
Another good video. Stanford nutritionist and self-described vegetarian admits benefits of low carb diets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo
[+] [-] keefe|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natrius|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hedgehog|16 years ago|reply
http://www.nature.com/nrendo/journal/v2/n8/full/ncpendmet022...
[+] [-] carbocation|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pohl|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickyp|16 years ago|reply
So all we need now is a meeting of the leaders of the world in Copenhagen to ignore this huge problem with the processed food everybody buys and consumes for at least another 20 years. (potential problem, if you're not convinced something is wrong with the massive amounts of sugar in our processed food)
[+] [-] pingswept|16 years ago|reply
The guy seems pretty sensible in his explanations earlier in the video series, but his style is inflammatory. If he left out the bitterness toward the industry players that he's arguing with, he'd be more convincing.
[+] [-] neilk|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yaroslavvb|16 years ago|reply
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/news/events/pastmtg/2007/cehr/docs/...
[+] [-] steveplace|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skmurphy|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thras|16 years ago|reply
At my normal healthy weight, I was starving. And weak as a kitten. I took up running, and stopped watching my diet. I literally could not keep up the willpower necessary to continue a 3000 calorie diet, even though 900 had been doable for so long. Despite running for an hour a day, I immediately started gaining 10-15 pounds a month.
So I was convinced that it was all about calories. I was fat because I ate too much. Why my body was so hellbent on eating 4000-5000 calories a day, I didn't know. I seemed to have a lot more willpower than anyone else I knew. It was sort of confusing. Then about a year ago, I read Taubes' book.
What if the human body is actually sort of complicated? What if hormonal regulation controls fat? What if the "trash bin" theory of body fat is actually a humongous oversimplification or just wrong? What if, after getting to a "healthy" weight by starving fat, muscle, and vital tissue, I wasn't healthy at all? What if it had also made me malnourished (hence the amazing hunger at my "healthy" weight)?
Anyway, I cut the carbohydrates out of my diet last December. I made zero effort at calorie restriction. In fact, I ate a lot. I made very little effort to exercise more. After a year of this, I'm almost 100 pounds under my max weight. I recently started running again, for fun, not weight loss, and am up to 2-3 miles a day.
And I am stronger than I've ever been in my life. Eating steak every day is probably more expensive than building the same muscle mass with steroids, but I'm pretty happy. I wasn't expecting it. It's good being a carnivore.
[+] [-] glymor|16 years ago|reply
Sugars can ignore homeostatic regulation for hedonistic reasons and fats don't have the same day to day correction that carbohydrates do.
So the part that might be working in your diet might be the no-sugar part of no-carb.
Overall it's quite amazing that many people can consume something like a million calories per a year and end up within 0.5kg (3500 calories) of their starting point.
[+] [-] MikeCapone|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keefe|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|16 years ago|reply
I know someone who did this; she was bedridden for a month and couldn't turn her head for 2 months.
[+] [-] FreeRadical|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjurney|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jodrellblank|16 years ago|reply