Well, I've been keeping a little secret from my readers. I didn't want to say anything, in case nothing came of it, but when I met Andrew DiMino at the Low Carb Meet & Greet this summer, he asked me if I would be interested in writing for his online magazine, CarbSmart.com. I thought about it for a few days, wrote an article and emailed Andrew, saying, "The answer is 'yes' and here is an article for you to consider." And guess what! He liked it! It went through a little editing with Dana Carpender and was published very late last night.
I am so tickled to be joining the ranks of Andrew DiMino, Dana Carpender, Amy Dungan, Jimmy Moore and others, in writing articles about the low carb movement and my personal journey in weight loss and improving health.
This is my article to the left, entitled "The Carbiest Generation." Here is a short excerpt:
When future generations look back upon today’s generation, what will they see? What will set us apart in the timeline of human history? What contributions have we made to humanity that will define us in a word or a phrase? Some people in the Low Carb Movement think we will be known as “The First Modern Generation Where the Children Had a Shorter Life Span than Their Parents,” but that’s a little wordy. I feel a better name would be “The Carbiest Generation,” because, when it comes down to a pretty important aspect of our humanity – our overall health and very existence — this encompasses all that has gone wrong. Blame it on the food guidelines that have been handed down to us by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and promoted by our government starting in 1977. That’s when George McGovern took it upon himself to change the way America eats by vilifying saturated fat and cholesterol and glorifying carbohydrates. In case you don’t remember what happened back then, or were not even born yet, this short video by Tom Naughton summarizes the dubious wisdom and eventual adoption of the tenets of The McGovern Report. (Read the full article here.)
In this newest book, the subject of blood ketone testing is explained in detail. In the "olden days", we had to use urine testing strips for testing ketone levels, and the results were less than consistent. Back in 2000, my husband, Bill, lost around 30 pounds eating very low carb but never turned a strip purple, which is supposed to show evidence of ketosis. I, on the other hand, did not lose any weight, and my testing strips turned as dark a shade of purple as they could.
Today, there is a new over-the-counter system available to test blood ketone levels. Although designed for diabetics, this system can easily be used by people like myself and any other non-diabetic who wants to get to the bottom of why they are not losing weight eating low carb. Jimmy Moore explains here how he is testing his blood for evidence of ketone bodies with a handy dandy hand-held meter which is very similar to the blood glucose meters that you can buy in any pharmacy. One drawback is that, although the meter is pretty cheap, the testing strips for ketone measuring are pricey at $5-$6 per strip, but I guess it would be worth it to achieve the results that you have coming to you! Typically, one strip is used each day. You can find the meter and the strips on Amazon.com here and here.
I bought my meter from Amazon, but I bought my strips here, because they were much cheaper.
Jimmy explains how it has become obvious to him, after testing his blood for ketone bodies, that although he has been diligently eating low carb all these years, he has probably been eating too much protein for his system. And anyone who has been low carbing for any amount of time has heard that excess protein, beyond what the body needs, will be turned into glucose and will hamper ketosis. Even a zero- or nearly-zero-carb diet will not produce weight loss if too much protein is being eaten. I'll let Jimmy tell you the details of just what exactly he is eating now, but suffice to say his protein intake is less and his fat intake is more, along with his regular low carb.
Jimmy spent a few days visiting with Tom Naughton this past week, and Tom was able to witness first hand the new way Jimmy is eating and losing weight, and blogged about it here. Tom bought one of the meters, too, and is hoping to shed those last couple of pounds himself.
Obviously, I have found this very interesting! Anyone who has read this blog knows of my struggles to get rid of my remaining visceral fat. Although I am thrilled that I have lost 17 pounds of body fat in the last three years of low carbing, currently, I am still carrying around an extra 20 pounds of body fat that I would love to get rid of, once and for all, and the idea that this might just be the answer has me, well, pretty excited!
Today, I tracked my grams of fat, protein and carbs for the first time since last summer. Drs. Phinney and Volek advise that you should be eating between 0.6 and 1 gram of protein for each of your pounds of lean body weight. With my goal of lean body weight at 99 pounds, I should be eating between 59 and 99 grams of protein per day. In the past, I've tried 99 grams per day and more, but the results were bad, so this time, I will go to the low side and see how that works. Today, I ate 160g of fat (84.7% of total calories), 47g of protein (11.1% of total calories) and 18g of total carbs (4.3% of total calories). I was not hungry all day, eating mostly fat with a little bit of protein and carbs for breakfast and lunch, and a normal-ish dinner of salmon patties and salad. I also did some interval training outside (6 intervals of slow walking interspersed with fast-as-I-could-go sprints) before it got too hot outside to bear.
I really want to buy the meter and the strips to see if I am in ketosis, but money is tight and I have not decided whether I need to spend the money yet. If I start losing weight by just eating this new way, I may skip the meter all together. But I love data, and I probably will not be able to resist forking over the cash to do at least 10 days worth of testing.
I started out this morning at 147.4 pounds on the scale, with a body fat percentage of 36.3%. I wonder what I will weigh next week? Golly, I hope this is the answer I have been looking for!
In November, 2010, I posted this about the book The 6-Week Cure For the Middle-Aged Middle by Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades. If you read that post, you will see that the plan involves drinking three protein shakes with added fat and branch chain amino acids per day plus one low carb meal of whole foods for the first two weeks, then very low carb for the next two weeks and regular low carb for the last two weeks.
My plan is to drink a shake at 7:30 am, 11:15 am and 3:00 pm and then have my whole foods meal around 6:30 pm. After that meal, I won't eat anything else for the rest of the day.
Although I did not weigh myself right after I got home from vacation, I begrudgingly got on the scale this morning, and based on what I weigh this morning, and allowing for the fact that I have no doubt lost a few pounds since returning home, I estimate that I gained 11 pounds of fat and lost 1 pound of lean mass during that almost four week period. Most of the weight was added around my waist and midriff, with my hips not far behind. According to the book, this indicates NAFLD, or Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. The book explains what this is and claims to be able to reverse it in six weeks.
As you know, I have not been weighing myself on the bathroom scale for over a month now. But, in an effort to gather all the data I can about this next six weeks, I got on the scale this morning, so I could have a beginning weight for comparison purposes. I also took my full body measurements, which I usually only do on Sunday.
Here are my beginning stats:
Scale Weight - 150 pounds
Neck - 12.25"
Bicep - 11.75"
Bust - 36.75"
Midriff - 31.75"
Waist - 32.125"
Navel - 36.75"
Hips - 40.625"
Thigh - 23.25"
Calf - 14"
Total Inches - 288.25"
BMI - 26.6
Waist-to-Height Ratio - 0.510
Waist-to-Hip Ratio - 0.791
Body Fat - 36.5%
Lean Body Mass - 63.5%
Fat Pounds - 54.8
Lean Mass Pounds - 95.3
I am going to track my food on Fitday to get all the data I can. Based on what I calculated back in November, this is approximately the way I will eat each day for the next two weeks:
1400 calories
86g fat (55%)
127g protein (36%)
30g total carbs (9%)
20g fiber
10g net carbs
Aside from being lower in fat grams (55% instead of 70%), this is exactly the breakdown of macronutrients that I was eating when Colette Heimowitz, the Atkins nutritionist, decreased my food back in May 2009 to get my weight loss started after losing only one pound during my first seven weeks of Atkins.
One thing I am doing differently than last time is that I will not be exercising, aside from the physical therapy for my shoulder and maybe a little walking. The shoulder is so bad now, that exercise of any kind causes it to be painful, so I'm just putting that on the back burner until the issue is resolved.
So, here goes. I'll post at least once per week during this "cure" and let you know how it's going.
The latest blog post from Tom Naughton, the maker of the movie Fat Head:
In a Weight Watchers discussion group, someone recently posted this advice:
The key to successful weight loss is simple mathematics . . . ingest fewer calories than calories expended in a day.
That second part of that sentence is, of course, correct. Your body won’t tap the energy reserves in your fat cells unless the energy is needed. You have to expend more than you ingest. But that doesn’t mean successful weight loss is all about “simple mathematics.” Biological systems aren’t simple.
Unfortunately, too many people grasp (again, correctly) that gaining or losing weight requires an imbalance between the energy consumed and the energy expended, but then take a leap in logic and conclude that:
Consuming additional calories is the root cause of becoming fatter (as opposed to a response to storing more calories as fat).
Everyone who becomes fatter is either eating more or moving less than before.
Consuming fewer calories will automatically lead to a lower weight and less body fat.
In other words, they think it’s about simple mathematics, just like a savings account. To dispute any of these conclusions, we’re told, would be to ignore the laws of thermodynamics. So let’s see how that contention holds up in the face of controlled research.
In a study published earlier this year, researchers conducted two experiments, each lasting three or four weeks, in which obese mice were divided into two groups: a control group that ate freely (ad libitum) and a calorie-restricted group. In the first experiment, researchers first recorded the average caloric intake of the mice when they were allowed to eat freely, then limited the calorie-restricted group to 95% of that intake. In the second experiment, researchers observed the on-going caloric intake of the mice allowed to eat freely, then limited the calorie-restricted group to 95% of that intake. In other words, if the mice eating freely ate more, the calorie-restricted mice were given more food … but they were still eating 5% fewer calories than their freewheelin’ cousins.
A legitimate criticism of many diet studies is that the researchers relied on food-recall surveys or diet journals to determine how much people ate. Those methods can be notoriously inaccurate. Realizing this, the researchers on this study elected not to allow the mice to keep their own diet journals. Instead, the researchers precisely measured and recorded how much each mouse ate — even going so far as to examine the little critters’ cages and subtracting any bits of food they found from the food-intake totals.
In both experiments, researchers took precise before-and-after measurements of weight, lean body mass, and adipose-tissue mass. In the second experiment, they also used infrared sensors to track locomotor activity levels (”moving around” to us laypeople), and measured oxygen consumption and carbon-dioxide output to calculate how much energy the mice expended. I’d say that’s about as precise as a diet study gets.
Now, according to Jillian Michaels and the other leading experts in thermodynamics, there are only a couple of possible outcomes for these experiments:
The calorie-restricted mice, who were prevented from making little pig-mice of themselves, ended up weighing less and were leaner.
If the calorie-restricted mice somehow ended up fatter, it could only be because they were far less active than the mice who ate freely.
Yup … if you get fat, by gosh, it means you’re either eating more or moving less. Now let’s look at the actual results:
At the end of first experiment (four weeks), the calorie-restricted mice weighed a teeny bit less than their free-eating counterparts — the difference was not statistically significant, but it was there. However, the calorie-restricted mice also had 68.5% more fat mass, and 12.3% less lean mass.
Being put on a diet made them fatter.
At the end of the second experiment (three weeks), the average weight for both groups was virtually identical — it was also virtually identical to their baseline weights. But the calorie-restricted mice had 43.6% more fat mass and 6.4% less lean mass than the free-eating control mice. Once again, being put on a diet made them fatter.
Well, clearly, those fat little calorie-restricted mice must’ve spent too much time sitting around watching reruns of The Biggest Loser while their free-eating cousins were whipping themselves into shape by running on the big wheel, right?
Nope. According to the study data, there was no difference in locomotor activity levels between the two groups.
The calorie-restricted mice ate less, they moved around just as much, but they ended up weighing the same as the mice allowed to eat freely, and also ended up with more fat and less muscle. Oh, dear me … did these mice find a way to violate the laws of thermodynamics?
No, heck no, for the thousandth time, NO.
The researchers didn’t take body-heat measurements (too bad), but reported that the calorie-restricted mice expended significantly less energy: 5% less overall, and 20% less while at rest. Simply put, their metabolisms slowed down, even though they were just as physically active. No laws of thermodynamics were violated in the process.
I once sent a link to this study to someone who insisted that according to the laws of thermodynamics, weight gain is caused by eating more or moving less, period. His reply was something like, “That doesn’t prove anything! I’m not a mouse. I’m talking about people.”
Well, I agree that mice aren’t little furry people, which is why I’m not concerned when this-or-that food is shown to trigger cancer in mice. (Mouse chow probably wouldn’t agree with me either.) But remember, we’re talking about The Laws of Thermodynamics here. They don’t apply to one species, but not another. If mice can become fatter without eating more or moving less, yet somehow avoid violating the laws of thermodynamics in the process, then so can people.
The researchers were at a bit of a loss to explain why the calorie-restricted mice grew fatter, but I’m pretty sure we can rule out gluttony and sloth. They suggested perhaps the mice were reacting to the stress of a limited food intake.
“Reacting,” of course, means something hormonal was going on. (It wasn’t thyroid hormone. The researchers checked.) Perhaps the calorie-restricted mice produced more cortisol. Perhaps evolution geared the mice to respond to the threat of starvation by accumulating more fat, even if it means sacrificing lean tissue.
The point is, they didn’t get fatter by eating too much, and they didn’t get fatter because they decided to expend less energy. They began to expend less energy (in spite of being just as active) because they were being hormonally driven to accumulate more fat, even on less food.
Doesn’t that sound something like the process described by a best-selling science journalist who supposedly doesn’t understand that his hypothesis would violate the laws of thermodynamics?
Calories do count. Your body can raise or lower your metabolism in response to a change in the total calories or type of calories consumed, but calories don’t magically disappear. Some people who either didn’t read Good Calories, Bad Calories or didn’t grasp the section titled “Energy Balance” have accused Gary Taubes of proposing a hypothesis that would violate the laws of thermodynamics, but that isn’t the case. He proposed that if hormones are telling your body to store fat, your body will listen and obey as much as possible … slow your metabolism, make you feel lazy so you don’t move as much, ramp up hunger so you eat more. All of those factors work to increase the calories in and decrease the calories out.
When insulin is high, you store a higher proportion of calories as fat, which prompts you to eat more because you run out of fuel at the cellular level. Ignore the hunger, and your body may slow your metabolism in response. If you lower your insulin level, you’ll have an easier time burning body fat for fuel. In the complete absence of insulin, you’ll barely be able to store fat at all, but other than type 1 diabetics, we always produce some insulin in response to food — and good thing, too; we need insulin to make use of nutrients. The point of going low-carb is to avoid producing too much insulin.
Some people are very resistant to becoming fat, so their bodies find a way to burn off or waste the extra calories if they over-eat. Most of us aren’t that lucky, so if we overwhelm our bodies with excess calories, we’re going to gain weight. The reason a low-carb diet works for me is that I no longer want to overeat … since I’m not storing as many calories as fat as when I ate a high-carb diet, my appetite is controlled naturally, without counting calories.
--> A couple of years ago, in response to watching the movie Super Size Me, I completely stopped eating at fast food restaurants and I've never looked back. Tom Naughton's response to watching the movie was a little more extreme: He set out to make his own documentary, exposing the obvious (to him) inaccuracies, inconsistencies and downright deceptions in that movie.
The result was Fat Head, a factual and comic look at Super Size Me, written by, produced by and starring Tom Naughton, a stand up comedian, sit down writer and first time film-maker. Not only does Tom rip Super Size Me to shreds, but he also shines a very informative spotlight on the whole low carb nutritional movement. I just got my copy a week ago, after watching all the teasers for the same on youtube, and I loved it. However, because of the way I am "wired", I wanted to know more about what Tom thought on a few low carb confusions of mine.
I contacted Tom, asking if I could grill him a little, and he graciously told me to fire away. In pretty short order, I got some very interesting and thought-provoking answers and observations from Tom, which helped me fine tune my own understanding of the way I have chosen to eat - high fat, moderate protein and low carb.
Following are some Q & A from Tom and me.
Rebecca: How is fat stored in the absence of insulin? Most of the things I have read talk about how the over-release of insulin causes glucose to be stored as fat. I have also read that protein that is not needed by the body is converted to glucose and stored as fat. But what happens when a person eats overeats fat? I asked that question of Gary Taubes in his recent interview with Jimmy Moore. Gary answered by saying he has a problem with the word “overeat” and then he really didn’t answer the question. He said that what is enough for one person might not be enough for another person.
So I am trying to rephrase the question so that it is clear: Say a person is eating a certain amount of fat, protein and carbs (very low carb), and they are maintaining their weight on these amounts of each macronutrient. Then, they suddenly increase their fat intake only by a large amount. Do they begin to gain weight? And if so, why? If fat storage is driven by insulin, and fat does not provoke an insulin response, then how does that fat get stored?
I have heard some say that excess fat beyond what the body needs will just cause the body to raise the metabolism to burn it off. I have heard some say that the body does not use the excess fat, but just excretes it. I have heard some say that the excess fat is a “calorie bomb” and will be stored as fat, but they do not say by what biological mechanism this happens.
Dr. Atkins said that we can eat as much fat as we want, because it will not cause insulin to be produced and there will be no way for the fat to be stored. But then he says that if we eat way too much, it will cause weight gain. How?
Tom: Unless you’re a type I diabetic, your body will always produce some insulin in response to food, and good thing too, or you’d waste away and die. Carbohydrates generally provoke the greatest insulin response, but protein provokes an insulin response too. I’m not aware of any experiments in which subjects lived on a diet of 100% fat, so I can’t say whether or not it’s possible to gain weight on fat alone, but we don’t eat fat alone; we eat fat with protein.
So my guess is that while you’re less likely to store calories as fat if you’re eating nothing but fat and protein, it’s still possible to gain weight if you eat enough, because the protein could provoke an insulin response sufficient to store some fat.
Rebecca: What is the difference between “Calories In Calories Out” and “Creating a Calorie Deficit”? I have heard many people talk about how 3500 calories equals a pound, and that to lose a pound per week, all you have to do is cut 500 calories from your daily food. Or cut 250 calories per day and increase your activity by 250 calories each day for the same result.
Many low carb people will say that this theory is wrong, because a calorie is not a calorie is not a calorie. The body will react to 100 calories of high glycemic index carbs differently than it will react to 100 calories of butter. I know that I, personally, will maintain my weight on 1100 calories of high carb, low fat food, and I will also maintain my weight on 1800 calories of low carb, high fat food. So I do believe that there is a “metabolic advantage” to eating low carb and high fat.
Also, many will say it is wrong because the body can adapt through homeostasis or thermogenesis, and keep the body from losing weight. I heard this analogy recently: It's kind of like the Borg on Star Trek, where a phaser weapon works against the alien Borg creatures once, but then they adapt, and soon the same phaser blast no longer does anything.
I started a thread on the Atkins Forum called “My Body is Not a Piggy Bank! (Do Calories Matter?)” and I posted information that I got off of Adam Kosloff's website Why Low Carb Diets Work. On that website, Adam attempts (and does a great job, I think) of crystallizing Gary Taubes’ Good Calories Bad Calories into an easily read and understood form. Gary told Adam that he thought it was good.
If anyone can prove that homeostasis and/or thermogenesis are real, it is me! Without changing my activity, I have both gained and lost weight eating 1400 calories and 2000 calories and everything in between. And all of this high fat, moderate protein and very low carb (never more than 40 total carbs and as low as 20 total carbs).
Tom: To lose weight, you still have to create a calorie deficit. The idea behind low-carb is that the fat cells are open for business, so if you create the need to tap them, you can. Otherwise, simply eating less can encourage your body to slow your metabolism.
Calories In Calories Out assumes the number of calories you burn stays more or less constant. It ignores adaptive thermogenesis, the process by which your body can dramatically raise or lower your metabolism in response to the foods you eat, hormones, etc. So according to the Calories In Calories out crowd, if you simply eat less, you’ll automatically lose weight matching the equation 3,500 calories = 1 pound of fat. However, if your fat cells aren’t open for business and you simply eat less, your body will respond to starvation at the cellular level by slowing your metabolism. That’s part of the reason so many diets fail, and also the reason some people who try to grit it out end up losing muscle instead of fat. Likewise, people who literally can’t seem to gain weight (my son, for one) have metabolisms that ramp up if they eat more.
If your fat cells are open for business, your body can make up for a fuel shortage by burning body fat, so it won’t experience cellular starvation and won’t slow your metabolism. But any way you slice it, you need to give your body a reason to tap those fat cells. I’ve seen people accuse the low-carb doctors of either denying the need for a calorie deficit or just now admitting to it, but Drs. Eades & Eades wrote about the need to create a calorie deficit way back with their first Protein Power book, which was published in 1997.
Research has shown that people who go on low-carb diets often end up eating less spontaneously. There’s a reason for that: once the fat cells are opened up, they supply a bigger share of your energy, so you don’t feel the need to eat as much.
Rebecca: It seems like you are saying that Calories In Calories Out does not work if the fat cells are “closed” but it does work if the fat cells are “open”. Or maybe it works when the fat cells are “open” but you make sure not to drop your calories too low and cause the body to “shut” the fat cells again.
But doesn’t “creating a calorie deficit” also ignore adaptive thermogenesis? If the fat cells are “open” does that turn off adaptive thermogenesis, or is it still possible?
If I am understanding this correctly, the difference between Calories In Calories Out and Creating a Calorie Deficit is really only a matter of semantics. You could basically say that if you are eating high carb and low fat, Calories In Calories Out will not work. But if you are eating low carb and high fat, Calories In Calories Out will work. Isn’t Creating a Calorie Deficit really the same thing as Calories In Calories Out, provided, of course, that you are acknowledging that all calories are not created equal?
Just eating less and exercising more (Calories In Calories Out) will not make a person lose weight IF they are eating wrong. But if they are eating right, eating less and exercising more will make them lose weight (Calorie Deficit). Please help me to understand this better!
Tom: Well, it’s a big, complex subject, but I’ll try to make it as clear as possible. The Calories In Calories Out crowd believes that 1) Body fat is passive and 2) All calories count the same. Therefore, they make goofy statements such as “If you just cut 100 calories per day from your diet, you’ll lose 10 pounds per year.”
They see the body as a bank which has a set number of daily expenses (your basal metabolism). Every calorie consumed is a deposit, and every calorie burned through activity is a withdrawal. So in their view, if your basal metabolism is 1500 calories and you burn an extra 500 calories through activity, eating more than 2000 calories will always cause weight gain, and eating fewer than 2000 calories will always cause weight loss.
We know this is poppycock because people like my wife and son weigh exactly the same year in and year out. They can’t possibly be consuming EXACTLY the right number of calories every year. My son easily consumes more than a million calories in a year. According to simple calorie math, if he over-ate by a mere 7,000 calories, he’d gain two pounds – yet that never happens. So unless he’s eating exactly the right number of calories every year – with 99.3% accuracy – his body must be adjusting his metabolism up and down in response to his diet to maintain his weight.
In fact, my son twice tried to gain weight by eating quite a bit more, but it didn’t work. Other people have tried to starve themselves thin but couldn’t lose anything close to what the simple Calories In Calories Out math says they should have lost.
That’s what Taubes explained in his book. It’s important to understand that despite what some of his critics have said, Taubes does not believe calories can magically disappear or that the laws of thermodynamics don’t apply to the human body. (We’re talking about a guy with a degree in physics, after all.) In any system, the body included, the inputs and outputs must match. However, Taubes believes that 1) Body fat is an active driver of your metabolism, 2) the amount of fat your body wants to maintain is determined by hormones, and 3) the body responds to different sources of calories in different ways.
Body fat drives metabolism by providing you with a supply of fatty acids for fuel. To keep your blood sugar level, your body needs to alternately store and retrieve fat – storing fat when blood sugar is high so the blood sugar will be consumed first and brought down to a safe level, retrieving fat as blood sugar drops so blood sugar isn’t over-consumed and pushed too low. The amount of body fat you need for this system to work depends on how efficiently your fat cells can release fatty acids, which in turn is a function of several hormones. Insulin, of course, is a prime mover in this system because high levels of insulin can slow down or block the release of fatty acids. If your fat cells are slow to release fat, your body will work to make them bigger, because bigger fat cells can release more fatty acids, thus allowing you to keep your blood sugar stable.
So if hormones are telling your body to maintain a certain level of body fat, it will fight your efforts to gain or lose. It fights by adjusting your metabolism up or down. So you cut 100 calories per day from you diet, just like the experts suggest, and nothing happens. Why? Because if hormones are telling your body to remain fat, your body will respond by making adjustment to the calories it expends.
The Calories In Calories Out crowd doesn’t account for those adjustments. They also don’t account for the fact (despite plenty of clinical research) that the body tends to raise its metabolism in response to certain nutrients, such as proteins and medium-chain triglycerides – the fat found in coconut oil.
Here’s an analogy: To the Calories In Calories Out crowd, the gas I put in my car is calories in, the gas my car burns while idling is basal metabolism, and the gas my car burns while moving is calories expended through activity. In their minds, this equation never changes. But of course, we all know you can buy a car that gets 35 mpg, and three years later it’s only getting 28 mpg. That doesn’t violate the laws of thermodynamics, and it doesn’t mean the energy in no longer matches the energy out. It means something has changed inside the car’s system and it’s no longer using the energy in exactly the same way.
There is no getting around the fact that to burn away body fat, you need to create a need for your body to consume the fat – an energy deficit. But merely cutting calories may not do the trick, because your body can adjust your metabolism down, thus reducing or eliminating the deficit. That’s what Taubes was trying to explain: The calories in can cause adjustments in the calories out. If you don’t solve the hormonal issues first, shrinking your fat cells will simply produce a situation where your body can’t retrieve fatty acids quickly enough to feed your cells and keep your blood sugar level. Then your body will fight like crazy to avoid shrinking the fat cells any more – again by slowing your metabolism.
So for the calorie deficit to work in the long term, it must be combined with a hormonal environment that allows your body to efficiently retrieve fatty acids from your fat cells. That’s where keeping your insulin levels low comes in.
Rebecca: If I am Creating a Calorie Deficit, why am I still 36% body fat, even though I eat high fat, moderate protein and very low carb?
Even though it makes sense, in theory, that I need to “burn” more calories than I take in, I have not been able to make that theory a reality in my body. It seems that every time I either increase or decrease fat and protein (carbs always staying very low in all cases), there is no rhyme or reason to why I either stay the same weight, or lose weight or gain weight.
Remember my "Borg" analogy? Well, my body is the Borg, and it wants to weigh 143.4 pounds and Resistance is Futile! When I decrease my intake of food in order to create a calorie deficit, it will sometimes give up a little fat, but then adapts and starts storing fat again, bringing me back to 143.4 pounds or more. There was one time that I increased my food intake from 1600 calories to 2000 calories, and dropped several pounds in a week, but then my body adjusted my metabolism (I’m assuming) and all the weight came right back, with a little more just for good measure, to teach me a lesson.
In your Jimmy Moore interview,Tom, you said that people can look up exactly what you ate and how it caused you to lose a certain amount of weight. If you were to look at my food diary, you would see no rhyme or reason to the weight I have lost, gained or maintained relative to the food I happened to be eating at the time or the amount of exercise I was getting or not getting.
I recently just gave up and ate 1800 calories per day for a few months without a change. My weight stayed the same. I then dropped down to 1400 calories, and did not lose weight. I have been doing this now for two weeks, with no change in my weight. But didn’t I create a calorie deficit? And 1400 calories for a 5’3” woman is certainly not starving, I would think…
How can a person (me!) create a calorie deficit when thermogenesis is at work, it seems, to keep my body at a certain weight? What is the likelihood that a person has no control over their weight, and no matter what they eat or how much they exercise, they will not lose weight?
Tom: Okay, this is the answer nobody wants to hear, but here goes: Short of starvation that would ruin your health, it may not be possible for you to be as thin as you would like to be. As I explained above, your body needs to be able to store and retrieve fatty acids to keep your cells fed and your blood sugar level. The amount of body fat required to do that job depends on how quickly and efficiently your fat cells release fatty acids. Think of it this way: if you’ve got weak batteries, you need more of them to produce the same charge. So unless you can make your fat cells more efficient, your body is going to fight you tooth and nail to maintain your current level of body fat – because it NEEDS that body fat to avoid cellular starvation between meals, especially when you’re sleeping.
You may be able to make your fat cells more efficient through changes in hormones – thyroid recovery, adrenal recovery, insulin sensitivity recovery, etc. – but if you’ve suffered irreversible damage to any of those, there’s a limit to how much body fat you can or should lose.
I once managed to semi-starve myself down to 165 pounds, but the love handles and bit of belly fat in the front still didn’t go away. I started burning up my own muscles instead. My arms, legs and chest got skinnier, the belly didn’t. At some point, my body refused to sacrifice the body fat it needed. I just didn’t realize at the time that it did, in fact, need the fat.
So I can only suggest looking into possible fixes for hormone problems, keeping your carbs low (which you apparently already do), and engaging in hard exercise to improve your insulin sensitivity a bit. Beyond that, I believe the smartest thing to do is to accept that what matters is health, not body size. As Dr. Mary Vernon said in a lecture I attended, “From a health standpoint, I don’t care how fat you are. I care about what you’re burning for fuel.”
Rebecca: What do you think of the BodyBugg? I have a friend who uses one, and he says it accurately tells him how many calories he is burning off each day so that he can create a 20% calorie deficit and lose weight consistently. He eats high fat, moderate protein and low carb. I feel that if I got one (out of desperation!), it would tell me that I am burning calories, but I still would not lose weight.
Tom: Never seen one. Since the body will adjust your metabolism to keep you fat if you don’t solve the hormonal issues first, I don’t see the point of counting every calorie.
Rebecca: What other processes are at work in the body to store fat due to hormonal imbalances other than insulin?
Estrogen dominance, low progesterone, low testosterone, low thyroid, high cortisol and low melatonin will all cause weight gain. Why? (By the way, I have all of these, and having my hormones balanced with natural, bio-identical hormone replacement has not helped me lose weight.) Do people with these imbalances gain weight because the imbalances cause excess insulin to be produced? And if that is so, and a person is eating very low carb, what the heck is the insulin driving into the fat cells? Fat and protein?
Tom: I don’t believe they all work directly through raising insulin. From what I’ve read, they all have an effect on how efficiently your body can release fatty acids for fuel. Testosterone, for example, aids in lipolysis – the release and burning of fatty acids. Insulin, however, can block the actions of hormones that aid in lipolysis. If you can’t release fatty acids quickly, your body doesn’t want to give up the body fat it needs.
Rebecca: It's disappointing to me that I am actually a success story in the new Atkins book, A New Atkins for a New You.
Tom: I take it you don’t feel successful at the moment?
Rebecca: The answer to that is resounding NO! I have done everything right. I have exercised, I have lifted weights, I have eaten low carb, I have had my hormones naturally balanced with bio-identical hormone replacement. I am one of the top three contributors on the Atkins Community Forum, where some of my articles are used in the forum “stickies” so that newcomers will see them. I am profiled in The New Atkins For a New You. I was interviewed by Jimmy Moore for his podcast this past September. I have this health and nutrition blog.
And sometimes I feel like a hypocrite. I spend all my time telling everyone I know that low carb is the way that human beings were designed to eat, but eating this way is not causing me to lose more than just a few initial pounds of fat. I started out at 46% body fat and now I am 36% or so, and I am stuck. I did get down to around 33% over a year ago, but it has steadily been going back up since then.
Tom: I hear you. I’d love to have arms with veins that pop and six-pack abs, like my son. But it’ll never happen. I stopped a life-long weight gain and reversed it to a significant degree, but I know I damaged my metabolism as a young man, and it will apparently only recover so far. I have to focus on the fact that at age 52, I’m stronger than when I was at 25, I can walk for miles in hilly terrain without getting fatigued, I kick my wife’s behind in racquetball even though she’s 14 years younger, my blood pressure is low, my triglycerides are low, my HDL is high, and I’m the only one of my friends in my age bracket who isn’t taking some awful prescription drug.
You are NOT a hypocrite, Rebecca. You cannot compare yourself to people whose bodies are happy to be thin. (If I compared myself to my wife and son all the time, I’d go bonkers.) You can only compare who you are now with who you would’ve been if you hadn’t taken steps to improve your health. So I don’t compare myself to my son. The only person I compare myself to is the one I used to be.
Rebecca: Can fat tissue be damaged beyond repair? I have heard some say that the basic problem is that fat tissue function is damaged. Do you think that there is a possibility that, in some cases, adipose tissue has been damaged beyond total repair? Is there a chance, when there are no other possible issues at play, that a person cannot be capable of creating a calorie deficit in order to lose weight? Gary Taubes said something to that effect in his recent interview with Jimmy Moore. He said that, in some people, there will be excess fat that will not go away, no matter how well they eat.
Tom: I think Gary’s right, for the reasons I have already talked about here.
Rebecca: So you think that a person can be fat and healthy? In your Jimmy Moore interview, you talked about the difference between being overweight and being unhealthy, using members of your family and yourself as examples: You are a little overweight and yet you have normal blood sugar, and others in your family are normal weight and yet have Type 2 Diabetes. Do you believe that being overweight causes disease, or that disease leads to overweight? My father’s doctor has always told him to avoid gaining weight in order to avoid Type 2 Diabetes. His mother, my grandmother, was overweight most of her life and developed Type 2 Diabetes in her 60s.
I think of myself, and realize that I have low triglycerides, good HDL and slightly high LDL, but normal blood sugar, and low inflammation markers, like C-Reactive Protein and Homocysteine, and yet I am 36% body fat. If I stay this fat, will that lead to developing Diabetes and Coronary Heart Disease, or can I stay fat and remain healthy, as long as I eat right (low carb) and exercise? Should I only care about my health, and not try to lose weight, and if I do that, will this fat, healthy body of mine lead me down the road to ill health?
Tom: My father-in-law is lean, athletic, and a type 2 diabetic. My maternal grandmother is on the skinny side, but also became a type 2 diabetic. Clearly, body fat is not the cause of type 2 diabetes, or we wouldn’t see lean type 2 diabetics. It’s far more likely that many people eat diets that both make them fat and create insulin resistance at the same time. Others can eat the same diet and become insulin resistant without becoming fat.
Having said that, there is some evidence that the fat that accumulates in your liver may accelerate insulin resistance through the production of inflammatory cytokines.
Rebecca: So basically, does staying slim keep you healthy, or does staying healthy keep you slim (chicken/egg)?
Tom: Proper diet can aid in keeping you both slim and healthy. Losing weight may assist in keeping you healthy by removing inflammation-producing visceral fat from your liver.
Rebecca: Tom, why do people get fat? I know that Gary has a book coming out about this, but I am interested to hear your take on it. I have heard it said (maybe by Gary) that we don’t get fat because we sit on the couch and eat too much – we sit on the couch and eat too much because we are fat.
In other words, we aren’t fat because we eat too much and don’t get enough exercise. We’re not just lazy gluttons. It’s not just Calories In Calories Out. There is actually something wrong in the adipose tissue that is driving us to eat (specifically carbs) and causing us to stay inactive and keeping our metabolism slow.
I know that I did not change the way I was eating or exercising, but when I hit thirty, I just started gaining weight. I now blame hormonal imbalances, of which I’m sure insulin was one. I was also eating a high carb and high fat diet, except when I was trying to lose weight, and then it was high carb and low fat.
What do you think?
Tom: Metabolic derangement happens first. The result is weight gain and lethargy. When Dr. Robert Lustig treated kids for cancer, they nearly all become fat and lazy soon after. Realizing something hormonal must’ve happened, he tested them and ended up giving them a drug to suppress excess insulin production. Bingo; they lost weight and became active again, without anyone harping on them to eat less and exercise more.
Rebecca: I've been doing a lot of reading lately about cholesterol, because my husband's is high. Based on what I've been learning, I am beginning to wonder: Does serum cholesterol even matter?
Since starting low carb 20 months ago, my cholesterol has gone from around 200 to around 220. I’m sure it would not surprise you to know that my doctor wants me on statins. I refused. I did agree to start supplementing with red rice yeast, but now I am wondering if I should even be trying to lower my LDL. I have been reading a lot of things in books and on the internet that say that as long as triglycerides are low, and inflammation is low, you could have a high LDL and it doesn't matter. Some doctors believe that, ten years into the future, cholesterol will not even be considered a marker for heart disease. What do you think?
Tom: Don’t try to lower your LDL. High LDL protects you against infections and cancer. It’s only a problem if you’re producing small, dense LDL, which is unlikely if you have low triglycerides and high HDL. Also, LDL isn’t usually measured; it’s calculated. If you have low triglycerides (below 100), that calculation will nearly always overestimate how much LDL you have. Your doctor probably doesn’t know this, but there’s never, ever been an association shown between high cholesterol and heart disease in women. In senior citizens, those with high cholesterol have the longest average lifespans, primarily because they have a lower rate of cancer.
Rebecca: Thanks, Tom! I really appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions! I know that we all hope that low carb wisdom will prevail - and hopefully in our lifetimes!
Tom Naughton: Over the past several weeks, I’ve received quite a few emails and comments about Kansas State nutrition professor Mark Haub and his “Twinkie Diet.” I became aware of professor Haub’s experiment awhile back because he emailed me about it. He’s seen Fat Head, and if I remember correctly, he said he shows it to his students in class.
In case you haven’t heard about his experiment, here’s a typical headline, this one from a CNN article:
Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds.
For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too.
His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food.
The premise held up: On his “convenience store diet,” he shed 27 pounds in two months.
As you might imagine, a lot of the emails and comments I received included a question along the lines of “How can this guy be losing weight when he’s living on all those refined carbohydrates?” I replied that I’d need to see a breakdown of what he actually ate. Fortunately, Professor Haub (unlike Morgan Spurlock) has nothing to hide and has made his food log and health assessments public. I finally spent some time going over them and crunching some numbers.
So, the answer to the question How can this guy be losing weight when he’s living on all all those refined carbohydrates? is … (wait for it): By not actually consuming a high number of carbohydrates.
Despite the headlines, Professor Haub wasn’t living on a “Twinkie Diet” or a “Little Debbie Snack Cake Diet.” He was on a diet that includes Twinkies and Little Debbie Snack Cakes.
First, let’s look at a couple of daily menus:
November 12
Pumpkin Spice Donut
Coffee
Protein shake
Onion Rings
Steak
Broccoli
Macaroni and Cheese
Baked potato casserole
Dynasty Lychees
Baby carrots
Peanut butter cookies
2% milk
October 29
Hostess cupcake
Coffee
Sesame chicken
Teriyaki chicken
Egg roll
Chicken nachos
Broccoli
Lemon zingers
Kit Kat
Like my Fat Head fast-food diet, nobody would mistake this for any kind of health-food diet. The guy is definitely consuming sugar. And yet he lost weight, lost body fat, raised his HDL, and lowered both his triglycerides and LDL. How can that be? Well, let’s look at the numbers.
I copied the daily nutrition totals into Excel and calculated Professor Haub’s average daily intake of calories and macronutrients over the 10 weeks he’s been on the diet:
As a percent of daily calories, it works out to:
Fat: 38%
Carbohydrate: 47%
Protein: 15%
Now, 173 grams of carbohydrate per day certainly isn’t low, but it’s not high either. Depending on whose figures you use, that’s about half as many carbohydrates as an average American male consumes per day. It’s also at least 1,000 fewer daily calories than an average male consumes. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that Professor Haub lost weight on a “Twinkie Diet” that is actually moderate in carbohydrates and very low in calories. I’d lose weight on that diet, too. (I’d hate it, but I’d lose weight.)
I would also lose muscle on such a low protein intake, and according to his health assessments posted on Facebook, Professor Haub did in fact lose 6 pounds of lean body mass over the 10 weeks. So we’re looking at a fat loss of 20 pounds in 10 weeks, or two pounds per week.
As with dieters everywhere, his weight loss appears to be slowing down as he goes along. During the first four weeks of the diet, according to his online data, he lost an average of 3.75 pounds per week, but slowed to 1.8 pounds per week over the next six weeks. That’s not surprising. There’s usually some initial water loss in the early phase of a diet, and of course once you begin to lose weight, your basal metabolism tends to drop. What would be interesting to see is how quickly he’d regain the weight if he went back up to 2500 calories per day and consumed more carbohydrates — not that I’d encourage him to try it.
Overall, it looks like an interesting experiment, and it’s certainly generated a lot of media buzz. It’s just too bad the buzzing media reporters aren’t taking a little closer look at the professor’s online food log. There’s certainly junk food in this diet, but it is not (as one headline described it) a Junk Food Binge. When you consume fewer than 1500 calories and 175 carbohydrates on an average day, it’s not any kind of binge.
According to a brand-new study, we common folks have a real problem with our diets: namely, we don’t appear to be letting bad scientists scare us away from real foods quite as much as we once did:
The public’s attention is beginning to drift away from the anti-cholesterol message that doctors have been preaching for 40 years, according to the authors of a review in the November 2010 issue of the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.
“A widespread misconception has been developing among the Canadian public and among physicians. It is increasingly believed that consumption of dietary cholesterol and egg yolks is harmless,” Dr J. David Spence and colleagues state.
Hmmm … perhaps the public believes egg yolks are harmless because egg yolks are harmless. After years of making omelets with Egg Beaters and other frankenfoods, it could be that people are thinking to themselves, “You know, my grandma ate eggs every day, and she was 97 before the yolks finally killed her.”
The long-standing recommendation to limit dietary cholesterol is still important, especially for people at risk for cardiovascular disease, but a single egg yolk contains approximately 215 mg to 275 mg of cholesterol, more than the 200-mg daily limit recommended by the American Heart Association and National Cholesterol Education Program, and even more than some infamous fast-food items such as KFC’s Double Down or Hardee’s Monster Thickburger, the authors note.
Allow me to interpret that gobbledygook: Eggs are bad because a single yolk contains more cholesterol than the daily limit recommended by organizations that don’t know diddly about heart disease and believe Cocoa Puffs are good for your heart.
Also, eggs are bad because they contain more cholesterol than foods that don’t actually contain much cholesterol, such as chicken and hamburgers. This is akin to saying strawberries are bad because just 10 of them contain more fructose than 50 pounds of sausage.
“We have become increasingly concerned about the pervasive success of egg marketing propaganda,” including a brochure touting the benefits of eggs promoted by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, “quoting directly from the egg marketing propaganda,” Spence told HeartWire. “After I received that, I called the HSF and offered to meet with them to discuss the evidence, but I was brushed off as if I were someone they had never heard of.”
Oh, now, I don’t think they brushed you off as if you were someone they’ve never heard of. I’m guessing you were brushed off precisely because they have heard of you. I’ll bet the conversation in their offices went something like this:
“It’s Dr. Spence on the phone. Again.”
“Who?”
“You know, the nut-job who still thinks eggs are killers in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.”
“Oh, him. Uh … tell him we’re busy.”
“Despite widespread belief to the contrary, it is simply not true that dietary cholesterol is harmless,” because research over the past 40 years supports reducing dietary cholesterol to reduce LDL levels, which in turn reduces coronary risk, according to the authors.
Ah, yes … teleoanalysis in action. In case you didn’t watch the video of my Big Fat Fiasco speech, here’s how teleoanalysis works:
We cannot prove, in spite of many clinical-study attempts, that A (low-cholesterol diet) causes C (reduction in heart disease). But … if we can prove that A (low-cholesterol diet) sometimes leads to B (lower cholesterol in the blood) and B (lower cholesterol via statins) sometimes leads to C (reduction in heart disease), we can still claim that A causes C.
So that proves egg yolks will kill you … see?
The only trouble with Dr. Spence’s logic (besides the fact that teleoanlysis is utter hogwash) is that several studies have shown no connection between the amount of cholesterol you consume and the level of cholesterol in your blood — even Ancel Keys eventually admitted that fact. And of course, the link between high cholesterol and heart disease is about as statistically weak as you can get.
Epidemiological studies of egg consumption that failed to show a link between eggs and cardiovascular disease in healthy people were not powered to show an effect in healthy people …
Allow me to interpret again: dangit, if only we’d had a chance to crunch the numbers ourselves, we could have “powered” the data into producing the result we wanted.
… but did show an increased risk of cardiovascular disease with egg consumption among diabetics.
Or as a separate article in Science Daily about the same study explained:
The authors point out that in both studies, those who developed diabetes while consuming an egg a day doubled their risk of cardiovascular disease compared to those eating less than an egg a week.
We’ve covered those observational studies before. Eggs were associated with heart disease among people who also developed type 2 diabetes, but not among those who didn’t. In other words, the link only shows up in people with lousy diets overall.
Those would be people Dr. Mike Eades calls “non-adherers” and I call “people who don’t give a @#$%.” They don’t care if eggs are (supposedly) bad for them. They also don’t care if sugar is bad for them, or if smoking is bad for them. One of the studies noted specifically that the subjects who consumed more than one egg per day were also older, fatter, and more likely to smoke.
The studies also showed a significant increase of new onset diabetes with regular egg consumption.
Wowzers … such bad-science thinking, they didn’t even bother with the phrase “was associated with” this time. Read that sentence without knowing any better, and you’d think eating eggs causes diabetes. So let’s see how that idea holds up against actual evidence.
In the chart below, I plotted the rate of diabetes over the past several decades (in red), along with the per-capita consumption of eggs during the same period (in blue).
Hmmm … looks like back in the 1950s, when egg consumption was far higher than it is today, we had an amazingly low rate of diabetes. It would also appear that diabetes rates went up while per-capita egg consumption was going down. So what can we conclude from this? Thinking … thinking … aha, I’ve got it! — eggs don’t actually cause diabetes, or we’d see consistent and repeatable evidence that they do. No consistency, no scientific validity.
The authors conclude, “There is no question that egg white is classed as a valuable source of high-quality protein. Egg yolks, however, are not something that should be eaten indiscriminately by adults without regard to their global cardiovascular risk, genetic predisposition to heart attacks and overall food habits.”
The blogger concludes: the authors are lousy scientists
This from Jimmy Moore of the Livin' La Vida Low-Carb Show:
Tom Naughton, whose FAT HEAD documentary is one of the most entertaining and informative films on healthy low-carb living ever made, had gone on the speaking circuit with a fabulous speech called “Big Fat Fiasco.” This is well worth your time to watch from start to finish because Tom infuses his trademark humor and ability to make the complex understandable. You’re gonna enjoy this!
And from me, Rebecca - This is one of the best explanations of why the "high cholesterol causes heart disease" theory is false and is doing nothing but killing people. By the time it was over, I was almost to the point of tears because it was so true and moving. Everyone needs to know this!
