Ignoring the whole hard to gain fat with a minimum of carbohydrates in your body thing, not everyone has your iron will when it comes to just not eating as much, and not everyone’s body reacts well to doing that. Cutting out carbs, especially refined ones helps me to eat less, feel healthier, etc. I don’t feel as hungry or need to snack nearly as much.
My girlfriend works with a lady who basically has herself on a starvation diet and that lady loves to complain about how hungry it makes her and how terrible she feels and how she isn’t actually losing any weight. Her body seems happy to drastically reduce calories out as she reduces her calories in.
When I was in college, I got down to about 300 calories a day for a good long while. Lost about 90 pounds. It was years later that I realized that metabolically speaking, going low carb did pretty much the same thing, except you got to eat.
Ok the problem with all diet calorie in/out arguments is one side treats this like an accounting problem, but it really is a psychological problem.
If you had humans prisoners fed them like cattle, yes, the calories will adjust the weight change. The thing is for the average Westerner it is easy to get calories, so the trick is how you trick people into changing habits which is very very hard.
I like bbc good foods because they often have nice recipes, laid out in an easy to follow format.
Anyway I can accross this:
Which I thought was interesting.
I think the BBC counts as mainstream media by any measure, and in this article they hint at the work of others who say:
Fasting can cure diabetes (a very low calorie diet here…):
"Recent research has reported interesting evidence to support the reversal of type 2 diabetes. Research funded by Diabetes UK and performed by a team at Newcastle University reported that type 2 diabetes can be reversed by an extremely low-calorie diet (600 kcals per day).
This diet is extreme and Diabetes UK strongly recommends that such a drastic diet is only undertaken under professional medical supervision. People with diabetes who want to lose weight should consult their GP before undertaking any new eating plan."
Ofcourse they don’t say it quite so boldly, but the idea is getting some traction.
I read another article about fat shaming where a doctor said something very interesting about how we’ve (society) have created an environment where it’s very easy to ingest too many calories .
Now if they would just recognize that you can accomplish the same thing with low-carb, without being low-calorie. I’ve done both, as mentioned before, but I’d think low-carb would be much easier for people to stick with over the long term as a lifestyle change.
Anyway I hope the government or whoever starts advocating measures that actually work, and that this doesn’t become a victim of political gain (more than it already is I mean)
But much harder to make money on. Low carb diets are mostly whole food diets, not processed-boxed-and-frozen-crap diets. And that processed food is where all the money is made.
I don’t know why Newcastle is trotting out this information like they did ground breaking research. Dr. Robert Lustig had already run clinical research a decade ago and was able to reverse Type-2 Diabetes in all his compliant patients. He didn’t need to drop them to an agonizing 600 calorie diet either. That’s unnecessary unless their pancreases are decimated and they’re going for the islet’s of langerhans regeneration hope.
Key is no HFCS, low sugar and low simple carb intake, whole fruits that contain fructose are fine, it’s the refined sugars and refined carbs that are very bad.
I’m reasonably convinced at this point that it’s the satiating effect of fats that makes them much healthier than their calorie density implies. And that is effect is real, significant, and hugely ignored in most advice handed out to people.
I’ve lost considerable amounts (~35 pounds) of weight twice in my life. Once in college and once after college. It never felt “hard” in the sense that I had to try to lose weight. It had more to do with not having a good dorm meal plan, and having a fast-paced job.
Oddly, working in a restaurant also killed my appetite.
I always have trouble balancing weight loss with my low blood sugar. If I skip a meal, I usually feel ill.
The other problem is I hate to waste time exercising when there are fun things to do. This was less of a problem when I lived in Europe, where I would walk or bike to places, and could usually get a few miles in a day, but in the US, walking isn’t feasible because of the distances, so I end up driving.
I’ve never understood why so many of us Americans think it’s totally a normal thing to need to be slurping down some sweet-tasting liquid most of the day, “diet” or regular. I’m so thankful to my mom for never buying us soda when we were kids, and maybe in the summer we’d get koolaid occasionally, but made with half the sugar the package called for.
But yeah, I think young people/kids now suffer from a lack of physical activity built into their day (because of helicopter/paranoid parenting + too much screen time of one kind or another) + the sweet beverage crap + fast crappy food franchises IN SCHOOL CAFETERIAS (which is utter BS, and in an earlier age would have been called out for the corruption it is).
