A four-year post-weight loss study by the NIH shows that motivated people *do* keep weight off. I weigh 50 [...]]]> If you read Tara Parker Pope’s article The Fat Trap, you might be led to believe that weight loss is difficult and maintaining a weight loss is a herculean feat. This is just not true.

A four-year post-weight loss study by the NIH shows that motivated people *do* keep weight off. I weigh 50 pounds less than I did in 2000. I lost that weight in two big pieces, one in 2000 and one over the end of 2009 into 2010. Don’t let her defeatism convince you to not bother.

People who maintain a weight loss do pay attention to what they eat. I do not weigh and measure everything, and I do drink alcohol and eat sweets or chips sometimes. The key is to eat the most nutritious diet that you can, using fruits, vegetables and healthy protein sources to crowd out foods that don’t contribute much to your nutrition bottom line.

A few points:

• If you go back to what got you fat, you will gain back the weight. You need to find a weight-loss formula that is really a lifestyle change.
• Eating like “everyone else” isn’t what you think. If you mean the “everyone else” that’s overweight or obese, that’s an obvious problem. If you mean someone who is active all day and you aren’t or someone who is still growing, that’s another problem right there.
• People who are naturally thin don’t eat the way you imagine. The two very thin people I know DO eat a lot less than I do on average. One of them fasts and binges, which is actually a formula for weight loss if done correctly.
• You must eat high-quality food while dieting and afterwards. Yes, you can eat a bit more afterwards, but the basic composition of your diet needs to be the most nutritious food you can get.

I think the next big thing in dieting will be micronutrient sufficiency. I’m see it becoming a popular topic on blogs and podcasts. Here are three references to it from the last week:

Paul Jaminet’s The Perfect Health Diet
Free The Animal’s post on Malnutrition and Obesity
Jimmy Moore’s Podcast with the authors of Naked Calories.

Within what I can only describe a mean-spirited and pointlessly rude blog post from Matt Stone, there’s one interesting nugget of possible truth:

“…remember that prolonged dieting (this one, [...]]]> I’ve been seeing reasoned debate about the effect of long-term low-carb diets for a while now, but this last week, things kind of exploded into a yelling fest.

Within what I can only describe a mean-spirited and pointlessly rude blog post from Matt Stone, there’s one interesting nugget of possible truth:

“…remember that prolonged dieting (this one, low-fat, low-calorie, or a combination) tends to shut down thyroid function. This is usually not a problem with the thyroid gland (therefore blood tests are likely to be normal) but with the liver, which fails to convert T4 into the more active thyroid principle, T3. The diagnosis is made on clinical ground with the presence of fatigue, sluggishness, dry skin, coarse or falling hair, an elevation in cholesterol, or a low body temperature. I ask my patients to take four temperature readings daily before the three meals and near bedtime. If the average of all these temperatures, taken for at least three days, is below 97.8 degrees F (36.5 C), that is usually low enough to point to this form of thyroid problem; lower readings than that are even more convincing. It may be appropriate for those of you who fit these criteria to be prescribed thyroid by your doctor, and if so, a natural form of the hormone, which contains T3, is far superior to the most popular form of prescription thyroid, synthetic T4.”

-Robert C. Atkins

Google books says it comes from The Complete Dr. Atkins. Since I don’t own that, and I’ve never read it, that would explain why I’ve never seen this quote.

Jimmy Moore responded in the comment section of Matt’s site as well as on one of his blogs. Richard Nikoley of Free The Animal leapt to Jimmy’s defense. Matt has also previously said disparaging things about Richard.

My concern about all of this is that vital information might be missed. A lot of former low carbers or current paleo dieters *do* seem to have thyroid or metabolic issues of some kind.

Jenny, who runs diabetes update, talked about why low-carb stopped working for her. The whole piece is worth reading, but here’s the introduction:

The enthusiasm for the low carb diet as a weight loss diet arises in the first few weeks and months when most people experience dramatic weight loss.

What rarely gets mentioned–especially in the miracle weight loss books–is that very few low carb dieters ever get to their weight loss goal, especially those who start out with a lot of weight to lose.

I am enthusiastic about the power of carb restriction to lower blood sugar to normal or near normal levels. I am not as enthusiastic about low carbohydrate dieting as the solution to tough weight loss problems.

Because even the online low carb community tends to believe that people who stall out are “not doing the diet right” and respond to stall posts with that assumption, most people who do stall out long term leave the discussion boards, leaving only those who have succeeded to greet the newbies.

I’d like to point out that “not doing it right” is *exactly* what the purveyors of conventional wisdom spew at fat people trying to lose weight. If eating less and exercise is not working, then clearly, you aren’t doing it right. Or you’re lying about what you’re eating and your workout schedule. I think these amount to the same thing, but “you aren’t doing it right” is a lot nicer than “you’re a liar”.

I’ve seen many of the same complaints on BBSes like Low Carb Friends and Active Low-Carbers and even on Atkins Diet Bulletin Board. People will complain (almost exclusively women, though this may be a function of the boards themselves rather than an indication that all the people having the problem are women) that they can’t lose weight unless they cut calories to 1,400 or even lower, and generally, they do this by eating very low carb because they aren’t (as) hungry that way. This does not seem to get them anywhere either, and most low carb books I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of them) indicate that counting calories is a bad idea. While they admit that it’s possible to eat too much, they recommend you don’t count calories, but because almost everyone tracks their carbs in something like Fitday, they always know what the calorie count is.

Atkins says that if you have a lot of weight to lose, it’s OK to stay on induction a long time. So, people stay on induction a long time because, in their minds, they have a lot of weight to lose. At some point, their weight loss becomes negligible. They either add a lot of cardio at this point, or get very strict about what they are eating. The Atkins book says that after induction, you should be adding carbs back at the rate of 5g per week until you don’t lose weight any more, then back off a little. There’s a “carb ladder” that indicates the order. The ADBB folks who have made goal by following the instructions in the book always push for this, but I think it scares people to think they will stop losing weight, gain weight or even go on a carb binge, so they don’t do it.

In Lyle McDonald’s The Ketogenic Diet he has a section on hypothyroid and euthyroid stress syndrome that contains this sentence: “The decrease in T3 due to hypothyroidism must be contrasted to the decrease seen during dieting or carbohydrate restriction.” Basically, that the decrease in T3 is a known issue with ketogenic diets (Atkins is a ketogenic diet).

Any diet of sufficient length and restriction will slow the metabolism. It seems to take longer on a low-carb diet than a straight-up low-calorie diet, and it’s possible that alternate day diets or calorie cycling might be an even better option, but I think what a lot of low-carbers (Atkins and lwo-carb Paleo Dieters alike) are experiencing is an evolutionary adaptation that makes complete sense once you see it from the right angle. I think that it handily explains the idea of the Atkins “One Golden Shot”.

In my next blog post, I’ll try to give the right angle.

“This raises the question of whether the physiological basis for eating is becoming deregulated, as our children are moving toward constant eating.”

This is one of those news bits for the day. I heard it on KMOX while I was still in bed – I’m sure it will be [...]]]> Towards? Children? We’re all doing it!

“This raises the question of whether the physiological basis for eating is becoming deregulated, as our children are moving toward constant eating.”

This is one of those news bits for the day. I heard it on KMOX while I was still in bed – I’m sure it will be repeated as a snippet all over the place.

All anyone will get out of it is that it’s too many calories as that’s primarily what the article is about. I’m sure calories matter, but I can’t believe this many researchers are totally disinterested in other effects beyond a surplus of energy.

There’s useful information within, and there are a few recipes I’ll try.1 I could, in fact, do his Phase 1 diet with little difficulty. Beyond that? It’s not something I’m going to do, and where it winds [...]]]> I was interested in reading this particular book after seeing it mentioned in several of my usual nutrition haunts.

There’s useful information within, and there are a few recipes I’ll try.¹ I could, in fact, do his Phase 1 diet with little difficulty. Beyond that? It’s not something I’m going to do, and where it winds up at Phase 3 (ie, the rest of your life) is simply not somewhere I want to go.

His “Phase 1″ diet involves eating protein portions the size of your palm and as much greens and other low-carb vegetables as you like. Pumpkin is limited to 1 cup per day, beets and carrots are allowed raw only. His vegetable list is about what you see on any low-carb diet. What really got me interested is that he’s claiming we are in a summer mode, and we should tell our genes that Winter is Now in order to let go of fat. There’s a lot about that in Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar and Survival, a book I really liked and found fascinating.

A deviation from most low-carb plans is that the dairy allowed in the form of fresh cheeses like ricotta, mozzarella and yogurt (1/2 cup to 1 cup) and only a maximum of 1 ounce of aged cheese is permitted. Eggs are in the dairy section and are permitted.

Virtually any soy substitute is permitted for meat or dairy, which I find kind of baffling in a book that complains quite a lot about how lousy the modern diet is. He even lists seitan as OK, which surprised me.

Also included are a two snacks each to consist of 1/4 cup unsalted, raw nuts (except peanuts – they should be roasted). He recommends eight to ten glasses of water daily, as most diets do. Men may have two glasses of red wine a day, and women may have one. After the first two weeks, you can add back up to two servings of a list of fruits, though he says they will slow weight loss. Avocado and tomato are on the fruit list (they *are* fruits, after all), so you can’t have them the first couple of weeks. The fruits are all the lower sugar ones you’d find on lower carb diets.

That all sounds pretty do-able to me. This is where it gets a bit sideways:

As you continue in Phase 1, slowly cut back on the size of your protein portions and simultaneously upsize your portions of “Friendly Vegetables,” especially leafy greens. In doing so, you’ll decrease the amount of calorie-dense but micronutrient-sparse food and increase the amount of those denser in micronutrients but lower in calories. For example, if you’re already eating 2 cups of salad or cooked vegetables a day, up it to 3 cups. If you’re already at 3 cups, take it to 4 or 5 cups. If you have always been a big veggie fan, you can eat even more. By the end of your sixth week in Phase 1, your protein servings should be roughly half the size of your palm.

His goal is to get you to a mostly raw vegan diet. He uses meat and sometimes cheese as a seasoning in the Phase 3 meal plans. He’s very big on tofu shirataki noodles, in particular, but soy is all over the place. I guarantee our ancestors, primates or humanoid, were NOT eating soy.

Over the past twelve or more weeks, you’ve transitioned from Phase 1 of Diet Evolution, which emulates the diet people ate roughly a century ago, to Phase 2, based on the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our earlier ancestors. As a result, you’ve normalized your weight—or are on a steady course to do so—enhanced your health, and are well on the way to making permanent changes in your lifestyle.

Uh, apparently, he’s never looked at a cookbook from a century ago. I have, and l can say that people were afraid of raw vegetables. They cooked everything, and certainly, they ate plenty of bread and cooked root veggies.

As far as hunter-gatherers, there seems to be some romanticism that they were out gathering plants all day. This is simply not possible for half the year in a lot of places that humans *did* live before agriculture. They were killing animals, especially in the fall when the animals were fattest, and when they needed that fat themselves to make it through the winter. Furthermore, have you ever eaten wild fruit? We’ve subdued fruits so that they produce small seeds and lots of sugar because we’re smart, have thumbs and love sugar. Wild fruit is very seedy and has it’s own future as it’s primary concern, not ours. Never mind the fact that plants were only available seasonally and for relatively short periods for each. We can have damn near anything we want, any time. Do you really think a hunter-gatherer would have killed a fowl and then only eaten the white meat without the skin? If you believe that one, I have a bridge to sell you, as the kids used to say.

Phase 3 reaches back even earlier for inspiration. I regard the Longevity phase as the natural culmination of my program. But I am well aware that it is not for everyone. Up to now, you have been eating both cooked and raw foods, the latter primarily in the form of salads. In Phase 3, you eat primarily raw food, as our earliest ancestors did. For them, the opportunity to consume meat and other animal sources of protein was not a daily event; they relied instead on plant protein, consuming most of it raw.

So, in other words, our primate ancestors because the first humans ate mostly meat. I’m not really sure what he thinks plants were like before we started mucking around with them and growing them ourselves, but our guts simply cannot get enough nutrition out of what was available then.

In particular, people like to point out that gorillas are big and strong, a close relative of humans and eat mostly plants (they also eat insects). What goes *in* to a gorilla is low in fat. They get protein from plants, but they eat an enormous quantity of them. Dr. Gundry specifically says you should get your protein by eating lots of vegetables. He also says you should cut your nut portion to 1/8 of a cup for each of two snacks, so less protein there. I can’t find the quote right now, but he eats an entire bag of pre-cut and washed romaine per day in addition to lots of other vegetables.

Anyway, we aren’t gorillas. Our small intestine does 50% of our nutrient extraction and our colon does 20% (estimates, obviously). A gorilla (and other large plant-eating primates) are set up opposite this. They extract most of their nutrients in their large intestine and cecum.

This difference is highly significant. In a herbivore such as the gorilla, the caecum and colon harbour huge colonies of bacteria which ferment carbohydrates, particularly fibre, and use it to produce short chain fatty acids (SCFA) — principally acetic, proprionic and butyric acids. These are then absorbed into the body to be used as a source of energy.

So, the gorilla’s diet looks like it’s mostly carbs, but the gorilla gets something quite different out of it. It eats foods containing 5.9% fat, 37.1% carbohydrate and 57% protein. After it’s bacteria do their job, it’s estimated they wind up getting more like 24.3% protein, 15.8% carbs and 59.8% fat. Our systems just can’t do that.

Based on what I see in his Phase 3 meal plans, it looks like he’s suggesting around 800 calories a day. Throughout the book he stresses not counting calories or weighing foods. Now there’s nothing wrong with that. Both of those things are a pain in the ass, but the critic in me says that it’s so he can take your calories waaaaay down without you knowing. By the time you figure that out, you’re already doing it!

I find it really hard to believe I wouldn’t be hungry on that little protein, never mind the calories. Every time I’ve tried to reduce protein, I get hungry and can’t control my appetite. The only time I’ve gotten away with that, I was taking HCG! Getting a lot of protein from soy is no solution either. When I tried that, I got to my fattest *ever*, and it completely fucked up my hormones.

All that aside though, the dirty little secret of every diet is that you can’t ever really go off of it. If you go back to what you were eating before, you gain the weight back and then some. Watch this space for more about that.

¹The Seed-Sar Salad recipe is fantastic. I don’t see it attributed at this link, but the text is identical to that in the book. I used half walnuts and half sunflower seeds because I didn’t have pumpkin seeds, but wow, was it tasty.