Just in the last few months I have finally wrapped my brain around the idea that insulin [...]]]> I’m pretty big on diet shake-ups: if what you’re doing is not working for you then change it. Doing the same thing (or more of it) and expecting better results is just *nuts*, if you think about it.

Just in the last few months I have finally wrapped my brain around the idea that insulin is not the only hormone. I’ve recently gone back and read the actual food suggestions in Neanderthin and The Paleo Diet and found that those diets have 25-35% of calories (maybe 150g in a 2,000 calorie diet) from carbohydrates. For The Primal Blueprint, that’s near the top of the curve, but it’s definitely still on the curve. Certainly, from the point of view of the USDA Dietary Guidelines, that is a low-carb diet, but for people that come from a world of GCBC and Atkins…from the way they react to the idea of eating a banana, you’d think it was SAD-levels of carbohydrate.

I found myself saying on a forum “but I eat a lot more fruit than is currently fashionable in Paleo circles”, and I realized that it is probably more than just fashionable — it’s more like a dogma. In particular, there seems to be a terror of fructose, but the accepted leading authority, Robert Lustig, has no problems with fruit. He thinks fruit juices are a really bad idea, but not whole fruit because it comes with fiber. I’ve seen others (and I’m not sure who, unfortunately) say that juice is OK if it’s fresh squeezed in your own kitchen (something Ray Audette has on his Neanderthin meal plans, BTW) – that what makes fruit bad is *cooking* it. Since virtually all bottled juice is pasteurized, that would eliminate all but that you’ve squeezed yourself. That whole end of the discussion seems to provoke incredulity in people like Jimmy Moore who think all sugar is bad and that’s that. I believed for a long time that any kind of sugar would make me gain weight, but it just doesn’t.

A trip around paleohacks.com will show that there are more than a handful of folks that have stalled out with muscle gains and/or weight loss while eating 50g or less of carbohydrate a day. I see people on the low-carb boards and forums decide that they are eating too many calories, so they take carbs lower or go ZC because more protein and/or more fatty meat allows them to eat fewer calories. They either can’t stick to it or it still doesn’t work, and they just come on and off the threads alternately sounding discouraged or confused. It gets a little sad to read because it gets to the point where, though they diet is failing them ultimately, they think *they* are a failure for not sticking to it properly. If you can’t stick to it, that’s a failure of the diet too. TRY SOMETHING ELSE. Many of these folks have lost a lot of weight already, and they have demonstrated they have will power…but suddenly it’s not working, so it must be their fault!

Here’s how it seems to me:

• If you have an insulin resistance problem, low-carb will work well for you and you probably don’t need to deliberately reduce calories. You may or may not be eating less, but reducing the glucose load on your already burdened liver and pancreas is so helpful that you lose weight no matter what.
• If you don’t have an insulin resistance problem, low-carb will work well for you if it causes a decent-sized spontaneous reduction in calories.
  

The insulin resistant folks seem to stop losing weight when they have solved their sugar problem. This is often way before they’d *like* to stop losing weight. Eventually, kind friends and internet acquaintances start talking about how health is more important than appearance. Goodness knows, I think that a long-term low-carb diet is quite healthy for people. All their biomarkers are excellent, but if they want to be thin, they need to take a chance on something else!

I’ve had this sitting around for a while, and I didn’t read it [...]]]> This is a review of Lyle McDonald’s The Ketogenic Diet: A complete guide for the Dieter and Practitioner. I’ve also recently read a couple of his other books, but after thinking about it a while, I learned the most from this one.

I’ve had this sitting around for a while, and I didn’t read it because I figured that 1) I wasn’t interested in a ketogenic diet at the moment and 2) I know what a ketogenic diet is already. The thing is that the book is chock full of biochemistry that I didn’t know and that was very enlightening.

Because of all the information it contains on everything related to metabolism, I’d recommend it for any non-scientist with a stubborn weight problem or really, any weight problem at all. No matter what kind of weight-loss diet you want to do, the processes detailed and explained in this book are really important to understand.

I also have a keen interest in his book The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, but I’m not going to talk about that until Dr. Mike’s Thin So Fast shows up. It’s my understanding that it’s also a Protein Sparing Modified Fast, which is what the McDonald’s RFL Diet actually is. Anyway, moving on.

In case you don’t know what a ketogenic diet is, here’s a definition:

In the most general terms, a ketogenic diet is any diet that causes ketone bodies to be produced by the liver, shifting the body’s metabolism away from glucose and towards fat utilization. More specifically, a ketogenic diet is one that restricts carbohydrates below a certain level (generally 100 grams per day), inducing a series of adaptations to take place. Protein and fat intake are variable, depending on the goal of the dieter. However, the ultimate determinant of whether a diet is ketogenic or not is the presence (or absence) of carbohydrates.

Atkins is a ketogenic diet, as are most low-carb plans. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what ketosis is, and instead of defending it, I’m just going to say that it IS NOT KETOACIDOSIS. This is well covered by McDonald – most people cannot provoke ketoacidosis since people without diabetes that are not alcoholics have feedback loops that prevent it ever happening. If you could cause this to happen just by not eating carbohydrates, how on earth would our human ancestors have made it through the ice age? Answer: they wouldn’t. Your system will deal, so don’t worry about it.

I now understand exactly how the brain starts using ketones for fuel, why it causes fatty tissue breakdown, and how much is too much protein on a low-carb diet. More importantly, I also understand how dietary fat works, and I see why I didn’t lose weight by shifting to a high-fat, low-carb diet. I’d get into ketosis, but it was mostly from dietary fat, so it never really touched my own stores. You can still eat fat and get your body to break down it’s own fat, but not too much.

Another really important thing: I understand why stalls happen on low-carb diets. The same hormones that caused your weight to drop are only made even MORE fat sparing by cutting carbs more – the usual solution. There are a lot of questions from people on the internet wondering how on earth they could be eating 20 carbs a day and not losing weight. The answer? They need to do a re-feed because their system has freaked out and lowered their metabolism by using hormones that are not insulin. It’s much easier for women to provoke this condition with a long-term very low-carb diet, but it can happen to men too. It’s more complex than this, but I’m not going to quote a whole chapter here.

One of things about protein that I learned that’s easy to explain is that it’s about 58% non-ketogenic. Let’s say I’m eating 125g of protein and 75g of net carbohydrate (we can ignore fiber here). This means that I will have 147g of glucose available for my body as fuel. This will definitely not be ketogenic. If I keep protein the same and lower net carbs to 50g, I should get into ketosis. The other factor is fat: about 10% of fat grams are made available as glucose in your bloodstream. Fat is *not quite* too cheap to meter, and eating more fat will actually lower utilization from your fat stores. If you’re trying to lose fat, that’s not something you want to do.

One of the other stumbling blocks for low-carb eaters is this one:

Individuals who have been on a low-carbohydrate diet (of any type) will show a rapid increase in bodyweight when carbohydrates are added to the diet (2,3). This weight gain…can be anywhere from 5 to 11 pounds (2,3).

For dieters who focus only on the scale, this rapid weight gain can be disheartening, pushing them straight back into a low-carbohydrate eating style. The inability to differentiate between weight gain and fat gain tends to promote the belief in dieters that excess carbohydrates (rather than excess calories) are the cause of their problems. This may make it difficult for these individuals to ever wean themselves away from the ketogenic diet.

For people who read AND FOLLOW the official Atkins Diet, they know to re-introduce carbs slowly. Most people just stop cold and add carbs back, gaining weight and then saying the diet failed them. In reality, they didn’t follow the diet.

The vital bit that McDonald suggests is this one: “for every 2 grams of carbohydrate which are added to the diet, 1 gram of fat must be removed.” This is because calories DO matter. How much you use and how much you waste has to do with your metabolism, but eating too many calories is going to cause you to gain weight over time. When you first stop dieting, your metabolism is often quite keen to put that fat right back on, so maintenance shouldn’t be ignored. McDonald recommends around a 65% fat diet, so it shouldn’t be too painful to remove some of that to add back carbs.

I don’t agree with everything last he says, but the science is understandable and well-referenced.

This book is very much worth reading, especially for Paleo/Primal types that are looking to lose (more) weight or lean out. I’m very well read in terms of diet books of the Paleo and low-carb stripe, and I learned a ton from this book. Yes, it’s expensive, so I’ll leave it to you if it’s worth it, but if you’re really stuck, it’s probably worth the $50.

Normally, I love diet books [...]]]> I’ve been reading chapters of Good Calories, Bad Calories again, and I was finally moved to look for Dr. Yudkin’s books on Amazon. His books Pure White and Deadly and Sweet and Dangerous cost way too much, but I did buy a copy of Eat Well, Slim Well.

Normally, I love diet books that are all about the meal plans, as this one is, but the recipes and meal plans were pretty disappointing. I think, for my taste, the original Atkins book (1972) is better.

Anyway, the introduction *was* interesting, and I’ve put up a PDF of it.

Here is a list of “unrestricted” foods: those, that is, which you don’t have to limit but which limit themselves. They are meat, poultry, fish, eggs, butter, margarine, cream, leafy vegetables. In addition, you should take between half and one pint of milk a day, up to half a pound of fruit, and up to two ounces of cheese.

The margarine is not something anyone recommends now, but in 1982 (the copyright date), people were a lot more warm and fuzzy about it.

Anyway, I’m keeping an eye out for a cheap copy of Pure White and Deadly.

It’s coming from a little different place than I [...]]]> I’ve had something about polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) in the hopper that is my brain for some time, but when I was finally catching up on my blog reading, I found that Dr. Kurt Harris has written something about it recently. It’s a good one.

It’s coming from a little different place than I am, and winds up somewhere a bit different, but it’s close. Ultimately, vegetable fats are not your friends. I’ll get to mine eventually, but go read his, especially if you’re a Paleo who uses canola oil, flax oil or eats a lot of nuts.

Anyway, another concept that I’ve been thinking about a lot came up on Robb Wolf’s podcast this week. Here’s “Bill’s” question:

Quick question about maximizing effectiveness of carb intake on cortisol levels. In a nutshell, if carb intake is restricted sufficiently to require more or less continuous gluconeogenesis to maintain blood sugar, and cortisol is the pathway by which gluconeogenesis is activated, wouldn’t eating close to zero carbs result in continuously elevated cortisol levels?

I’m pretty sure that this is what triggered my cortisol and adrenal issues. If I didn’t have *other* issues, it might not have happened, but I can’t help but notice that a lot of people (especially women) in the paleosphere also have hypothyroid symptoms. Non-raging hypothyroid symptoms (like gluten intolerance) are something you can experience for quite a long time and not realize that you just aren’t performing up to snuff. Once they start to abate, you realize just how many problems you had that were caused by your hormones that *aren’t* insulin. People in the low-carb world, paleo or not, tend to blame everything on insulin.

Here’s Robb Wolf’s answer (this is my transcription from the podcast. It may not be perfect, but I’m sure it’s pretty close):

Cortisol is not the only way to turn on gluconeogenesis, it’s one way to do it, but it’s not the only way to do it. The thought here is good, and this is part of the reason why the Intermittent Fasting stuff is really interesting, but also potentially very, very problematic because if you are in a fasted state, and then begin training, especially at a high intensity level, the likelihood of you releasing cortisol to prop up blood sugar levels is very, very high.

When I was talking with Lon Kilgore [not sure about that name, maybe this guy?] the other day about how cortisol levels can be elevated from overtraining and one of the obvious places this can happen, like if we’re doing intense, mixed modal activity where we’re using a lot of muscle mass intensely, like basically taking things down to failure, we’re causing a huge stimulus to uptake glucose into the muscles. If we clear all the blood glucose out of the bloodstream into the muscles, we’re going to really perturb the system, and if we do not have an easy way of replenishing that glucose then we are going to stimulate the release of cortisol and adrenaline to release glucose out of the liver. And so this is one of those things that when I’m looking back at my own problems with elevated cortisol levels, the AM training in a fasted state, when I’m looking back at it and I was already stressed, already having problems, already overly caffeinated and then throwing in fasted training on top of that? Oh, I was an idiot, no wonder I ended up producing the problems that I had.

He goes on to talk about moderation, and says that (paraphrased) some of the HIT training, some of the fasting is OK and maybe you can fly under the cortisol radar if you’ve got everything else in order, if you aren’t stressed and you’re sleeping enough and all that.

Robb and Andy Deas have discussed caffeine in the past, so they don’t go into that piece again here. Basically, they feel a moderate intake is OK and that something to slow down the jolt (heavy cream or coconut/almond milk if you don’t do dairy) is beneficial. They take a lot of questions about caffeine and alcohol in the podcast.

Also, Robb seems to feel pretty strongly that benefits of Intermittent Fasting max out at 16 hours. He has mentioned that more than once in these podcasts. The other half of the question:

Likewise, to maximize development of muscle (occurring in reduced cortisol environment) wouldn’t the ideal, though perhaps unattainable, diet be the one that provided JUST enough carbs to nearly eliminate gluconeogenesis, thus generating the lowest levels of cortisol due to diet (all other factors being equal)? Or is my understanding of this simply immature?

Robb’s answer:

I think that’s pretty spot on from the reality for maximum muscle development, although I am no means an exemplary expert in this area, the things that seem to go into it are insulin sensitivity but then also getting away with as much carbohydrate as you can definitely has some growth promotion to it, but different people have some different levels of buy-in on how much carbohydrate they can tolerate in this whole scene. The cortisol management piece is definitely really important from an androgen perspective. If your cortisol is going up, testosterone is going to go down and it’s going to have some other collateral damage effects including insulin sensitivity because of elevated cortisol, so there’s a lot of reasons for keeping cortisol in tight check.

As your pro-sleep hormones fall off (your best quality sleep for hormone balancing occurs before midnight), your system starts to produce cortisol in the morning to get you going. This is normal, but it’s *not* normal if you’re getting that shot of cortisol at 3am or 4am and waking up then. I found that if that happens (I can usually go back to sleep for a couple of hours, but it’s not high-quality sleep), I have a higher fasting blood glucose in the morning (in the 90s or about 105 instead of my normal low 80s) as well. This also makes sense, because the cortisol is driving the liver to produce some glucose as part of the waking process. So, this is a deranged reaction as the BG is too high and I was waking up too early.

Since I added the carbs back (a serving of fruit at the end of two meals and one meal with root veggies – I eat about 100g of carbohydrate a day including fiber), my morning blood sugars are coming down from 95-100. Yesterday it was 72 (which is really too low), and today it was 87, which is just right. I’m not waking up at 3 or 4am either, obviously. It’s a slow process, but everything keeps getting a *little bit better* every day.

Once you’ve gone low-carb for a long time, whether you’re paleo or not, it’s hard to go back without gaining weight. Many people who’ve been on a low-carb diet for a long time claim that they gain from consuming [...]]]> This time, I’m launching right in so I don’t get distracted. Part one is here.

Once you’ve gone low-carb for a long time, whether you’re paleo or not, it’s hard to go back without gaining weight. Many people who’ve been on a low-carb diet for a long time claim that they gain from consuming any carbs, and quickly. Many people that do any kind of a long-term diet gain the weight back, but they don’t seem as surprised by this as low-carbers or paleo/primals that gain or stall out. Many of the LC and Paleo/Primal crowd are very strong-willed people who’ve been doing something difficult with a major part of their life for months, and they feel like they know what they are doing by now (damn it!), so how could this awesome way of eating betray them?

My first post has a pretty high-profile low-carber talking about her issues, and Richard Nikoley’s “Paleo Diet Problems” includes a concise list, just thrown out there. The comments go on for a very long time, and are damned interesting.

I can concur that low-carb just stopped working for me at some point. I was told that I must be doing it wrong, but no matter where I took my macronutrients or diet composition generally, it didn’t really make any noticeable difference. Now that I’ve gotten the weight off through brute force, I’m determined not to gain it back, but it is definitely not easy. I think there are two main reasons that the stalls or gains occur.

First, you may have eaten a food that you have an allergy or sensitivity to, one you had restricted on your Paleo or low-carb diet. Often, this food is in a cheat/reward meal at a restaurant with *other* foods you haven’t eaten for a while, so it’s hard to figure out which one is the troublemaker. If you gain several pounds overnight, you’re inflamed, and it’s probably an immune issue, unless you did something ridiculously strenuous or actually injured yourself. If you way-overdo working out, throw your back out or get in an accident, your muscles can retain a lot of water. Food allergies can be very hard to suss out, especially for women since they have a lot of up and down just from female hormone cycles.

Second, you may have down-regulated your metabolism. If this is the case, you’ll gradually put on weight eating more calories or high carbohydrate foods, and you won’t lose from buckling down on your current program.

So, let’s imagine that you are an actual hunter/gatherer living in the wild. You aren’t going to go on a diet. You don’t care if you have a spare tire. You aren’t likely to exclude entire groups of food because you think they are unhealthy. Except for meat, your foods are available seasonally, and since it’s now winter, the vast majority of your calories are from meat. In order for you to survive and procreate, your body makes the glucose it needs from said meat. You aren’t hungry, and you’re still alive. Eventually, your metabolism needs less food to keep you alive. This is a *brilliant* evolutionary strategy. Lowering your body temperature and pulse doesn’t do you any serious harm because your food supply, though it may be available is not endless, so why run pointless cycles to create waste heat? After all, you might need that fat later.

When other foods (fruit, tubers) become available, you will certainly eat them, and you will either use the energy for tasks or your will pack on some fat. But now you need less food, and if you can get by like this it’s an evolutionary win. And the appetite suppression? If you’re not hungry, you can just sit on your butt instead of hunting so you don’t need more food. Another win for survival!

The first time you get keto-adapted, the strategy works well and you lose quite a bit of fat because your body has it to spare and that’s why it packed it on. Once your body is on to you (detecting that it’s winter and your food it’s not getting any carby foods), it’s going to quit wasting fat on unnecessary heat.

If you are a female H/G, maybe you’ll get pregnant. Either you’ll be growing a new human outside you or nursing one for at least three years, through all the seasons and possibly some food shortages. Now it’s really a win to lower your metabolism. I think this is why more women have subclinical hypothyroid issues after being keto-adapted for a while. Eventually, you might not be fertile at all because your hormones think the environment will not provide and that you don’t have enough fat to get by. This happens more than I ever thought it did. I always pictured this happening to extreme athletes like ballerinas, gymnasts and runners. I would *not* have guessed it happened to women that don’t look in any way extreme…but read the comments on that thread at Free The Animal or listen to some of Robb Wolf’s podcasts.

Your hormones are planning for the future, and you just can’t trick your body forever. If you insist on sticking to your plan, you might lower your calories more or add a bunch of strenuous exercise. This will mess up your adrenals. You might buckle down harder and burn out your adrenals. While you’re provoking your body to use adrenaline, you feel good, so you don’t detect a problem with the exercise. If you want to learn more about Cortisol, Adrenaline and bio-chemicals and how use use them up and really screw yourself up, read Dr. Diana Schwarzbein’s The Schwarzbein Principle II, The Transition. I always thought “adrenal fatigue” was like the new yuppie flu. I don’t think that any more – I fully accept that it’s a real thing.

You could, of course, have developed a thyroid problem. Many people report that it’s hard to get taken seriously by mainstream medicine unless you hit the markers on a blood test. Even if you do, it’s hard to get your medication where you need it to be. None of this means you *don’t* have a thyroid problem caused by chronic dieting. Now, I’m not a doctor, and I’m not giving medical advice, but this article at Ray Peat’s site was a real eye opener. But wait! There’s more. If you’re a woman, do not pass up his articles on progesterone and estrogen. They are worth a lot more than you’ll pay for them (hint: they are free). There’s a lot there, and it’s well documented and annotated.

All these hormones have to perform a delicate dance for you to feel good and look good. It’s worth reading up on them if you’re stuck or stalled or feeling crappy, especially if you’re already sure that you’ve got all your food sensitivities mapped out.

One blog that covers subclinical hypothyroid quite often is 180 Degree Health. I don’t agree at all with Matt Stone’s “High Everything Diet” (google it, I’m too annoyed with him over the Jimmy Moore thing to drive traffic to his site) that includes lots of potatoes and rice. He’s talking about 400g of carbohydrate a day which you might note compares quite well to the Standard American Diet. He strongly discourages gluten grains and Omega-6 fats, but people do report gaining up to 20lbs. (I saw this in a comment on his blog) by taking his advice on how to “heal their metabolism.”

I think he’s taken a lot of solid ideas from Ray Peat, Dr. Diana Schwarzbein’s The Schwarzbein Principle II and possibly Lita Lee and come up with something quite different than what they recommend. He promotes a lot of ideas from Dr. Broda Barnes that have been damned useful to me, but I combined that information with Peat, Schwarzbein and Lee and wound up somewhere quite different from the “High Everything Diet.”

Broda Barnes recommended the following for weight loss:

It’s pretty moderate, unlike Matt’s diet, and it includes fruit, something the low-carb paleo crowd criticize quite often because of the dreaded fructose.

Schwarzbein recommends balanced meals of real foods that include 20-30g of carbohydrate, as much green veg as you like and sufficient protein. This comes out to more like 100g of carbohydrate a day, not 400g. Lita Lee’s recommendations are almost entirely the same as Ray Peat’s: avoid all unsaturated liquid oils except extra virgin olive oil, all soy products, herbal estrogens and estrogen stimulators, all RAW cruciferous vegetables and do eat adequate protein (she and Peat recommend a lot of full-fat dairy as a protein source), whole sea salt, complex carbohydrates (fresh orange juice and raw carrots are mentioned by Peat often) and coconut oil. How you get stuffing your face with carbs out of that, I don’t know.

There are some interesting bloggie bits at Diet-Fucked too. Most of the entries are distillations of ideas from people I’ve already mentioned, but the anecdotes and other pointers in the comments were great for me.

I want to return for just a moment to Richard Nikoley’s blog post. I had some of the same issues he complained about, and since I had cut a lot of salt out of my diet and switched my salt intake to sea salt, I thought it was possible that I could be deficient in iodine. I tried that for a while, and found out that this is true, at least for me:

“In my quick research on the issue, I note a number of sources that indicate iodine is a U-shaped curve, i.e., too little or too much can cause hypothyroid conditions.”

A little helped, more helped more…and then it got worse. I saw something on, I think, Ray Peat’s site that said “beware of the iodine guzzling cults”, and thought about the fact that I’d heard that before…and cut way down. Now I take some, but not too much.

For more about hypothyroid and graphic body temperatures, check out Dr. Bruce Rind’s site. Diana Hsieh tracked her body temps for a while, and has her information on the web, if you’d like to see some real data.

I don’t have this all figured out by any means, but what I’ve learned from all these sources is really helping. Maybe it can help you too.

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.