Aha! Taubes often cites WHO recommendations about minimum total calories in his lectures. It's 2,000kcals for women and 2,500kcals for men. The Minnesota semi-starvation experiment used ~1,600kcals during the semi-starvation phase. Where did they get the idea that 1,200kcals could ever be enough let alone healthy? I have no idea.

From the 1980s, I'm thinking, LOL!

At least based on the sideways photostatted look of the sheet...

I remember when I began dieting at age 11, which would have been 1978, everyone was screaming "1200 calories, 1200 calories" for any woman, of any age, any height and any starting weight. A higher activity level was not considered cause to bump up those calories any; such people would only lose faster and should be commended. In fact, if you were eating your reasonable 1200 and WEREN'T adding your Spandex-contained hour of aerobics per day (you lazy schm*ck, you!), then most diet gurus - at least the ones I kept encountering on TV or at the library in their books - would smugly warn you to go ahead and be lazy, and just not "see the results" if that's what you reeeeeeeally wanted...

My mom got me all kinds of "diet" books - one that comes to mind was a book by Cheryl Tiegs, I think it was. She described being at her emotional low and eating crackers out of a garbage can. She was bursting out of size 10s, I think, before she realized how utterly disgusting and out of control she was (what was she, six foot one? And we're talking about a 70s/80s size 10, not today's much larger one).

She finally got her act together and managed that healthy 1200 calories and lived happily ever after. I remember being smart enough (even as a pre-teen, or maybe I was 13 when this exact book came out? Can't remember) to realize that at a full foot taller than I, she should probably be eating more calories than I did - so I went down to 1000 calories and "saw the results": hair loss, fainting, a sudden onset of depression, anxiety and insomnia, forgetting simple facts like my address (yes, that seriously happened and more than once), a sudden drop in school performance due to an inability to think that lasted through my school experience and caused me to just not try for college because I was "too stupid" (many previous IQ tests and my insane diet notwithstanding and not counting) and because I knew I'd never be able to sit up in those long classes without sliding to the floor and collapsing...but plenty of boyfriends because 95 lbs. was hot. And I felt good about myself for this accomplishment, can you imagine?

I began this diet journey as a growing adolescent who had reached an absolutely disgusting, unacceptable 120 lbs. that looked terrible in Spandex, would never land me a boyfriend and would surely leave me alone and unloved until my dying day, as well as unable to get a job because, well, you know, who would hire a fat woman? Everyone knew fat people were horribly unlazy and undisciplined if they couldn't manage this one simple feat: starving every single day of their lives. (My mother managed it with 3 packs of cigarettes and two to three full pots of coffee per day. One of my earliest childhood memories is of her saying to my dad when I was little, "Bob, I don't feel so well," handing the phone she had been on to my father and promptly fainting onto the kitchen linoleum.)

Imagine being terrified of being on Welfare and jobless and being unloved by a man when you're only 11 years old.


From my and my sister's adolescence on, we would all, my mom, my sister and I, have contests to see who go the longest period of time without eating. My mom and I usually could make the entire day - I was in school during these days, just picture this! - until dinner without a bite. We would go whole-hog at various times with fasting competitions. My sister could always go three full days - yes, she was also a student at a time - and I could never seem to beat her. I started smoking at 15 to increase these efforts. It worked beautifully for my mom and the same way for me and my growth stopped completely and I am now, as an adult, by far the shortest woman in my entire family. My mother and sister were both a few inches taller than I, having started dieting later in life - my mom always described her first diet at age 15 when she "got fat" (due to thyroid disease, mind you) and my sister started at age 14, when I had "finally lost the weight" and she got jealous - and had at least that time to grow normally. My mom is deceased, aneurism at age almost 51.

By the way, fastforwarding to more recent times and at least attempting to get back OT, the nutritionist I saw (I think this was four years ago? Five years ago?) also had a 1400 calorie a day diet, but she wouldn't give that one to me because I was too fat for it. She didn't say it exactly that way, but something along those lines. (?????????????????) The sheet had all kinds of "healthy" options such as five "multigrain" crackers with a teaspoon of butter (a teaspoon, seriously?), one egg white with a slice of whole wheat bread and again, a teaspoon of butter, JUICE (seriously, with that lack of food I'd be wasting it on juice?), plain oatmeal (oh yum... :vomit and so on. Oh, and one nice big satisfying salad sprinkled with vinegar at lunch and dinner in addition to my delicious skinless chicken breast or whatever the hell the recommendation was, just so I'd get that "full" feeling.

Yeah, those are the sorts of recommendations that had me pigging out in response when the fainting spells got too bad, and managed me right on up to thyroid disease, medicated depression, pre-TII and 220 pounds.

Anyway, sorry to go so far OT, but yeah. I don't take much stock even in today's "nutritionists," at least the ones who go by the book and the fabulous Food Pyramid or, for the really up-and-coming ones, the new Food Plate, and shake their fingers at you if you're not getting your healthy whole grains because how else are you going to get your (injected) vitamin B? (I guess all the meats of the world have suddenly run out of naturally occurring vitamin B.)

ETA: BTW, this isn't a "life is cruel" post. Far crueler things than this have happened to countless other people around the world. My mom thought she was doing the "right" thing, all those supermodels, who made their money off anorexia, truly thought they were helping people and my ill, pale, shaking, half-bald nutritionist thought she was telling me the right thing too, and helping me. Stuff happens. I'm just glad I have finally figured out that I CAN eat and not faint all the time. If I had been born 20 years earlier, who knows, I may have been 67 rather than 47 when I figured all this out. Or might be dead. Who knows.

In the late 80s, I was an aerobics instructor and competitive bodybuilder. My bodybuilding coach had me on a 1200 calorie per day low-fat diet (about 15 percent of calories) during the muscle building phases of my workout, and knocked me down to 800 calories (less than 10 percent fat) when I was "cutting" for competition.

It broke my body. I seriously shut down. I went from a reasonably healthy size 8 to a very sick size 3. I was always cold, exhausted all of the time, and in severe pain. I remember breaking down at the gym one day - what seemed like a full-blown panic attack. I'd always been a laid back, happy-go-lucky sort, so it was a shock.

I got to the point where I could no longer work out. I'd take several weeks off from the gym and then try to come back, easing my way into workouts again, and my body would immediately shut down again. At the same time, I was terrified of gaining weight, so I maintained the 800 to 1200 calorie per day low-fat diet. I stopped eating meat altogether, convinced that being a vegan would restore me to health. I'm pretty sure I got that advice from some "nutritionist."

Even at very low calories, the weight piled on, and why wouldn't it? Within six months I went from about 120 pounds (I had a good amount of muscle) to 200 pounds.

When I went to my doctor, he said, "What are you doing to gain weight so fast?" Instead of saying, "Wow - you're gaining weight very quickly. Let's see if we can figure out why." When I told him my dietary and exercise habits, he told me I must be lying or underestimating how much I ate or overestimating my exercise - which was a very modest 30 minutes of walking 3 times per week because any more made me sick.

These are the myths that should be poo poohed - not low-carb myths. That you need to eat very low-fat and exercise like a fiend to stay slim. That anything over 1200 calories and under 6 hours per week of high intensity cardio is doomed to make you fat. That eating a low-fat diet promotes health. These myths robbed me of my health, and over 20 years later I'm still struggling to get it back using the low-carb diet "myths."

I remember the standard recommendation of 1200 calories. It's still around. I can't get it out of my head, the same way I can't overcome the lingering doubt that low-carb is enough (without counting...well, you know, calories!)

I'm not a textbook case for low-carb. Have not been obese (by common definition) since 1996. Hypothyroid pretty well under control. No belly fat. Low-carb eating isn't specific to thunder thighs.

But I still "believe" and that counts for a lot.

Carry on everyone!

Nope. And there are "skinny" people who are DXd with TII and so on. (I mean you already know that, just sayin'.)

I never questioned how I could be 95 lbs. and my thighs (what there were of them) still jiggled, and my waist still seemed so large in proportion to the rest of me. I never asked myself whether my diet was wasting my muscle and leaving me with loose untoned unhealthy skin and a little tiny layer of fat. (I was working out, by the way! In addition to walking a total of three miles per day to/from school plus gym class daily, naturally.) I never asked how that could, by anyone's definition, ever, be healthy. It never occurred to me to wonder why, 100 or 500 or 1000 years ago or more, people obviously weren't deliberately starving themselves as I was in order to be "a normal weight," and why at those times, when they did starve (unwillingly - famine, poverty, etc.), they didn't only get down to 95 lbs., but starved to death and died - yet even with constant hunger and very low calories, my little layer of jiggly fat remained. Because these were the recommendations, "dedicated" people could do it, there were tons of anecdotes about "successes" so the problem couldn't be the diet, it must be me. All the experts agreed with this assessment and apparently some still do. More than some. Many.

I never even wondered how just 30 years or so prior to my starting out dieting, kids ate big farm-style breakfasts but weren't "fat" like I was.

I now know I was just, in a very unfortunate way, ahead of my time. I couldn't eat in the "normal" way of cereal and fruit and juice for breakfast, sandwiches and the like for lunch, and so on, without getting what actually was overweight (120 was definitely overweight for my height at the time). Or why I couldn't eat in an "average" way my friends were without my eyes bugging out of my head from hunger and begging my mother over and over again for snacks (snacks were forbidden in my household). But today, EVERYBODY is feeling this - I believe with the changes in wheat and so on. (Just my belief.) NOBODY can eat the way "typical" people did in the 60s and earlier and not be starving all the time, crave junk food and have their insulin through the roof. Or let me amend that - not "nobody," but most people, since going on 70% of us are now overweight. This increase in our appetite, I believe, largely driven by ever more refined foods is driving us to seek out more and more junk food and it just snowballs from there.

When I was a kid snacking was almost unheard of in many households for anyone over preschool age and nobody (except me! And even then I didn't get them - I simply rolled around on my bed sobbing every night with my belly screaming for food despite my "three square meals" and thinking I couldn't possibly make it until breakfast) seemed to "need" snacks all throughout the day. With the SAD (appropriately named), people don't want, but seem to NEED breakfast, then a mid-morning snack, then lunch along with "a dessert," a mid-afternoon snack, dinner, then another snack. Plus snacks at every event, sports game, every anything. I mean physically need, as in 200, 300-lb. adults feeling dizzy and having "low blood sugar" events if they don't get in their snacks.

I wasn't weird or undisciplined and my body wasn't weird - it was just ahead of its time...reacting to refined foods. The rest of the first world seems to be catching up to me, sadly for all of us.

And we're only getting fatter.