I would think the risk is limited fat loss or simply maintaining your current weight but that's just based upon what I've read - no specific study that I can point to. If you're over-consuming on your protein macro wouldn't you just maintain? It seems that is what I see in forum after forum of (especially) women who are stalled...(too much protein=stall). Now, if you're over-consuming on carbs also, I would think you would gain. And, if you're over-consuming on all your macros, I think you would definitely be gaining weight.

However, like I said....this is just my opinion.

Here's another opinion of mine, for what it's worth.....
I think the key is that in order to find out if this WOE will work for you (the global YOU, not pointing fingers specifically here) a person needs to really commit to it and follow it as closely as possible for a specific period of time. It doesn't do any good to make changes and tweaks in the beginning because then you'll never know if the program as written really works for you or not.

My other thought is that this program certainly isn't for everyone. There are people who can return to normal weight simply by cutting out processed foods. There are people who can return to normal weight by decreasing their carbs to a moderate level. There are even people who lose weight and can survive on low cal or WW. Not me though. Somewhere along the way, something has gotten really screwed up with my body and I have an incredibly hard time losing fat. If this plan works, if by decreasing my protein and increasing my fat intake I am able to remove more fat from my body, I will be jumping up and down with delight (and thanking Lisa for bringing this WOE to my attention!). If this plan doesn't work - what have I lost? As long as I have given it my best effort - as long as I've followed the guidelines without deviation to give it a valid test - I've lost nothing.

I've been doing a lot of reading tonight on different sites and have read that too. Which kind of sucks since I love nuts and veggies. And really, organ meats, eggs, etc. I'm all for. But a potato over veggies or nuts kind of breaks my Atkin's heart

I want to do this right so I may have to bite that potato bullet. But still...

Also, I have a concern about the high amounts of saturated animal fats. not that I think it's bad but at least in America most of our livestock is grain fed. It's hard to find grassfed here and I'm betting the health benefits of grainfed fat & dairy is not the same as grassfed which is probably more common in Poland. Does that concern make sense to any one?

I found this on the Australian Homo Optimus Society website:



I can eat offal once a week. After watching Bizarre Foods, I wish I could get a some calves brains in a good restaurant. LOL Seriously, I LOVE pork. I can eat pork all day. And pate is something I can eat once a week. Yummo. I even like making my own.

I don't think there is a Optimal diet, as humam beings make up for their lack of specialization and strength with their adaptability. Lately I have people being as healthy as it can consuming various low-carb diets (different setups) and exercising. If only one kind of narrow setup would provide result, no one but a dozen of individual would be healthy in this world, and although health people are rare, there are many among those who are following a conscious dietary regimen. What I'm trying to say is that you should doubt that you need to do this diet with the exact details the author thought of fearing a total insuccess unless you don't do exactly what he wants you to do (organ meat, no veggies, strange recipes)

There's a thing called the Paredo Principle. It claims there's a top 20% and a bottom 80%. The "vital few" and the "trivial many". According to this principle 20% of an idea will account for 80% of its results. The problem according to this principle is that people avoid and procrastinate on that 20% that is the most unvaluable, what would really make the difference and bring results and they busy themselves with the 80% trivial, that will contribute very little to the results and are just irrelevant details. This is true of everything, only a small part of a general program, teaching system, instructional guide makes the difference if followed, the rest are details that can be ignored and it's not worth losing your mind over them. So I think you should embrace the general principle of this diet, which makes sense; a low-carb diet should be high fat. The body doesn't work by numbers but by ranges, so rather than an exact amount of proteins, there are a range of proteins where they are both used or excreted or where they're turned into glucose. But eat veggies, nuts and avoid organ meat, because there are hundreds of extremely vibrantly healthy people who eat tons of the former and none of the latter.

OK, I have gained ½lb! I ate only streaky bacon, cheese, fat meat, green veg', eggs, cream & berry fruit over the last week. So where have I gone wrong? Perleeze...

Calories still matter.
I can gain pure abdominal fat (as measure by DEXA body fat percentage scan) on a completely ketogenic diet of eggs, meat, butter, sausages. I have talked with a lot of bodybuilders who follow ketogenic diets or no carb diets and still, they need to control what they eat if they don't want to lose definition because of fat storage. The body can sustain its weight on a wide caloric range (-/+ 600 calories) In my experience an high carb diet makes you gain weight at the bottom of the range while an high-fat low-carb diet makes you gain weight at the top of the range, but still there's a limit above which you certainly can store fat even if you eat nothing but fat (the body uses a substance called ASP to store dietary fat as fat, even in the absolute absence of carbohydrates, glucose or insulin) Reading articles by Taubes I'm pretty sure he meant to say that it's very hard to consume enough calories to gain fat while on a low-carb diet (although many people as the Protein Power site suggested have this problem) but he didn't mean to say that 5000 calories of fat would disappear as heat or turn into air, since this is physiologically impossible and disproved by whatever study conducted on this planet.

Argh! I was thinking this same thing. Obviously I AM having a tough time adapting. I just love the way I eat on Paleo.

I think what I'm going to try is, rather than jumping in feet first, change things slowly. I can still try to up my fat and carbs and reduce my protein. I have already switched out one of my 2nd meal meats w/ the hog jowls to reduce protein and up fat. I will also try to eat more veg and let my carbs creep up (I seem to have aquired a pathological aversion to carbs, lol.)

I also need to toss the pork rinds. Too much sodium and high protein as u pointed out.

Re: the hog jowls - I never weighed them because no nutritional calculator has them. i suppose I could dissect out the tiny bit of lean and weigh it separate from the fat ... (Pork belly is tripe, BTW)

Thanks for the umpteenth time for the advice!

I've always been a bit suspicious of the idea that pork is the most healthy meat to eat because it is the closest to human tissue. Especially when I think about those dry little hockey pucks of pork that they call chops in the supermarket. I agree with the person who mentioned that grass fed meats will be healthier than grain fed.

Due to to degradation of our food supply, it may not be possible to find those perfect foods from traditional diets. We can just try our best with what we have.

For the time being, I'm going to focus mostly on the correct level of macronutrients and stick with whole natural foods. I will try to get in a variety of fatty meats and venture to cook some liver or at least buy some liver pate. I'm still going to eat fish, egg yolks, macadamia nuts, high fat dairy, berries, and vegetables. I stay away from AS but I do eat 87%-91% chocolate which has a little sugar.

I guess I can't call this the OD. The influence will be the high fat, lower protein, low carb. If not perfect, I at least feel that this is sustainable for me.

This plan restricts calories and carbs and protein.
My macros are 52 g P - 78-104 g F - 26-42 g C which gives me a 1014 to 1384 calories limit. I have been lurking and on it for 4 days.
I feel good but I do waste some 15 mins each morning fitting around foods in Fitday so the ratios work. I have also lost 3 pounds meanwhile (I wasn't stalled or anything in the beginning but wanted to kickstart things after my birthday gain.)
I find this plan works well so far for a cure of sorts for a limited time but I wonder about how sustainable it would be in the long run. I'd switch back to a more freestyle lowcarb plan after that.

Hi Lisa -

I have to say, from everything I've read/experienced, I would STRONGLY advise to take magnesium instead of vitamin C for constipation from too much cheese (or any reason really); the reason being the calcium content of cheese is very high with no Mg to back it up. Unless you are eating huge quantities of green veg and nuts it is close to impossible to get enough Mg in the diet. Believe me - I have become Mg deficient eating a lot of cheese on high fat/low carb and it is not a pleasant place to be in. I'm sure vitamin C does work - but personally I would chose magnesium every time.

You must be 12 inches tall! The calculator was pretty generous with calories for me, like just under and well over 2000. Did you enter the units in the right format; kilos, centimeters?
Well, you know what, I'm 2 pounds up. It just might be the case this isn't the right diet for some of us. But I said I'd give it at least 2 solid weeks and by golly, I will! I've played with high fat diets before and had poor results, but I was very haphazard about it. This time I decided to be really careful about macronutrients and log everything so if it doesn't work, I can say with complete confidence that high fat diets don't work for me. Or, I can be pleasantly surprised and say they did!

Yes. I should be weighing 52 kg for my small frame at 5'3".

DorianJ, please stop posting "calories matter" in this thread. If you want to debate that, start a new thread. Maybe they do, maybe they don't but we're on the Optimal Diet here and we're discussing that and having a lot of naysaying going on isn't helping anyone with the topic at hand, which is figuring out this diet and giving it an honest try.

Sorry, I this sounds harsh, I might end up even agreeing with you but it is getting hard to follow this thread if people are interjecting their arguments into it and aren't even involved in the diet.

Well since liver is included in the organ meat I'm sure I could manage too, as I've always liked liver. Liver and onions was something I grew up with as my dad liked it. Paté is great too! And I've been yearning to make bone broths since I read 'Nourishing Traditions' a couple months ago.

I do understand the concerns about the US food supply though, and the grain-fed meats, which have an unfavorable omega3/omega6 ratio, not to mention hormones and antibiotics. I like to get some fish in my diet too, which Dr. K seems opposed to. But I always go for the "fatty" fish, things like salmon, mackerel, sardines. And I have no problem adding more fat to them. :-) I try to go for wild-caught salmon since farmed salmon, fed on corn, has a lot of the same problems of imbalanced nutrients.

I live in New Jersey, and have found there is a Wegmans' supermarket (northeast US chain only as far as I know) about 40 minutes from my house. Too far for regular shopping, but a great source for meat! I made my first trip there a couple weeks ago and came home with meat for the freezer.

They carry grass-fed beef. The cheapest cut they carry is chuck steak, because it's the fattiest, so I bought several large chuck steaks. I cooked one as recommended in 'Nourishing Traditions' - marinated for 2 days in buttermilk, and then cooked in a crockpot all day in red wine, and it came out so soft you could cut it with a fork, and wonderfully flavorful.

I also bought some wonderful paté there - duck paté made with lard, and it was delicious.

I also ordered some organic, mostly grass-fed pork online from www.flyingpigsfarm.com and so far it's been great - nice thick porkchops with a really healthy rind of fat - the sort I used to see when I was a kid, but not seen in years in the supermarket. I also bought some leaf lard from them to render my own lard, though have not done that yet.

And lamb is always grass-fed if you are concerned about grain-fed feedlot meat. I bought some nice ground lamb at Wegman's also, and plan to make a moussaka with it as soon as I get some eggplant.

I just can't see myself doing potatoes though. I've never liked potatoes especially. And I certainly won't be doing the *grains*! I have sworn off wheat and and gluten-containing grains for life.

And I'm also doing whole eggs when I have my omelets. I like the texture better than with just yolks, and I figure my protein allowance can handle it. Dr. K seems to recommend at least 3 eggs a day, so that's something I can easily do most of the time. :-)

This thread *is* getting awfully unwieldy though. Is there anything we can do to help promote our own sub-category under General Low Carb?

I'm down 3 pounds this morning. I usually weigh on WSaturdays so will wait till then to make an official changes to my fitday weight tracking.

Maybe veggies and nuts ARE OK and the percentages matter too. I guess I'm going to see what happens. And add liver once a week. I love liver & onions!