Has anybody seen this video?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zVxA6yipv4

ETA:
I would add to this list Amy Dungan, Jimmy Moore, Andrew DiMino and possibly Dana Carpender. Oh, and the Drs. Eades, who wrote The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle because they had gotten too fat to do a weightloss cooking show. http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/...id-weight-loss/

I'm not trying to be mean, and I personally understand the ups and downs of weightloss. It's just that the prominent low-fat vegans really do seem to be quite slender, while the lowcarbers are, at the very least, struggling.

Just a drive-by comment: I don't know any of the "prominent" vegans, but among my friends, the vegetarians and vegans who are slender started out slender before they altered their diets. And I know plenty of porky vegetarians, people who always struggled with their weight, and they struggle still, meat or no. I personally gained weight as a vegetarian, and got rather sick.

My working hypothesis is that people start life with different levels of insulin secretion and sensitivity, for reasons ranging from mother's diet to way-back ancestry. Those of us who hypersecrete insulin for whatever reason are going to struggle on any diet we're on, and are going to tend to gain weight very easily. Once overweight or obese, in fact, we may never be lean, even on a starvation diet. Those who -- like my adoptive mother, and like a former prominent poster here who changed her diet every couple of years while her body remained entirely the same slender thing it was when she was eating a diet of coke and twinkies -- have little insulin to begin with, don't gain weight no matter what they eat.

My hunch is that slender diet gurus of any stripe tend to fall into the "never-been-fat" category. It's not an artifact of the diet, but of the body type they started with.

I gained 50 pounds in my four years eating a vegan diet. I haven't been able to get back to anything like a normal weight since then. It ruined me.

I gained 50 pounds in my four years eating a vegan diet.


You simply needed to eat another 30 bananas ( at least ) per day. You were not trying hard enough.

Oh yeah, you also needed to do hundreds of youtube videos giving others poor and dangerous nutritional advice.

Finally, you needed to cycle 500+ miles a week to burn off all the sugar you just ate.

hahahahahahahaha
And don't forget the horse food grains all wrapped up in a nice sugar health bar...
By the way, to me, that guy looked really sick with his muscles sticking up above the skin with no meat holding it in. eeeek
Somebody needs to feed that poor guy some meat.

[QUOTE=Meme#1]hahahahahahahaha
And don't forget the horse food grains all wrapped up in a nice sugar health bar...


I remember on one of my road trips, absent minded eating a few "healthy" granola bars. At the next stop my sugar was 34 Mmol/L( over 600 for the imperial crowd)

Me too. Exactly. Four years a vegan. 50 pound weight gain. I've never been the same.

Who are the prominent low-fat vegans, and have they been at their low-fat veganism fairly consistently for decades as the Eadeses? All the Eadeses (and Jimmy's) gains show us is maintenance is hard and carb creep happens and there are consequences (fat gain) to carb creep.

Also, I pretty much agree with OregonRose. As we've seen numerous times in our microcosm here on the board, comparing one body to another in terms of weight loss/maintenance is pretty fruitless.

Finally, imo it's important to clarify whether the issue implicitly being discussed is "how to get as skinny-looking as possible", vs. focusing on health and/or body composition, or something else.

I never heard of Pam Popper before, but the others have all been thin and well-known for their diet for many years. McDougall (whom I dislike heartily, based on interviews I've read and videos I've seen) wrote his first book back in the 80's.



I guess it is easier when the boundaries are more clearly defined. The vegans in that video all eat no animal products and no fat. The amount of carbs allowed on a lowcarb diet is very personal and flexible. But all of them? Do we know that carb-creep is at fault?



This is true. We don't know who started out thin and who started out fat. But, for people peddling weight loss books, being thin would be a good advertisement. And, by the same token, being overweight...not so much.



Again, though...these are people who have written weightloss books. I agree that thin doesn't necessarily equal healthy. But if you're telling people how to be thin, you should probably be thin yourself.

They do look to be in pretty good shape to me. Especially Dr. Esselstyn, who is close to eighty. I would also add John Robbins to that list.

Yes, that's the correlation effect. It's intuitive to believe that the association is evidence of cause and effect, and that one will tend to always be thought of as the cause also intuitively. In this case, it's the status of diet guru and their body fat. It's more intuitive to believe that it's their own dietary advice that made them fat, than to believe they became diet gurus precisely because they were fat. Though both are equally valid conclusions.

We could also call it the salesman effect. When you want to sell anything, especially a body image product, you better look your best. That's why we use young beautiful professional female models to sell beauty products, and lean muscular men to sell bodybuilding products. And so the clip is basically a sales pitch.

An even better advertisement would be, having been fat and lost weight. How many low-carb people started out with a starchy plant-based diet based on the thinness of those diet sellers, and it didn't work, and THEN they went to low carb?
Hm, I would say, if you're telling people how to lose weight, you should probably have have been fat and lost weight.

There was Wolfgang Lutz who died recently in his 90s and looked great. The famous Jack Lalanne who for years was definitely not plant-based. Compare skin tone and vitality with people like Art DeVany and Nora Getgoudas.

If that little You Tube had compared Mark Sisson, Art Devany, Nora Gedgaudas, it would have looked much different.

I saw McDougall on TV once. He had wasted musculature and an insulin tummy. Just like Sisson describes the consequences of a certain kind of plant-based diet on "My Escape from Vegan Island."

The Drs. Eades admitted in their Middle aged middle book that they had gotten careless. I would not like to look like the women from the plant based diet books. Plus, I don't consider Barry Sears to be a true LC diet promoter.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Put differently, if they can get by with the bare minimum smarts, most people will.

All the low-carb people in the clip were fatter before they went low-carb. All the vegan people in the same clip were never fat to begin with.

I agree with Rose, and I can cite the precise mechanism that keeps us fat in spite of all our efforts. It's a consequence of the years of hyperinsulinemia. It's called insulin-induced lipohypertrophy. Fat tissue grows bigger not only because it contains more fat, but also because it's made up of more fat cells. Those extra fat cells won't go away just because we cut carbs. The simplest explanation is that for equal insulin (or equal hormonal milieu counting all hormones), two fat cells will have twice as much fat as one fat cell. There is no reason for two fat cells to contain only half as much as they should. It's their job to contain a set amount of fat based on the hormonal signals they receive. Furthermore, those extra fat cells need to be fed just as much as every other cell so the supporting tissue like blood vessels will also grow bigger for that. That won't go away either just by cutting carbs.

But the clip title is "Low Carb vs. Plant-Based". So, to keep with the subject, here's a list of 16 experimental studies that compares low-carb to other diets:
http://www.dietdoctor.com/weight-lo...ing-the-science

The clip is not science though it is compelling, isn't it. It's compelling because it does not draw any conclusion, we do. We're allowed to make up our own mind based on a simple comparison of fat people and lean people, and an associated dietary approach with each group. But then, the list of 16 experimental studies also allows us to make up our own mind, however it does not allow us to imagine a falsehood, namely that "If these guys follow their own diet... Their pictures speak a thousand words." The falsehood is that if they do follow their own diet, then that's why they are fat. That list doesn't allow this falsehood because when they put fat people on the same diet those fat gurus presumably follow, they lost more weight than on any other diet.

In other words, the clip here is an observation, and the list of 16 experimental studies is a test of the hypothesis that the observation generated, namely "low-carb makes us fat".

I also put in my $0.02 but from my experience, the vegan crowd doesn't like science.

None of the diets in those studies was vegan, and all are around 30% of calories from fat - a far cry from the "no animal products, no added fat" diet of the people in the video.



But the diet in question, that of Esselstyn, McDougall, etc., was not studied. So, it's a falsehood to say that "they lost more weight than on any other diet."

...than on any other diet tested.

Not such a far cry. A low-carb diet is high-fat, thus higher in fat than the other diets tested. This refutes the idea that it's fat that makes us fat, and refutes the idea that even less fat like whatever Esselstyn et al advocate would somehow make us leaner than more fat. I mean, why would fat make us lean when we eat more of it, but then suddenly make us leaner when we ate barely any? I can think of one reason - malnutrition. There's nothing better than malnutrition to cause weight loss at a fantastic rate, even faster than low-carb no matter how low-carb you go. Ancel Keys proved it with his semi-starvation study back in the 1940's. In fact, the diet he used then is best described as mostly plants, very little meat, very little fat. Remind you of anything? Sure, the diets Esselstyn et all advocates. But then that same diet also causes fantastic deep constant hunger, emaciation, and neurosis, that led to self-mutilation in one case.