Exactly how I feel. In theory a good whole foods carb-rich diet sounds great, but those carbs always get the best of me in the end, resulting in heartburn, food addiction, overeating blah blah blah. Doing a whole foods low carb diet keeps my appetite down and makes me feel great.

Different bodies, different ways of utilizing what they eat.

T

I've actually stopped telling ANYONE (unless really necessarry) that I'm dong low carb because I'm so sick of hearing people say something like "oh, I couldn't stand just eating meat and cheese all the time"

I did extreme "healthy" low fat before for about 1 year. I exercised, ate 800-1200 calories a day, lost a ton of weight and made it down to about 125lbs.

Breakfast was either whole grain ceal with 1/4 banana & berries. Lunch was a big salad with vineger (no oil) as dressing with a can of Tuna in water (or chicken breast). Snack was a protien shake made with fat free milk. Dinner was brown rice, lean meat, veggies and fruit for desert. Bedtime snack was another 1/4 cup of whole grain cereal.

I was tiny, fit into small clothes, etc, but I was HUNGRY all the time. All I could think about was "when can I eat again?" I felt nauseated, shaky, etc, all the time. I stood up after sitting or laying down for awhile and my vision would many times go black. But I thought I was in shape.

Today, I feel better than I have since I was like 8 years old! NO ONE is going to talk me out of this style of eating. I have every confidence that my version of low carb is very healthy. I have a little bit of nuts per day, lots of veggies, moderate amounts of full fat dairy products, lean meats (for the most part), some soy products (with no added sugar) and even a few berries several times a week (with fat like heavy cream to slow absorption), flax seeds & oil, and so on. I only use Stevia for a sweeneer, and I find the longer I'm on low carb the less I even think to use it.

But with that being said, my cousin who has been SKINNY SKINNY all her born life can eat anything sweet on an empty stomach and she is just fine. (Like she will eat a granola bar or a sugary cereal for breakfast). Apparently she's one of those people who can handle it.

Also my mother, who is pretty slim, doesn't seem to be affected by sugar like I am. She eats steel cut oats with 1/2 banana and an egg every day for breakfast, eats whole grain bread, sucks on candy, etc, and seems to keep the weight off effortlessly. She just seems to not be as hungry as I always was. She eats enough, but not too much. She used to say to me all the time "I can't believe you are eating again, you can't possibly be hungry already!!" But I was - until low carb.

So, whatever works for YOU is what's important I think.

Yes they are. I want to beat my head against a wall in frustration every time low-carb advocates talks about how we're all supposedly getting fat on lower fat intake, as per government food pyramid recommendations. Fat has gone down as a PERCENTAGE of calories only! Because our intake of refined carbs has also gone up. Our fast food nation is eating MORE fat and carbs than ever before.

I'm glad your WOE is working so well for you, and the others on this thread who've described similar scenarios of low-carb being the only thing that's ever worked for them. You all know your body better than anyone else.

Ouch! A comparison of my statement to that militant vegan treatise masquerading as objective science?

But you are correct that Asians appear to have some unique physical characteristics for handling a higher glucose load.

So perhaps invoking Asian dietary practices was not the best example for me to use. But we certainly have many other examples of traditional cultures who ate plenty of low glucose load carbs that had robust health. I believe Weston Price's work in this area is irrefutable. Even Gary Taubes said that Weston Price is an unimpeachable source of information.

Maybe they just burn it off quicker because they work so damned hard, or used to before the great economic boom took over. Now they are starting to suffer the same sicknesses and affluence diseases as their Western counterparts no doubt influenced by the influx of McDonalds, cars, HFCS, etc etc into their society.

Holy crap, this is so true! While I love LC, I do believe the people living this WOL can be just as obessive and zealotous and close minded as other lifestyles, if not even more so!

I also believe that vlcarb diets are NOT necessary. If you want to LOSE loads of weight fast/and cure metabolic disorders, yes, it can be very helpful.

But for many people, maintaining a healthy diet balance of protein, good carbs, moderate fat is the way to go, I think. There is a reason Atkins diet, for example, has you gradually increase your good carbs and thus you must lower your fat. There is a reason you must watch calories and stuff as you get to goal. Whats more calorie dense than fat?

Before everyone gets all Inuit and Taubes preachy, let me add that NO, higher carbs and grains arent for everyone. Some people (celiacs, for example) cant handle that kind of stuff at all. Like Ruth said, there is no one answer for each person.

Regardless of what you believe in, whole foods is always the way to go.

As for the Asian diet thing, believe you me, they dont sit there and eat pork fried rice and noodles all day. They DO eat carbs, yes. But their biggest thing is portion control.

My stepmother is vietnamese, and yes, she leads an active lifestyle anyway. But when she makes her own dishes, her rice is a cup, and her meat and veggies fill up most of the plate.

Conversly, when she makes "chinese food" for the american relatives/friends, she makes it to their palate, which is loads of noodles, with a smaller amount of veggies and meat.

And a typical vietnamese breakfast? Pho. Which is a meat/veggie soup. In restaurants you may see some with a smattering of noodles, but in real traditional vietnamese, they basically leave out the noodles.

Anyway, I'm not sure there is a gene or not that helps them process carbs. But I can say her idea of a meal is quite different; smaller portions in general, and the noodles or rice is NOT the main focus of the plate.

Also, Jeff, I can only answer for myself, but when I compare lc weight loss phases to a low fat weightloss phase, I am definately thinking of their processed allowances, like 100 calorie packs. Maybe it is unfair, but every friend I know that buys into the lf way, relies heavily on processed food. So I cant help but compare it.

Great post NW If you look at any dietary approach where people are healthy and don't and don't gain bodyfat, be it low, medium, or high carb, the common theme is always not consuming more energy than your body needs. Some people like low carb better(like me) because I'm far less hungry eating this way. And eating is fun, so the more help I can get in that department the better . When food is constantly available and you add much hunger (moderate hunger isn't that hard to resist, let's face it) , you usually end up eating or going slowly crazy.

Low carbers are often in a state of blind denial that by far the majority of the human race is perfectly healthy on high unprocessed carbs, as long as they don't overeat - ie. calorie equilibrium, and get adequate protein and EFA's. Some people, like me, will always tend to overeat if I also eat a lot of carbs, processed or not. Fresh fried wild rice and vegetables...yummmmm (fatty carby food, I simply find it impossible to stop, and even though I personally don't ever gain much bodyfat, overeating is overeating, fat protein or carbs). Processed are usually worse of course, but the point remains, it's the overeating, not the macronutrient ratio that causes the weight gain and ill health.

And because I'm completely comfortable with eating no more than my body needs on low carb, I'll be doing it for life, and try to be as persuasive as I can about it's calorie reduction/health potential for anyone struggling with overeating.

Stuart

I have a friend who is very skinny and very in to whole/organic foods. She recently switched to low carb, not for the weight loss, but for the more stable blood sugar. She feels much better now than she did eating a higher carb level.

I also went whole foods/vegetarian for years. I gained weight.

I started gaining weight in college eating junk food. It wasn't a huge amount of weight, but it was noticable.

I decided to go low-fat whole foods vegetarian (because it's just common knowledge, dontchaknow). I lost maybe 3-4 pounds and ended up a mess. I was always ravenous, gassy, and bloated. I slept all the time. My back ached every day. I got IBS. And I started getting heart palpitations from the insulin surges and got diagnosed with mitral valve prolapse.

I switched to a low-carb diet after doing some research and not only did I lose significantly more weight than I did on my previous diet, but most of my health problems went away. I refined it further by switching to a paleo-type low-carb diet and the rest of my problems went away.

So, just from personal experience, whole foods low-fat and whole foods low-carb are a complete world of difference. Hell, whole foods low-fat and processed foods low-carb are even a complete world of difference (at least to me).

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Equating a lower fat diet with an Ornish like vegetarian approach. This is what too many low carbers do.

Several others in this thread have also shared how a "low fat" diet ruined their health - but the diets were actually vegetarian diets probably deficient in EFAs and protein.

Many bodybuilders (I come from a bodybuilding background) follow a somewhat higher carb/lower fat diet, and they get into single digit bodyfat territory with that approach. But they are NOT following some stupid pseudo vegan low protein diet. They eat low glycemic carbs and plenty of lean protein.

Don't get me wrong...I'm not out to criticize low carb diets. I believe they are a good option for many, many people. I only object to low carbers over generalizing and stereotyping "low fat" as being automatically synonymous with a protein and EFA deficient vegetarian diet.

That's no better than low fat advocates stereotyping low carb as the "meat, cheese and egg diet."

You've got to replace fat with something and you can only eat so much protein before you start feeling sick. So that leaves you with carbs. Many of us have issues with eating carbs, thus the bias against this approach. Plus others of us, well lets just say that "healthy whole grains" leave us sitting on the toilet doubled up in pain, bloated, brain-fogged, exhausted, depressed, and with lovely autoimmune diseases and more.

If I want more carbs in my diet I'd probably start eating yams and fruit. But until then, I'm sticking to my non-starchy veggies, meat and coconut products.

I think Bernstein's is low fat, low carb. The weight loss is pretty high...but largely unenjoyable.

Have you read Weston A. Price's book, "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration"?
After I read it, I came to the conclusion that the healthiest people he saw were the people who ate pretty much entirely meat and organs. The Eskimo, and the Maori. Next were the Masai, eating mostly milk products with some meat and blood added,(blood primarily being given to the little children and pregnant mothers). Next healthiest were the folks eating lots of fats, meats, and then some starches, whether it was taro root, or oats in the Outer Hebrides.
Then healthy but less so, were the agriculturists. Of course, they were eating lots of bugs to satisfy the need for whole proteins and fat. From what I gathered as soon as the grains were added proportionately higher ratio to meat and FAT (saturated) the shorter the people were, more diseased teeth (which shows cardiovascular health) and less healthy bones.
As soon as any of those tribes people changed their eating to modern processed food, tuberculosis showed up on the scene, also rotten teeth, and children who's teeth now came in crooked.
Oh, one more thing. Dr. Weston Price didn't come across a single tribe or group of people that ate only vegetarian/vegan. They all knew that their reproductive health depended on animal fats and meat. I think it's not just about whole unprocessed foods. It's about body chemistry, and the need for saturated fat in the diet.
I have a friend who was vegan for 30 years. When he turned 70 he almost died from having too little fat around his heart. The first thing his doctor told him to do was start eating salmon. He did, and he lived. I've heard now that he has cancer. His whole point of eating vegan was for health reasons. He made himself a guinea pig, and now we all see that vegan isn't what it promises.
Weston Price's book was what convinced me that Dr. Atkins was right. I've raised my kids as little hunter gatherer type eaters. They have excellent health and excellent teeth. I highly recommend reading Weston Prices book. It's very readable and puts it all into perspective.
Eden

Yep, I wore my copy out and am looking to get a hardback copy this time. Actually the Weston Price Foundation says that Mr. Price found the Dinkas to be the healthiest of the tribes he studied in Africa. They ate fish and grains.

"The healthiest tribe that Price studied was the Dinkas, a Sudanese tribe on the western bank of the Nile. They were not as tall as the cattle-herding Neurs groups but they were physically better proportioned and had greater strength. Their diet consisted mainly of fish and cereal grains. This is perhaps the greatest lesson of Price's African research—that a diet of whole foods, one that avoids the extremes of the carnivorous Masai and the largely vegetarian Bantu, but incorporates both nutrient dense grains and seafood, ensures optimum physical development." Click here to read rest of article