Tue, Mar-17-20, 12:38
|
|
Senior Member
Posts: 1,891
|
|
Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
Stats: 000/000/000
BF:
Progress: 50%
|
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by bkloots
Entertaining myself in self-isolation by catching up on various threads of interest. More on calories:
In Good Calories, Bad Calories, Gary Taubes includes a chapter on Hunger. There you'll find an account of Ancel Keys's infamous Minnesota experiment in 1944 involving conscientious objectors. The idea was to replicate starvation conditions likely to occur in Europe.
The "starvation" regime: 1,570 calories per day, split between two meals. Mostly starches, cereals, minimal vegetables and meat. These healthy young men lost weight all right. Furthermore, all the subjects went nuts (not the clinical term!) When the experiment ended, the remaining subjects after rehabilitation weighed 5 per cent more than at the start; they had 50 per cent more body fat. So much for starvation as a long-term solution.
By the time we came along, Calianna, the weight-loss advisors were limiting us to 1200 calories. Evidence?? None.
Hmmm. Maybe I'll reread Taubes's entire tome.
|
I remember reading about the diet of the week/month in the magazines mom would buy at the grocery store during the '60s, and I never saw one that allowed 1200 calories - they were always 1000 calories, which is of course even worse. Naturally, they were accompanied by claims of how much you could lose in a week by following their latest diet. The claims weren't as outlandish as the ones you find on the cover of Women's World these days (Lose 20 pounds every week on new Better Than Surgery Diet!), but from the first week results (which is generally the biggest weight loss week, but was in reality probably all the longer they tested or could stick to such a strict diet), the article with the diet would extrapolate expected results in a month or more.
She always claimed she bought those magazines because of the short stories in them, but I suspect she was also taken in by a few of those diets, because when going through her old recipe file a couple years ago, I found many recipes where she'd calculated and written the calorie count on them. They were of course very low fat, all starches and sugars.
|