Hi Dorian J,

Have you got any sources for these studies, just out of curiosity? I am re-reading GCBC by Gary Taubes right now, and many many "unconventional" diets offered their obese patients "unlimited fat and protein" and the people still lost weight, even when their calorie intake was pretty high.

From my reading, if your metabolism is working "properly", your body will compensate for excess energy intake by simply burning it off as heat. The studies Taubes quotes for this are, admittedly, of young people (men, I think) whose metabolisms may be running higher than, say, mine, but, as far as I remember, these young men could increase their calorie intake to like 5,000 calories, and still didn't put on weight. Your argument sounds like the calories in = calories out argument which has been shown to be wrong. The body ain't that simple.

amanda

The mascarpone & greek yogurt is VERY yummy - both are new products to me and I'm amazed at how I like the Greek Yogurt. Two fold benefit to adding the mascarpone.....it adds a richness of flavor and texture and adds fat!

oh, I remember the delight of panna cotta when we were in Italy a couple years back. Time to find some gelatin.....

Not handy, let me do a brief research and I will post some



This though would not be a "proper" metabolism, this would be a "deadly" metabolism. In our overweight society we're forgetting that storing fat is of vital importance for whatever living being. If we could not store fat as long as not many carbs are consumed, we would have been extincted for centuries. Also consider a girl who looses too much body fat and got amennoreah. If really eating certain foods would prevent her from gaining fat, she would be right in considering the whole human life pure junk.

The body can't compensate by dissipating extra calories as heat, because the body needs those extra calories. If there was an heat dissipating mechanism there would be no fat storage mechanism, and the fat storage mechanism is the only reason why we're having this conversation today.

Even people like Atkins or Eades agree that the "metabolic advantage" is like 100 calories or so, but it's impossible to claim that calories don't matter. Hunter-gather populations get fat eating meats and fat when a period of food shortage is predicted. They get again lean during the food shortage and are at their original thin weight when food abudance returns.

We know that carbs and proteins can be converted to fat through insulin action. But fat itself can be converted to body fat even in the absolute absence of insulin, through a fat storage enzyme whose function is exactly to store fat in the absence of carbs.

The body wants it to be calories in - calories out, I want it too .. because it's the only reason I'm alive today and the only reason I will be alive if I'll find myself in the middle of an economical crisis or war.

I think there's a metabolic advantage to low-carb diets, I think you can lose more visceral and abdominal fat, I think the true reason why they work so well for fat loss is appetite control, I also think that there's a lot of calories wastage as you move from a carb-based metabolism to a fat-based metabolism (and this is explains those studies) but the effect disappears as soon as one gets completely adapted to the next energy substrate. The body has no interest into wasting calories as extra heat, they're too important and rare, even if we've forgotten it in such a food abundance.

What Taubman fails to address is that studies which require people to report what they have eaten are completely flawed from the beginning, for the simple fact that people misreport all the time.
A study was conduted to estimate the proportion of people missreporting (writing down exaggerated serving, writing down food they haven't eat, odmitting foods they have eaten) and based on what they reported and what the actual amount of food they ate when on a controlled environment, it has been estimated that 95% of dietary studies subjects doesn't report properly the daily food consumed.

Dorian and Amanda, sorry to interrupt your great convo!

Merpig, your daily menu looks so complex compared to mine, LOL!

OK, guys I think I'm doing something wrong here. Yes, I'm only starting out day 3 today but I still think my protein is too high. Give me some suggestions, plz!

I started adding heavy cream to my coffee (yum!) and dropped egg whites. I also switched out one of my 2nd meal meats with hog jowls. I'm snacking on butter.

Yesterday:

1st meal: 2-3 hog jowls, 4 egg yolks, all fried in bacon grease, 4 mugs coffee w/ tsp heavy cram in each.

2nd meal: large pork chop, 2-3 hog jowls, both fried in bacon grease, sauteed zucchini noodles w/ mozzarella and parmaisan.

snack: butter

And I did drink alcohol.

I'm having a huge problem w/ the hog jowls as I have no way of knowing what the nutrition breakdown is. If you're unfamiliar with them, they are mostly fat pork w skin attached and some lean and are at least 1/4 inch thick.

But i don't know how much protein/fat is in them.

Just thought I'd reassure anybody reading this thread that, if you are already following the Groves' plan, you are basically doing the same thing as is recommended by Jan Kwasnieski.

Here's BG's recommended breakdown of macros:

Carbs: 10-15% of calories
Protein: 15-25% of calories
Fat: 60-70% of calories.

Here's JK's breakdown (according to BG in NH&WL):

Carbs: 10-15% of calories
Protein: 20-30% of calories
Fat: 60-70% of calories.

Not much difference, huh?

He recommends 50-60g of carbs per day for weight loss and 50-100g of protein. He doesn't give a figure in grammes for fat.

I have been following the Groves' plan for two years and, when I stick to it, I lose between 1-2lbs a week. I can lose well on an average of 70g of carbs a day, but I think my carb threshhold is quite high: it might be lower for other people.

I have only been counting my carbs, nothing else. Today I weighed myself and I am about 1lb down for the week, so I have decided I don't really need to change anything in what I am doing, maybe just not overdo the protein.

To be honest, I am quite relieved that I can carry on doing what I was doing and still rely on this WOE taking the excess fat off, without having to do all this tedious weighing (I already weigh my carbs, although, after 2 years of practice, I don't weigh absolutely everything as I now have an eye for some things) and calculating and putting the weight of every dang thing I eat into some computer programme.

I have discovered that I need to add extra fat into my meals otherwise I get hungry again too quickly for my liking, so I always have high-fat foods in the house and add them to most meals.

For example, the other day, I made plain fish sautéed in a skillet, but served it with broccoli gratin. It kept me going for hours!

This high-fat, low-carb, relatively low-protein WOE is absolutely do-able without using a lot of technology or computer programmes, thank goodness!

That said, I am really glad that this thread has been started as I can personally testify that this WOE does work and is easy to do. I never wanted to go down to 20g of carbs and BG doesn't recommend it as, in his opinion, it puts the body under too much stress. He also recommends that some people might like to ease into this WOE, and steadily lower their daily carbs, rather than crashing from 100s of grammes of carbs a day to 20g. He claims that this slower start will prevent the headaches, nausea etc which are common with people doing Atkins induction.

So, if anybody finds this Kwasnieski WOE too technical, go out and get "Natural Health and Weight Loss" by Barry Groves. He's also got a few nice recipes in the back of the book.

I shall keep checking out this thread for more recipe ideas, and if anyone wants some recipe ideas from me, just ask!

Good luck to everyone, whatever way you decide to go, I am sure you'll be able to lose weight. I have just decided to choose the less complicated method.

amanda

We know it's calories in - calories out BUT what we are saying is that Ein and Eout are biologically linked. This makes a world of difference. The body is always trying to keep it's current weight (status quo). If you eat too much carb you can deregulate your metabolism and your body starts getting fatter and then you start eating more. That's how we become overweight.

The body does not need to become overweight to survive a long fast. Thin people can survive more than 30 days without any food. So when you say that when food is present we gain energy, that's true but your body will stop getting fatter when it reaches it's nominal level, which is still fairly thin. If you want to see us like a battery, think of it as if our battery has a max charge where we are still thin.

It's by eating too much carbs (mainly fructose) that our battery is deregulated and grows ad infinitum.


Gary Taubes does not fail to address anything my friend ! You really should read his book.

The book looked at the whole picture from 200 years ago to today. Citing every true scientific studies (real experiments not statistics) and demonstrating how the epidemiological ones tried to improperly infer causality. We should never forget that epidemiology can never infer causality it can only infer correlation. Scientists must still test the correlations to infer causality. This last step has never been done for the "caloric deficit" hypothesis. They are having a really hard time to confirm their hypothesis and there is a good reason for this. It's because it is wrong.

Soon more and more proper experiments will confirm our hypothesis that Ein and Eout are biologically linked. Since you have a scientific mind, I'm sure you would love the book .

Patrick

It sounds like you're recommending a low calorie, low protein, low carb high fat diet.

Well, so far I've gained about 3/4ths of a pound but it is getting close to TOM and the dairy products are constipating me as they usually do. So it's probably nothing to be concerned about yet.

Fructose?

You have to be kidding.

Haven't you noticed all of the recent threads about fructose?

Even the professional journals for nutritionists are reporting about the DANGERS of fructose, and its implications in the obesity epidemic and the development of diabetes.

Much less the fact that one out of three Americans have Fructose Malabsorption.

Anne, do you like sweep the forum for the word fructose? You need a yellow spandex suit for your super hero crusade against fructose. I'm not sure what you'd have as your initial on the front... a "G" for glucose? Maybe a "F" with an X through it.

I don't disagree with you, fructose is a horrible choice. If you're going to use a sweetener use one with the least amount of fructose possible. Fructose is the pathway to diabetes and fatty liver disease and probably other things as well. Oh, I forgot gout.

I'd recommend using erythritol, Lo Han, splenda, xylitol or a combination. Some of those even have sugar like properties.

GOOD BY, then -- you will NEVER ever read another posting from me.

Are you using fitday or something? I think you're going to have to at least until you get used to the changes. I'm not sure what to tell you about the hog jowls. Maybe try to separate off the meat and weigh it on a digital scale and count it like cooked bacon. I've never seen a hog jowl so I don't even know if that's possible.

You're probably not going to be able to eat meat more than once a day and only in a fairly small portion. That's a bummer for you, since you raise your own meat! My only meat yesterday was 3 strips of bacon for breakfast and about 1.5 in my cheese sauce and I still went over my protein count by a gram or two. But cheese has a fair amount of protein in it too.

Someone said not to count protein in veggies, I suppose because it is not a complete protein.

Aw Annie, I was just teasing you a little. I'm sorry if my joke rubbed you the wrong way.

Today's Menu (so far):

Breakfast: Greek yogurt cheese and peanut butter (and sweetener)

Lunch: Salad (pine nuts, olives, 2 sl bacon, 1 oz cheese, dressing)

Dinner: 3 oz yams with butter and creme fraiche
A breadless "reuben" with 1.5 oz of meat, 3 slices of cheese, sauerkraut, mayo, mustard.

Snacks: TBD

I haven't felt like cooking, but I really should make my lemon custard and a quiche.

Hmm, I thought this diet was different. I mean what I was doing before (and sort of stuck in a rut, not losing) was 5% carbs, 25% protein, 70% fat, and that was WAY more protein than I calculated I should have based on Dr. K's web page. Yesterday I had 80g protein which was far less than I've generally been having, but still more than my calculation based on the Dr. K page (which was 70g). That worked out to 15% of my calories, and 81% came from fat. That felt "right" somehow, and the scale was down 2 pounds this morning after 4 weeks of basically not moving.

Now I just have Easter dinner to get through.