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Unsurprisingly, my email and my Facebook feed regularly turn up articles about diet and weight loss. Some are good. Some are garbage. Some make my day. Some make me want to bang my head on my keyboard.
I ran across one of the latter category this week. After a promising start, it devolved to a predictably useless conclusion.
By Brian Parr, an associate professor in the Department of Exercise and Sports Science at USC Aiken, the article is titled Finding a ‘normal’ diet is key for weight loss. The main thrust of the article is that maintaining weight loss depends on making your weight loss diet your normal diet. This is so. For years I have told people “There is no finish line. What you do to lose weight is what you must continue to do to keep it off.” You know, that whole “lifestyle change” thing everyone talks about.
Mr. Parr tells the story of “Bob,” a dieter who successfully lost weight, then gained it back. How did Bob lose weight? He went on a low carbohydrate diet. Bob lost fifty pounds on his low carb diet. But when he reached goal, he went back on his “normal” diet, with predictable results.
Parr’s initial comment? This leads to the common belief that diets don’t work. But the problem isn’t that the diet wasn’t effective for weight loss. What Bob didn’t realize is that his “normal” diet was not consistent with maintaining the weight loss. In fact, it is what caused him to become overweight in the first place. What Bob needs is a new normal diet.
Hooray! Sounds like Parr gets it. Until the very next paragraph, when he starts in on calorie calculations. Bob lost weight, Parr says, because his low carbohydrate diet was lower calorie than his normal diet, and he was exercising. Must be it. No mention of the content of those calories. No mention that if Bob did, indeed, eat fewer calories it was likely because a low carbohydrate diet dramatically reduced his hunger.
Bob needs to find a new normal diet, says Parr, and I cannot disagree. But despite Bob’s dramatic success low carbing, Parr continues to parrot the old line about how Bob is eating “large portions,” and that his new diet has to revolve around “smart choices.” Does he note that, for Bob at least, those “smart choices” appear to be low carbohydrate foods? Nope. Not a word.
Read about the history of calorie counting in The Resurrection Of Calorie Counting – Big Time! by Di Bauer here at CarbSmart.com.
Noted science journalist Gary Taubes probes the state of what is currently known and what is simply conjectured about the relationship among nutrition, weight loss, health, and disease in his excellent book Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Instead, Parr finishes up with an invitation to visit his blog, to learn to estimate your energy expenditure, and for information about an “appropriate ‘normal’ diet”.
What does it take for people like Brian Parr to see the dramatic evidence right in front of them? What does it take?
Dana, you are so right! People believe the Big Fat Lie, and have been so brainwashed by inaccurate “reports” that no one knows what is the reason for gaining weight in the first place, or gaining back weight after dieting.
The one thing we DO know is that calorie restricted diets will put the body is fat storage mode, and it’s just a matter of time until even eating the same amount of calories will make you gain back the weight. (there is documented research in Taube’s book about this). The Diet Industry has convinced people to blame themselves instead of teaching them that it is DIETING that makes you fat! Overweight is a symptom of a problem, it is not the cause of the problem.
Betcha I can guess his political leanings, too.
Huh. Can’t say I could tell…
Instead of banging your head on the keyboard, bang HIS head in it. Just kidding, of course, but it seems that this is the only way some folks will get it.
Just started the low carb lifestyle this week. It is tough to “un-wash” the brainwash. As I’m eating *real* food, there is a small voice in the back of my head that says, “The fat! The calories! Stop the madness!” But for the first time…well, ever..I’m not hungry. Well, I’m hungry – but at appropriate times. And I’m never ravishingly so. I track my carbs and what I notice is that my calorie intake is well within “normal”..maybe not “normal” for the fatphobics, but for a good, healthy diet. I’m grateful to all the bloggers who have done the preliminary research for me so I could go on and search myself. I feel very good eating this way and I doubt I’ll pick up another piece of bread again. It just doesn’t feel right or make ME feel right.
I don’t believe Dr. Parr’s political beliefs have anything to do with what he was suggesting in his article. The reality is, our bodies cannot maintain low carbohydrate diets for extended periods of time. Carbohydrate fuels the brain and our muscles while exercising. While it is true that a low carb diet can help with satiation (increased protein consumption has that affect), it is unreasonable and unwise to ask a person to follow a low-carb diet for the rest of their life. There is a reason that carbohydrates are the largest portion (macronutrient percentage) in a normal, well-balanced diet. It is a very simple equation, if you want to lose weight you eat less calories than you expend everyday. It is difficult to have the energy for proper exercise if you don’t have carbohydrate to fuel you. The body cannot burn fat efficiently while exercising at intensities worthwhile for weight loss. As such, Dr. Parr’s article is right on the money. After the initial weight loss, Bob needs to consume a normal, BALANCED, healthy diet, with fewer calories and include exercise. Then we will have a happy healthy Bob, instead of a grumpy, carbohydrate-starved Bob, with no energy or critical thinking ability.
My body can’t maintain a low carbohydrate diet for an extended period of time? Why didn’t you tell me that before I spent 17 years eating this way? ;-p
Carbohydrate fuels our brains and muscles simply because we feed our bodies carbohydrate, but most of the cells in our bodies can and will run just fine on free fatty acids and ketones. You’ve heard about fat burning, of course; everyone knows that you have to “burn fat” to lose weight. Where do you think it gets burned? It gets burned in your cells, for energy.
There are a very few cells, particularly your red blood cells, that are glucose dependent, but most are not. Even your brain, often cited as glucose-dependent, will run happily on ketones. Here’s what The Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition has to say:
During very low carbohydrate intake, the regulated and controlled production of ketone bodies causes a harmless physiological state known as dietary ketosis. Ketone bodies flow from the liver to extra-hepatic tissues (e.g., brain) for use as a fuel; this spares glucose metabolism via a mechanism similar to the sparing of glucose by oxidation of fatty acids as an alternative fuel. In comparison with glucose, the ketone bodies are actually a very good respiratory fuel. Indeed, there is no clear requirement for dietary carbohydrates for human adults. (Emphasis mine.) Interestingly, the effects of ketone body metabolism suggest that mild ketosis may offer therapeutic potential in a variety of different common and rare disease states. Also, the recent landmark study showed that a very-low-carbohydrate diet resulted in a significant reduction in fat mass and a concomitant increase in lean body mass in normal-weight men. Contrary to popular belief, insulin is not needed for glucose uptake and utilization in man. Finally, both muscle fat and carbohydrate burn in an amino acid flame.
Dr. Lubert Stryer, professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University and author of the biochemistry textbook used in most medical schools, says ketones are normal fuels of respiration and are quantitatively important as sources of energy. Indeed, heart muscle, and the renal cortex [kidney] use [ketones] in preference to glucose.
As for those red blood cells, the liver is perfectly capable of creating what little glucose the body actually requires through a process called gluconeogenesis. It makes that glucose from protein, which has led some to insist that low carbohydrate diets will cause muscle wasting, but your average low carber easily eats sufficient protein to supply the modest need for amino acids for glucose production.
All of which explains why I’ve been able to write a dozen books and work out regularly while eating low carb for the better part of two decades.
Carbohydrates make up the preponderance of the human diet because they’re cheap to produce and easy to store. However, we all have hunter-gatherer ancestors, and while the proportion of carbohydrate in a hunter-gatherer diet varied considerably with both the region and the season, there was very little in the way of grain or legumes involved, and certainly people who lived in temperate climates ate little in the way of fruit during the winter. And, of course, there were the Inuit, who ate virtually no plant matter at all — and managed to hunt, fish, and generally run around in one of the world’s harshest climates, apparently without problems with energy, grumpiness, or brain-fog.
There are a fair number of studies disproving the idea that “a calorie is a calorie is a calorie” — Kekwick and Pawan are cited most often, but there are more recent studies, including one from the Harvard School of Public Health demonstrating that a low carbohydrate diet allows weight loss on more calories than a “balanced” diet does. There was also the Schneider’s Children’s Hospital study of obese adolescents in which the low carb group lost twice as much weight as the low fat group, while eating, on average, 66% more calories per day.
The common reaction to this sort of study is “But that defies the laws of thermodynamics!” It does not. The body is not a bomb calorimeter that burns everything in the same way. Macronutrient balance influences hormonal signaling, and thus metabolic rate. It’s clear that restricting carbohydrates sharply increases caloric burn — which, I must point, out, means more energy, not less.
I don’t know what you mean by “exercising at intensities worthwhile for weight loss,” but assure you that aerobic exercise is easily fueled by free fatty acids. (Remember how aerobics instructors used to have everyone take their pulse, to insure they were in their “fat burning zone?”) Sustained anaerobic exercise — lifting heavy weights for an hour, or a prolonged bout of sprinting — may require dietary carbohydrate, but I assure you my husband and I manage to do a Slow Burn workout once or twice a week, working all major muscle groups with heavy weights, without any added carbohydrate, and we’ve made excellent progress. (I went for a massage this past weekend, and the nice young man commented that I had remarkable muscle mass for a woman my age.)
Indeed, one of the great benefits of low carb diets is increased energy, and far more stable energy at that, since we’re not living from blood-sugar-high to blood-sugar-high. When you’re adapted to burning fat and ketones, you shift seamlessly from burning the fat in your last meal to burning stored fat from your fat depots — which, of course, is what fat depots are for.
The first week or two, while the body is adapting to burning fat and ketones — increasing levels of the enzymes needed to burn fat for fuel — some people are tired and a little foggy, but the same can be said of the first couple of weeks after quitting smoking, and that’s generally not seen as a reason to start smoking again.
All of which is beside the point, because Bob did not mention being grumpy and having no energy or critical thinking ability on his low carbohydrate diet. There was no indication in Professor Parr’s article that Bob had any ill effects at all from his low carbohydrate diet. It appears to have merely been Parr’s assumption that Bob’s low carbohydrate diet was an inappropriate candidate for his “new normal” — an assumption that legions of long-term low carbers would dispute.
I’m often amazed at the low powers of observation evident from authors like Parrs. What do they say about 20 year old I work with who can, and do, eat anything and everything they want, and never gain an ounce? Some of them are lethargic, never exercise, and sleep all the time. How can establishment scientists fail to account for this, and just continue claiming that weight loss is calories in minus calories used? My most recent case is a young buddy who went onto low carb and is already down 60 pounds in four months, but eats as much or more than ever.
Yep. You’d think it would be obvious that different people have different metabolisms. Everyone knows that you can’t turn a bulldog into a greyhound with diet and exercise, but the general message seems to be that if you just have the “willpower” and the “strength of character” to starve yourself for the rest of your life, you too can look like the people on television.
Perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about weight loss came from self-improvement guru Tony Robbins, a guy I generally like. But he once said that if you wanted to lose weight you should find a skinny person and do what he is doing. Apparently he’d never met an old boyfriend of mine, who was 6’6″, weighed 150, and ate roughly his own body weight daily. We’d go out to an all-you-can-eat buffet, where I’d have one plate of food and he would have five or six. Then we’d go back to his place and he’d eat an entire pint of Hagen Daaz by himself. An hour later he’d be saying “Do you think we should order a pizza?” If I’d eaten like him I’d have been wider than I was high.
BTW, I still know the guy. He’s now fifty-ish, and just as skinny and voracious as ever. I swear, he’s got a shrew gene patched in.
Many people don’t get that low carb really mean we stop eating the “junk” carbs. we eat lots of salad and vegi’s just not the starchy sugary ones. We also tend to eat less proccessed foods. though sometimes, I fall victim to the need for an Atkins Endulge .