Is The “Total Wellbeing Diet” A Good Low-Carb Option?

Does Low Carb and Low Fat mix well for healthy weight loss? We don’t think so. Here’s why.

There’s a new diet coming out of Australia that is all the buzz right now in that country as well as the UK. It’s called the “Total Wellbeing Diet” and was developed by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) researchers Dr. Manny Noakes and Dr. Peter Clifton to help people enjoy the speedy benefits of the Atkins diet in combination with the health results provided by the glycemic index (GI) diet.

This book is so popular in Australia, where 60 percent of the population is overweight or obese, that it has even sold better than the latest Harry Potter book by moving close to 400,000 copies and is at the top of the bestseller charts on the British Amazon.com web site. In fact, the publisher Penguin Books expects one million of the 20 million people in Australia will own this book by the end of the year.

Not surprisingly, the “Total Wellbeing Diet” book is now on its way to the United States and other countries to try to duplicate this success elsewhere. What is this new plan being heralded as the next great trend in the diet industry?

“Total Wellbeing Diet” is a low-carb, high-protein, low-fat approach to weight loss

In a nutshell, the “Total Wellbeing Diet” is a low-carb, high-protein, low-fat approach to weight loss designed for producing rapid, yet safe weight loss.

The researchers took 100 overweight and obese women to test this way of eating over a 3-month period. Half of the ladies ate a 1,340-calories-per-day diet consisting of a high-protein, low-fat meal plan while the other half was given a high-carb, low-fat diet with the same number of calories.

Dr. Noakes presumed there would be no difference in weight loss between the two groups since they were both consuming the exact same number of calories. But there was a stark difference in the women who ate the higher protein plan as they not only lost more weight, but also improved their triglycerides, blood glucose and insulin levels while trimming inches from their waist. Additionally, the researchers found that more people stuck with the high-protein program than the low-fat diet.

The study results were the basis for constructing what has become the “Total Wellbeing Diet.” Dr. Clifton, a nutritionist with CSIRO, boasts that this diet plan allows you to eat more fruits and vegetables than the Atkins diet in an effort to help prevent heart disease and that there are very few side effects with the diet.

Dr. Noakes says the protein is the key part of making the “Total Wellbeing Diet” work as well as it does.

“One of the most intriguing areas is how protein can affect appetite regulation in the brain,” she says. “Three hours after a meal, you will feel far less hungry after eating a lot of protein than if you ate the same number of calories from carbohydrates.”

As in most low-carb programs, you have to avoid potatoes and sugary snacks. But you also eat cereal, milk, sandwiches with bread, rice, pasta, and unlimited salad and vegetables on the “Total Wellbeing Diet.” While you do eat a lot of meat to give your body lots of protein, you are also encouraged to eat low-fat and low-calorie versions of yogurt, soup, salad dressings and more.

I am very concerned about this particular aspect of the “Total Wellbeing Diet.” Mixing low-carb and low-fat is not a good recipe for weight loss and weight maintenance that you want to attempt to do. Blending these two methods for losing weight can be a surefire way to sabotage an otherwise successful low-carb program.

It simply makes no sense to get away from eating the healthy fats that you can and should enjoy in foods such as nuts, for example. You will only get discouraged because you will be hungry all the time which will cause you to quit in a very short amount of time due to frustration and exasperation! This is not your goal when you are trying to find a lasting way to permanent weight loss. Traditional low-carb programs do not force you to restrict your calories, fat grams or portion size when you are using them to lose weight.

As I was losing my weight on the Atkins diet in 2004, not once did I ever count a single calorie, look at the fat content on the nutritional label of the foods I was eating, or hold back on the amount of food that I ate. I didn’t need to because none of those are important when you are losing weight. Maintaining your level of carbohydrate intake is all you have to remember when you are living low-carb. That just irks people who believe fat is the enemy and that you have to burn off more calories than you take in, but that’s exactly what I did to lose my weight and keep it off.

People who follow a low-carb program actually need the fat in the foods they consume to burn as fuel and to help them feel satisfied between meals. There will be claims by people who oppose this way of eating that there are potential health problems awaiting people in the future who use a low-carb approach. But these are mostly scare tactics to prevent hurting obese people from improving their health! Plus, many of these statements have been debunked by low-carb success stories like me who have proven they are just plain wrong.

In fact, this idea of combining a low-carb diet with a low-fat diet is not a new one. It was actually brought up this summer by an obesity expert speaking at The European Congress on Obesity in Athens, Greece. Professor Arne Astrup told the crowd of 2,000 delegates from 80 countries at that meeting that taking the best elements of the low-carb and low-fat diets will be “satiating” and “enhance weight loss.”

Wrong, wrong and wrong again!

Mixing low-carb with low-fat is like mixing oil and water

They don’t go together at all. In fact, both ways of eating are diametrically opposed to one another because they each have a different role to play in shaping the body’s chemistry for weight loss.

Explaining to people like Astrup and these Australian researchers from CSIRO that your body needs fat to function and make low-carb work is like trying to explain to someone why the sky is blue and the grass is green. Although the science behind low-carb is easy to understand, for whatever reason, many still just don’t get it or don’t want to get it.

But with all the media attention looking for something “new” in the diet world to suddenly appear and take the place of the Atkins diet, the “Total Wellbeing Diet” is attempting hard to carry that mantle.

I am cautiously critical of the “Total Wellbeing Diet” because CSIRO has been releasing some of the better news for people who support the low-carb lifestyle in recent months. One of their studies published in the June 2005 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that high-protein, low-carb weight loss methods provide greater nutritional and metabolic advantages than a high-carbohydrate diet such as low-fat or low-calorie. Revolutionary to say the least!

But this focus on limiting fat as part of a high-carb, low-carb approach is very disconcerting to me and should give pause to anyone who has been successful on a traditional low-carb approach. Once we start down this road of mixing low-carb with low-fat, the effectiveness of the low-carb lifestyle over the long-term will greatly diminish.

I think I’ll be sticking with old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

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