low carb or not?

lockef

Depending on your hormones and metabolic environment, you may need to continue doing low carb to lose weight. Not everyone responds favorably to oatmeal, fruit and whole grains.

That said - whatever you decide to do, give your body time to adjust. If you're going to introduce carbs, start with low-glycemic carbs - berries, yams / sweet potatoes that will not spike your insulin.

Awesome post!

It's rare to see such an informed, unbiased post on these forums, especially when it comes to discussing carbs.

*golf clap*

smarterthanyoda

My dr. recommended South Beach for me, since it has less bad fat than Atkins. I think it's a good balance. It's considered "low-carb" but isn't nearly as restrictive as Atkins in terms of the carbs you can eat.

The biggest thing you need to look at is the kinds of carbs you are eating. Your weight gain probably was water weight, and may have been because the pizza had more salt than you realized.

I wouldn't recommend that you tell yourself "it's only temporary" and try to tough it out. The term "lifestyle change" gets thrown around a lot, but you really do want to look for something you can stick to for the rest of your life not just until you get down to your goal weight. The most important thing is that you find one that matches your preferences enough that you can stick with it forever. There are lots of diets out there that have worked for a lot of people, and there's no reason you can't try all of them until you find the one that works for you.

fatguyweightloss

Try to get ur carbs from mostly fruits, veggies, and whole wheat/grains. I typically eat low carb, but what really matters is the KIND of carbs u eat. Ur body NEEDS carbs for muscle growth and energy!

I agree getting carbs from real foods like vegetables and limited fruits is a good way to go. I found eliminating wheat made me feel better and not be hungry. Your body does not need carbs for anything unless you are so underweight and need to desperately gain fat.

Brandicaloriecountess

I say no-ish. I eat carbs, but not lots of potato or white bread carbs. I eat fruit, sandwich thins or other low cal bread and sometimes pasta or brown rice. I have lost 90 pounds since January of this year, so it has obviously not held me back.

fatguyweightloss

Depending on your hormones and metabolic environment, you may need to continue doing low carb to lose weight. Not everyone responds favorably to oatmeal, fruit and whole grains.

That said - whatever you decide to do, give your body time to adjust. If you're going to introduce carbs, start with low-glycemic carbs - berries, yams / sweet potatoes that will not spike your insulin.

Couldn't agree more, I recommend anyone to read "Why we get fat" or watch "Fat Head" to get a better understanding how this works and try it out. If not for weight loss but for health benefits.

joejccva71

Try to get ur carbs from mostly fruits, veggies, and whole wheat/grains. I typically eat low carb, but what really matters is the KIND of carbs u eat. Ur body NEEDS carbs for muscle growth and energy!

CHO is not an essential macronutrient. Not for muscle building nor energy. Period.

Acg67

Depending on your hormones and metabolic environment, you may need to continue doing low carb to lose weight. Not everyone responds favorably to oatmeal, fruit and whole grains.

That said - whatever you decide to do, give your body time to adjust. If you're going to introduce carbs, start with low-glycemic carbs - berries, yams / sweet potatoes that will not spike your insulin.

Couldn't agree more, I recommend anyone to read "Why we get fat" or watch "Fat Head" to get a better understanding how this works and try it out. If not for weight loss but for health benefits.

only read that book if you want your head filled with nonsense (besides his writing on the lipid hypothesis)

Grokette

My dr. recommended South Beach for me, since it has less bad fat than Atkins. I think it's a good balance. It's considered "low-carb" but isn't nearly as restrictive as Atkins in terms of the carbs you can eat.

The biggest thing you need to look at is the kinds of carbs you are eating. Your weight gain probably was water weight, and may have been because the pizza had more salt than you realized.

I wouldn't recommend that you tell yourself "it's only temporary" and try to tough it out. The term "lifestyle change" gets thrown around a lot, but you really do want to look for something you can stick to for the rest of your life not just until you get down to your goal weight. The most important thing is that you find one that matches your preferences enough that you can stick with it forever. There are lots of diets out there that have worked for a lot of people, and there's no reason you can't try all of them until you find the one that works for you.

Your doctor is very misinformed as saturated fats are not BAD fats. Actually that processed low fat cheese, low fat salad dressings, and frozen south beach food is not healthier than Atkins or the Paleo way of high fat eating.

http://www.health-report.co.uk/saturated_fats_health_benefits.htm

Please have a read by a very well known and well educated Doctor, not a Doctor that was trying to "bite" the coat tails of the late Dr Atkins.

Grokette

Try to get ur carbs from mostly fruits, veggies, and whole wheat/grains. I typically eat low carb, but what really matters is the KIND of carbs u eat. Ur body NEEDS carbs for muscle growth and energy!

Carbs do not promote muscle growth. Muscle growth comes from protein, not carbs.

Lift_hard_eat_big

I eat chocolate, cake, ice cream etc. on the regular and I still lose weight.

Grokette

I eat chocolate, cake, ice cream etc. on the regular and I still lose weight.

Good for you that your Endocrine system is not broken.

Lift_hard_eat_big

I eat chocolate, cake, ice cream etc. on the regular and I still lose weight.

Good for you that your Endocrine system is not broken.

At least not yet. We'll see what happens when I hit my 50's. Several of my family members were diagnosed with diabetes around that age.

bcattoes

You can lose weight whether you eat low carb or not. You will get all kinds of nonsense advice on carbs from MFP members. The fact is carbs affect different people differently. If you have any type of medical condition at all this can affect how many carbs you should eat, so you should consult your doctor or nutritionist (just because someone else's nutritionist recommended something is not reason to follow the advice. Any good nutritionist tailors their advice on an individual level). If you have a doctor that is familiar with you and your medical history, that is the best place to start.

But if you can't or don't want to live your life eating low carb, and you have no medical reason to do so, then why do it now? Finding a diet plan you can live with long term is important for keeping the weight off long term.

joejccva71

Exact words of Lyle McDonald:

Despite oft-heard claims to the contrary, there is no actual physiological requirement for dietary carbohydrate. Even the RDA handbook acknowledges this, right before recommending that a prudent diet should contain a lot of carbohydrates.

To understand why carbs aren’t essential, I need to discuss the concept of an essential nutrient briefly. And, in brief, an essential nutrient is defined as:

1.Any nutrient that is required for survival.
2.Can’t be made by the body.

When carbohydrates are restricted completely, the body still has a small requirement for glucose (although this decreases over time) and the body has to find something to make glucose out of. That something is lactate and pyruvate (produced from glucose metabolism), glycerol (from fat metabolism) and some amino acids. It’s the amino acid use that can be problematic since they have to come from somewhere.

Now, if no food is being consumed (e.g. total starvation), that somewhere is generally muscle tissue (the body will also break down liver proteins); the body will readily break down body protein to scavenge the amino acids it needs to produce glucose. In doing so, the muscle released alanine and glutamine (produced in the muscle from the breakdown of leucine and the branch chained amino acids, so you know) which can be converted to glucose in the liver. This process goes by the unwieldy name of gluconeogenesis which just means the production of new glucose.

Protein losses during total starvation are extremely high to start, gradually decreasing as the brain switches over to using ketones for fuel (this reduces the body’s glucose requirements which means less protein has to be broken down to make glucose). Even so, during complete starvation there is always some loss of body protein. Over long periods of time, this goes from harmful (because function is compromised from muscle loss) to downright fatal. Especially as folks get extremely lean and body protein breakdown increases.

In this context, an under-appreciated fact of liver and protein metabolism (but discussed in detail in The Protein Book) is that over half of all ingested amino acids are broken down in the liver in the first place. A good portion of those can be used to make glucose and this is especially true when carbohydrates are restricted.

funkycamper

I say no-ish. I eat carbs, but not lots of potato or white bread carbs. I eat fruit, sandwich thins or other low cal bread and sometimes pasta or brown rice. I have lost 90 pounds since January of this year, so it has obviously not held me back.

What works for you may not work for someone else. As someone stated above, people who are insulin resistant usually need to be far more careful with the amount of carbs they eat in order to lose weight. I know that about 80-90 carbs max a day is all my body can handle. Above that amount, and I won't lose a pound no matter how low I keep my calories because I will have too much insulin, the fat-holding hormone, raging through my system. I also get very sluggish, groggy, and retain water to the point where my feet hurt and shoes are tight if I eat more than that many carbs in a day. I actually do best around 40-60 carbs/day.

Of course, this isn't true for someone without insulin issues and you may be one of those lucky people.

LowCarbForLife

Depending on your hormones and metabolic environment, you may need to continue doing low carb to lose weight. Not everyone responds favorably to oatmeal, fruit and whole grains.

That said - whatever you decide to do, give your body time to adjust. If you're going to introduce carbs, start with low-glycemic carbs - berries, yams / sweet potatoes that will not spike your insulin.

Couldn't agree more, I recommend anyone to read "Why we get fat" or watch "Fat Head" to get a better understanding how this works and try it out. If not for weight loss but for health benefits.

only read that book if you want your head filled with nonsense (besides his writing on the lipid hypothesis)

LOL, thanks but I've read enough of Taubes work to know that calling his writing nonsense smells a lot like sour grapes.

From garytaubes.com, addressing his critics charge of cherry-picking his data:
In explaining my problems with food reward and palatability as a viable hypothesis of obesity, I’m going to repeat many of the arguments I made in my books for why the energy balance paradigm itself seems to be such a failure. (Not all of them because life is short, but many.) And these, of course, will also provide the rationale for why something like the carbohydrate/insulin hypothesis is necessary. It doesn’t imply that the carbohydrate/insulin hypothesis is right, but that something very much like it almost assuredly is. I’ll also explain why I find many of the observations and some of the experiments used to support the hypothesis meaningless and inconsequential. I hope, as I did with my books, to create what Kuhn called a “playable game.”

But here’s another catch: This map-making exercise can be perceived as a justification for cherry-picking of the data, which, in a way, it is. But I’m arguing that such selective interpretation of the data is a fundamental requirement to make progress in any field of science, and particularly one as off the rails as that of obesity and nutrition. It is inherent to the process that Kuhn described as “map-making,” to taking a non-playable game – a dysfunctional paradigm – and making it playable.

This was a point the physicist Richard Feynman made indirectly back in 1965 in The Character of Physical Law, the book version of a series of lectures he gave the year before at Cornell University. (The lectures themselves are available on line and are worth viewing for many reasons, one of which is the experience of listening to one of the great thinkers of the 20th century express himself in a thick New Yawk/Queens accent.) Feynman was talking about how physicists find a new law of nature, and this is what he said:

In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is — if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

But then he added the caveat:

It is true that one has to check a little to make sure that it is wrong, because whoever did the experiment may have reported incorrectly, or there may have been some feature in the experiment that was not noticed, some dirt or something; or the man who computed the consequences, even though it may have been the one who made the guesses, could have made some mistake in the analysis. These are obvious remarks, so when I say if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong, I mean after the experiment has been checked, the calculations have been checked, and the thing has been rubbed back and forth a few times to make sure that the consequences are logical consequences from the guess, and that in fact it disagrees with a very carefully checked experiment.

And this is the point. Experimental results and observations have to be rubbed back and forth a few times to see if the interpretations that first come to mind are really justified, and whether the experiment, for that fact, is a “very carefully checked” experiment. And what we want to know is whether the result really disagrees or agrees with the predictions. Or is something else going on? Not just dirt in the equipment, but maybe another interpretation entirely – an alternative hypothesis? What was missed in the interpretation? Artifacts in the experimental apparatus? Confounding factors that might explain the observational evidence?

Asking these questions, indeed, leads to all kinds of cherry picking of the data, what a Scottish physician once described to me as “Bing Crosby Epidemiology” – i.e., accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. And the paradigm in which we live, not surprisingly, will determine how we define positive and negative and so what we accentuate and what we eliminate. Depending on our paradigm or our preferred hypotheses, we’ll put more or less effort into the rubbing back and forth process based on whether the experimental results agree with our notions or don’t.

As I’ve said before in various venues, at one time in the writing of Good Calories, Bad Calories I had a 400,000 word unfinished draft. I couldn’t complete it because it was obviously far too long already – twice as long as it should be — and yet I had important chapters yet to write. I solved the problem by giving it to my editor to read with the suggestion that maybe we could make it two books. He read it in its entirety (one of many acts of editorship that earned my undying devotion) and said, no, one book. We proceeded to cut the document by more than half, so I could then write the chapters that still had to be written and end up with a book that was under 200,000 words (bibliography and endnotes, not included).

Much of what was removed was the rubbing back and forth. I would present an observation – high levels of insulin, for instance, in obese subjects first observed in the early 1960s – and then I would explain how it was interpreted to support the conventional wisdom (we get fat because we overeat and being fat then causes insulin resistance and so increases insulin levels) and why that wasn’t necessarily the correct interpretation and how the same observation supported alternative hypotheses as well. And I would go back and forth with arguments and counterarguments.

My editor pointed out that this wasn’t necessary; that my job was to present my interpretation of the evidence and if someone wanted to challenge it later, so be it. I could provide the arguments and counterarguments, the rubbing back and forth, then.

What I always found amusing once the book was published (okay, amusing in an irritating way) were the critics who would first complain that GC,BC was too long – I go “on and on about experiments old and new,” as Gina Kolata put it in the New York Times – and then upbraid me for leaving something out that they considered important. And so when Kolata pointed out that “definitive” experiments by Leibel and Hirsch should have been in my book because they refuted my arguments – thus accusing me, in effect, of the supposedly heinous crime of cherry picking — I was left to point out in a letter to the editor that the experiment (no “s” at the end, as Kolata had it) was poorly done, didn’t address the salient issues, that Kolata got many of her facts wrong, and that her use of the word “definitive” left much to be desired and that “ambiguous” was a far more accurate description.

So Kolata read the Leibel/Hirsch experiment in a way that supported her beliefs and didn’t bother to rub them back and forth. (She had just published a book a few months earlier that adhered closely to the conventional wisdom.) And I did, because of the implication that the experiment refuted my arguments. I had to see if it did indeed do what Kolata claimed and concluded (not surprisingly, considering my bias) that it didn’t. Or at least that it couldn’t be used, as she had used it, to refute my arguments.

This selective interpretation of the evidence is human nature, as Francis Bacon pointed out almost 400 years ago. But it’s a necessary part of science. For a paradigm to shift, a significant proportion of experimental results will have to be reinterpreted – meaning the interpretation in the new paradigm and the significance is going to be different than it had been under the old. Some significant portion of experiment results will be deemed irrelevant, on the basis that they don’t shed meaningful light on the subject. And, of course, how meaningful is defined is dependent on the paradigm.

So we’re back to the tricky business of assessing who or what is right in such a situation – in determining where to place our bets?

The ultimate determination should indeed be based on data, but not just any data or any experiment that seems relevant. A controversy would not exist if it were not possible for most experimental results and most observations to be consistent with both hypotheses, both paradigms. The key to making progress is to identify observations in nature or generate them by experiment that are consistent with the predictions of only one of the competing paradigms or hypotheses, not both — or not all, if there are more than two. (Thus invariably prompting proponents of the unsuccessful paradigms/hypotheses to evoke what philosophers and historians of science would call “epicycles” to rationalize away the negative evidence.) The problem with the Hirsch/Leibel experiments, as I pointed out in my letter to the Times, is that the results were consistent with both hypotheses, and so the solution was not to conclude on the basis of a popularity contest which was right, but to advocate for better experiments.

What we ultimately want, as Feynman suggested, is an experiment or an observation that can unambiguously — i.e., rubbing back and forth gets us as close to nowhere as we can get — differentiate between hypotheses or paradigms. The competing hypotheses/paradigms predict different results and only one of the predictions holds up. Meaningful experimental results or meaningful observations are those that refute one hypothesis but not the other. Anything less doesn’t help us and doesn’t answer the question of what or who is right. So a constant reminder in this business is to ask ourselves whether the observations or experimental results we’re discussing serve this purpose: can they differentiate between the two hypotheses? If they can’t, let’s move on and find (or fund) ones that can.

Acg67

Depending on your hormones and metabolic environment, you may need to continue doing low carb to lose weight. Not everyone responds favorably to oatmeal, fruit and whole grains.

That said - whatever you decide to do, give your body time to adjust. If you're going to introduce carbs, start with low-glycemic carbs - berries, yams / sweet potatoes that will not spike your insulin.

Couldn't agree more, I recommend anyone to read "Why we get fat" or watch "Fat Head" to get a better understanding how this works and try it out. If not for weight loss but for health benefits.

only read that book if you want your head filled with nonsense (besides his writing on the lipid hypothesis)

Taubes says overeating is a symptom of obesity not the cause of obesity based on self reported data that said the obese ate the same or less than the lean, but leaves out the obese chronically self report upwards of a 50% lower caloric intake then they actually do

Controlled studies have shown no metabolic advantage to keto diets

Taubes fails to mention that protein is also highly insulingenic, which throws a wrench in his main hypothesis about CHO/insulin/fat

he makes no mention of when DNL actually occurs (it's a pretty rare process)

fat can be stored in the absence of insulin (oops another strike against his hypothesis)

i can go on and on...

questionablemethods

Controlled studies have shown no metabolic advantage to keto diets

I don't doubt that such studies exist, just wondering if you could cite. Please and thanks.

Acg67

Controlled studies have shown no metabolic advantage to keto diets

I don't doubt that such studies exist, just wondering if you could cite. Please and thanks.

not a problem

Johnston CS et. al. Ketogenic low-carbohydrate diets have no metabolic advantage over nonketogenic low-carbohydrate diets. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. (2006) 83: 1055-1061

questionablemethods

Controlled studies have shown no metabolic advantage to keto diets

I don't doubt that such studies exist, just wondering if you could cite. Please and thanks.

not a problem

Johnston CS et. al. Ketogenic low-carbohydrate diets have no metabolic advantage over nonketogenic low-carbohydrate diets. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. (2006) 83: 1055-1061

Are there others? (You said "studies.")