Another Reason Why Low Carb Works

Yesterday, I attended the baptism of my 8-year-old nephew and afterward, there was a big family get together. With food. Lots of food, and almost all of it pure "carbage." So I ate what I could (a few strawberries and the roast beef and cheese innards from a croissant sandwich plus some other green veggies) and left the feeding trough satisfied.

But I noticed that everyone kept going back to the chips, potato salad, cookies, sandwiches, watermelon, soda pop, etc., while I abstained. I wasn't suffering and felt quite full, actually, with what I ate. I realized that by nourishing my body with nutrient dense calories, my appetite was sated and I probably consumed a lot fewer calories than most people there. A lot fewer calories. Feeling full and then spontaneously consuming fewer calories is one of the reasons people lose weight on low carb diets. I saw a vivid example of that principle in action yesterday.

Weekly Update

This week, I dropped another 2.6 pounds, bringing my total weight loss to 41 pounds. You can follow my weekly progress by viewing this chart. Another milestone is that I have been in Europe for one month now and during that time, I have dropped at least 9.2 pounds (there may be a small measurement error that could increase my weight loss by another two pounds).

More importantly, there are several non-scale victories (NSVs) worth mentioning. First, I have gone down from a 50-inch waist on my pants when I started in February to a 44-inch waist, which I just started wearing when my daughter brought me over a pair of jeans when she arrived last week. And those pants are now too large! I can pull them off without unbuttoning or unzipping them. Thank goodness for a belt.

Second, I have been walking a lot more lately and can do so without hunger. I am fully keto-adapted and so exercising does not make me hungry, as it does for people on a high carb regime. We walked for miles and miles (approximately 25,000 steps per day, according to my pedometer) while in Paris for the last few days. I got thirsty, but not hungry.

Third, we have been eating out a lot, some times all three meals per day, and by staying low carb, I am continuing to lose weight, in spite of all the eating out. This is important since, beginning tomorrow, we will be on a nine-day bus tour of Europe and will be eating out for every meal.

Fourth, my blood glucose levels are still falling. One hour after eating, they are consistently in the 100-105 range, and frequently they are in the 90-100 range. They should be below 140 one hour after eating and below 120 two hours after eating. So my one hour readings are quite good. My low carb lifestyle is effectively controlling my type II diabetes.

Finally, I am not really craving carbs anymore. When I do eat carbs, such as the blueberries I ate yesterday, they taste really, really good. And sweet. My palate is no longer in sugar shock, so I can fully taste and appreciate the natural level of sweetness in the berries I have been eating.

Life is good.

Why Low Carb Diets Reduce Hunger

The most amazing thing to me about the low carb lifestyle is that those constant hunger pangs have simply disappeared. Not only that, but I now feel full after eating, which never really happened before. I used to blame my upbringing (both my parents were obese) for damaging that switch in my body that told me I had eaten "enough."

Now I know it has to do with leptin resistance. In the briefest of terms, leptin is a hormone secreted by fat cells and this hormone "tells" the brain that you are full. Most obese people secrete adequate amounts of leptin but, as in the case with insulin, they become insensitive to leptin (just like type II diabetics produce insulin, but they become insensitive to insulin). Tryglycerides are apparently a major problem in leptin resistance. When triclyceride levels increase, so does resistance to leptin. Overweight and obese people usually have quite high triglyceride levels. A low carb diet will reduce triglyceride levels quite rapidly (usually within a few days or a week or two), which then makes you more sensitive to leptin. And then you start to feel full.

This is one reason why people who eat until they are full on a low carb diet spontaneously consume fewer calories than those who eat until they are full on a low fat, high carb diet, and perhaps explains the greater success rate of shedding pounds with a low carb diet.

But there is one additional problem. While you are losing weight, you won't be hungry. However, when you have reached your goal, you will have lost most of your excess fat stores, which are largely responsible for the release of the hormone leptin. There is a three-fold solution to this problem. First, maintain the low carb lifestyle. Second, eat more slowly during meals. And third, go five to six hours between meals without eating. This allows the leptin receptors to reset themselves naturally in the absence of excess fat stores.

Weight Loss Update

This week, I dropped 2.6 pounds, for a total weight loss of 38.4 pounds. Follow my progress with this chart. That means, among other things, that I have lost 6.6 pounds in the three weeks I have been to Europe. How many people can come to the continent of celestial cuisine and lose weight? I know that some of the students who have come with us have put on weight. At least, they have been lamenting about putting on weight, but have decided they will deal with it after their experience is over.

I ate a fair amount of grass fed Scottish beef last week, and continue to cook with and eat butter and cream (which, as I have mentioned before, do not increase heart disease risk). I am really not missing carbs at all, and markers of health, my blood pressure and blood glucose levels, are all quite good. And, most amazing of all, since this is not a semi-starvation diet, I am not hungry between meals on my low carb lifestyle.

Weekly Update

I lost 0.6 pounds this week, for a cumulative total of 35.8 pounds.  Follow my progress with this chart. While that is not a great deal of weight, I have been weighing around the same weight for about a week now, which means I am due for another whoosh experience, where I will drop three to four pounds over night.  Except for the first two weeks, my monthly totals have been quite consistent, around eight pounds per month.  Just about what I expect to lose long term.

More importantly, other indicators are also positive.  I have notched up my belt another notch and I continue to have lots of energy.  I am sleeping better, my blood pressure is down, my blood glucose levels are still falling, and I am not hungry while following a low carb diet. All thanks to the low carb lifestyle I have discovered.

Considering a Low Carb Diet? What Not to Do

I think there are some new readers of this blog who may be considering a low carb diet, so I wanted to post a caution about following the diet.

First off, you really need to be committed to it.  About the worst thing you could do is add a lot of fat to an already high carb diet. It won't work if you don't also cut carbs.  According to the Weight Loss Sweet Spot, you need to be consuming 100 or fewer carbs per day to lose weight, and really, to get into the fat-burning ketosis, you need to be below 50 carbs per day.  I would recommend fewer than 30 carbs, at least for a month or two, to see some dramatic results. If you consume 150 or fewer carbs per day, you can enjoy almost effortless weight maintenance.

Second, cheating is immediately punished in a rather shocking way.  If you cut out the carbs, you lose water weight quickly at first, perhaps 6 to 12 pounds in a week.  But if you cheat for a day and binge on carbs, it can all come back quickly, too.  But it is just water. Remember that if you binge on carbs one day and gain 10 pounds the next day. Your initial weight loss is water (the fat will come off later) and if you cheat, your weight gain is all just water, too. Get up, dust yourself off, and get back into the saddle and try again.

Third, do NOT try a low-fat, high protein version of the low carb diet (like the old Weight Watchers Core program). If you truly cut out your carbs, but eat a lot of lean protein (like skinless chicken breasts) and very little fat, you may actually get sick. If you are going to try a low carb diet, you must get over your lipophobia (fear of fat) and eat animal fats. They will not clog your arteries and they won't cause a heart attack. For a very detailed explanation of this, read Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. Warning: this is a dense book, but it outlines the history of the saturated-fats-cause-heart-disease hypothesis, including a very thorough debunking of this hypothesis. Or just watch this video instead, which essentially says the same thing Taubes said, but without dozens of pages of scientific citations.

Fourth, realize this is a lifestyle, not a diet you can step off once you get to your weight loss goal and then resume eating like you used to eat. If you do that, you will just gain back all the weight you lost.

Finally, if you do a low carb diet, and cut out most of the carbs you have been eating, you will experience carb withdrawals to one degree or another. But this is temporary, and the healthy aspects of the low carb lifestyle will quickly outweigh the withdrawal symptoms. Michael R. Eades, M.D. has a two part series on starting (or restarting) a low carb diet, including tips for getting over carb withdrawal.  Part I is here, part II is forthcoming.

Now for the good news: you will not be hungry, you will lose weight safely, you will have more energy, your lipid profile will improve, and you will be very healthy. Here are some very useful suggestions for following a low carb diet.

Stopping Food Cravings

According to this article, if you restrict certain types of foods, you will eventually stop craving them.  That means that if, on a low carb diet, you restrict carbs, you will stop craving them at some point.  I can see that happening in my life.  Eleven weeks into a low carb diet, I have no desire to eat bread, pasta, oatmeal, cookies, chips, etc.  I am still a bit bothered by sweets, probably because I have not entirely cut out diet soda (but I am working on that).

The article also mentioned that low carb dieters were less bothered by hunger than low-fat, high carb dieters, but we already knew that.

Thought for the Day

Happy Easter everyone.

In a previous posting, I commented on how the low carb diet had curbed my hunger cravings.  Isn't it interesting how, when I was putting on fat, I was always hungry?  Yet now that I am burning fat, I am not hungry between meals and have lost those intrusive thoughts of food.  An interesting contradiction.  I had heard people make a distinction between "hunger" and "appetite."  Hunger was the physiological state when our bodies needed food and appetite was the psychological state when our bodies wanted food.

Actually, that kind of thinking was wrong.  We were hungry because we were starving at the cellular level, since much of what we consumed was stored as fat instead of burned as energy.  This made the distinction between hunger and appetite meaningless.  It was just hunger.  What low carbing has done for me is restore feelings of satiety.  This is a new and novel experience that I am savoring.

More Interesting Research Studies

A new study in the journal Obesity shows that those on a low carb diet were less bothered by hunger than those following a high carb, low fat diet.   This effect was particularly true for men.  I can attest that this is true, as I was always starving on Weight Watchers but not on my low carb diet.

There are several food studies from the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR), a marketing journal.  But interesting nonetheless.

This study shows that thinking about dying causes you to eat more (this link opens up a Microsoft Word document with a press release from the journal).  If I had to contemplate staying on Weight Watchers for my whole life, I would think about dying, too.

Another JCR study shows that the more "healthy" options on a menu or in a vending machine, the more likely someone is to choose something unhealthy.  I guess the "healthy" choices are so unappealing it causes people, in near desperation, to choose the unhealthy options.  To quote Fox Moulder, "The air in my mouth tastes better than that" (in reference to a diet ice cream bar Scully was eating).

Yet another JCR study shows that if you put junk food, such as M&Ms, in a 100 calorie pack, people will think it is diet food. (this link opens up an MS Word document with a press release from the journal).  A second JCR study shows that if you put junk food in 100 calorie packs, dieters will consume a lot more of them (this link opens up an MS Word document with a press release from the journal).  Stupid dieters.

There are many more JCR food studies.  I will report on more later.

Why am I doing this?

Twice in my life, I have lost 100 pounds, both times using Weight Watchers.  I was even a leader at Weight Watchers meetings for about a year.  And within two to three years, I gained my weight back.  Now, approaching 50, I have become concerned about my health and determined to make one final attempt at becoming lean.  I am a type II diabetic who recently had to switch to insulin shots and my third try at Weight Watchers was a complete bust.  I was 100% honest on the new program for four weeks, but only lost 0.8 pounds in that time, not my normal experience.  Something wasn't working.  At first, I blamed the new Weight Watchers program.  But one day, I was reading www.instapundit.com, and the author, Glenn Reynolds, linked to a book by Gary Taubes, called Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It.  I downloaded the book from Audible.com and listened to it one weekend.


This book changed my life.  I was converted, completely, as my weight loss biography mirrored the failed attempts detailed in Taubes' book.  I had considered myself weak-willed, gluttonous, and slothful for failing at keeping weight off, but then I learned why I had failed:  too many carbs and too much insulin in my system.  It's too complicated to explain how that works, just read Gary Taubes' book if you are interested.  It is short and interesting.  But a low carb lifestyle boils down to this:  avoid most carbohydrates and eat a lot more saturated fat and protein.  Eat as much meat, poultry, and fish as you like (but stop when you are full), and consume fat, including the saturated fat in animal products.  Eat small quantities of leafy green vegetables (and a few other vegetables) but avoid most carbohydrates:  flour, sugar, starchy vegetables like potatoes and rice, and anything made with those ingredients.  I am striving to live on fewer than 20 carbs a day.  Bye bye bread. Hello bacon, eggs, and steak.

My wife and I went on a business trip to Las Vegas, and without telling her, I decided to begin my very low carb journey.  When she found out about my decision, she was not happy.  We fought a lot about what, and why, I was eating and I kept insisting she read the book.  She finally did, and saw the light, too.  Now she is not heavy at all, but has seen the value of the very low carb lifestyle.

Now I am three weeks into my journey.  My blood sugars have stabilized, I am reducing the amount of insulin I am injecting by more than half, and my blood pressure has gone down.  Oh, and in three weeks, I have dropped 13 pounds.  And I am no longer hungry.  On Weight Watchers, I was hungry all the time.  Gary Taubes calls WW a "semi-starvation" diet, and it was.  That is why I failed, and why most people who do semi-starvation diets fail to keep the weight off.  But protein makes you feel full, and keeps you full.  It helps me to not obsess about food.  Prior to embracing my inner carnivore, I could hardly make it past 9:30 a.m. without eating something else, despite eating (what I thought was) a healthy and hearty Weight Watchers approved breakfast.

I was going to die of a heart attack on my previous high carb, low fat diet, but I won't now.  For those of you who still believe saturated fat causes heart attacks, look at the empirical research before you comment.  Hint:  there is none.  Here is a piece of medical research to chew on if you still think I am crazy:  http://www.ajcn.org/content/86/2/276.full.  If you cannot trudge through the turgid and dense academic prose, skip directly to the summary at the end of the article.  "LCD" stands for "low carb diet" and CVD stands for "cardio-vascular disease."