low carb diet?

Breathe Jimbo wrote:I've been using the iPhone app LoseIt! for three days now to track my food and exercise. It is quite an eye-opener to see just how much I eat, and how satisfied I am eating within a calorie budget that allows me to lose weight at a reasonable, steady pace.

When I was doing very complete accounting of what I was eating I found that recording small snacks was more hassle than the enjoyment of the snack was worth. It was easier to forgo the snack! An unintended benefit of detailed recording!

nmevan wrote:who do I report a hijacked post to?

just kidding...it was very interesting...and helped with my diet

I lost my appetite for food completely

Doh! Sorry I was thinking of how much I love low carb today when I was eating left over chicken from last night a few minutes ago, and dipping it in full-fat dressing. And I still lose weight. Another favorite (sounds weird, but you've gotta try it) is a bit of cream cheese rolled up in genoa salami. Delish!

3 eggs scrambled with fresh kale and provolone, add mayo.

Much land in the world is unsuitable for cropland.
They found that out the hard way in north central Nebraska decades ago.
Even with irrigation, the soil in the sandhills turned right into sandy wastes.
We had immense lovely vegetable gardens there, though; and the Sandoz ranch had a commercial apple orchard.
(yes, Mari Sandoz' dad--Old Jules' homestead.)
Land there is great for vegetables and fruit trees, NOT grain; but the best beef comes from those tall grass meadows.
The land flourishes, the less we abuse it.

Just took this pic a few minutes ago across the street from where I live. This is about the fourth of fifth time they've been over this cropland this year and they aren't anywhere near harvest time. Lots of fuel and chemicals.

You think maybe I might know a little more about agriculture than someone living in a snow bound city??? LOL


Once again, a natural meadow that cattle feed on is more sustainable than growing grains.

And this corn isn't eatable (like most corn grown in America) It will be used for either corn syrup, turned into fuel, or used to FATTEN cattle, yes, grains are used to make cows fat. Ya think they might also make humans fat? Refer back to my earlier pics for proof they do.


JeffH

JeffH wrote:All good advice. I've found that to lose weight I need to eat lots of good fats (the kind Gary speaks of)

I haven't gotten through this entire thread yet, but what is the rationale for eating lots of good fats? Or do you mean instead of "bad" fats (and I assume those are trans fats and saturated fats)? I've cut carbs down considerably, although I wouldn't say I'm even close to a no carb diet, but I haven't deliberately INCREASED fats... do I need to?

SleepingUgly wrote:

JeffH wrote:All good advice. I've found that to lose weight I need to eat lots of good fats (the kind Gary speaks of)

I haven't gotten through this entire thread yet, but what is the rationale for eating lots of good fats? Or do you mean instead of "bad" fats (and I assume those are trans fats and saturated fats)? I've cut carbs down considerably, although I wouldn't say I'm even close to a no carb diet, but I haven't deliberately INCREASED fats... do I need to?

This article is poorly written but it still contains the basic message:

Gary Taubes eats eggs with cheese, bacon and sausage each morning for breakfast and he looked pretty lean and trim to me.

He said we have been told not to eat red meat, don’t eat butter, don’t eat cheese and it’s crazy. Everything we have been told not to eat, if you just eat that you’ll lose weight effortlessly. He also so said when he goes to the supermarket he goes straight to the meat department because meat doesn’t make you fat and he skips the potatoes.
http://healthybodydaily.com/dr-oz-in-ca ... diet-works

Read the whole article. Oz is a dense head.

It's in the genes! I just knew it all along!!
Same gene determines obesity and diabetes.
http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2011/05/ ... 305574675/

The KLF14 gene, linked to type 2 diabetes and cholesterol, is a "master regulator" of fat in the body, researchers from Britain and Switzerland said.

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2011/05/ ... z1MZ7dbUFD

Blaming it on the genes is a bad excuse that does not generally hold true.

Acting on a suggestion from a post here, my dad and I compared my recent HS album with his from 40 years ago. 40 years ago 80% of the senior girls were skinny and almost none were obese. Now look at the girls in my album. Fat faces, fat arms, fat calves, and fat ankles. Maybe 20% were skinny.

Genes did not change in one generation. The diet did.

NightMonkey wrote:Acting on a suggestion from a post here, my dad and I compared my recent HS album with his from 40 years ago. 40 years ago 80% of the senior girls were skinny and almost none were obese. Now look at the girls in my album. Fat faces, fat arms, fat calves, and fat ankles. Maybe 20% were skinny.

If my experience with Facebook is at all telling, in 25 years, most of the men will be fat and many of the women, including those who were heavy in HS, will be thin and look way better than their male counterparts.

NightMonkey wrote:Genes did not change in one generation. The diet did.

Very true. What I protest against is the idea of many in the medical community, and the community in general, that obesity is always caused by diet and lack of exercise, and that diabetes is always the result of obesity. That has never been the case. I have believed for years that researchers would eventually discover that obesity and diabetes have a common cause, that obesity is not necessarily the cause of diabetes.

Is diet primarily responsible for the obesity epidemic? Most likely, although I wonder how much our metabolism and overall body chemistry have been impacted over the long term by all the added chemicals in processed foods, thus contributing to our fatness. Sadly, it is not in the interest of the food industry to look for causes of obesity within their system. But the populace in general also share blame in that we find it easier to blame the fast fat food and snack food industry and not accept responsibility for poor eating habits and lack of exercise.

Diet means not only the quantity and kind of food, but also the quality. The uproar over taxes and government spending will look mild compared to the uproar there will be over the cost of food if government were to start forcing the food industry to focus on the health quality of food. Low cost food has always been a very high political priority. Take a good look in the supermarket. Low cost food is high fat, high carbo. It costs to eat healthy, if not in money then in time to cook.

Can someone tell me why I need to eat lots of fat on a low carb diet? Thanks!

Jeff, thanks for posting that pic. You reminded me NOT to clean the windows yet. I have about the same front view, but it's been too wet to even plow here yet. I saw one of those mosquitos go by today. A John Deere, and 2x as big as the one last year. Sucks when they drive in my yard because they are wider than their lane.

I'll have to visit the guy who used to farm the ground here and get the details. I remember him talking about how the farmer's got baited into huge debt in the 70's. That's when I remember the equipment getting bigger and bigger, air conditioned cabs...

There is more profit to be sucked away from the farmer in grain than livestock and Agri-business wins.
Equipment, seed(that Monsanto owns all of now so they can't plant there own), fertilizers, fuel, storage bins and dryers, elevators unless they take the price at harvest. Then throw in corn subsidies and set aside payments for ground you don't plant!

I went in a quickstop for a snack. Aside from the meat and dairy, the only thing I could find in the store without sugar, wheat or corn in it, was a packet of raw almonds and a bag of pork rinds. But I like both of those!

SleepingUgly wrote:Can someone tell me why I need to eat lots of fat on a low carb diet? Thanks!

Think of your body as being like a flex-fuel car. Able to run on a variety of fuels. In the case of cars, they can run on gasoline or gasoline/alcohol blends. Your body is set up the same way. It can utilize carbohydrates, or fats, or protein as its energy source. Restrict the availability of one fuel and your metabolism shifts to another fuel. That's how people can thrive on a steady diet of seal meat and blubber, or rice and not much else. We're flex-fuel creatures.

I'm half way through Gary Taubes' book Why We Get Fat, and it makes sense. I really like the book. It's not dry, and it's not sensationalistic like Atkins' book was to an irritating degree. Taubes says so long as there is a certain level of glucose in the blood, your cellular machinery will use it in preference to fat. Once the glucose level drops below a certain level, one's metabolism shifts to burning fat. That's what happens during the "induction period" in the Atkins diet, when you go cold turkey (!) for 48 hours, eating no carbs. During that time, your sugar reserves, and I suppose glycogen reserves which are stored in your muscles, are depleted. Then your metabolism shifts to burning fat. That is the period when you suddenly notice you're no longer ravenously hungry, you stop craving junk food (carbs), and you develop an odd sense of well-being that Atkins went on and on about. Once you're into that mode, weight can drop off very quickly, but you can't keep going like that for very long, as many of us have learned.

So on any low-carb diet, your primary energy source will be the fat and protein you consume. In that sort of diet, fat is not a bad thing.

Taubes' theme appears to be that insulin is your real enemy. And the idea is to keep your insulin levels low by minimizing your carbohydrate intake. So long as your insulin remains low, your body will convert the triglycerides that are stored in your fat cells to free fatty acids, which then fuel your cellular machinery. Eat some carbs, and your blood sugar and insulin levels go up, reversing that fat-conversion mechanism, and you're back to being a carb-burning and fat-storing machine.

Slartybartfast wrote:So on any low-carb diet, your primary energy source will be the fat and protein you consume. In that sort of diet, fat is not a bad thing.

But is increasing fat a good thing? Someone wrote above that he didn't lose weight into he started eating more FAT on his low carb diet. Is it necessary to eat a lot of fat while on a low carb diet in order to lose weight? I have not gone out of my way to increase fat (e.g., I'm still spraying the pan that I cook my eggs in with olive oil spray), although I also don't eat gobs and gobs of fat.

I have to go back and see what Gary Taubes said about types of fat and whether any are bad for you. I thought I remembered him not thinking any fat was bad, but I'm hesitant to ascribe to the notion that trans fats and saturated fats are OK...