Low Carb vs. Low Fat Diets
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Weight loss is great, but the energy gains from the diet are incredible. I never crash anymore. I have steady energy all day, and way less lethargy in general. Also, in general my stomach is not tempermental anymore. I used to get stomach aches after dinner, no more.
It does make eating out trickier, but oh well.
Now, I don't necessarily think it's just keto that is responsible. I think it's these 3 things (in this order):
1) Way less beer drinking (and when I do, it's Miller Lite or something comparably light on carbs)
2) In general just paying attention to what we eat
3) The science of Keto itself
On the second point especially, it's kinda insane to pay attention to the carb counts in some meals. Especially fast foods/Mexican/Italian foods, you're looking at _hundreds_ of grams of carbs in a single meal...sorta nutty.
I recommend everyone try it if not just for the experiment/self control test. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when I hit my goal in terms of lightening up on things or not, but I'm happy so far.
Now that you are down 17lbs, go grab 17lbs worth of weights and strap them to your body somehow and walk around the house for a bit like that. It's pretty incredible how much 17lbs will feel like. Now think of how much harder your body had to work to carry that extra 17lbs everywhere. (This is assuming that the 17lbs lost was not comprised of muscle =p)
The weight loss certainly helps. But for me, keto does something different.
My problem is because my parents have been on the Atkins diet for about 5 years now. They objectively have lost weight, they claim to feel much better, more energetic, etc. I don't have a way to argue that this could just be because they are healthier, fitter, and slimmer now. That the reason could just as easily be because they consume less calories and a no-longer-absurd amount of carbs. To them, it's all because of Atkins.
The reason I have a problem with it is that I'm not convinced that long-term, severe carb restriction (and the consequential increase in fat in the diet) is healthy. Their cholesterol is rising, they are consuming alarming amounts of high-fat foods such as bacon and butter, and I don't think they ever actually learned how to "diet" because they still eat a lot, but because it's low carb, they don't gain weight. They still drink and eat a lot of "sweet food," because they never tackled those cravings, just instead of sugar now they get aspertain or whatever it's called. Lots of coke zero, atkins bars, etc.
I can't find any evidence that long term atkins dieting is unhealthy, so I can't convincingly link the increase in cholesterol (or convince them that high cholesterol levels are unhealthy) or increase in kidney stones to their diet. To them if I ever am able to point out a negative change before and after their diet, it's simply due to old age (kidney stones for example).
Regarding cholesterol levels: make sure they get a full vertical profile, not just a calculated one. If their overall levels are higher, but it's from HDL, and the amount of LDL or VLDL is low, there is no associated increase in cardiac risk. FWIW.
Your sleep may have improved, but that's not generalizable. People have extremely different reactions to keto.
It honestly isn't. My weight has fluctuated quite a bit over my adult life, and I can tell you with 100% certainty I had more energy (by far) eating keto when I weighed near my max of 250 than when I used more traditional diets to get to ~220 during an earlier cycle.
* Most ketogenic dieters are properly hydrated so they lose the initial water weight
* Ketogenic dieters watch their electrolyte levels
* A ketogenic diet removes wheat/gluten which may be causing inflammation/other irritations for some people
* Most ketogenic dieters increase their intake of leafy greens/vegetables since they are great carriers for fatty dressing and butter
* Lack of sugar so blood sugar levels stabilize
I think it's very difficult to say whether it's ketosis, proper hydration, better electrolytes, lack of inflammatory foods, no sugar, or increase in vegetables that leads to people feeling "better" on a ketogenic diet.
Ditto on everything else you stated.
> Way less beer drinking (and when I do, it's Miller Lite or something comparably light on carbs)
Michelob Ultra's great and readily available as well with 2.6g carbs per bottle (vs 3.2g carbs for miller lite)
I've been doing strict keto (i.e. less than 25g of net carbs per day) since April. Down ~15 lbs (180 -> 165) as well.
Agree with everything else though. It definitely changes the way your body works (the whole "sweating acetone" thing took some getting used to), and it's a killer way to lose weight.
Dehydration - due to low water volume it is very easy to get dehydrated even with normal electrolytes.
Too little carbohydrates. Even ketogenic diets need some carbs. Less than 30g/day or so, but still. The bottom limit has not been established but is probably dependent on too many variables. It is pretty easy to mess this up as the margin is thin.
Too much sodium to potassium. Mostly a problem if you're fuelling keto with processed foods. Processed meat tends to be loaded with sodium. To fix, eat potassium rich greens or plain old potassium tablets (preferably citrate).
If I even eat something like a potato--my cravings for sugary stuff goes up. When I flip the switch into ketosis - I have to remember to eat, hunger doesn't exist, cravings aren't usually a thing except sometimes mental stuff when I see food on tv, or while I'm out and about.
I've lost 35 lbs since May 1st when I started Keto. I was 515 when I started.. my highest weight was 690 but I lost 190 after having gastric sleeve surgery.
I actually lost a bit more..got down to 460 but have been yo-yoing a bit between 460 and 510'ish...
We just had our first baby, and while I have no health issues (blood pressure, sugar levels, cholesterol are all in top percentiles - I literally have no weight related co-morbidalities and the only negatives are needing a CPAP for sleep apnea, low energy levels, and joint pain -- all of which are a LOT less now than in 2012 when I had surgery.
Years after surgery I still can't eat a ton at a meal- I can't eat a whole burger for instance at Red Robin, I split it 50/50 with my wife -- but my biggest problem was soda, you can definitely drink a lot of calories.. I think just cutting out soda and trying for less sweets I'd probably lose a good deal of weight over 1-2 years. But I'm impatient and have upped my game lately. I also have been lifting weights and walking 10k steps per day.
I can't see a low-fat diet ever really working for me... just because I'll probably always be addicted to carbs, which means over-eating if I let myself have the sugar, or carb-loaded foods.
They designed two diets that were very similar to each other, and unsurprisingly got similar results.
This could also be simply attributed to being watched. That to me is a huge confounding factor that needs to be carefully isolated in all diet studies.
The huge success of personal fitness trackers suggests people tend to have healthier lifestyles when they measure their actions, even if it's for their own personal record (let alone for sharing on social media or being studied).
The trouble is that diets take very long to apply so a cross design study would take many years.
There is another aspect to it though: With a low-fat mentality you can eat anything you like since everything is "low-fat" these days. Low carb on the other hand requires conscious strategic thinking & planning - the average processed product isn't geared towards it. I wonder whether some of the health benefit comes from that: The second I'm tracking & analysing things I automatically eat healthier and better as a result regardless of what exactly I'm tracking.
Really? I do very low-carb precisely because it's so very easy. I have heaps of vegetables and lean-meat and that fills me up and gives me all the energy I need. I almost can't see where I'd fit carbs in now. (I do eat more carbs when I'm doing something particularly arduous though).
> Many products for the breakfast are rich in carbs.
Well you can eat whatever you want for breakfast. You don't need 'breakfast food' in particular. I often have steamed fish for breakfast.
> Practically all products in small stores (such as newsstand)
Well yes, things are going to wrong if you are planning a diet around shopping at a newsstand. I'd say obviously you shouldn't do that no matter what your diet, but I suppose people have different lives to fit diets around - I work from home so it's probably easier for me.
Well, it's not easy to do it "cheap," in most people's mind of what "cheap" food is - the little muffins at star bucks, or mcdonalds, the free cereal at work (when there are no high-protein, low-carb options).
So it's not "easy" because you're no longer even capable of eating what 80% of the people you know are. If you had even half of one of the muffins at work, you'd be thrown out of ketosis and you'd need half the week getting your diet back on track.
That being said, if you already have a strong habit of cooking and eating the majority of your meals instead of eating out or eating the free food at work, a low carb diet is a remarkably "easy" way to lose weight, because it doesn't come with that shitty feeling of grumpy hunger that (I at least) one gets from low-calorie dieting.
Its also pretty liberating to get off the carbs to the point that you don't need those carb-rich products. The stabilization of blood sugar on low carb makes it easy to just skip a meal or two when needed - its really not a big deal.
Does anyone who advocates a low carb diet consider 30% of calories from carbohydrates "low carb?"
In a 1600 calorie diet (likely calorie restricted), that would be 120g of carbs.
Though most enthousiasts on keto aim for <20 grams/day.
So you're right, 120g is still very high. And can basically be accomplished with just not stuffing yourself with bread, pizza or fries.
I've done the keto target at less than 5g, 10g, 15g, 20g (depending what stage you're at) carbs a day. Even increasing that number to 100g carbs a day kind of ruins that diet.
The under 10g carbs a day has worked very well for me. Just remember, stay hydrated! =p
But, my experience with dietary studies (it's a kind of hobby of mine to read them), many have serious methodology or analysis problems. The study they are referencing is this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/articles/28027950/ which you will notice is published by Elsevier -- which means I can't read it. The abstract does not fill me with confidence, as it is very light on details.
Personally, I'm aiming for 20 - 30 carbs per day now, but some days I have cheat days where I carb load a bit more, sometimes junk food, and things from food trucks, but gotta enjoy life sometimes too.. I do try to make those my heavier workout days though... I also do 15 off the stair pushups everytime I go near the stairs, and 10k steps per day.
Lost 35 since May so I'm happy so far.. have 200 more pounds to go though give or take.. My goal by October is 100 total pounds off. (Currently 480).
That's what happened to me. I tried to lower carbs to 40% of calories, not to lose weight but rather to see what affect it would have on blood sugar levels. My A1c had crept up to 8.1, and that was while on two different diabetes medicines.
I made no attempt to limit calories...just to make sure that 40% or less came from carbs. In fact, to reach that I started increasing the size of some meals. For example, if I got a sandwich which would normally be 50% carbs, I would order that sandwich with double meat and/or with full mayonnaise instead of light mayo or no mayo, because meat and mayo are calories without carbs, and so lower the carb ratio.
I found that this made the food more satisfying, and I ended up eating less kind of automatically. Over the next 18 months I lost 140 pounds that way. A1c is down to 5.0 now, and that is after three months with no diabetes medicine.
Long term, I'm eating about 30-35% carbs, and about 45% fat.
I think that just doing keto for a few months can change the way you think about eating, or even change your relationship to food overall. That more mindful approach to nutrition might last longer than the temporary deprivation. It would explain some of the longer-term benefits that people who've [successfully] done keto tend to talk about.
This keeps being touted again and again as if it's some grand criticism of diets. Obviously if you stop following a diet, its results will stop applying to you. If you follow a diet that restricts your calories and causes you to lose weight, and you then stop following the diet and eat whatever you ate earlier, of course you will gain back your weight.
Healthy eating is a lifestyle decision and a lifestyle change. You have to understand what your diet was trying to achieve, and then try to apply similar concepts to your general everyday life.
And, once you adopt it as a lifestyle, you really watch what you eat even after the intensive diet - I eat whatever I want, I just don't find myself wanting sugary foods because I know what they do to you, and I have zero problem staying at my desired weight.
The point is, those people are, in practice, a tiny fraction of dieters.
It's interesting how there used to be so much variance in the world (and in fact, you can turn on the TV or get on a plane and still see variance everywhere you go).....yet if you were to take the word of people on the internet, everything is identical everywhere.
Diets work (or not) based on fairly straightforward causal chains. People who want to continue to do exactly or very nearly the same of whatever they were doing and see a drastic change are bound to be disappointed not only in the mission of reducing weight but also in life.
20% carbs is not a "low-carb" diet.
I've been doing keto since January and have lost over 50 pounds. I never get more than 20g of net carbs per day, which is less than 5% of my overall caloric intake.
ps: i do zero exercise, just because i can't.
Many have great results on this diet without counting any macros.
The docu "What the Health" also discusses this diet and some other stuff.
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In The Forks Over Knives Plan, there’s a section “What About Alcohol?”
“It’s been reported in the media and many people think that drinking some alcohol is protective against heart attacks and strokes. There does seem to be a beneficial association between some study populations who moderately drink and their risk of heart disease. However, this relationship is not clearly causal in nature. Furthermore, it turns out that only in the unhealthiest populations does the possibility of such a benefit even exist. An interesting study looked at “healthy” people and found that there were no longer any cardioprotective effects of alcohol in that population. We are putting “healthy” in quotation marks because we don’t know whether this study’s definition of healthy was adequate: it was composed of exercising moderately or vigorously a minimum of three hours a week and not smoking, but the published results referenced eating an unspecified amount of fruits and vegetables each day. (It is unclear in the study whether eating as little as a single serving of one or the other each day may have qualified as sufficient.) Yet these habits alone were healthy enough to cancel out any possible benefits of alcohol. The diet recommended in this book is at least as healthy as the diet component in this study. Furthermore, a plant-based diet protects your heart and blood vessels, likely negating any potential positive effect of the alcohol and leaving only the harmful effects. Alcohol seems to increase the risk of many other problems, including getting cancer (even with very light drinking), cancer recurrence, weight gain, liver damage, and heart arrhythmias. And the more overweight you are, the more likely you are to succumb to liver cancer because obesity and alcohol synergistically increase the risk of incident liver cancer. In short, there is nothing health-promoting about alcohol. If you do not presently drink alcohol, we urge you not to begin. That being said, the most important thing you can do for your health is to change your diet over to whole, plant-based foods. So focus on what’s easiest for you to change right now. However, if you feel ready to push further toward optimum health, then by all means cut out the alcohol.” (p.126)
So… maybe a single drink every now and then.
High protein diets do work indeed, but most of them end up ketogenic by accident as well. Mostly because sugary or starchy foods have little protein.
Also, at the end it talks about the idea of satiation. Eat as much as you want to feel full, as long as it is healthy. That has been my philosophy, and it has worked very well.
I've lost 32lbs/14.5kg since then (and another 30 to go).
I guess i will see in the long term if it is healthy, but i do feel great now.
I think my personal problem was that I didn't know what "too much" was until I actually started counting and comparing that to my TDEE.
Winning quote right there.
I don't use anything like MyFitnessPal to track calories counted. Keeping things to "eat only 700 calories per meal" is simple enough where you can do a quick Google search before eating to make sure you're on track.
Something interesting is that my error with calorie counting (and possibly metabolism) is about 10-15%, given that the hacker diet calculations (trendweight.com hooked up to my withings scale) calculates my TDEE (based on my actual weight changes) at 2,200 kcal instead of the calculated 2,500 kcal.
Also, I just bought a medium t-shirt last weekend for the first time since I was in high school! :)
Meanwhile, the moving-average of your weight is closer to some kind of ground truth, and can be used to recalibrate the calorie budget.
4-5 years ago I started a trek from 215 down to 155, which took a year using basic calorie-tracking. The best thing about it was that it let me start doing this little comparisons of "which choice will I enjoy more" between different quantities of different substances with the same calorie-budget.
While I backslid a bit over the next few years (170) I still think it went pretty well and it encourages me that I can probably do it again, even as a sedentary computer-guy.
For example, celery, broccoli and lettuce are very fibrous and humans don't really digest the carbs, so they have little impact. Probably only ruminants can extract significant nutrition.
On the other hand, in roughly increasing order of carb content, tomato (technically a fruit), onion, carrots, potatoes, corn, wheat products, and rice will reduce the effectiveness of a low carb diet, especially if dieters are told it's ok to eat vegetables all day long without specific guidance on what to avoid.
I agree that ultimately it comes down to the rate at which we put energy into our bodies vs the rate at which our bodies use the energy and don't store it as fat.
Unfortunately, there are confounding factors that make this a simplistic heuristic. Things like underactive thyroids, insulin response to blood glucose fluctuations, our basal metabolic rate, and similar things, many of which are often genetically determined.
I believe that a really important reason to do a low-carb diet with moderate protein and enough fat for satiation is that it is much easier to sustain as a permanent lifestyle change than a low-fat diet, which in my experience leaves one often feeling hungry and unsatisfied. And the permanent change is what is needed for long-term success.
The more I follow trends in diets, the more it seems to boil down to : don't eat too much or too little and have a varied diet.
The first point is obvious, the second one is more subtle. There is actually no need for a varied diet. It is just that it is the easiest way for us to make sure we get all the nutrients we need while limiting toxicity. By toxicity, I mean that everything we eat is a bit poisonous, but fortunately, our body is well equipped to deal with it. But eat too much of one poison and it won't keep up. So it is possible to have an unbalanced diet and still be healthy (ex: vegans) but it may take some bookkeeping.
Note that research seem to point that the more we eat something, the less we get pleasure from it, as if we are wired to prefer a varied diet.
Remember, we are omnivores, and the whole point of being omnivores is that anything goes.
Perhaps it is just the B-vitamins in the Kombucha but I find that being on keto and having Kombucha once a day is a good combination.