There seems to be a zero-sum mentality that will (maybe) never die off that if one food group is good others must be bad. As for me, I'll listen to Michael Pollan's advice:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Try it. No carbs, just fat & protein, 10,000 calories.
Seriously, try it. Just one day. Won't hurt you.
It is possible to consume 10,000 calories of carbs in a day. Short of physically stuffing it in, you will find it effectively impossible to eat 10,000 calories of fat and protein. You'll probably find it a challenge to go beyond 3,000. (Though if you switch to a high-fat, high-protein diet you might manage in the first couple of days before your body adjusts fully. And I'm assuming you're average; a large man might get 4K, but again, that'll be a challenge.)
Calories are not fungible. And once you accept that, it's frankly hard to look at the evidence, the biochemistry and how the hormones work, and not end up fingering carbs as the source of the obesity epidemic, not fat.
You may find it interesting to note that carbs all come from plants. (But not all plants, of course.)
It's funny because most of the "carbs are bad" and "carbs are fine" people agree that in reality it's calories that make you fat. For some reason when they talk to each other that point gets lost and it turns into two people talking past each other who agree in actuality.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=carbohydrates+insulin+fa...
The correct question is, why do people over consume calories? And for that you get two very different answers. One is an external answer about how food has been made very available and appealing and is manufactured to be overconsumed (and often more than a faint whiff of Puritan moralism, indeed, often a great deal more than a faint whiff), and the other is about the biochemistry of consuming food and what happens to the satiety mechanisms and your blood sugar and where the blood sugar goes and why and how it comes back out again.
There's a real difference at that level.
I think the problem is that carbs, much more than either of the other 2 macros, have more complex mechanisms at play.
For instance, carbs in the morning or at night? Most people know that you are burning fat when you wakeup from your overnight fast. But what most people don't know is that the first time you eat carbs, the fat burning stops.
6 meals or 2? Smaller insulin spikes over time lead (it appears) to insulin resistance moreso than one or two big spikes. The jury is a bit out on this, but the data is leaning this way (last I looked).
The meal frequency doesn't really matter with protein and fat, just carbs it seems.
Those are just some examples, but I think you get the idea. My mother (65) recently asked me what she should do for her diet in old age. Simple, I told her, eat lots of fish, meat, veggies, cream and some nuts. Avoid grains, bread, over doing it on fruit etc. She's worried about living a long time, heart health and cancer. No reason she should be anywhere near carbs.
You probably want to be getting a substantial fraction of your calories from sugars and starches, mixed with fat and protein. Ya know, like portions in cuisine all around the world has favored for ages.
I used to buy this high fat idea before reading more broadly. Firstly, non-saturated fats should be avoided to the extent possible, and that's hard to do on a high fat diet. Secondly, high fat meals are clearly inflammatory. More inflammatory than carbs. They cause endotoxin absorption and promote dysbiosis. The hormone profile of being a "fat burner" is not so great either. Cortisol goes up, because that drives fat metabolism. This is why people who go atkins or go on a fast say they feel great. It's elevated cortisol, just like a runner's high. That's fine in short doses, but sustained it leads to breakdown and damage.
Relax and have some sugary chocolate milk. It's perfectly healthy. Almost a balanced meal, in fact.
With no exercise (I sit 8-10 hours/day at a desk) I lose about 1 pound every 2-3 days. Your body literally sheds fat on a low/no carb diet.
EDIT: After I'm down to my goal weight (150-155lbs), I plan on powerlifting. With large amounts of exercise, anaerobic or aerobic, you need to start consuming carbs to have the energy required. You're no longer at an energy surplus; based on your exercise level, you're shooting for coming out energy neutral.
I've been a lean 168, an obese 250, and am now a pretty healthy 175-180 pounds. As a matter of principle (I love food!!), I don't change what I eat over time. It's a healthy balance...but it's a lot of calories. If I'm active, I lose weight. If I'm sedentary, I gain weight. The fact is, if I have a consistent surplus of calories, I'm going to get fat. Period.
I can easily go lean by going down to a 500-calorie-a-day diet for 2 months; And then, for 6-8 months, my intake doesn't seem to matter - I stay lean - until all of a sudden, with no change of intake, and within a couple of weeks, I balloon 20-30 lbs, that stay there until the next "low-calorie" period. Yes, this is baffling. No, I haven't figured it out yet, though gut bacteria and similar explanations seem much more relevant than anything else at this point.
Read this guy about consuming 6k/day: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/sam-feltham/why-i-didnt-get-... - I've known other examples. calorie counting is NOT science, physics or thermodynamics, and produces miserable results for some people.
Re-feeding programmes for people with anorexia are carefully worked out to avoid problems. How were you re-feeding after this extreme modification to your diet?
This ruins your credibility.
> calorie counting is NOT science, physics or thermodynamics,
It is. Really, truly, it is.
> and produces miserable results for some people.
This may well be true. Reading this thread is clear evidence that people have horrible understanding of diet and nutrition, and that people get information from weird sources. I can easily imagine someone reducing calories to 1,800 per day but having a miserable time because they're also following some stupid advice they got from a quack.
Just gradually ramping back over a week. And you may want to read the definition of Anorexia, because from this post, it's probably NOT what you think it is.
> It is. Really, truly, it is.
[citation needed] "calorie counting" for the purpose of weight loss, as commonly practiced, is not. I've posted a few links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6779151, some from pubmed, in case you are interested.
Calorie counting is only useful for weight management in the tautological sense (that eventually invokes E=MC^2) meaning not at all.
If it's science, you would be able to provide reference to an experiment that demonstrates it, I guess? Not bomb calorimeter measurements, mind you (these imply you can eat paper - it's carbohydrate!, or drink gasoline). Real results that indicate, in no uncertain terms, that all energy is done through aerobic or anaerobic glycolysis (for which bomb calorimeter measurements have some relation), and never through fermentation (which is about 1/8th as energy efficient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_hypothesis ), and that all edible carbohydrates (what's the scientific definition), all fat, all protein, and all alcohol (but not fiber, hydrocarbons, etc) are used for energy.
It's not science. It really, really isn't. Not anymore than e.g. the lipid hypothesis, which was never proved though is accepted as gospel by "scientists".
Question is still based on a fundamentally flawed premise, which is that we can just talk about the human body as if it's a bag in which you stuff a certain amount of calories, and the bag passively accepts the stuffing with no reaction. Stuff it with 2000 calories or 10,000, it doesn't care.
This is so obviously wrong that as soon as you examine the assumption consciously it's obviously flawed, but people don't, usually. The point is, if you eat nothing but protein and fat, you will find yourself unable to overconsume. (Barring a real medical disorder, like thyroid problems.) Whether you would hypothetically gain weight if you forced the food in isn't very relevant, except in a very abstract scientific sense.
The truth is that humans aren't special, and just like the entire rest of the animal kingdom, our bodies have no particular inclination to become morbidly fat. Even in abundance, your body will self-regulate. It is not as if abundance is that unusual thing in the real world, not even sustained abundance, but you do not see morbidly obese deer waddling around or fat squirrels getting splattered in the road. What's wrong is what we eat, not our bodies. The idea that our bodies could be this... stupid is frankly just absurd.
If you eat protein, fat, and natural high-complexity carb in moderation (not Russet potatoes or the modern biological candies that some fruits have been turned into), you body will regulate itself. Any discussion of weight gain or loss without discussion of regulation mechanisms is so flawed it can just be ignored; the body is full of them. I don't count calories; I watch what I eat. The calorie counting is done by ancient and well-honed parts of my brain I have no conscious access to, but I don't need that and don't want it. All "me" could do is mess it up.
(I find my body is tending to self regulate to the "just barely overweight" part of the BMI spectrum. There is significant recent evidence that this is actually quite normal and healthier than fighting your way down to the "officially" correct BMI.)
They will lose weight faster than those who continue to eat carbs. I don't think it's even an argument anymore that cutting carbs helps to lose weight. By saying "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" you are agreeing with less carbs..?
There's no magical obesogenic property of "carbs."
Those who do anything while keeping their caloric intake in check relative to their caloric expenditure will lose weight.
Controlling carbs may be particularly effective for some people in acheiving this, particularly because some people are relatively resistant to the satiating effect of carbohydrates, and thus have a higher tendency to overeat when eating carbs.
I know a lot of people think low-fat = healthy, and that fat makes you fat, which isn't really the case.
This article just seems to be confirming that "simple carbs" should be moderated, which is commonly suggested in health and fitness books.
An influential Swedish health organisation has recommended a diet that is low in carbohydrates but not low in fat for people who are overweight or obese or have diabetes.
...
“...When all recent scientific studies are lined up, the result is indisputable: our deep seated fear of fat is completely unfounded. You don’t get fat from fatty foods,” Nyström said.
Those are both pretty solid endorsements for eating A LOT of fat/fatty foods. If they meant "A diet consisting of a calorie count appropriate for your body size should have a higher proportion of fats to carbs to make your target weight loss more efficient." But they didn't. They simply said/implied 'don't eat carbs but don't worry about how much fat you take in'.
However seems people are really bad understanding what's healthy and following common sense when it comes to eating. Many people have grown up with that butter is unhealthy and vegetable oils or cereal are healthy.
Also if you eat lots of carbohydrates you're more likely to feel hunger and loss of blood sugar every two hours, and you eat more. When you eat mostly plants, meat and fat, you feel satisfied longer and don't eat extra snacks, calories or other things, which makes eating sane amounts of food and calories easier.
I don't think the obesity or health problems are completely going away by changing the macronutrient ratio but probably anything is better than high-carb & low-fat advice. In the end people need to learn moderate and balance their diet.
You are describing symptoms of metabolic syndrome, typically caused by being fat, not an affect of carbohydrate. I am thin, and therefore not insulin resistant. I can and do add sugar to OJ sometimes for a quick meal. I don't get hungry again for hours.
A liter of olive oil.
Ah yes, the Tautology Diet.