Weight Loss and Diet Confusion is an Epidemic

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Why Weight Loss Remains So Confusing

Do We Question So-Called “Authority” — or Do We Just Let It Go?

The nightly news reported on the new weight loss study released yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study was the brainchild of two of the pre-eminent medical institutions in the world: the Harvard School of Public Health and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at LSU.

Seventeen names represented the authorship of the article. The purpose of this multi-year study was to establish if diet composition — how much protein, fat, or carbohydrate in the diet — would impact weight loss.

The researchers validated the well-known fact that calories dictate what happens to body weight over the long haul. Although there were four different dietary combos of the three major food types, the results showed that diet composition was not a factor in weight loss.

There were problems with this study:

• participants lost weight during the first six months and then began to regain weight during the next eighteen months
• this result parallels 50 years of weight loss research showing that people never lose weight at the pre-trial predicted rate
• people do not stick to a weight loss regimen in which calories are reduced — they can’t and I’ll tell you why in a moment

The researchers concluded “that diets that are successful in causing weight loss can emphasize a range of fat, protein, and carbohydrate compositions.” It’s important to emphasize that the range of carbohydrate intake was between 35%-65% of the day’s total calories.

Few People Have the Experience and Backgroud to Make the Following Analysis

Here’s the important point that these researchers do not know: for carbohydrates to contribute to weight loss, the daily composition of the carb intake must be at or lower than 25% of the day’s total calorie intake.

What’s the real result of this study?

Just more confusion.

So, the breaking news covered by all the media is now that diet composition does not matter in weight loss — a totally false conclusion!

We just fall deeper into the quicksand. Here’s what else our research elite just don’t get:

• the reason subjects started regaining is because they could no longer stick to a calorie-reduced diet
• Why? Because they were hungry
• the body rapidly converts carbs to body fat and this process is brisk when carb intake exceeds 25% of calories
• the blood then clears of fuel and ravenous hunger sets in
• the body wants to go back to its original weight
• at 24 months, the average loss among the 4 groups was about 8 pounds — that stinks — 2 years for a lousy 8 pounds
• and, I’ll bet in another year that most will be back to where they started or heavier

We’ve seen the same problem with researchers who study a low carb diet. They simply have no practical experience in it and follow the fatally flawed Atkins’s version. In this study, they did not follow a true low-carb diet, again, because they have no practical experience in knowing what that actually is.

Yet, these researchers, coming from trusted centers, will have the last say and the country will now believe that diet composition makes no impact on weight loss.

Yes, calories do count, but if one cannot stay on a calorie-reduced diet, he has no chance of succeeding in weight loss and certainly if he did lose some, in maintaining the loss. To succeed in calorie-reduced diets, carbs must be dropped to at least 25% of total daily calorie intake, and better yet to below 15%.