Why Weight Loss Remains So Confusing
February 26, 2009 by Dr. Greg Ellis
Filed under Calories, Carbohydrates, Healthy Diet, Low-Fat Diet, Overweight/Obesity, Weight Loss
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%.
I had always wondered why I felt fatigued after eating. Turns out it was the carbs. Even worse is why I always felt hungry on the higher carb diet. Again, it was the carbs. They go through me rather quickly. But if I eat not one, but two cans of tuna with a little mayo, I can get by nicely without getting hungry. It seems that I get full and stay full when I eat more protein than carbs, and with fewer calories.
I think I’ve done better overall on low-carb diets than on a higher carb diet. It kills me sometimes because I do miss things like pizza, but will have it on occasion.
It’s not only the carbs, as 66% of all the protein you eat is converted to carbohydrates. That’s why the low-carb diet backfired for so many because as they began to fear carbs they continued with their fear of fat! So, now the diet became high-protein AND low-fat. On low-carb, hunger is virtually non-existant. The mayo added the needed fat to squash hunger. Funny, everyone believes that carbs are the body’s primary fuel and this is false. In fact, at rest, 90% of the fuel comes from fat (diet or stored).
The real key here is that you should be eating a good bit of fat, animal fat (that awful saturated fat that has NEVER been PROVEN to be bad for us — they just say it, but that’s a blog for another day).
The point is that you don’t have to not eat carbs. That piece of pizza is fine as long as during the rest of the day you keep carbs down. My daughter, who at 24 finally started listening to me, has found that eating the cheese off the bread, or eating the cheese steak out of the roll is tasty. She was stunned to realize that the bread was just not needed.
All her life she had little bumps on her arms and they, along with the afternoon fatigue all went away.