Who would have thought it? One of the main nutrition-industry opponents of the Atkins diet has had some of her research sponsored by the flour industry. Remarkable.
They really don’t like it up ’em, do they?, these nutritionists, who for years have been ordering us all to eat more low-fat (i.e. high carbohydrate) foods. And the Atkins diet is the bayonet up the bum they all secretly dread. For an entire industry of do-gooders, sponsored by the NHS and other tax-funded bodies, have made a fabulous living in the UK over the last two decades by sticking their noses into the things we eat, the fluids we drink, and the way we live.
And the news they don’t want anyone to hear is that it may be their advice, which has been causing all of the increasing obesity, because of their obsession with low-fat food. Manufacturers pack out these products with sugar, rice, and all the corn-syrup they can get their hands on. These overwhelm the poor old insulin-creating Islets of Langerhans, in the pancreas; the effects of this, according to Dr Atkins, are that we pile on weight and become addicted to carbs (sweets, beer, etc).
As well as causing obesity, particularly amongst children, the nutrition industry may also have created the huge rise in that dreadful silent killer disease, diabetes.
It’s not a pretty picture. And neither was I. Just after Christmas this year I topped 17st and 10lbs, and I was exhibiting what doctors call a pre-diabetic tendency (e.g. chain-eating packets of sweets). By God, that was some stomach, and in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase, that was some neck. But now, because of the late Dr Atkins, I’m 16st and 1lb. I was even better than this, at 15st 10lbs, but a recent reversion to ‘normal’ carb-loaded eating sent me back over the dreaded 16st barrier. So it’s back to Atkins, starting today, till we hit my fighting weight of 14st, though I’ll probably have some carb-relapses on the way, involving lager and curry, and it may take me a while.
So, to any anti-Atkins nutritionist, is it better I be nearly 18st, pre-diabetic, under blood pressure strain, and eating carb-laden low fat snacks, or 16st, not eating carbs, and a with significantly decreased obesity-related health risk? Hmmm…it takes me about 3.9 nanoseconds to work that one out. Yes, because of the extra protein intake, the major protein-metabolism organs, the kidneys, have to excrete more urea, the major nitrogen-based product from amino acid end-chain processing. But plenty more water deals with that one, and it’s not like I’m eating half an ox every day, just a little bit more meat than I would normally consume, plus a lot more fat, which doesn’t impact on the kidneys. And I’ll be heading back to the Atkins lifestyle maintenance diet, which is very slow in weight loss, but is basically a normal diet excluding sugar, potatoes, white rice, and yes, you guessed it, white flour. Is that bad of me?
And none of these products are ‘natural’ anyway. We all have the digestive system of creatures which arose in Africa 200,000 years ago. These people, our direct ancestors, ate mainly meat, nuts, eggs, fruits, and berries. This is a pattern of eating now successfully branded as the Atkins lifestyle diet. These Africans did not eat refined sugar, except the occasional find of honey guarded by angry bees; they did not eat refined flour, or indeed any form of processed grass such as rice, and they did not eat South American potatoes until the Bering straits were crossed about 20,000 years ago (or so).
The invention of grass farming, around 10,000 years ago, introduced wheat, rice, corn, and other carb-related products, all over the world, culminating in the invention of sugar-cane farming within the last couple of millennia. And as far as I know, for us Brits, it was Sir Francis Drake who brought us back the potato from those carb-rich Bering Strait crossers, and gave our children their endless obsession with chips, in that worst-of-all-diets, the High-Carb High-Fat diet.
And even when we managed to grow this stuff, it took us loads of processing to get the energy out of it. So we had to invent milling, baking, casava pounding, oxen ploughing, paddy-field flooding, pot boiling, and numerous other industrial techniques, to end up with baked bread, corn-on-the-cob, or cooked rice. So carb-eating is far more ‘unnatural’ than low-carb eating, where you simply reach up into a tree and pull down a Rothbardian Cruesoesque berry.
And here’s the horrible news, my dearest friendliest neighbourhood nutritionist. If it is found out that you gave us the high levels of obesity and diabetes which you all so profit from in ‘tackling’, you’re in a lot more trouble than the much abused Atkins diet, so I’d keep screaming loudly if I were you. Though I wouldn’t worry, too much. With so many of you being funded by taxes, and with governments being just as complicit in your possible guilt, in their bid to control our lives ever more closely and their irresistible wish to extract yet more tax from us on high-fat foods, there’s going to be very little tax-funded research which will demonstrate this. So breathe easy.
But leave us the hell alone.
Here’s a little story. I saw this taxi driver, a few weeks ago, who filled his cab, at 26st. (That’s what he told me he weighed, anyway, without any need for prompting on my part.) I felt obliged to ask him back, “Have you tried the Atkins diet?”. “Nah,” he said, “it’s bad for your kidneys.” I gave up my feeble bid to try to help, and sat back behind my copy of The Spectator, too tired to argue.
Well done nutritionists. There’s at least one man you’ve saved from the dreaded Dr Atkins. Congratulations.
…erm…. In my naivete I always thought that the real issue on dieting and weight loss was to compare calories consumed (irrespective of whether from fat, carbs, or whatever) vs calories expended.
Not wishing to be rude – but how much exercise do you do Andy? How much exercise does that cabbie do I wonder?
I have known loads of sporty people and soldiers who could eat for Britain but they remain trim because they burn it all up (even when at rest because they’re fit).
Moral of story? ALL DIETS ARE CRAP. Those seeking a six pack need to hit the tarmac.
I agree 50 percent Patrick. Exercise is important, but so is diet. The Atkins plan works. People do lose weight with it.
Keeping that weight off, on the other hand, is not going to happen without exercise.
One problem with, however, it is that it tends to make body odors much more noticeable, so if you use it, schedule lots of showers.
I know lots of people who have lots weight with Atkins, but not as many who’ve kept it off. Of course, that’s the problem with all “regimes”: the maintenance. In the end, the Atkins devotees versus the Food Pyramid devotees are missing the point: to lose weight, you must burn more calories than you eat. All the other advice, like don’t eat before bed, don’t eat white bread, don’t eat this or that, is purely secondary. Honestly.
And for the record, can you do the conversion on “stones” into good ol’ American pounds? I never have figured out what a stone is.
There is alos one other thing to consider.
The Atkins diet will fur up your arteries big time.
Is that really what you want. Lose weight but gain more sturated fat?
Eamon
Not to pick nits, but wasn’t it Walter Raleigh who brought the first potatoes back to England?
Calorie-counting has always struck me as flawed. I remember learning about what a calorie is in school science lessons. You take a piece of food — we used a peanut — and burn it under a beaker of water, measure the temperature change of the water, and thus work out how many calories were in the food. This is all very well as a way of measuring energy used by machinery, but do any biochemists really think that biology isn’t a tad more complex than that? We don’t literally “burn” energy; there are no furnaces in the human body. So factors such as cell structure, which wouldn’t affect the amount of energy a flame could get out of some food, do effect how much an animal can get out of it. Many diets, Atkins included, attempt to quantify the varying ways different types of food react with the biochemical system that is the human body. This approach strikes me as far more sensible than counting calories.
The Atkins diet will fur up your arteries big time.
Not proven. It makes intuitive sense that eating lots of cholesterol will put lots of cholesterol in your blood stream, just waiting to gum up your arteries, so that’s the conventional wisdom. But intuitive sense isn’t evidence, and there’s some indication that the cholesterol you eat doesn’t have a lot to do with the cholesterol you paper arteries with.
I wish poor ol’ Doc Atkins had left instructions for an autopsy.
Patrick W writes:
…erm…. In my naivete I always thought that the real issue on dieting and weight loss was to compare calories consumed (irrespective of whether from fat, carbs, or whatever) vs calories expended.
Ok, assuming I’ve spent the last two years watching an endless loop of the Simpsons (a productive use of time :), while both eating the usual high-carb diet, and then the Atkins low-carb diet, how do I explain my loss of 28 pounds in weight since adopting the latter eating plan, where I’ve been eating very high calorie foods (like strawberries and cream)?
Well, I’m pretty sure the aliens didn’t take me away and give me liposuction, so what else is left?
Yes, I suppose you are right. It is about calories, and the human body is one of the greatest fat-acquiring machines ever invented by evolution, in its stone-age bid to eat enough each summer, to get through often foodless winters (where the fat also helped you keep warm, finally draining off in time for spring). Which was nice! 🙂
But without wishing to rewrite the first five chapters of Dr Atkin’s book, if you only let your body have fats and proteins, and no carbs, it has to switch from sugar-burning, or glycolysis, its normal mode in western society, to fat-burning, or lipolysis, the usual mode in stone-age winters, in modern day real poverty.
And because there are no large swings in blood-sugar levels, you feel a lot less hungry, so you automatically eat a lot less than you used to, where a large white flour intake massively increased the insulin level, which causes large decreases in blood sugar, on a bouncing feedback curve, which makes you feel hungry again, making you eat again to get the blood sugar back up (giving rise to the old ‘I always feel hungry 20 minutes after a chinese meal’ effect, because of the white rice, which creates the same effect.)
And then when you eat something sweet to get the blood sugar back up, you get into an endless vicious cycle of satiation, hunger, and back to glucose satiation again. Which is a real bummer for a carb addict like me.
Also on Atkins, with a double-whammy effect, because your body is burning fat for energy, rather than swing-cycle glucose, when there’s no fat available from your alimentary tract, it turns to your fat stores to supplement your energy income. Again, your appetie is suppressed, as this body fat is consumed, with hunger only really kicking in when the protein level drops (often suddenly, after a long high energy plateau, which feels a bit weird – I now carry bags of nuts for these energy hits.)
Meanwhile the heavy protein is keeping your protein requirements up (also helping decrease your appetite, because your body has plenty of amino acids to play with and doesn’t feel the need to make you want to go out and get more). This protein is also broken down, in a complex long-chain pathway, to provide enough glucose for your brain, that fussy organ which takes up one quarter of your sedentary energy levels, always demanding exclusively glucose, the only energy bearing chemical it allows past the blood-brain barrier.
Plus, most carbs consist of sucrose, that horrible molecule composed of a fructose and glucose molecule. And the annoying thing about fructose is that unless you immediately burn it off, the only metabolic pathway it follows is that towards fat storage in your fat cells. And that means immediately. So if you have a sucrose filled chocolate snack, you must immediately hit the tarmac, or all that fructose (half of the sucrose, or purified white sugar) will turn to fat.
Not wishing to be rude – but how much exercise do you do Andy? How much exercise does that cabbie do I wonder?
Well, I try to swim about 2500 metres of front crawl twice a week (100 lengths of a 25m pool), which generally takes me about an hour, though sometimes I only manage once a week.
I used to play rugby (blind-side flanker/2nd row) back in those happy days of pre-children adulthood, training two to three times a week, plus playing. At this point I couldn’t get to 14st (hence, my weight target), despite eating curries for England. Since I stopped playing, five years ago, I kept up the old beer, chips and Mars Bar rugby player diet, and ballooned on another 2st. Not pretty.
Once I stopped rugby playing, after a sustained wrist injury, I ran for two years, about 10-12 miles a week, for two years, but had to stop when my daughter was born about three years ago. When I stopped, this threw on another 2st.
You are right that exercise is good. I stopped for a long time after my daughter’s birth, but it was only when I received a large energy kick from doing Atkins (because of the constant blood sugar level, plus copious amounts of stored energy available to the dominant lipolytic metabolism caused by Atkins), that doing even 2500m of swmming in an hour is not really all that difficult. The main problem is finding the time, and I only finish after an hour, because being in a chlorinated pool that long does terrible things to the skin. I’m hoping to get to 3km in an hour, twice a week, by the end of the year.
Once I’ve reached 14st and I’m doing 3km in an hour in the pool, I fancy doing an Olympic-length triathlon, if my rugby-battered knees will stand it, something I could not have contemplated without ol’ Dr. A’s help.
I don’t know about the cabbie. I would assume absolutely zero. But given that Atkins gives you a tremendous lift in energy levels, maybe it would give him a boost, and get him out from behind the wheel? I have recently persuaded a 22st colleague to adopt Atkins, and he’s now below 21st, and dropping (having lost weight for the first time in his life, which he can’t believe), and he’s doing no exercise I can get him to admit.
Though carrying round approximately a back pack 24 hours a day, containing 7st of fat, must be giving him some level of exercise, even just walking to the lift.
I have known loads of sporty people and soldiers who could eat for Britain but they remain trim because they burn it all up (even when at rest because they’re fit).
Hmm…possibly. I think you may find however that their arteries will be furred up if they are eating a high-carb high-fat diet, because of the effects of swinging amounts of insulin. Atheroma was discovered in the arteries of American soldiers, in the Vietnam war, something which partially caused this massive low-fat scare of the last few decades. This kind of atheroma had never been seen before. No doubt twinky bars and lucky strike cigarettes had something to do with it.
You may also have heard of many prominent professional football (soccer) players, and coaches, presumably in the flower of health, usually in their mid-forties, who’ve suffered from heart failure and other coronary problems, requiring bypass operations. And professional football players these days eat very large amounts of carbohydrate before games, in the form of pasta. Though this may of course simply be genetic bad luck.
And then there’s Ranulph Fiennes, of course, who recently had to have heart surgery after a heart attack. (See here.)
And this was possibly one of the fittest ex-SAS men in the world, who has even written health books on fitness of the kind you describe. And what did he do before dragging 1,000 lb sleds across the Antarctic? Yes, that’s right. He ate HUGE amounts of complex carbohydrates, and pastas.
Coincidence? Hmm…. I’ll leave you do decide.
Also, on the soldier and athlete front, yeah, show me pictures of them when they’re 25, and they have fast metabolisms which can cope with 15 pints of beer one night, and a full game of rugby the next afternoon. But then show me pictures of them when they’re 45. Yes, some will have kept in trim, but most won’t, and even if they do, their metabolism changes so they can’t just ‘run it all off’ any more.
This is the metabolic trap I got stuck in, where no matter how much exercise I did, the weight would not come off. And then of course, for a carb addict like me approaching middle age, lots of exercise makes you even HUNGRIER!!! Bummer, eh? 🙂
Moral of story? ALL DIETS ARE CRAP. Those seeking a six pack need to hit the tarmac.
Well, I’d rather hit the pool, as it’s a lot less stressful on the joints, but I agree on the exercise front, as even the most sedentary of us in the stone age, the time for which we are physcially designed, did at least a little bit of running about. But all diets are crap? No. The Atkins diet has probably saved my life, and prevented, or at least delayed, me from having diabetes and heart problems, and it has significantly lowered my blood pressure from above normal, to lower than normal (along with all the swimming, which it gave me the energy to do).
I don’t know about my kidneys. I’m prepared to take the balanced risk, if there is one. After all, it is my funeral if I’m wrong, and I’m heavily life-insured if the do-gooding parasites are right (which I severely doubt, as you may have guessed).
What is good is that you haven’t suggested that a law be brought in to stop me following the diet of my choosing. It is no business of anyone, what anyone else eats, except possibly parents with their children, and it is certainly not the business of tax-fed nutritionists to try to order me to stop using the Atkins diet, or taxing my high-fat foods, because they’ve decided in their own selfish interests that it’s not good for me (when I believe it is their advice which has caused all the problems in the first place.)
PS> A medical acquaintance of mine tells me Atkins doesn’t work very well for those of A or AB blood types. They may be better off on high-fibre diets. It something, he says, to do with the increased alimentary acidity levels of blood type O and B types, which is more easily able to digest meat. Some companies have made a lot of money out of this by charging you loads for blood tests before recommending what kind of diet you have. If you were just about to spend £200 pounds on such a test, I’ll be pleased to accept cash notes for £50 quid, for saving you this money! $-)
Yow. I wonder how many calories you burn off typing?
Adrienne writes:
And for the record, can you do the conversion on “stones” into good ol’ American pounds? I never have figured out what a stone is.
Only if you promise to put dates the right way round! 🙂
Today is 18/08/03, BTW.
14lbs to a stone, so that makes my figures:
17st 10lbs => 248lbs (yes, that’s BIG 🙂
16st 1lb => 225lbs (yes, still not SMALL 😎
14st => 196lbs (which the men at the gym tell me is just within the upper bound of my ‘ideal’ weight)
Eamon Brennan writes:
The Atkins diet will fur up your arteries big time.
Do you have any proof of this? You might like to read:
Study: Atkins Good for Cholesterol
Atkins diet ‘is beneficial and twice as effective as rivals’
But the original piece isn’t really about how good, or not, the Atkins diet is; that is, of course, up to you. It’s about my, and your, right to adopt it, if we want to, without being hectored by nanny-state cretins, who we’re forced to fund via socialised health programs, who’ve got an awful lot to lose if it is categorically proven they have been talking gibberish for the last two decades, and encouraging people to become obese through their advice.
Internet Ronin writes:
Not to pick nits, but wasn’t it Walter Raleigh who brought the first potatoes back to England?
Errr… I fear you’re right, kind Sir (or Sir-ess). I was thinking of that Blackadder II Episode III, Potato where who I thought was Sir Francis Drake bringing back the potato, was in fact Sir Walter Raleigh bringing back the potato. Or was that the other way round?
Was he played by Simon Jones, who also played, or did he?, Arthur Dent? It was a damn funny episode, whatever the case, especially the bit about being up the old sea dog 🙂
My apologies.
People don’t get fat from eating roast dinners and a hearty breakfast, rather they eat loads and loads of sweets, cakes, buscuits, crisps and pies and drink lots of lager. This is low class food for morons without the wit or style to cultivate proper tastes and habits. What fat people are lacking is a well developed aesthetic sensibility. If they had any taste at all they would want to present a fit and toned body to the world and would choose to eat those foods which lead to that. Until the fatty realises that it is his lack of taste that makes him an utter physical disgrace he will seek quick fix fad diets or continue eating his usual revolting snacks often in their self-deluding ‘low fat’ versions. Could anything be more absurd than ‘low fat’ crisps/ buscuits or ice cream etc. Atkins is equally absurd, how preposterous to eat cream without fruit, butter without bread, chicken without rice etc. and go around smelling like a horse. Take pleasure in your food, cut out the ricidulous crap and if you want to be toned as well as slim, take some moderate exercise.
Just to put the other side of the case, finally convinced that Atkins was (relatively) safe and seemed to work for so many others, I tried it.
The last time I felt so ill was when I had ‘flu.
Meanwhile, I gained 11lbs in a single week.
Clearly, it doesn’t work for everyone.
None of which means it doesn’t work, of course, and claims by nutrionists that it is ‘junk science’ would be laughable if the pot weren’t so obviously blacker than the kettle.
Andy: I’m happy to learn that I’m not the only uses Blackadder as his source authority for the genuinely important events in English history! (I think you are right about Simon Jones playing the part, too.)
While I acknowledge that “sir” has now become the normal form of address used by waitresses and boxboys, I try not to encourage it because it makes me feel far older than I prefer to think I am.
Hey, guys, here is some free advice: eat less, of whatever is your diet of choice. Just eat less. Instinctively, I´m with Atkins, but it seems obvious that what matters is not only what you eat but also, and maybe mainly, how much of it.
G Cooper writes:
The last time I felt so ill was when I had ‘flu.
Yep, this is a bit rough, as your body kicks and screams into lipolysis mode, something it really doesn’t want to do. What it wants to do is get you so fat you can run out of shirt sizes, and for many of us in this 18+ inch situation, it manages to overcome all willpower to do otherwise! 🙂
What it doesn’t know yet, is that you probably don’t have to get through a cold winter living on moss, but that there’s a Pizza Express and McDonalds on every other corner, in the affluent west, open every day of the week.
Clearly, it doesn’t work for everyone.
Just for my personal scientific curiosity, are you prepared to reveal your blood group? My falsifiable prediction above guesses you’re either type A or type AB. If you’re not, I’ll suggest you were abducted by aliens, and forced to drink extra pints of guinness, without your knowledge, a completely unfalsifiable theory.
Or it was global warming wot did it! 🙂
Hi Andy
I am a little suprised that you are not bothered by the fact that The Atkins Foundation paid for that research.
I suppose Atkin’s pet scientists are more relaible that the flour industries.
Hmmm
Eamon
Andy: Please, easy in the comments. Perhaps, you could link to the Atkins sacred texts rather than reproducing them more or less in full. 🙂
But keep up the good work. Sometimes it seems to me that those who critise the late Dr Atkins and his ways, have never bothered to actually read his book/theory.
Eamon Brennan writes:
I suppose Atkin’s pet scientists are more relaible that the flour industries.
Et touche, Eamon, for the first researcher in the first article. But I was more thinking of the second set of research, from the New England Journal of Medicine, the full abstracts of which everyone can link to, below, to make their own minds up:
Abstract 1
Abstract 2
These have been extensively quoted, in the last few months, even yesterday on the BBC, though we all know now how unreliable they are! 🙂
I would also be genuinely delighted if you could demonstrate the research which shows Atkins induces atheroma. In a world of imperfect information, I’m always willing to try to learn more.
Andy,
My wife and I have lost 90 lbs between us (umm, that would be 6st 6). It is amazing how many people always have a scare story: “Y’know, my friend’s cousin tried it — and he went totally deaf!”
Thanks you for introducing the relative risk. I always ask whether that person thinks I would be better off 60 lbs overweight.
Jacob, my friend, your suggestion to “eat less” is telling your body to turn off one of its lowest-level, hardwired reactions. I find that Atkins allows me to feel sated while eating less. I used to eat high-carb/low fat foods and was always hungry.
This discussion does belong on Samizdata because why, why, why, do we look to the government to select between competing diets? I grew up (in the USA) with “The Four Food Groups,” truly “The Four Most Successful Government Lobbying Organizations.” This was discredited for the food pyramid — oddly enough, it was probably more sound nutrition.
There is no doubt in my mind that Atkins is a good diet for a good number of people, because I know them, and I am one.
I am not sure I believe Atkin’s explanations for Lipolysis (i.e. the “free lunch” part of the Atkins diet). There is the strong implication that by being in ketosis, one can eat huge numbers of calories and still lose weight. There may be some truth to that, but I suspect that the main weight loss benefit of Atkins is the reduction of carbohydrate craving and thus overall appetite, resulting in a net reduction in total calories without fighting one’s instincts and hunger.
As far as exercise goes, a little exercise goes a long ways. It seems to shift your body into a better place than no exercise. More doesn’t do much more for you unless you really get excessive. Personally, I hate exercising. It bores me silly – even with a book on tape. So I have to work at getting the bare minimum – my current trick is to walk up a very small nearby hill every time I have to leave my desk for any reason (I work out of my home).
Exercise is a very hard way to burn calories. If you walk on a flat surface for half an hour, you burn up your body weight (in pounds) in calories. Not much! If you run the same distance, you burn up the same amount (but in fewer minutes).
It takes REALLY HARD WORK to burn enough calories to offset any significant amount of food.
My personal experience: I was way overweight… I went on a medically supervised, extremely low fat, low calorie liquid diet and lots many tens of pounds. While on the liquid diet I was also not hungry, even though it was 800 kcal/day. I also exercised a lot (walking up and down hills 40 minutes a day).
I then went into the maintenance phase of that diet, carefully monitoring my calories and maintaining my exercise, and going to weekly meetings. Guess what! I gained about 8 pounds a year, almost my same rate of gain that I had prior to the diet, when I just ate what I wanted and didn’t exercise!
Furthermore, my base metabolic rate was reset by the diet to 1400 calories (kcal) per day, when for my weight it should have been at least 2000! Thus I could only eat 1400 kcal/day (with a bunch of exercise), which is a starvation diet for an adult male!
During this time my blood HDL was very low – a very bad thing, according to current science.
Eventually, (after seven years of this) I fell off of the program, and pigged out for a while, and ended up back at my original weight. Common story!
Then I went onto the Atkins diet. Once again I have lost weight. More slowly, but I am losing. Furthermore, my HDL went up dramatically, while my total cholesterol stayed the same! In other words, for my particular genome, eating lots of fat and protein, and very few carbohydrate calories, dramatically improved my blood chemistry by the currently known measures.
Almost 40 years ago, I worked as an intern in a lab studying cholersterol pathways. Cholesterol can be created by the body very easily – you don’t have to eat it!
I also find that it doesn’t take much food to reach satiety, hence it is much easier to maintain the diet, and I don’t feel starved.
So for me, and others in my family, the diet “works” – whatever that means.
I have friends who have used the “Zone Diet” or variances thereof. This diet is a less extreme variant of Atkins – in the sense that both try to avoid keep blood insulin levels from rising.
There is evidence that high insulin levels cause cardiovascular damage (or at least are associated with it), and spiking insulin (which is what happens when you eat carbohydrates, especially rapidly absorbed ones) definitely leads to carbohydrate cravings … which leads you to eat too much.
“PS> A medical acquaintance of mine tells me Atkins doesn’t work very well for those of A or AB blood types. They may be better off on high-fibre diets. It something, he says, to do with the increased alimentary acidity levels of blood type O and B types, which is more easily able to digest meat.”
Well, good! I knew I did better on a low-meat diet, and it’s good to know that other things back me up. (Salad rocks when you grow up with a garden in the backyard.) I’ve also been told that for hypoglycemia (low blood sugar problems; I have a mild case) that pasta is a good choice because it has long-term release carbs. Pasta with lots of salad! 🙂
So… you know how they say “consult your doctor before starting a diet?” A doctor in the know could point you toward the most effective solution… and take the stairs rather than the elevator.
I’m so glad that I never listened to all those health nuts.
By all accounts the Atkins diet does work, in the short term. More power to you if you’ve used it to lose weight. The problem is that in the long/medium term “diets” are really not an answer to maintaining a healthy weight. Nearly everyone fails in the long term.
About ten years ago I had balooned up to 14 stone and decided it was time to do something about it (I’m 5’10” and NOT built like a rugby player). Well I’m not a very organised sort of person so I didn’t go on any kind of specific diet. I just started eating a bit less, drinking less and walking a bit more. These days I’m walking/hiking/running about 50 miles per week, I weigh 10.5 stone and there is nothing I feel I can’t eat (I just don’t eat it every day). I’m an ex-pat Yank in Ireland and for my 4th of July party this year I smoked an 8kg pork shoulder and a 4kg beef brisket, plus loads of homemade coleslaw and potato salad, oh yeah, all served on white bread.
My wife is a chef and I’m a computer geek who thinks he’s a chef. Needless to say, we eat very well, but we think about what we eat, Lots of fish and veg, not too many spuds. A (very) modified Atkins that includes Guinesss and any other damn thing we feel like. Potatoes fried in goose fat anyone?
I guess my point is that to maintain a healthy weight you have to settle on a way of eating that is not a “diet” per-se, but a habit of eating what you like in quantities that keep you slim.
I wonder: if I had gone on the Atkins diet ten years ago instead of just eating less, would I still have the weight off? I sort of doubt it. I really enjoy beans, lentils, chickpeas, rice, spuds and all the rest. If I were on a diet I’d have quit it by now. As it is, I look forward to cooking my dinner every night.
Overlockers come to mind.
One of the strengths of a free society is that it can try several different approaches at once. We can evaluate the success or failure of various methods independently. It’s harder to suppress evaluation for the purpose of saving face, or preserving some agenda.
Everything is exposed to re-evaluation.
Andy,
Thanks for the (essay length) reply. I’ve certainly learned something about diets! Maybe not ALL diets are crap just most of them.
Anyway – best of luck keeping trim and healthy.
I’m kinda with Andy Duncan on this. Aitkins, when I stick to it, does work for me, I am much less hungry all the time than if I eat Carbs. My brother did the Aitkins thing for the BBC diet show last year and lost 4st in just over 8months and has kept it off.
However… looking at my calorific intake pre-aitkins and post and I notice that in reality my total calorie intake under Aitkins is a shed lower than if I eat sugary crap. I also lose weight even faster if I visit the gym 4 times a week.
I suspect the real villan of the piece is sugar and foods contained processed sugar.
Pasta and Potatos probably aren’t all that bad, but I must admit than since I gave them up I haven’t missed them much.
Squander Two:
Combustion calorimetry is accurate for biological purposes because of Hess’s Law–basically a corollary of the conservation of energy. It means that it doesn’t matter how fats and carbohydrates are oxidized into carbon dioxide and water, because the amount of energy released will be the same.
Hmmmm. My blood type is A+ and I have lost 15 lbs. (a trifle over 1 stone) in the past 3 weeks on the Atkins diet. I feel better and have more energy. My blood sugars are stable, and my blood lipids are in MUCH better shape.
Are you on the Atkins Diet?
Do you know anybody on the Atkins Diet?
We’re looking for people with first hand experience of the diet – good or bad. We’d like them to complete our questionnaire for the BBC1 current affairs programme Real Story with Fiona Bruce.
Please complete the questionnaire (below) and return to philip.hawkins@bbc.co.uk NO LATER THAN FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17th.
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BBC1’s Real Story Atkins Diet Survey
When did you first try the Atkins Diet?
A:
How long did you stay on it?
A:
What was your weight BEFORE you tried the Atkins Diet?
A:
What was your weight when you came off the Atkins Diet?
A:
If you lost weight on the diet, did it stay off when you came off the diet?
A:
If not, what weight did you go up to?
A:
Have you tried the Atkins Diet again?
A:
If so, how many times?
A:
What is your weight NOW?
A:
Have you suffered any illness or health problems as a result of the diet?
A:
Would you try it again?
A:
Did you read the Atkins book before embarking on the diet?
A:
Did you follow the guidance in the book?
A:
What are the positive things about the diet
A:
Do you have any negative comments about the diet?
A:
Any other comments?
A:
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Please distribute this questionnaire to anybody who may be able to help. Your assistance is appreciated.
Regards,
Philip Hawkins
BBC NEWS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS