Weight Loss Archives | Page 2 of 17

Archive | Weight Loss

All posts (173)	Crazy ways to lose weight (14)	Insulin (17)
The Obesity Epidemic (40)	Weight loss stories (24)	Weight loss studies (13)
Weight loss surgery (4)	Why Americans are Obese (17)

Lose Weight by Cutting Down on Dairy Products and Nuts 94

You’re Seven Feet Tall Because You Eat Too Much 50

How to Lose Weight #8: Avoid Artificial Sweeteners 34

Why Calorie Counting is an Eating Disorder 28

Dr William “Wheat Belly” Davis on The Dr Oz Show! 42

How to Lose Weight, Part 1 of 17 34

Why Calorie Counters are Confused 57

Is the Solution to the Obesity Epidemic Launching Today? 22

Low Carb Seems to be Healthy In Every Way 43

Low Carb Explained 79

Slim is Simple 7

The Largest Man in the World 50

Kids Drinking Low-Fat Milk Gain More Weight – Again!

March 20 8:47 in Failed low fat diets, Food for kids, Weight Loss

Big mistake?

Is low-fat milk good for you and your family? Yet another study says no.

The start of the low-fat craze back in the 1980′s perfectly matches up with the start of the obesity epidemic. A coincidence? Probably not.

Low-fat products usually contain more sugar and more starches. If not you’ll probably end up eating more carbs anyway as you’ll be hungrier. This raises the levels of the fat-storing hormone insulin. Study after study prove that low-fat diets are worse for our weight than high-fat low-carb diets. The same is true for kids.

Not surprisingly, a recent Swedish study showed that people using low-fat dairy products end up gaining more weight. Now a new American study shows the same thing. Kids drinking low-fat milk are not only more often obese, they also tend to keep gaining more weight than kids drinking full-fat milk:

LA Times: Low-fat milk doesn’t help toddlers’ weight, study says

When will the disastrous low-fat craze end? How many more kids are going to get obese for no good reason?

What do you think?

Four Weeks of Strict LCHF and Ketone Monitoring

March 18 19:28 in About Diet Doctor, Exercise, Ketone Measuring, Low Carb High Fat, Weight Loss

Can ketone measurement help you lose weight and improve performance? That’s the main question I’ll be trying to answer with my four-week experiment.

See Report #1 for diet and experiment design.

Note: This experiment was done six months ago and initially only reported on my Swedish blog. This is a somewhat delayed translation!

Below are graphs of my weight and waistline over this first four-week period, as well as the results of blood and urine ketone measurements.

optimal-ketos-4veng

After two to three weeks of light nutritional ketosis, I’ve now spent 8 days in “optimal ketosis” – that is, between 1.5 – 3 mmol/L. Want to know what’s happened?

Continue Reading →

The Doctor Asked: “What Have You Done?”

March 17 13:35 in Diabetes, Weight loss stories

Yet another story from a person with type 2 diabetes, who has tried an LCHF diet:

At an appointment with my doctor, after being on an LCHF diet for one year (diabetes checkup):
The first thing she asks me is…. “What have you done?” – with a big smile.
“I started eating an LCHF diet”, I say.
“I just knew it had to be something like that!”, she says.
All numbers are good. Blood sugar normal, cholesterol numbers good, blood counts…. everything that can be measured is great (all was not good a year ago). My waistline has shrunk by 5 inches, and I have lost more than 30 pounds (have acquired more muscle mass too, so my fat loss is probably significant).
In addition I have completely stopped taking some antidiabetic medications (don’t need them anymore), and am currently taking half the dose of the last remaining antidiabetic medication that I take daily. I don’t need more than that when I eat an LCHF diet.
Then comes the funny part (or the not so funny part). She tells med that many of her patients have changed their diets to an LCHF diet on their own. And they all lose weight, they all improve their health markers, become healthier and feel much better.
“Isn’t this amazing?!”, she says, adding “And I am not allowed to recommend this to my patients, because we have to follow the official guidelines. Our whole society is sugar-poisoned.”

Congratulations!

The doctor’s idea that she is not allowed to recommend an LCHF diet is a common urban legend, that is spread by ignorance. As a physician in Sweden you may certainly recommend an LCHF diet. I have done so to appropriate patients more or less daily for the past six years, with results similar to the above.

Previously on diabetes

Lose Weight by Achieving Optimal Ketosis

March 13 15:09 in Insulin, Ketone Measuring, Weight Loss

Do you want to lose weight? Here’s number 14 of my 17 best tips. All of the published tips can be found on the How to Lose Weight page.

Before we get started, here’s a short recap of the tips so far: The first and most crucial piece of advice was to choose a low-carb diet. The next were eating when hungry, eating real food, measuring progress wisely, thinking long-term, avoiding fruit, alcohol and artificial sweeteners, review your medications, stressing less and sleeping more, eating less dairy and nut products, stocking up on vitamins and minerals and finally, exercise.

This is number fourteen:

14. Get into optimal ketosis

Warning: Not recommended for type 1 diabetics, see below.

confused

We’ve now arrived at tip number 14. If you’re still having trouble losing weight, despite following the 13 pieces of advice listed above, it might be a good idea to bring out the heavy artillery: optimal ketosis. Many people stalling at weight plateaus while on a low carb diet have found optimal ketosis helpful. It’s what can melt the fat off once again.

So how does this work? A quick run-through: The first tip was to eat low carb. This is because a low-carb diet lowers your levels of the fat-storing hormone insulin, allowing your fat deposits to shrink and release their stored energy. This tends to cause you to want to consume less calories than you expend – without hunger – and lose weight. Several of the tips mentioned above are about fine-tuning your diet to better this effect.

How do you know you’re getting the maximum hormonal impact from your low-carb diet? You do that by achieving what’s known as “optimal ketosis”. Continue Reading →

You’re Seven Feet Tall Because You Eat Too Much

March 9 17:24 in Insulin

Is this man seven feet tall because he eats too much? Did he just forget to count his calories? Hardly. Far more likely he’s got an excess of growth hormone, handing him a possible career as a basketball star.

So why do we assume that people with obesity, people who grow horizontally, just eat too much? They too might have an hormonal issue. Too much fat-storing insulin, perhaps?

Credits

My friend Fred Hahn just posted this picture and argument on his blog. And of course the argument is Gary Taubes 101. Still worth repeating though.

Weight Watchers Suffers PR Disaster in Sweden

March 7 14:32 in Crazy ways to lose weight

Weight Watchers recently suffered a true PR diaster in Sweden. They’ve run a lot of TV commercials this year with its new spokesperson in Sweden, pop singer Shirley Clamp. This under the slogan “Weight Watchers – because it works”.

A Swedish paper revealed the truth behind the commercials. Shirley Clamp did not lose weight with Weight Watchers. Instead, from June to August 2012, she went to the exclusive private Bülow Clinic (price tag around $3200), which provides a very different method, including hormone supplements. A few weeks after her significant weight loss at the Bülow Clinic she signed a lucrative contract to become the public face of Weight Watchers.

Expressen (Swedish paper): Weight Watchers knew that Ms. Clamp had already lost weight (Google translated from Swedish)

So what does this mean? Can Weight Watchers really continue to use Ms. Clamp as its face to the public and its slogan “Because it works” when Ms. Clamp has lost weight in a very different way? It would be more than unethical.

And that’s not all. Continue Reading →

Yes, a Low-Carb Diet Greatly Lowers Your Insulin

March 3 20:11 in Insulin

Less carbs, less insulin

Is “eat less and run more” really the only thing you need to know in order to lose weight?

Why is it then that most people lose weight on a LCHF diet, even when eating until satisfied? And this without even any increase in exercise? To think that this should be so controversial!

The best explanation, in a simplified version, looks like this:

Carbohydrates – > insulin – > obesity

Thus more carbohydrates lead to more insulin which leads to more fat accumulation. With more details this can be written as follows:

Too many (bad) carbohydrates – > pathologically high insulin levels – > obesity

What constitutes “too many” varies from person to person depending on sensitivity and activity level (how much carbs you burn). Intensely exercising young men can often tolerate a fair amount of carbs, while heavily overweight older diabetics can only tolerate minimal amounts without problems.

The opposite is the following:

Less carbs – > lower insulin levels – > loss of excess fat

Insulin is a fat storing hormone. And the easiest way to increase your insulin levels is to eat more carbohydrates. The easiest way to lower insulin levels is to eat fewer carbohydrates.

This seems very straight forward. But some are still adamant opponents. Without being able to come up with any better explanation as to why a low-carbohydrate diet works (it does) they still don’t want to accept this explanation. They come up with all kinds of objections. Some don’t even want to recognize the most basic, that carbohydrates increase insulin levels or that a low-carb diet lowers insulin levels.

Their complicated objections don’t matter much in reality. The truth is clear in study after study on humans. Insulin levels are much higher when you eat a lot of carbohydrates and lower on a low-carb diet. The figure above (from Boden et al.) is one example.

Here are some more: Continue Reading →

One Hundred Weight Loss Blogs

March 2 16:53 in About Diet Doctor, Weight Loss

Here’s a list of the “top 100 weight loss blogs to follow”. I like Authority Nutrition at #18. I don’t consider this blog to be a weight loss blog, but it’s at #11:

Top 100 Weight Loss Blogs To Follow In 2013 [Infographic]

Apparently there’s no links, so if you want to check out the blogs you have to type in the adress yourself. Consider yourself warned.

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

February 25 11:57 in Industrial food-like products, Salt, Sugar/fructose, The Obesity Epidemic

Here’s a great new article on how junk food is engineered to be addictive:

NYT: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

It’s perhaps nothing really new and the journalist is still stuck in old-fashioned failed ideas (sugar, salt and fat are equally bad). But the article gives great insights into the minds of the men running the junk food industry. Like this quote:

People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”

You see the problem? Any junk food company trying to focus on healthy food (instead of focusing on making the junk food ever more addictive) risks being quickly eliminated. Any executive trying to do what’s right (and make less money) will likely be fired.

So what happens if the industry is left unregulated? It turns into a rapid evolution towards ever more addictive and ever less healthy junk food. It’s what’s been happening for a long time.

Here’s how a former Coca Cola executive was secretly thinking about expanding his market and making more money:

Dunn said. “How many drinkers do I have? And how many drinks do they drink? If you lost one of those heavy users, if somebody just decided to stop drinking Coke, how many drinkers would you have to get, at low velocity, to make up for that heavy user? The answer is a lot. It’s more efficient to get my existing users to drink more.”

I imagine that’s not too different from how any drug dealer thinks.

Does Exercise Promote Weight Loss?

February 22 13:17 in Exercise, Weight Loss

Do you want to lose weight? Here’s part 13 of 17 in a series of blog posts on the subject. You can read them all on the How to Lose Weight page.

confused

13. Exercise

Do you wonder why this weight-loss tip doesn’t show up until number 13 on the list? It’s because few things are so overrated for weight loss as exercise is. Continue Reading →

Older posts Newer posts

Kids Drinking Low-Fat Milk Gain More Weight – Again!

Four Weeks of Strict LCHF and Ketone Monitoring

The Doctor Asked: “What Have You Done?”