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The biggest health blog in Scandinavia, with over 25 000 daily visitors, now has an English version: DietDoctor.com.
This is the blog of Andreas Eenfeldt, MD. The goal is to spread new knowledge, dispel old myths and to inspire you on the road to impressive health.
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I stopped consuming wheat and sugar in 1999, long before I heard of either of these gentlemen. However, I *still* have hypertension, and I'm still fat. (It appears that I have rid myself completely of gout, though -- and that's a Big Deal for me.) In case you don't remember me, Dr. Eenfeldt, I was the guy who always sat right up front at all of the lectures on the last low-carb cruise.
In 1999, I weighed somewhere north of 350 lbs. Today, I weigh 250 lbs, or roughly 50 lbs more than I should. Losing 100+ lbs was easy, but I am having a hell of a time getting rid of that last 50. So it's pretty damned obvious to me that fructose and wheat are NOT the only problems.
I hope to see you again in May. Perhaps we can discuss this at length on the next LC cruise. I understand that attendance is off a bit this year, so maybe I'll get more time to talk with you.
In fact, if I can be so bold as to ask, may I record an interview with you on the cruise?
I can bench-press my bodyweight. I have maxed out all of the leg machines at the Plano rec center. Weight training does help with my blood pressure, but not much.
While I don't run (I'm too heavy, and I still have knee problems left over from the days when I ate wheat), I walk and ride my bicycle. During one 6-month period, I rode my bicycle to work (about 6 miles one way) 5 days/week. I haven't done that for the past few months, but I saw essentially no difference in weight either way.
There are several recent studies that confirm my experience: Exercise is indeed good for you, but it has only a minor impact on weight loss.
@Howard -- I am in a similar situation: the first 100lbs was easy enough but I am not back to the "fighting weight" of my mid-20's. Still I am much healthier overall and happier than I have been for decades so I don't see this in any way as a failure.
I am convinced that an extended period of obesity is both: a symptom and a cause of an underlying metabolic disturbance that, unfortunately for many of us, in unlikely to ever go away. Apart from anything else I understand that fat cells proliferate; so we both likely have more now than we started with... and each is trying to hold onto its stores.
Yes, I'm healthier than I was in 1999, and yes, that is a measure of success. Sometimes, though, I lose track of the fact that losing over 100 lbs is a major accomplishment even if I haven't (yet) accomplished my goal. I suspect that I would have had a stroke or heart attack before now if I had not discovered how well a low-carb diet works. Unfortunately, the Late Dr. Atkins was not making a clear distinction (at the time my wife and I began our low-carb journey; later, he started to) between types of fat, and I consumed a lot of corn, soy, and peanut oil in the first couple of years on his diet. I read somewhere that the half-life of trans-fat mitochondrial damage is 7 years.
Since I started LC after I was 50, that half-life may be more than 7 years for me just because of my age.
I strongly suspect that you don't get over 350 lbs without doing some permanent damage.
I also suspect that I may have a cortisol problem. I'd sure like to find a handle on that, but my VA doc is not really interested in finding actual causes of anything. She just wants to add more pills to my regimen. She finally backed off of statins after the 3rd time I barked at her for that insanity. I actually tried statins for a short while several years ago, and I'd rather die of stroke or heart attack, thankyouverymuch. I think she gets her nutrition and drug information from TV commercials and pharma reps.
I haven't done a blog post in a while, so I plan one this weekend to report the results of my "losing while cruising" n=1 experiment of last week. On my prior cruise, I lost about a pound. On this one, well... I'll cover it in detail on my blog. On my next cruise (which will be the annual Low-Carb group cruise), I will be testing a different variable.
I've seen the proton series, but I can't say that I really understood all of it. I wish Peter would provide an executive summary, instead of making me carefully pick out the information from the droll humor.
Hmmm... come to think of it, that could be blog fodder for me.
I am a huge fan of a ketogenic diet for the increased energy and stamina it gives me (I am a long-distance cyclists) along with never thinking at all about my weight. I will be 60 in a month and feel like a million bucks (maybe a billion). This morning I scored a 10 on the "standing, sitting" test that has been touted as the best indication of health and longevity.
I really don't subscribe to the idea of an overall "conductor" (usually suggested as being in the brain) which has an overarching control over pretty much everything... people talk about "set-points" and similar; as if the brain decides how much fat we should store. I don't see that at all... we would have evolved with mechanisms for partitioning energy, long before we had anything resembling a brain!
I find it useful to think of us as a collection (a colony, a swarm, a flock, or a school) of systems that each perform a relatively simple process but give the overall impression of a cohesive complex organism -- like a murmuration of starlings; only obviously more complex
Fat is continually cycling into and out of fat cells -- under the influence of hormones of course -- and what we see externally is the overall balance...
Yes energy balance DOES apply at the cellular level!
Liver, muscle and other cells are competing for Blood Glucose and Free Fatty Acids etc...
Each system is simply doing "its own thing".
Think of a lake way out in the wilds... over time it will have a fairly constant shoreline (a settling point if you like) despite the variability of inputs from rain, streams, rivers, springs etc...; and the outputs from rivers, evaporation, seepage etc.. BUT no-one is suggesting there is some guy behind the scenes with a set of pipes and valves controlling the level.. are they?
So, in short, it makes sense to me that simply having more fat cells leads to a greater uptake of fat for storage and may be at least part of the explanation for the stubborn last pounds.
This is relevant, don't tell me it isn't. We need to stand up against this and fight for our right to eat food that is free from this rubbish. The gall of these people, I am so shocked.
Hopefully you can achieve your goals, I have to admire your drive to do so.
Have you tried a thing called "investigative research" ? Maybe you should oput down the laughable misinformation from Lyle mcDonald and Anthony Colpo in favor of poeple who actually study this condition- who themselves are struggling to understand it.
Fat prejudice is what keeps people from trying to UNDERSTAND obesity
You can start here:
http://alternet.org/story/108513/fat%3A_what_the_experts_don't_know_about_obesity
There is no such thing as an "expert " on this topic. Even Dr. Jeffrey Friedman is not an all knowing "expert". But Anthony Colpo and Lyle McDonald are certainly NOT experts- not even close.They're laughably misinformed author salesmen preying on an uneducated and gullible public- people like yourself!
Just sayin'.........
It had been discucced a while ago http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-fat-trap..... You body is not broken, it works in a way it supposed to work by just resisting a weight-loss regardless of the way you achieved it. However, I do think LC has an advantage by keeping you from being insanely hungry.
You said " I'd love to figure out the mechanism by which the extra fat cells try to hold on to lipid stores -- and turn it off." Unfortunately, the only way to turn the mechanism of is gaining weight. One young women got lucky to receive leptin ejections during the leptin research trail, http://itsthewooo.blogspot.com/search/label/Leptin%20%28withdrawal%29 but it is not available for general public. She lost 160 lb out of 280 and had to have a skin removal surgery. It looks like fat sells could be removed surgically or by liposuction.