This is a great post by David Katz, MD. He says that obesity is “much more like drowning than a disease”:
Huffington Post: Obesity as a Disease: Why I Vote No
My only problem with his view is the obvious one. He blames surplus calories, but that’s not a problem unless we want to eat too much. Unless our appetite regulation does not work.
Get rid of all refined sugar and starch and most obese people can eat all they want and still lose excess weight. It’s been demonstrated in study after study. The trick? They no longer want to eat too much.
The problem is that our entire food supply is full of sugar and starch – it’s hard to find a processed food item without it – and it’s making us too hungry. Unless we cook our own meals from real food ingredients it’s getting harder and harder to avoid it.
It’s like a giant flood, everywhere. No wonder people are drowning.
What has worked for me (a sugar addict) is first move to three unprocessed healthy meals a day and keep fruit/chocolate only for after meals. Same times every day, regular as clockwork no snacks at all.
Then remove the fruit/chocolate. I then had 3 weeks of "candida die off"/withdrawal which was fascinating, difficult and worst os all on day 21 which is amazingly late. Then suddenly woke up feeling fine and "off" the addictive substance. I always over ate fruit, 6 - 8 bananas, never one, massive loads of cherries and strawberries, 1000 calories of nuts and raisins at once. I was using fruit like chocolate.
I kept in my brown rice and baked potato for the 3 weeks without chocolate/fruit.[I am female - i think that does make a difference with diet and eating and moods, PMT etc etc]
Then I took out the potatoes/rice.
Did not miss them. No carb or sugar cravings. Never hungry (I eat a lot of meat, fish, eggs, veg.) (Also I have never liked diary or milk or cheese but I have some butter on veg still. I gave up bread years ago as it makes my throat swell so that was no issue and I never had tea or coffee and drink only water so those aspects are easy for me and not for many people).
Anyway my suggestion is just practical as to what might work for some other women - how to move yourself in a way that works to 3 meals a day no snacks. then cut out the fruit/chocolate, then the rice/potatoes and most importantly of all how that then feels like a change for life, no temptation to snack, no longer wanting the junk food and chocolate or even fruit and feeling full whilst losing weight. It works.
Drowning happens all at once. It is not as though submerging in water compels one to swim deeper and overrides the natural impulse to resurface for air. If drowning were stretched out for years and we detected the override of natural impulse to seek air, we might say the person was in a state of disease. Obesity seems to be the obverse of anorexia, which is viewed as a disease. The tragedy is that it appears that in most cases excess fat gain is initiated by a prolonged pattern of dietary choices unsuitable for that person's metabolism and could be prevented without medical intervention. The farther along, the more difficult to reverse, the more diseased the person becomes.
What I admire about the LCHF people is that they have seen through the dogma of nutritional authorities and guidelines, which is plainly based on non-disinterested interpretations of data that bear different interpretations. Gary Taubes has done important work in debunking bad nutritional science (thanks in part to his science education) and presenting evidence that hormone dysfunction causes excess fat gain. ZellZ, I know Gary and he would not recommend avoiding whole foods. Lots of data supports excess insulin as a culprit and reducing insulin as a strategy to shed body fat. What foods and how much stimulate excess insulin varies person to person. And other factors can disturb insulin metabolism apart from diet. Bodies are complex.
Yes, I don't think Gary Taubes would be against whole foods & I do apologize for giving that impression. What I meant was his view (which I have read in his book, "Why We Get Fat") is that for people who have a lot of weight gain, they might run into problems even w/green leafy vegetables! From the carbs in those vegetables, I am assuming he means. Gary Taubes writes that the longer one has been ill, overweight & struggling, the less likely a hflc diet will result in weight loss. It will not work for everyone, at least for weight loss - or Enough weight loss to once again have a normal weight. I *think* I am getting it right, what he says. He doesn't hold out false hope. I would imagine that many if not all fat people go to a lchf diet to lose weight, first & foremost, even if they are also deeply concerned about related health conditions. Now, those conditions Can improve, even w/modest weight loss. Modest weight loss will still look like a "drowning person" to Dr. Katz (ie: a Fat person), though & to the person him or herself, they may feel very frustrated that they can't lose any more weight. That is my circumstance. Taubes would say to me (I'm guessing) to keep doing lchf, but I don't know if I can, anymore. I feel a desire for more fruits, for more veggies, for the occasional corn on the cob, with lots of butter & salt. I highly Doubt Taubes would recommend those whole foods for one such as me. But I am tired of so much meat & vegetables mainly. I don't know how long I can keep doing strict lchf. The thing is: I Was drowning, but now I have a raft: some degree of real weight loss & improved health. But you can't SEE it (unless you knew me at my heaviest). This constant emphasis on weight loss from everywhere & everyone might even be the very thing that pushes a person Off their chosen raft, too (lchf, or whole foods diet, abstaining from sugary & simple carbs).
1. to continue to make myself do the lchf diet, until, possibly, I get SO sick of it that I become vulnerable to the extreme risk of having a regular dessert (I ain't talking fruit, here!) OR
2. to experiment w/whole foods that would be deemed "too many carbs" on a strict, ketogenic diet, taking the risk that I will start to regain the weight I Have lost, plus the improved health I have already achieved.
I guess the answer is obvious. Either strategy holds risks for me at this point, but I really think the strategy to eat more whole foods like fruits & a greater quantity of vegetables might keep me safe from the dietary evils that lurk everywhere.
As EnglishRose says, we are "drowning in a sea of processed foods".
I'm only human. I don't want to go back to bingeing, but the risk is always there. I have never found that my cravings have Completely gone away. So I must find new strategies to keep them at bay (more water comparisons, lol).
One thing I enjoy on the hflc diet is that it IS High Fat. If I eat more whole, complex carb foods, will I have to reduce the amount of fat I eat? If so, will that happen naturally, as I eat more complex carb foods OR will I start to take in too much fat And too many carbs (albeit, from whole food sources), which doesn't sound good.
I don't count a thing & that is never going to change.
So, I'm very confused at this point.
The lfhc diet works so well because people don't have to count calories (or even pay much
attention to carb grams IF they really stick to the allowed foods). And all that high fat is VERY satiating!
So I have LOVED the hflc diet for a long time, but now I am feeling like my body wants a change & I want to respect that w/o compromising my health.
I don't think it's a coincidence that a new weight loss drug was released at the same time as this change in obesity status.
This is just another way the medical establishment can recommend more drugs and more gastric bypass surgery both a lot more profitable than educating patients on how to lose weight. And most doctors don't have a clue about that anyway.
All the best Jan
"As a friend of mine put it "I refuse to believe that bread, the biblical staff of life, the food that sustained our ancestors for so many generations, is bad for you."
Amen.
For those of you who are not so up on the bible, consider this: the obesity rates of France, Italy, and Japan are much lower than obesity rates in the United States. Though I don't have precise statistics, I'd bet money that the majority of calories consumed in these countries come from bread, pasta, and rice (respectively) -- the staples for which their cuisines are famous. And we're not talking brown rice, or whole grain bread, or amaranth pasta. We're talking the very refined stuff Atkins and his fellow gurus insist is so evil.
The simple fact is that most people in the world for most of history have gotten most of their calories from carbohydrates, and most of them were skinny (too skinny!). Percentage wise, we eat far fewer carbs than they did. They were too poor to eat much protein or fat. Only rich people had meat regularly. Fat was a luxury; you hunted for eyes of it in your soup.
What our skinny ancestors didn't eat was much sugar. They ate at social meals, not in between. And they were lucky if they had enough for firsts. Sound familiar?
I'm not saying it's ideal to eat a ton of refined carbohydrates. I'm willing to concede that brown rice is (nutritionally) a better default starch that white rice, and I even happen to like it (short grain, at least). But it's not the chief issue, from a weight management perspective. The chief issue is not to eat too damn much, of anything. And the No S Diet helps you do that."
Don't eat too damn much of anything? Tell that to obese six month olds, please.
(And to all the people struggling to do just that, but constantly failing. I guess they Want to be fat? Sure they do). Plus, let's Not forget what Dr. Lustig says: FORTY PERCENT OF *THIN* PEOPLE ALSO HAVE METABOLIC DISEASE. The same as the 80% of fat people who have it. Maybe you need to tell the Thin people not to eat so damn much? Or maybe not to eat (and drink) so damn many simple carbs & sugars, methinks....
In fact, why don't you read Dr. Lustig's book, "Fat Chance"? Now, it's Not the bible,
I grant you. However, the bible only matters to Any degree for those who are Christian....(and plus, even Christians have myriad Interpretations of it). So let's leave the bible out of it, for the general populace, who may be anything from Buddhist to Atheist.
Targeting Atkins as a Guru is silly. He "merely" & brilliantly offered a way of eating that can counteract all the simple carbs that have caused so much damage to so many in the Current environment we all swim in. Not hard to grasp, really, that sometimes an Extreme Remedy must be given for an Extreme condition.
"Though I don't have precise statistics, I'd bet money that the majority of calories consumed in these countries come from bread, pasta, and rice "
How much money would you like to lose? :D I say this to you in the nicest possible way. Before you bet, please know it's easy to google a pile of consumption stats from various studies & gov't agencies. . . .I'm happy to take you to the cleaners big time. :)
Do you know the French only eat about 3 oz of bread a day? And that the consumption of bread in France has been declining for a couple of decades? I suggest you review actual recent consumption stats from reliable agencies before you continue this line of argument. The stats you claim not to have are easy to find...and they destroy your argument.
Best wishes. :D
1. Exercise
2. Fiber
3. No Sugar (save for fruit & once a week splurges of desserts if one can do this w/o being addicted to sweets - or Bread!).
Sugar is Extremely addictive & we now eat more of it than we ever did. Refined flour is also bad. Places that have traditional diets no doubt eat much fiber, get a lot of exercise & have people who have not become sickened on Western food. Even our whole foods are being tampered with. Meat has a lot of nasty stuff added to it, breads & grains become "simple" from too much taken out of them. Food in general, whole food, is good, according to Dr. Lustig. There are good, safe carbs. I don't think white bread is one of them. Especially not for people who are already sick from too many carbs. I see the Atkins diet as a Tool. It's a way to heal from the bad, addictive foods we have so much of but it's not a panacea. One can do Atkins in a bad way too, by eating a lot of processed meats & Atkins bars & diet soda & too few veggies. (Yet even this is no doubt far better than bingeing on junk, eating fast food stuff, etc). But you are just attacking Atkins in a willful, unreasonable way. Atkins can work when nothing else will, but we have to remember that THIN PEOPLE ARE GETTING METABOLIC DISEASE TOO. So probably Atkins would be good for Them, not just fat people. Eating a low carb diet, one's appetite Naturally starts to decrease, I guess because there is less insulin around to screw things up. Insulin hyper secretes from all the simple carbs people eat, all the sodas, cookies, cakes, candies, bagels & bread.
1) "I refuse to believe that bread, the biblical staff of life .."
2) John McDougall's trump argument is that "...all successful civilizations obtained bulk of energy from starch..."
I say, (without going to details , which You probably know anyway) yes it is true that bread was biblical stuff of life and during so called recorded human history most civilizations main energy source were carbohydrates. BUT bread, corn, wheat, et cetera was a food of the poor and laborers. Elite and ruling classes ate meat - in most cases meat of sacrificed animals during religious festivals, which were held almost weekly and were design,as they are now - as we all know, to keep masses under control. Peasants ate wheat, corn (and had life expectancy +- 35 years) fed wheat, corn to animals, took animals to the temple - priest ritually killed animal, took meat home after all was done and ate it with his/her family. And it is this upper meat eating classes which build civilization with slave-wheta fed labor. Please read history and archaeology of Sumer, Ancient Egypt, Mezo-America, Hebrew history (even in the bible it is clearly said that priests and kings main food was meat of sacrificed animals - by the way I do not belong to any organized religion) it is all in there. John McDougall needs to read more.
Regardless, can you please list your source where the French only eat 3 oz o bread per day (I guess they throw away the rest of the bagette)?
Dr. Attia, a staunch low carber, disagrees with you:
http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/how-do-some-cultures-stay-lean-whi...
What about the Italians and Japanese? Are they all N=1?
Ondrej please do not prove to every human being capable of rudimentary reasoning that You do not have, for some reason, a basic grasp of human energy metabolism. Please do not humiliate yourself - unless You do it on purpose, just to have fun.
He said ". "Atkins is dead. I don't believe that bull---- that he dropped dead slipping on a sidewalk," Bloomberg suddenly said. "I actually went to his house out in Southampton for a Pataki fund-raiser two years ago," Bloomberg told the firefighters. "The guy was fat - big guy - but heavy. And the food was inedible. I took one appetizer and I had to spit it into my napkin."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,591316,00.html
http://www.atkinsdietalert.org/
In fact many commentators including Lustig make it clear there are plenty of routes to good health. My view and Lustigs is that sugar and fructose are particularly bad. Personally I don't think it makes too much difference if someone never eats baked or sweet potato or prefers white to brown rice, if they are eating in essence whole natural foods like that and lots of veg and protein or even if they are 100% vegetarian only eating natural veg, beans they will feel good.
I think it helps for there only to be two way of eating camps - standard Western diet full of junk and mostly or only eating wholefoods. All of us in the latter camp are on the same said. Whether you are traditional Japanese eating your bit of rice with fish and veg or an Eskimo on 100% meat/fat or grubbing for roots in Africa
I also suspect some of us including children of alcoholics in particular have big big problems with sugar. We all know some of us are more likely to be addicted to sugar and others can have the candy bar in the house and never eat it for months.
Women may differ too as traditionally they were probably grubbing for roots and finding insects and berries all day and eating more regularly whilst minding children whilst men were off hunting and perhaps not eating for days.
All of us are really on the same side. Most English people eat far far too much carb and nothing ilke enough protein. If they moved to a handful of brown carb, one of veg and one of meat 3 times a day they would be better. I at the moment as I am losing weight am not eating my brown or wild rice./baked/sweet potato but still have a good few vegetable carbs.
It's hard to blame bread and rice which have been feeding the world for more than 10000 years !!
Of course the trap is that correlation is plausible hypothesis, not causation. This is my concern with Paleo reasoning. I am with Konrad Lorenz: "It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young." It also makes for more variety in what one eats for breakfast.
It is one thing for long-qualified Doctors to be stuck in a rut (although professionally this should not be tolerated and my previous, past-retirement aged but very sharp Endo, was every bit as up to date on the research in this area as I find I have to be myself) but for fresh-faced graduates to be that way is pretty sad...
Once again I find myself reaching for one of my favourite quotes
“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.”
― Jacob Bronowski
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g
And some of the logic used to try and buoy up low fat is just as convoluted :-P
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2250450/Obesity-caused-gut-...
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2250450/Obesity-caused-gut-...
What is your oppinion about that?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19491241
http://www.dietdoctor.com/health-weight-and-gut-flora
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/
In short, they ate a diet of largely unprocessed whole foods and were very healthy. The only thing wrong with the western diet is its modern variant.