Pudgy middle-aged man with a beard indeed.I f I was around he wouldn t be the only one ,Actually at 5 ft 10 in and 175 lbs my BMI is acceptable medically if not too nice to look at

Edited by author 07-07-2002 02:45 PM
basically, how it works is this. when you eat, your food is transformed into glucose and other nutrients your body needs. insulin is produced based on the amount of glucose that is produced. insulin acts as a key to allow glucose into your cells for energy. excess energy becomes fat.

when a person is an uncontrolled diabetic, they either don't have any insulin (type1) or their body can't use the insulin they have (type2). untreated, this person will lose a lot of weight really really fast because the cells aren't getting the energy they need so they begin to burn fat and then muscle. this causes a state of acidosis which is extrememly unhealthy. it can cause damage to a person's internal organs as well as a slew of other health problems.

the atkins diet tries to create that state of acidosis in a healthy person. by starving the dieter with a lack of carbs (energy), no glucose is produced. not as much insulin is produced either.

that diet is unsustainable for any length of time. i've known people on it that began to obsessively dream about orange juice. what it's doing is manipulating their insulin production, they quit the diet and gain a lot of weight back (one of the causes of type2 diabetes) and end up with a permanent damaging disease.

i have lost 112 lbs. but it has taken 6 years to do it. i think most people want to lose weight quickly and they want to do it all at once. i was concerned with keeping it off. really, the only thing i've found that works is eating less and exercise. i don't even really change what i eat. sometimes i have to judge how hungry i am and think about - do i want to eat this item because it has fewer calories and i can eat more of it or do i want to eat a little of this item because i have a craving?

anyway, i'd like to lose about 20-30 more lbs. because it's healthier and i like pretty clothes, but i have accepted that i'm never going to weigh what i did in high school. realizing that has taken a lot of pressure off as well.

Cory, if you want to loose weight, exercise and get in the Zone. It's not a diet but a sensible philsophy on blanced eating. http://makeashorterlink.com/?D22623531

Jim Canuk: That was the joke.

>that diet is unsustainable for any length of time.

What do you mean by "unsustainable"? I have met a handful of people who have been on Atkins for over three years, have achieved the weight they want, and keep using the diet.

How long until the inevitable class-action lawsuit against the FDA, NIH, and other health bureaucrats demanding billions in recompense?

Add a "low-fat" settlement on top of the "tobacco" settlement, and every class action lawyer will have a vacation home.

paul - good for your friends. i haven't tried the diet myself, because i don't think bacon and eggs taste good without orange juice. a big plate of steak with nothing else doesn't do it for me. i've know literally dozens of people that have tried that diet and hit a wall at around 3 months. it is simply too hard to follow strictly for long periods of time. they had wild cravings and dreamt about food.

i would suspect that any of the people you know on the diet either cheated or took breaks from it in that time. from everything i've read/heard, it's bad for your body to yo-yo diet like that.

This post has sure spawned a lot of private email and public posts. Here's something I just sent to Dave Winer:

This drives me nuts from an engineering perspective. Weight is about two things: how much of your food you retain and which fat-reserves you burn when. Going through all this stuff to get your body to produce this precursor or enter that state is like keeping an ssh tunnel alive by running a cron job that writes a CRLF to the foremost terminal window every ten minutes. Sure, it works, but it's a dumb hack. Better to read the man pages and figure out how to insert a NOHUP argument.

I know that bodies are more complex and subject to subtler interactions than Turing Machines, but it still bugs me. My motion is under my autonomic control, but my weight-retention is not. Some accident of evolution put the triggers for weight-loss into ring zero, non-user-executable space. I hate the idea that I need to slaughter a chicken every time I want to wheedle *my* body into executing some trivial instruction. I should be a super-user, dammit.

There's no technical reason why your body can't burn fat at whatever rate it chooses to. There's a conditional operator that evaluates your environment to determine whether the circumstances are proper for fat-burning, and I would rather spoof the condition than enter the state that satisfies it. Nanotech, where are you?

Coincides with my own observation.
Used to be a little overweight. I dropped next to all refined sugar from my diet, and now I hover around the same great weight, no matter what else I eat.
Though, that sugar thing isn't as easy as it sounds. You'll find that nearly every foodstuff that is packaged or prepared has it. Though you can be sure that food that needs sugar to be palatable isn't all that "healthy" anyhow.

Quote from "The Anti-Aging Plan" by Roy Walford (page 65):
"[...]Total average sugar intake has increased twenty-five fold during the past two hundred years. Sugar is the number one preservative used in today's processed foods. This is energy rich but nutrient-poor consumption, exactly the reverse of healthy eating. Today we are eating foods with the highest calories and the lowest nutrients - foods that leave you hungry and, on a per-calorie basis, unnourished. [...]"

Refined sugar is the root of all evil. No really. It is. I am not kidding.

Cheers.

I'll tell you who I trust regarding matters of diet is the Center for Science in the Public Interest. http://www.cspinet.org/

Skim milk, no soda, whole grains, less fat, green leafy vegetables.

I've been slowly changing my diet, which consisted almost solely of fried chicken fingers from the cheap chinese place on the corner, rainbow sherbet, cheese doodles, and hawaiian punch in the first year or so after leaving college :]

There was an interesting article in the New Scientist magazine about diet a month or so ago but I can't remember much of what it said... maybe I'll look for it @ the library today.

I want somebody to explain the French to me. They eat everything, including sweets or heavy cheese for dessert. They eat plenty of butter, meat and bread. This is not just French resteraunts but the French in their homes. Walking around in Paris one sees almost no really heavy people and damned few chunky people.

From the reports of my friends, there are precious few gyms, and while some people run and/or walk to stay healthy, many people don't.

This holds even truer for the Japanese. Although I did notice many more chunky children than adults. But the kids were bigger than their parents too. More milk is how they explain it.

 
The only thing I can figure out is that they don't seem to snack much (even the children) as we do and they eat a much more leisurely meal, which usually includes wine. However, I rarely saw people 'under the influence'.

Like the movie line, I'll have what they're having.

I've dropped most sugar-heavy and carb-heavy foods from my diet and started working out with a vengance. I eat a lot of vegetables and still eat red meat and chicken and oatmeal or Grape Nuts for breakfast with some fruit. I have no idea what kind of poundage I've lost - nor do I really care about pounds, but I've dropped about four inches off of my gut since May.

Avoid soda even if you're not trying to lose weight, I've seen several studies that suggest that carbonated drinks contribute to osteoporosis.

Edited by author 07-07-2002 06:47 PM
I'm certified as a group exercise intstructor and a personal trainer, and I used to weigh half again what I do now. This is a matter in which I have some strong opinions.

Reading that article, I was actually surprised to see the low-fat thing advertised as mainstream belief. Not in the fitness field. I also repeatedly wanted to jump up and down screaming: "All fats are not created equal! All carbs are not created equal!" (Neither are all proteins, but the article never implied anything that made me want to shout that.) Also: "All people are not created equal!" Some people are going to thrive on different diets than other people. There is no one optimal diet for everyone despite what nearly every diet guru wants to tell you.

Cory, my oversimplification about what weight's about would have three things: 1) what you eat 2) how many calories you burn 3) your metabolism. Discussion of metabolic rates is one thing conspicously absent from the article. One of the causes of obesity is intermittent caloric-restriction dieting. When you eat less, your metabolism slows down 'cause your body thinks there's a famine going on and it needs to be more efficient. If you resume eating exactly like you used to, you're going to then gain weight — eating more doesn't speed up your metabolism.

Putting on muscle mass does speed up your metabolism. That's why I'd recommend that any efforts toward a leaner body-composition (which is how I'd recommend thinking about rather than losing weight) include resistance training, i.e. lifting weights.

I'm with Bjorn. Refined sugar is evil. And sucrose has a glycemic index of 65. Flour has a GI of 70, whole wheat flour 69 -- they'll spike your blood sugar even faster than sugar, causing the insulin reaction described in the article. (The grains are physically smaller and the greater surface area:volume ratio makes for faster reactivity.)

That was my chief frustration with the article: it kept saying "low-fat diets caused the obesity epidemic" instead of "high glycemic-index diets caused it". The low fat alone wouldn't have been so bad without what we replaced it with.

Carbs are where you want to be getting most of the calories you burn for energy from. If you're eating so much protein and so little carbs you burn protein for energy, you'll be straining your kidneys: protein doesn't burn cleanly.
Now you can do this just fine with whole grains, potatoes with skins, whole fruit, veggies, and I'd recommend it. You can cut refined starches and sugars without cutting carbs. (The big difference: the whole items have other stuff, including fiber, which lowers their glycemic index, as well as lots of healthful good for you stuff you don't want to miss out on.) And be sure that all your meals balance fat, protein and carbs to further lower the average GI of the meal (which is what matters.)

I'm not sure about the French and Japanese, Pat, but I'd guess: less sugar, less dieting, more physical activity.

Oh, and I'm mostly vegan (I eat eggs.) All of these high protein diets diss vegetarianism let alone veganism 'cause its protein:carb ratio is automatically too low. Now, I fully expect that veganism and vegetarianism may not be the optimal diet for some people, but it would take a whole lot of convincing to make me think it's implicitly a bad thing.

The whole article seemed to be encouraging an anti-carb backlash as big and stupid as the anti-fat bandwagon was to begin with. Sigh.

Oh, one last thing to tie up: when I said all fats are not created equal, I want to point out that almost no one eating the standard American diet is getting anywhere near enough Omega 3 fatty acids, and any amount of trans-fatty acids (to be found in nearly all margarine, and nearly all junk food and packaged food as hydrogenated or partically hydrogenated vegetable oils, and in the fryolator of any fast food joint, even if they started out with pure vegetable oil — the heat converts it) is too much.

So please don't give up vegetables altogether and start chowing down on fried chicken and think you're doing your health a favor.

If you stop eating like a starved dog you too can be at a weight appropriate to your skeletal size!!!Why do people not get the concept?Eat less,exercise more...why is the american public so hungry and so lazy?We all should take a huge leap into reality,come-on...if you eat like a pig you will certainly look like one!!and there are way too many.The parents who's kids look like little fat versions of themselves should be held liable for the poor kids health.If my offspring look like a overstuffed pillow i would be embarassed and ashamed and wouldnt let him outside to be mocked by people with some self control.Its time the american people take responsibilty for the way they look,enough b.s.

I used to weigh about 40 pounds more than I do now. Lost 60 pounds 5 years ago, gained about 10 back in the year after that, and my weight has remained very steady ever since.

1. Most people have no idea about the nutritional content of their diet. I have friends who are grossly obese who whine that it is their genetic makeup that makes them fat -- of course they have no idea they are consuming 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day. Very few people seem to be able to accurately assess just how many calories their eating on a daily basis (I've seen research that confirms this, where people tend to wildly underestimate both how many calories they are eating and how many they can eat to maintain their weight).

2. Fat people don't exercise consistently. I certainly didn't before I lost my weight. Now I'm not hypersensitive about missing exercise, but I make sure I do some form of exercise at least 3 times a week, even if it's just strapping on the rollerblades or playing some one-one-one basketball.

3. They obsess about stupid things like fat or carbohydrates. The Atkins diet is just as silly as the ultra-low fat diets as far as I'm concerned. Everyone I know on the Atkins diet is on it because a) they want to lose weight but b) they don't want to reduce their calorie intake. Atkins works great for awhile, but everyone I know personally who has ever gone on the diet gives up after the initial weight loss and gains back all of the weight since they haven't changed their calorie intake or workout habits.

4. You have to lift weights. Again you don't have to go all Arnold Schwarzenegger, but even a basic weight lifting routine with some small dumbells in the bedroom will make a world of difference in getting the weight off and (more importantly) keeping it off. Plus you'll decrease your likelihood of being a 98 pound weakling as you grow older.

Moderation in diet+exercise will take most people quite far.

I have the opposite problem. I have never been able to put on weight no matter how much I excercise or eat. I am underweight for my height and wish that I could gain weight. I have been the same weight since I was 20 +- 1kg. (75kg 6"2)