Not losing on 1,000 low carb calories?
A testimonial from Mr. and Mrs. Vegan -
https://mrmrsvegan.tumblr.com/post/...r-and-mrs-vegan Quote:
She goes on to say that she adopted a low fat, plant based diet and, on 2,500 caloried a day, lost 55bs. I'm sorry, but I have to wonder if this person is being truthful. How is this possible? |
From my experience, veganism is driven by moral imperative, which means facts are secondary to belief. Ergo, there's no strong incentive to control for facts that could influence the interpretation of results.
Now let's take a look at the facts which are reported so we can do our own interpretation. First, total calories on low-carb - 1,000. We can interpret this to mean a tiny amount of fat - it's not low-carb, it's low-fat. Our interpretation is supported by this phrase "...stuck in the low-carb, high protein diet mentality." Next, this phrase "...I was literally starving." We can interpret this to mean "I was hungry all the time." This confirms our interpretation of the calories/fat. The only logical inference is that she was eating a whole lot of carbs anyway, which kept her fasting insulin too high to allow fat to be released from fat tissue, so she omitted that part of her "low-carb" diet from her story. This explains the failure. To explain the success on that high-carb diet, it's a little tricky. A priori, vegans tend to lie outright about what they actually eat (they eat meat, but they won't tell you - moral imperative, remember?), so it's impossible to determine what she ate just from her own words. But there's one phrase that explains it all "I want to lose about another 15-20lbs, and I know that I can without feeling deprived or miserable." (relating to her new "high-carb" diet) We can now interpret this to mean that she began to eat a whole lot more fat, hence the lack of feeling deprived and miserable. This is supported by her report of total caloric intake - 2,500kcals. Our above interpretation of her failure and success is supported by experiments such as the Minnesota Semi-Starvation experiment, and the Bellevue All-Meat trial. In the first, constant hunger was common to all subjects. In the second, total lack of hunger was reported. However, in the first experiment, there was weight loss, so using a third experiment - the A-TO-Z experiment - we can now interpret this to mean that the carbs she ate on "low-carb" was mostly refined wheat and sugar, rather than fibrous turnip and cabbage. Ergo, WSLF is actually a low-carb diet in disguise, it omits or reduces refined and easily digestible carbs such as wheat and sugar. I searched that website for some reference to WSLF, and found a list of similar diets pushed as "advocated for milleniums", which is complete poppycock but that's besides the point. In that list, there's the Ornish diet, which is one of the four diets tested in the A-TO-Z experiment, and has been found effective but inferior to the Atkins diet is all measures including weight loss, further supporting our above interpretation of her failure and success. Finally, the story is an email presented as a testimonial for whatever that website is selling. We should all be familiar with intarweb testimonials by now, so there's basically zero credibility in there. Ya, I know, this sounds like a sweeping dismissal, but that's how it goes with testimonials in my book. |
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The only way I can see this being plausible is if water balance was obscuring fat loss. Walking 5-7 miles a day at a bodyweight of 210 pounds, with a 24 hour metabolic rate under 1000 calories--some people have slow metabolisms, yes, but you'd expect a higher metabolic rate if she was in a coma. That 20 pounds of weight loss can hide a lot. Suppose just five pounds of it were water--that water could be regained while 5 pounds of fat was being lost, and not show on the scale. That's 20 454 calories. She doesn't give a particular period over which she plateaued. But that's enough potentially hidden fat loss to make her story, as given, a bit more bellievable--she could easily be telling the truth as she experienced it, but entirely wrong about what was going on. Even people who are water fasting, a situation where not losing at least some body fat is pretty much impossible, will sometimes stall or even gain weight, for brief periods. |
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Not the exclusive domain of the vegan. I think it might happen a lot more than we think right here too. I, myself, can easily be found out by reading back my journal with 20/20 hindsight :) |
As an overweight teen, I biked for hours a day in the Florida heat while eating 1200 calories a day: and didn't lose a pound.
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In other words, "don't believe everything you think". I see it here too and in just about any food oriented forum. "I did this and then that happened. Therefore this caused that". In our n=1 experiments as well as in the more formal experiments, correlation does not equal causation. And often we are not even talking about established correlations, just coincidences or misinterpretations or misapprehensions. Jean |
It's true that we don't know the absolute lower limit for metabolism in free-living individuals. Hard to measure outside of a metabolic ward, and the metabolic ward itself is a stress likely to change the metabolic rate.
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I don't find it hard to imagine that someone is not losing on <1000 calories per day. What I do find more difficult to imagine is that someone cures it by eating 2500 predominantly carbohydrate calories per day.
If that's true (and, who knows, maybe it is), her body operates much differently than mine. |
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Guilty. I have some embarrassingly naïve comments splattered throughout my journal. I was much more confident in my ability to figure things out early on in the process. I made several "I did this" which resulted in "that" comments that proved not to be repeatable. I have figured out plenty about myself - but not as much as I would have liked. One of the most important things that I've learned is that what works for another individual may or may not work for me. I did an n=1 with carbs for 50 years. I'm pretty confident that high carb diet in the OP story is not a solution that would work for me. |
Martin's summary makes a lot of sense here in certain cases. The only difference between me and "some" vegans is that I admit that I eat meat, and I likely eat as many or more vegetables. Like many other posters, I know what would happen if I consumed carbs. Mr. and Mrs. Vegan have a few dogs in this hunt. I have one, my health.
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I ate mostly bananas for a week, once. Went into that from basically Atkins. I was surprised to find that it had a very diuretic effect, even though I was trying to eat to maintenance, I kept losing body water. Since I probably went in with low glycogen stores, I would have thought I'd at least gain some glycogen weight. I wonder if she's checked her blood glucose? Early on, before injecting insulin became an option, a low carb diet was used as an attempt to slow weight loss. Insulin doesn't need to be as high to store 1000 calories as fat and protein as it does to store 1000 calories of carbohydrate, carbs are only fattening if enough insulin shows up to do the job. Or maybe it's a salt/potassium thing, the usual suggested intakes don't make much difference, but more extreme changes might. I didn't salt those bananas. |
For one thing, if she's "soaking food in oil" then I don't see any way she was only eating a thousand calories a day. Likewise, that's like three or four chicken thighs.
So, you know.... |
The phrase "soaking food in oil" sounds more like what someone accuses Atkins of being, not someone who actually knew how to do a LCHF diet.
And I agree with Martin; words have different meanings when it comes to people embracing this lifestyle in a proselytizing, holier-than-thou kind of way. A small roundup of such translation:
And really, people can eat any way that works for them. Just stop lying about it! |
Or: Practices Meatless Mondays, Fish on Friday and puts dairy and eggs in everything = I'm practically vegan!
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Isn't it funny how one can do the exact thing they are railing against in space of one post? ;) It reminds me how how Captain Kirk blew up that Nomad computer with vexing logic...
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