Sun, Jan-15-17, 06:41
|
|
Senior Member
Posts: 15,075
|
|
Plan: mostly milkfat
Stats: 190/152.4/154
BF:
Progress: 104%
Location: Ontario
|
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by EileenJoy
Many thanks. Very good advice. My sister keeps telling me to do Weight Watchers, though, because - when it first came out - Atkins intimated you could eat as much as you wanted, as long as you followed the food chart. Now that it's changed so that you're allowed only small portions, I am wondering what is its advantage over Weight Watchers? The advantage of Atkins is now lost on me.
|
I think this is a fair memory of original Atkins, he did give this impression. I did lose from 190 down to 170 without counting calories, and it is a common occurrence for people to lose while eating protein and fat to appetite. But Atkins didn't stop there. He suggests a lot of things, some seeming contradictory. For example there are spots where he suggests that if you fail to lose, your fat intake may be a little high. Then there's the fat fast, where you take the opposite strategy of eating almost pure fat--but at lower calories, for a period. Which certainly goes against the unlimited calories idea. And when writing about induction, there's a place where he reminds that while two-thirds of protein can be made into glucose, only one tenth of fat can--the "glycerol" of triglycerol. I'm sure he used all of these with individual patients. With a larger audience--he couldn't give individualized advice, so we get a broad prescription, the one likely to work for most people--and then these various tweaks to try, if it doesn't.
If you have to eat less, how is this better than Weight Watchers? Well, there's this--suppose somebody had to restrict their calories by 20 percent to lose weight, whether they were on a high carb, mixed, or a low carb diet. Even if just switching to a low carb diet didn't result in a spontaneous calorie deficit, that doesn't mean that eating a controlled calorie low carb diet won't be easier that eating a higher carb caloried controlled diet--you can't know that for yourself without doing the experiment. There are plenty of low carb studies showing spontaneous weightloss without discomfort, without prescribed calorie restriction, but there are also a fair number showing weight loss with low carb and calorie restriction combined, without the expected discomfort, Gary Taubes writes about a number of these in Good Calories Bad Calories. I know for myself that eating a more ketogenic (controlled protein as well as carbs) version of the diet allows me to lower my calories without discomfort, and without the binges that this would make me prone to on a less ketogenic diet.
|