Ok, I think my sanity is coming back home for a visit:

I was never able to sustain a weight loss on a high-carb/low-fat diet. Hunger always won and I ended up bingeing too often. Low carb has worked for me as I can eat all I want and lose/maintain weight. Unlike the high-carb/low-fat problem, I don't have to be hungry all the time on low carbs.

Counting calories is something that I do not have to do on low carb. I don't have to pay attention to how many calories I take in or how many I use, I just allow hunger to be my guide. On days I exercise a lot, I eat more. On recovery days, I may or may not eat less, depending on my appetite.

Yeah, I bet the people stealing food off the trolley's in that other study were on the high carb diet. Probably that study where "mental effects" were noted they had people on high carb, low calorie too. Sure, when you're battling blood sugar you're going to be having an extra hard time of it.

Right; I think it helps to seperate reducing calories on a metabolic disease causing diet from reducing calories on a low carbohydrate diet. I often suggest people to count calories when they stall; often they respond that they are afraid they will feel hungry. They only know calorie counting in the high-carb context, so they feel reducing intake itself produces those awful blood sugar extreme hunger symptoms. In reality, most of the excessive hunger experienced on traditional weight loss diets isn't due to under eating but to blood sugar drops.

On low carb, if I planned my meals right, I can eat very little food and not feel spectacularly hungry. Yea I'm hungrier, of course. It's not the extreme, panic, soul-battle hunger you get when your body is in that emergency mode from hypoglycemia & high insulin. Many other carb sensitive obese people are the same way; they equate hunger with blood sugar drops, so they are afraid to restrict (even in the context of a low carb diet).

I feel I never knew what hunger was till starting low carb. All I knew was extreme fullness, and panic urgency of a blood sugar emergency. It was a weird state. The only time I think my metabolism worked at all was first thing in the morning; it is only then I felt satiety (and the total loss of appetite/fat burning my obesity SHOULD have produced). Soon after eating, though, that all went down hill and back on the sugar roller coaster we went. Low carb allowed me to preserve that "morning effect" all day. My body normalized intake and appetite accordingly, and I lost a lot of weight. Would I have lost as much weight without counting? Not likely. BUT I do agree with most of our forum members that I probably could have reduced my size to a healthy range by only counting carbs. For most people who are carb sensitive, counting the carbs is enough to fix most of the weight thing. The weight & eating is a symptom of the carbs; control one and you control the other.
If you have specific & very ambitious fitness goals (e.g. a 145 lb woman who wants to be extra paper-thin slender at 109) ... or significant emo/binge eating tendencies... then it may help to count cals too. But most people will find it redundant.

hey Ntz, thanks for the career advice! i was thinking about getting out of janitorial sevices and into the science journalism game, but your kind guidance has convinced me to stay put. oi fa voi!

and it's eepobee, btw.

i don't want to waste too much time commenting on the incendiary tone of your posts, but this is a public discussion forum and there are established rules for addressing each other. perhaps you should consult these rules before posting again.

discussing nutritional issues that i don't fully understand with people who might have a different perspective on things is one of the main reasons i come here. others in this thread have managed to disagree with me without adding snide commentary and i tried to extend the same courtesy. i'm sure you feel you have nothing to gain by engaging in civil exchange of ideas with people like me, but forum etiquette is definitely an area you could take notes on. if you find it impossible to post without attacking, could you at least mix in some sarcasm or self-deprecating humor so you don't come off as an angry, egotistical, jack**s?

and if you'd like to further discuss my career path or give me tips on researching my posts, please feel free to pm me and i'll give you my email address. or are you just interested in flexing your virtual muscle in front of everyone?

since you gave me such valuable advice in dissuading me away from a career in science journalism, i thought i might return the gesture. if you plan on making persuasive argurments in a scientific forum, in the future you might want to refrain from referring to conflicting ideas as "garbage" or accusing others of not knowing what they're talking about based on nothing more then your misguided sense of superiority. i have a feeling that the scientific community won't be very impressed with either your bullying or your credentials.</rant>

back on topic, the calorie count i came up with was based on the writings of steffansson himself (adventures in diet, parts 1-3). however, i wrote that at about 2 am last night, and remembered this morning that meat isn't just protein and fat, which i mistakingly assumed when i calculated their calorie intake. since you have access to more resources than me (i'm in korea with a few text books, the internet and no medical library within a two-hour train ride), i'll take your word that steffansson and anderson averaged around 2600 calories. so at 2600 calories, how do you know that both men experienced a calorie-deficit?

if you read my last post again, you'll note that i asked you to provide me with a tightly-controlled clinical trial that demonstrates weight-loss with a calorie deficit, not calorie restriction. as i noted in that post, the reason you can't do this is because accurately measuring energy expenditure is very difficult and is rarely, if ever, done in combination with weight loss studies. therefore, i find your request for a tightly-controlled clinical trial that demonstrates weight-loss without a calorie deficit disingenuous.

the kekwick study is referenced often, and i used it because it was easiest to access. i do have a lot of constraints on my time; you know floors to sweep, toilets to scrub. but i did find the author's quote you referenced, about the problems they experienced. here is the whole quote:
i noticed you cut out "a considerable number of known failure in discipline being discarded". perhaps you should change your slogan from "just the facts" to "just the facts that support my argument", huh?

since you seem to be evading my questions, let me reiterate my point(s). in your article "calories do count, baby" you mention that "One can employ both calorie restriction and increased physical activity so that calorie expenditure exceeds calorie intake". i contend that there is a third way to increase calorie expediture without calorie restriction or increased physical activity; namely by changing the macronutrient content of your diet. do you agree or disagree with this assertion? and if calorie restriction and/or increased physical activity are such a crucial part of weight loss, why do people studied on ad libitum lc diet invariably lose weight?

Eepobee, you go boy!!

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Hmmmm....don't know how accurate FitDay is in this regard, but it claims that I am burning about 2700-2800 calories a day with a lifestyle level of "Seated work, some movement". This does not include exercise. I don't know how much these guys weigh or do, or how old they are, but I'd expect a guy of similar weight, age and activity level to me would be burning more.

Fitday is not accurate. It grossly overestimated my BMR.

Mine too.

Maybe fitday PC is accurate; but fitday online, for energy out, is worthless.

I find even the "comatose" lifestyle reading is sort of accurate, but even that's a bit too high .
I'm not significantly lazier than most people I think

Nope, mine was wrong on the PC.

Nobody questions that calories in have to equal calories out.

Calories in are pretty easy to measure.

Calories out are not easy to measure.

I suspect most people think calories out are just calories burned plus calories stored.

There's a lot more to it than that. Calories out are actually:

Calories burned + calories stored + calories lost + calories wasted.

(Plus non-fuel calories like fats and cholesterol that become incorporated into cell walls, and amino acids which form structural proteins and enzymes. But these structural elements could all potentially be burned, eventually, so I'll ignore them.)

Calories lost are all the calories that you shed from your body in various ways, so they can't be burned or stored. Like the calories you excrete from your intestines and bladder. These calories originated from "calories in", so you have to account for them. Also anytime you visit the barber, the hair you lose originated from calories in. Unless you eat that hair, it's gone from the equation. Or anytime you shave, or trim your nails, or exhale the odor of food you ate (esp. garlic), or shower off billions of skin cells every morning. The actual amount of calories lost can probably be calculated, and I admit it isn't a great deal. But it's more than zero. And it may be more than negligible.

How about Calories Wasted. This is what eepobee meant, I think. It is far from negligible, and it varies continuously. And it is definitely related to your diet composition. In various abstracts I read it can vary from 20 to 40% of calories ingested, and these percentages probably refer to regular human diets, not the kind we eat.

I'd like to explain at least one method your body uses to waste calories. The following is not really very technical, it's just not for the faint of heart...


The fuel you eat (carbs and fat) is transported to the mitochondria in all your cells (that have mitochondria) where it is converted into chemical energy, ATP. If some of the fuel you burn is not converted into ATP, it is wasted. It leaves the system as heat. No ATP is generated from it. It is metabolic inefficiency. It is what allows me to eat a TON of calories, more than I ate when I weighed 35 pounds more. No -- I didn't count them. And I have no idea what FitDay is, and I don't want to know. But you can ask my wife how much I eat.

In the mitochondria the chemical bonds between carbon and hydrogen atoms release energy that pumps protons across the internal membranes within that mitochondrion. When these protons re-cross the membrane (due to electrostatic forces) thay drive an enzyme called ATP synthase, which forms ATP from ADP + phosphate.

If there was no other way to get those protons back across that membrane, our metabolism would be 100% efficient and we'd all be fat as hell, or explode from all the stored ATP. (maybe this is what spontaneous combustion is?)

But also in that membrane are uncoupling proteins (UCPs) which allow a certain number of protons to "leak" back across the membrane, bypassing ATP synthase. These UCPs can be turned on and off by various metabolites, including ADP. But they are always present, and therefore the amount of ATP a cell can make at any given instant can be increased or decreased in that instant, depending on the conditions or requirements inside the cell.

And-- the number of UCPs in each mitochondrion can increase and decrease. Guess what factors affect those numbers?

From the following PDF:



http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.or...eprint/49/2/143

(If you google mitochondria, uncoupling proteins and diet you can find tons more.)


So if I eat an Atkins high fat high calorie diet, all my mitochondria in all my cells contain enhanced numbers of uncoupling proteins, allowing a lot of my calories to be burned without the formation of ATP, and without incurring a storage (fat) penalty. Even though I eat a lot of calories (units of heat), I don't store a lot of kgs (units of weight) of fat.

And if you eat a low fat diet, your metabolism is more efficient, and more of your consumed calories drive ATP formation, which if you don't exercise them off become fat.

So eepobee is right. Changing the macronutrient composition of your diet is the third way to increase calorie expenditure without calorie restriction.

That's all well and good but why is it that for some of us, we still have to watch every last little stinking calorie or we don't lose? Or worse, we gain?

It is typically a male that gets on and talks about how he eats more than normal on low carb and loses weight, and its typically women I run into on this message forum that stop being able to lose weight on LC until they start counting calories.

Don't get me wrong, I love LC for many reasons, but as a magical, eat-lots-of-calories-and-still-lose diet it isn't for me and lots of others.

And why is it that some drugs, like prednisone and some anti-depressents, and hormones, cause people to gain weight on fewer calories?

I hadn't thought of it in that way before. I still fear hunger, although I must admit I haven't really felt it (like I remember it) lately. Actually it's been over 2 years since I've really felt it.

But the fear remains. I hated that feeling.

After reading your post, I think I would be willing to try calorie restriction, if I ever want to get to my goal weight. I'm not sure I need to, it's just the weight at which my BMI hits 25. I feel pretty good where I am. Maybe my metabolism is telling me "that's enough".

I'm not saying that you don't have to cut calories to get to your goal weight. I'm pretty sure I'll have to cut calories to get to my goal weight. I'm on a 2 year stall, I guess. If I've made my metabolism inefficient and gotten this far with it, I guess this is all the farther I will get. It isn't only women that "stop losing weight on low carb."

I agree that men lose faster, and maybe more, on lc. Maybe we're more "apple shaped" than women. In this study of women the more insulin sensitive they were (pear shaped) the better they did on a low-fat diet-
Obesity Research 13:703-709 (2005)-- sorry I don't have a hot link.

Prednisone does bad things to people's appetites, along with fluid retention and other stuff. Antidepressants affect appetite. Hormones are hormones, your body is supposed to react to them in various ways. If your body is making the hormone usually the effect is good. If you're ingesting the hormone you just know it's not going to work perfectly.

When I experience hunger on low carb it isn't nearly as horrible as it was on high carb. Its just a short of gentle reminder from the mid-section that I should eat. And cutting calories doesn't necessarily mean you have to go hungry either, it just means you choose less calorie dense food. Sometimes my hunger gets displayed as sleepiness, which is definitely weird. I used to get nauseous along with hunger pangs in my high carb days. It is horrible feeling you have to vomit unless you eat something.

I always wondered about prednisone. You see these sick little kids and they look so obese, but you know they've been through a terrible illness, they can't possibly be that fat.

I saw a show last night about a little kid that survived an internal decapitation. Wow! Talk about lucky. But he had that stay-puft-marshmallow look that I bet was the prednisone.