Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
I think the "calories don't matter" folks fail to understand that it's the calorie restriction part of the low carb diet that is losing them the weight.
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But it isn't; that's the problem. There are those among us -- and I'm one -- who lost NO WEIGHT on standard low-cal diets. I was on a 1,200 calorie/day diet, supervised by a nutritionist, and lost not one pound. And I was working out nearly every day, too.
That was my most recent experience with calorie restriction, and the most closely monitored (I was scared to death of reaching my birth mother's size, and I was also paying a lot of money, so I wanted it to work very, very much). But many prior experiences, with both Weight Watchers and self-monitoring, also didn't work. I had to drop to ridiculously low calorie levels (an average of 500/day) to see steady, albeit slow, weight loss. All while working out.
On a VLC diet, I was eating around 1,800 calories a day, still working out, and lost 30 pounds. After stalling on that for 2 years, I went to so-called "zero-carb" (<5g/day CHO), stopped working out, and lost the final 40 pounds, still at 1,800 calories a day.
I know how to count, and I'm not a cheater (believe me, I couldn't do LC, much less ZC, if I were) by nature. For at least some of us, calories really don't matter, at least on the intake end of things.
I hear over and over again that LC weight loss works because of spontaneously reduced appetite, and that may be the case for a lot of people -- maybe even the majority. But for some of us, it really does appear to be something else, and it may be that that something "else" is a very deep state of ketosis. In the absence of another theory, that's the one I'm currently going with, anyway.