Hi Merpig,

OK, confession time:

I would have a slice of bread in the am, another one in the evening, totalling 30g of carbs. I am trying to wean myself off bread at the moment and have replaced the am bread with - for the minute - a small portion of milk rice with cinnamon. I shall try porridge, too, doing it the NT way and soaking it first.

I'm not a big one for fruit, either, but you could maybe experiment if eating the fruit with something else, say, half an apple with some chunks of hard cheese (I use Dutch medium mature Gouda), because I think the addition of fat/protein slows down the insulin hit (you'd have to take your numbers and make some comparisons, I suppose).

I like brown rice, so I have about 80g (one serving spoon) with my main lunch meal. I have sugar with my coffee (about 1/2 a tsp), and drink about 4-5 cups a day (although I am weaning myself off the caffeine). I sometimes indulge in a 10g square of 70% cocoa chocolate with my coffee. I have fruit in summer, raspberries and strawberries with cream or yoghurt or sometimes have half a banana with Greek yoghurt.

If I remember rightly, you're a fan of Sally Fallon's "Nourishing Traditions": she has quite a few recipes for unusual, non-gluteny grain dishes like millet and so on. I would imagine it would be possible to cook those up in batches and then freeeze small portions to have with a main meal. If you froze them in individual portions equalling whatever amount of carbs you wanted to have with a meal, that might also help not to "overdose" on the carb in question.

I think, in your shoes, I would experiment with some of those grains that SF mentions. I am a big fan of potatoes so I am happy to have my hash browns, or just a few chunks of potato added to a beef and veggie soup.

And soups made from pumpkin and similar veggies are great in winter.

Good luck with your cooking experiments!

amanda

I'm always amazed that people can eat ordinary potatoes, rice, grains and bread and stay on LC. Man I touch that stuff and within three days I am face-down in carbs. I have to either be ON a meat-centric plan or OFF it; mixing in the carby foods I ate all my life just doesn't seem to work for me. That's part of what I spent the last 2.5 years doing: new ideas about what new thing to use to increase my carbs, all of which triggered me offplan repeatedly. Except legumes. I was able to make stews with beans quite well. Unfortunately I lost no weight when eating them, go figure. Now I'm back to VLC but feel better on it -- whether because of major vitamin supplementation or having had a break between...who knows.

At this point if I need to raise my carbs I'd probably do better at using cheesecake for it than anything else LOL.

OK - the Ein/Eout discussion is making my head explode. But isn't the point that not all the fat and protien we eat are used as energy? Everyone (meaning regular people, not us) accepts that we have totally new cells after 7 years, but does not accept that the calories hypothesis might be crap. Where are the raw materials for all these new cells coming from? I use a building hypothesis. You can't build a skyscraper out of electricity. That would be silly. You need bricks, and mortor, and rebar, and stuff. We can't build a body on calories, we need building blocks - protein and fat.

AJCole, you should see what people can come up with to cling onto the calorie balance hypothesis. It's incredible. Some are even contradicting themselves without ever noticing it, because they have blind faith in it.

Also, the calorie balance hypothesis is so simple that everyone can grasp it. Most people are not willing to let go of such a beautifully simple explanation of obesity and weight loss. Even though it is utterly invalid and barely useful at best.

Unfortunately, the truth is very complex, we don't even know exactly what it is still. But we do know that it's not about calories. That has been demonstrated in ward studies.

Patrick

I would guess it would depend on how much insulin resistance a person has. Fat doesn't need insulin to get into fat cells but it does need glucose (and HSL suppressed by high insulin) to stay there and IR tends to keep more glucose available.

I love it! I feel like this sometimes too.

How come the 'good carbs' aren't any good?

Quite simply false.

http://www.paleonu.com/panu-weblog/...e-from-fat.html

Patrick

I will add that not only is it impossible to grow fat by overeating fat, it's impossible to grow fat by eating anything in the absence of carbohydrate, with the exception of certain causal agents such as drugs and the like.

Mathematics to the rescue.

Let's establish how much carbohydrate it takes to grow fat over time. 86g per day for twenty years should do it. This is the toxic threshold for diabetes type 2. Since diabetes type 2 and obesity are tightly associated, it's reasonable to assume that the toxic threshold for diabetes type 2 also applies to obesity. So it takes 86g per day for twenty years to grow obese. How much protein, or fat, would we need to ingest in order to reach that amount of carbohydrate by converting the protein and the fat?

Protein can be converted to glucose at the rate of about 55%. I don't know exactly how much glycerol, the substrate from which we can get carbohydrate, fat contains but I'm positively certain that it's no more than 10% at best. So I'll use this figure for now. It is said that only excess protein is converted into glucose. Let's say a normal human male needs about 1.5g per kilo of protein to maintain lean tissue mass. Whatever is in excess of this will be converted to glucose. A 100kg human male would need 150g of protein. If he ate 200g of protein, he would convert the excess, about 50g, but only 55% of this will end up as glucose, so about 25g. That's still not yet to the toxic level of 86g. That's not all, we haven't yet established how much food we would need in order to obtain that much protein. Let's use plain old beef for this. Beef contains about 20% protein by weight, or about 25% when cooked. To ingest 200g of protein from beef, we need to eat 1kg of meat. Less if it's cooked. So, from one (actually the first kilo of beef we eat) kilo of beef, we can extract only 25g of glucose. In order to reach the toxic level of 86g, we need to eat an additional amount of meat that would give us the equivalent of about 60g of glucose to make up the difference. That's another 600g of meat. So, to get to 86g of glucose, we need to eat a total of about 1.6 kilo of meat. Whom do we know, besides myself and a few others, eat that much meat (never mind that it's lean meat in this example) in a day, let alone every day for 20 years? And whom do we know, from that group, who grew fat from it?

I discounted the amount of glycogen that may be stored in muscle cells of the meat we eat because first, it's not much more than 1% by weight, and second, it's entirely possible that the cells used it up once the animal was dead and thus unable to supply the oxygen needed to use fat as fuel, and consequently the cells would use the glycogen anaerobically until it ran out. Even if there is still some glycogen in there, it's only going to add no more than 10g per kilo of meat, or in our example above 16g total. That's still way off the toxic threshold.

The problem with the hypothesis above is that it's impossible to eat only protein since it's catabolic and toxic. In other words, not only can't we use protein as fuel for the purpose of converting protein because in order to be used as fuel it must first be converted into glucose, it makes us sick. Nevertheless, the math shows that it's extremely difficult to reach the toxic obesogenic level of 86g per day of glucose just by eating protein, if it were even possible to do so.

Now for fat. Only 10% percent of it (maybe less, somebody correct me), the glycerol substrate, can be converted to glucose. The math is simpler here. We would need to eat at least 860g of fat to get 86g of glucose. In terms of calories, that's 7740.

Just think about that for moment.

So without the help of a cooperative doctor, is there any way to tell if you are insulin resistant?

I don't think so since insulin resistance is diagnosed, to my knowledge, from inferences of a combination of clinical tests, among other things. I other words, it's not directly measured.

That has so far, not been proven to be true by any research.

Ever hear of acylation stimulating protein (ASP)?

Also, Body builders, even drug free ones, do this thing called a low carb bulk.

Do you know why scientists don't even waste their time in demonstrating this? I'll tell you why.

It's because they know that without insulin there is no fat accumulation and they also know that fat has practically no effect on insulin. If you were to eat only fat for one month, you would slowly waste away, more slowly than on a water fast, but you would really lose a good deal of excess fat weight and a fair share of muscle too. This would happen if you eat no protein or carbs at all and no matter how much fat you eat.

Patrick

Unless you are Type 1 and have no beta cell function at all, you will always have insulin in you system. It stops your muscles/organs from being broken down to create glucose.

Agreed.

But without some protein, you're going to lose lean mass and when there is no lean mass left then organs are not being repaired anymore and death is around the corner. This will happen even if you eat 10 000 calories of fat per day and also you won't be able to gain excess fat. You may not lose any fat on 10 000 calories of fat per day, but you wont be able to gain either. You would lose weight, because your muscle is broken down but not replaced anymore since there is no intake of protein.

Patrick

If you were to only eat fat for one month you would be a very sick human being. They are called essential amino acids for a reason. But the statement I was responding too was about zero carbs, not zero protein.