Its early here. My testosterone must be very low (at least now I have shaved off all that facial hair!) But I'm really glad we have clarified this point - so its certainly not accusing someone of lying when you assert, as a "speculative possibility", that he is saying things he "probably" knows to be untrue (regardless of the reason?).

Wow. Now I can ring work, say I am sick, and go back to bed. Thanks Abd.

Cheers,

Malcolm

I am under the influence of testosterone and I didn't even flinch.

Test me out. Mention it and see? Nothing, not so much as a blink.

Anthony has a professional reputation to uphold and being accused of being blinded by testosterone into saying things he knows aren't true is hardly going to be taken lightly. ABD, you did well to apologize for doing this at the end of your post, but we had to work our way through an awful lot to get to it. If you had read all of his writings you would have known that he does not disagree with the importance of macronutrient ratios for improving weight loss, but he does not support the belief of many low carbers that one can therefor eat over maintenance of the protein-fat combo and still lose....in that regard, it is calories that count and that was his point. What a storm in a teapot.

first of all, ntz, you weren't being attacked. at least not by me. when someone doesn't agree with you it doesn't mean they're attacking you.

i never did. you asked for trials in which weight loss was observed under calorie excess, and i was making the point that excesses and deficits are very difficult to accurately assess. i exposed your request as simply grandstanding.

you claimed that calorie restriction (or reduction) and physical activity (along with metabolism boosters), were the only ways to create a calorie deficit. i only pointed out that a calorie deficit can also be achieved by changing the macronutrient content of one's diet. increasing protein is one way to do it - restricting carbohydrate is another. as the graph i posted clearly shows, as carbs are decreased and protein and fat are increased, energy output is increased. but this is only part of the story. in addition to the thermogenic effects of presented above, there is the added energy cost of gluconeogenesis. as we all know, gluconeogenesis is a metabolic process unique to lc diets (at least in the immediate postprandial state), and is heavily relied on by the body during ketogenic diets. as ketogenic dieters' bodies adapt to the use of ketones as fuel, and glucose becomes less important (from an obligate need of approx. 100 g/day to approx. 50g/d), this metabolic advantage will slowly diminish, but not disappear.

this part of the metabolic advantage has to help explain why participants in sondike's study (which i referred to earlier in this thread), who were on an 1830-calorie (ad libitum) 56/60/32 (CHO/fat/protein) diet lost more than twice as much weight as those on a 1100-calorie 56/12/32 diet. note that protein part of the diet remains a constant % of total calories. while total protein would increase on the 1830-calorie diet, the thermogenic effects could not even come close to accounting for all the extra calories consumed and extra weight loss. could you imagine consuming on 1100/day for 3 months only to find out that another person was eating 700 calories more/day and lost twice as much weight? if you are not restricting carbs, gluconeogenesis won't be triggered and much of this "metabolic advantage" is lost.

i thought you were aware of all of this, but apparently i was wrong. when i wrote:
you countered with:so you didn't neglect to mention this part of the metabolic advantage, you just didn't know about it. you could have just taken the time to read the information i posted, but since you obviously feel you already know everything there is to know about energy metabolism, you didn't bother. you continue to complain about me not reading research that i don't have access to, while you don't even read what i put right in front of you.

yes, as i've pointed out a number of times, carb restriction can lead to unintentional reduction in calories. it is this, and the metabolic advantage lc diets bestow that lead to calorie deficits . it may seem trivial, or an "exercise in semantics", to you, but to people who've unsuccessfully spent years trying to lose weight through calorie restriction and physical activity, it is anything but.


first, congratulations on being a super guy. pat yourself on the back one more time for me. but, do i really need to point out the non sequitur here? are you actually saying you must be right because you have 5% body fat? so when looking for nutritional advice we should only consult people with low body fat? no one else is to be trusted? so athletes, rock stars, and supermodels have all the answers to the hidden secrets of weight loss?

let's get down to it right here. if i came to you for advice on losing weight and improving my health, what would you tell me to do first:
a) increase physical activity
b) restrict calories
c) restrict carbs

in support of my last post from thermodynamics of weight loss diets (feinman and fine, 2004):if i'm following this correctly, the use of endogenous protein as a source for gluconeogenesis is more calorie costly than the use of exogenous sources. this seems to indicate that increasing dietary protein leads to more energy effeciency and less weight loss.

one more thing, ntz. you continue to accuse me of not reading the relevant literature. here's is how this started. i made the following request:
to which you replied:
i ask for studies that show weight loss with a calorie deficit and you give me a list of studies that show weight loss with calorie restriction. nice try...

i guess you also assumed that if you just threw a long list of citations at me, i'd somehow get intimidated and back off. wrong again.

first, i know you didn't look over your list very well. you probably just copied and pasted it from another article. because if you had examined it closely, you would have noticed that i already cited the sondike study earlier in this thread. in that study, and in all of the studies i could get abstracts for, there was no claim of calorie deficits. surely there were many calorie-deficient diets examined, as some of these were very low-calorie studies. but they didn't assert there was a calorie deficit because they either didn't measure energy expenditure or didn't claim to do so accurately.

you knew this, and that is why your challenge - asking for evidence of tightly-controlled studies that showed weight loss with excess calorie intake - lacked any real substance.

if someone had accurately measured energy expenditure in these low-fat/low-carb comparison studies, wouldn't you expect to hear about the increased expenditure found in the low-carb participants? clearly this is one of the main factors in increased weight loss in those on lc diets. but this hasn't yet been established through energy output measurements. why do you think that is?

btw, you still haven't answered my question about steffansson and anderson. how do you know that at 2600 + calories/day, they were in calorie deficit?

This whole thing is starting to get stupid.

Everyone seems to agree that the fact that some sort of caloric deficit needs to be in place for weight loss to occur. Pretty much that's all Anthony said in his article.

So, the issue is how that caloric deficit occurs, is it by restricting calories by dieting, the natural restriction of calories due to ketosis or appetite suppression due to a low-carb diet, or the increase in caloric wastage or expenditure based due to a low-carb diet.

A few people start attacking Anthony's article (and yes, the tone got ugly, it was attacking) because Anthony didn't concentrate on the method or mechanism of caloric deficit that someone felt was more important than the other mechanisms. Well, cry me a river. Anthony is under no obligation to emphasize your personal pet theories, I actually thought he did a good job of mentioning all the ways a caloric deficit can occur.

As a matter of fact, I think he did many of us a service, by re-emphasizing that a caloric deficit is necessary for weight loss and if we aren't losing weight, then the caloric deficit isn't there.

I'm glad so many of you don't need to restrict calories, that a natural reduction of calories resulting from a low-carb diets is enough, but it isn't the truth for everyone.

There are too many men in their 20s & 30s that lose weight easily due to their youth and sex and men and women who have never reached super-sized obesity or damaged metabolisms that can lose weight simply by eating a low-carb diet that try to convince us that calorie counting is never necessary. But there are a lot of women (and some men) in their 40s, 50s & 60s that were severely obese or merely have slow metabolisms, or thyroid issues, or whatever, that may have lost well by switching up their diet to low-carb but then reached a point where that alone wasn't enough. We have had to deal with the reality that the caloric deficit produced by a switch to a low-carb diet alone ISN'T ENOUGH to get us to a goal weight. We now have to increase our caloric deficit by either dieting or increasing exercise or finding some other way to increase metabolism.

Anthony's article was a good reminder that if what we were doing before is no longer working, we need to look at other methods of caloric deficit if we want to continue to lose weight.

Val

Good post, Val. I think the notion that the argument that calorie-deficit, calorie-reduction and calorie-restriction being three different things is silly.

Enjoy your racing metabolism but don't pooh-pooh the reality that others of us have to live with.

Now, if we could just get people to stop saying that eating more calories will make you lose weight faster....

The whole thing was stupid from the start. I've only read Colpo's web page a couple of times, and even I knew he believed there were some weight loss advantages to a protein based diet. And now we've got people stamping their feet with indignance over the (essentially non-existent) difference between "calore restriction" and "calorie deficit," so it's only getting more stupid.

I think everyone has pretty much made up their mind by this point.

Maybe we could just let this thread die?

Very good post Val.

I would like to add my thanks to Anthony for his contribution which unfortunately was spurred by an absurd response to his common sense column.

People will always want to live in denial over certain things - and I certainly have felt the temptation to think that I can ignore calories/portion sizes if I keep carbs low enough (only to discover that this certainly isn't so, for me). I do think that Atkins is at least partially responsible for the confusion over this issue, but on the other hand he does put strict limits on things like cheese (and cream) - and it is not because of the small amount of carbs that (particularly) cheese comes packaged with. Could it be that he recognised that many people can easily eat too many calories with these foods which will slow or reverse weight loss even at induction level carbs (as I have found)? I rather suspect he did.

Cheers,

Malcolm

Since it is early, Malcolm can be easily forgiven for missing the point of the reference to facial hair. Facial hair in women, I understand -- I'm not an expert -- to be a sign of relatively high testosterone levels. Sometimes this comes from actually dosing up on testosterone. One transgender woman reported being astonished at finding, after ramping up her testosterone levels, that she started behaving in many of the ways she had found so objectionable in men.... She began to be a bit more sympathetic.... My point was just that the kind of writing we have seen from Mr. Colpo is not common among women, and is much more common among men. It *does* probably have to do with testosterone. Women who talk or write like that *do* have high testosterone levels. Which is not a crime. Thankfully.

None of this means that Mr. Colpo is *wrong*. But it does explain why he was so assertive, why he wrote as he did. And among the effects that are probably hormonally related as well are a deep conviction in one's own correctness, coupled with disdain and ridicule of the opinions of others.

It helps in combat to think that the one's own cause is the defense of truth, and those whom one is fighting are evil incarnate. We have testosterone for a reason, the aggressiveness is not merely a side-effect.



The post asked Mr. Colpo to read carefully. Malcolm might have profited from doing that himself: he did not quote me; instead, he rearranged what I wrote, ripping it from context, to make it mean what he imagined it meant, which was, of course, ludicrous.

What I actually intended to write was that Mr. Colpo, being knowledgeable and intelligent, probably would not have written what he wrote, had he exercised sufficient caution. He knows enough to know better. That does not in any way mean that he was lying, i.e., intentionally saying what he knows not to be true. He *would* know it if he thought it through, but he didn't and probably doesn't.

Why doesn't he? I mean NOW, after the error has been pointed out to him? (And not just by me.) Two easy possibilities: he wasn't wrong, or he was wrong and he is being "bull-headed." Which is, of course, a symptom which is associated with testosterone, the very name indicates it.

And I did write what I intended to write. Go back and read it if it matters to you. Malcolm misquoted me.

As to whether he was correct or not, that is the controversy here. To be very specific about it, Mr. Colpo has interpreted the common opinion among low-carbers that it is not necessary to count calories as being an opinion that "calories don't count," i.e., that caloric intake does not affect weight loss. This is a straw man argument, as I mentioned. Nobody here believes that, but Mr. Colpo continues to respond as if that was what we are saying to him.

It has been well put by another writer (there are many good writers on this support site, it is one reason why I regularly visit): *advice* to lower caloric intake has proven singularly ineffective, whereas *advice* to lower carb intake -- drastically -- has been shown, in a proper context, to be highly effective for weight loss.

YES, a reduction in caloric intake is probably part of the mechanism by which low-carb diets work. I don't think that's the whole story, though.

YES, if weight loss stalls before a healthy weight has been reached, excess caloric intake might be involved. As I've written, it is *complicated.*



Well, does your employer give time off for mental illness? :-)

If you did what you suggested, knowing quite well that you are *not* sick, you would be lying, wouldn't you?

Picking an off-target sarcastic remark out of the air in an argument is, once again, a symptom of .....

On-topic debate and disagreement is welcome here, but personal attacks and insults will not be tolerated. Please review the Forum Rules, in particular # 3. No Flaming or insults. Members who persist in this line of behaviour will lose their posting priveleges.


Doreen

People interested in this debate should read the following thread:http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.d...hydra?id=801431

In it, it is suggested that it may not be carb reduction per se that is the critical advantage, but protein increase. There is some support for this theory cited. Also, the issue of under-reporting in caloric intake is discussed as ad libitum low carb dieters have been measured to decrease their caloric intake, whereas generally low fat diets proscribe a calorie intake level, and that intake can be under-reported.

The interesting thing is, everyone is agreeing here. Eepobee, Antz and ABD are all in agreement but using tone that is offending one another which is keeping this whole debarkle going.

It's agreed, with all three of you, that low carbing has a thermogenic effect that promotes weight loss; that low carbing often has an appetite suppressing element which in turn reduces calories consumed; that counting calories isn't always necessary when low carbing but some people may need to employ this tactic depending on their particular situation.

So what are we arguing about?

e