To Fish re: diet/food (from: i would appreciate an opinion)

I'm on day one of low-carb and I got a cold. I'm trying my hardest not to form a link between the two :P

Miraculously, I've had no cigarette cravings today. Usually I want to smoke when I'm hungry (or when I'm out with other smokers), but today . . . nothing.

I'll keep looking around for the Atkins book, too. There aren't many charity shops in central London so I never quite get the chance to buy second-hand.

Here's Atkins in a nutshell:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_...he_four_phases

I'm listening to that Bitter Truth lecture now. It's very interesting. It's making me crave sweets, though :P

lol... I listen to it and think, "I'll never eat sugar again!"

What can I say, I'm a rebel.

I'm reading my Paleo Diet book, and as usual I make my usual rant about books:

They are all in the American context. Like with diet books, there are so many things where I read and wonder if this also applies in the EU, where our agricultural regulation is much more strict and we don't use hardly any HFCS.

According to Lustig, HFCS and sugar are pretty near the same. HFCS is 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Sugar (sucrose) is 50/50.

Haha, I just listened to that -- I should have made the connection.

He was saying too, though, that most bread in the US has HFCS in it. Bread in the EU has very little sugar -- it's banned/highly regulated (unless it's a loaf like brioche).

Now I'm going to go read the ingredients on my flatmate's bread and see.

It's almost impossible to buy bread without HFCS here. I've looked. But there's HFCS in almost every processed food here. I'm not exaggerating.

Do you think Lustig speaks kind of like Dr. Seuss?

This is what I'm taking about. Processed foods in America that are not supposed to have sugar (they are salty, for example) still have added sugar - then more salt to hide the sugar. The EU bans this; only allows it when it's necessary to make the chemical reaction -- like a wee bit of sugar to feed the yeast in breads.

That's not to say we don't have sweet processed foods -- obvs we do.

I eat this stuff:
http://www.biona.co.uk/product-276-4.html
It's so nice. Crunchy I like the rye ones better, but I'm not supposed to eat them because of the coeliac . . . sometimes I still do.

I am listening to this video now -- in the same lecture series and entitled "Obesity: Ten/Twelve things you thought you knew". It's astounding.

Especially astounding was the claim that if you're a bit overweight, "you can cure almost every condition known to medicine by losing weight".

Now my exam is over (I stress-eat junk food), I need to get back on a diet. My meds have made me put on a stone and I hate being so fat and wibbly - ugh! My brother (who's a personal trainer) says that it's possible to go no carb every other day and still lose weight... It's difficult to change my diet at the moment thought because I'm living at home and have to eat what everyone else eats. In Sept when I go to Uni, I'm hoping it'll be easier to eat healthier and keep the weight off *fingers crossed*

*Willow*

lol... No, I never noticed. Was he speaking in rhyme? Recommending green eggs and ham?

Look what I found next to this video! Taubes! My favorite.

I haven't watched this video, but I've watched several of his presentations, and he tends to cover the same stuff: .

Oh, oh, oh! Another favorite video of mine:



This guy took four popular diets and compared them head to head. And Atkins won! The researcher himself is a vegetarian and is raising his kids vegetarian, but he had to admit Atkins beat the other diets.

A big thing about the med weight is that a lot of it is water weight -- so you can't lose it by dieting I discovered that from an endocrinologist about a year after I stopped taking the drugs -- how I wish I had known that for the five years I was morbidly obese and abusing myself for not being strong enough to just lose weight.

No, but he has a similar cadence and I can actually see him recommending a meal of green eggs and ham as healthy

In that video I posted about Obesity, they showed another study that compared Atkins to three other diets (some vegetarian one, WW, and the Zone) and found that it didn't matter which one was chosen, so long as it was adhered to. All groups who stuck with the diet lost equal amounts of weight.

I think the problem is the meds mess with your metabolism. Diabetes is a huge risk with some of these meds. People talk like you get the diabetes because you're fat, but that's not so. Obesity and diabetes are both caused by the same underlying disorder. That's not politically correct to say, though. We have to say obesity is a behavior which causes other illnesses.

I've seen lots of people on mental illness forums talking about restricting calories and exercises in order to lose the medication-induced weight gain. Then they blame themselves when it doesn't work. It makes me sad, but I never say anything, because I don't want to get into the debate.

It may have been referring to this same study. It was called the A to Z study. It was something like Atkins, traditional, Ornish, Zone.

One of the things they were testing was how well people were actually able to follow the diet with minimal outside help. The Atkins group was the one that adhered best. The other 3 diets - as implemented by the dieters - ended up looking very much a like as far as their macronutrient ratios. (Ornish complained bitterly that his diet wasn't really tested, because the group on his diet failed to follow it properly.)

For the A to Z diet, they were able to sort the data according to whether the participants were insulin resistant or not. When you sort that way, the results are dramatic. Insulin resistant people do far better on low carb. Since I'm insulin resistant, it's not surprising I'd be in love with the low carb diet.

Personally I think this is one reason we get weird results on these diet studies. Different people have different metabolic issues.

The meds mess with everything, no doubt about it. Taking my first anti-psychotic was like triggering my "I need pasta now" gene. I was never much of a carb lover before; always preferred fruit and veg.

It was amazing/disgusting how much I peed and sweated when I was detoxing off the drugs. At first I just thought it was normal withdrawal symptoms -- but after six months, I saw an endocrinologist who said he had seen that in quite a few people who had stopped antipsychotics. I was losing about 2 stone (28lbs) per month for seven months without doing anything in particular! Madness.

Yet on the drugs, the psychiatrists kept telling me that the meds don't cause much weight gain - "Maybe a stone (14 lbs) at most, for long-term use" and the rest must just be my fault. Bollocks to that. I weighed 355lbs at my heaviest, well more than twice my normal weight.

I don't think it was the same study, because Weight Watchers was definitely involved.

As a vegetarian (possibly ex-vegetarian, haha!) I will say that it is incredibly difficult to follow a veggie diet in the US. You're OK if you're at home, but if you dare go out to eat you're just confronted with a sea of meat wrapped in processed cheese.

I also wonder how much of the success of the Atkins diet in these compliance studies can be attributed to its recent popularity and the availability of "low carb" carbs, like low carb bread and cereal bars.

I don't really think compliance is only to do with how good the diet is -- also depends on what food culture you live in.