Download: Low Carb Diet

Severely restricting carbohydrates in the diet (less than 40g per day) has a number of beneficial medical uses but also some substantial limitations. These include:

1.      The Low-Carb Diet promotes rapid fat loss through the inefficient burning of your fat stores as energy, spares most protein loss, and re-establishes insulin sensitivity.

2.      The Low-Carb Diet promotes rapid detoxification of toxins, which are primarily stored in your fatty tissues – but this assumes that the liver’s capacity for rapid detoxification is adequate.

3.      However, a life without carbohydrates is severely restrictive and in practical terms, “no way to live”.

I do use The Low-Carb Diet with patients but only for limited periods of time and for specific medical purposes like initial rapid weight loss or rapid detoxification.

When you severely restrict levels of carbohydrates in the diet, you force the body into a metabolic state known as ketosis. When available from the diet, carbohydrates (starches, sugars, and sweets) are the preferred fuel that the cells burn to generate energy. They are the petrol for your body’s engine. Any excess food in the diet (whether carbohydrate or protein or fat) will be stored for future use and most of the excess energy is converted to and then stored as fat. Most people in industrialized nations eat nearly twice as many calories as they need to thrive, and much of that excess is converted to extra fat. An analogy I often use with patients is, you can only stuff 10 pounds of sausage into a 5-pound bag for so long before something has to give.

Dangers of being overweight:

            Being chronically overweight is, first of all, unpleasant in terms of your quality of life. It is associated with symptoms like fatigue, malaise, and back pain. But more importantly, being overweight is associated with diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, and a significantly shortened lifespan. To make matters worse, most studies show that the vast majority of people who diet and lose weight only increase their risk of disease and death. Why? Those who go on fad diets or who severely restrict calories tend to lose muscle and keep nearly all of their fat. There are only two diets that I have found that really help patients lose fat and maintain their muscle mass. Those are the Low-Carb Diet and The Blood Sugar Balancing Diet. There are advantages and disadvantages to both diets. Both diets oppose our popular culture eating habits that are so focused on sugar and carbs (sweet, white, refined, and deadly).

In addition, both the Low-Carb and Blood Sugar Balancing Diets

·       Emphasize low-carb vegetables (non-starchy vegetables) as the cornerstone of a healthy diet. 

·       Improve insulin sensitivity and help prevent and treat diabetes.

·       Lower triglycerides and blood pressure, but do not generally affect cholesterol levels significantly.

Low Carb Diet	Blood Sugar Balancing Diet*
Faster short term results	Better long term compliance
Rapid fat loss	Steady fat loss
Easier to follow, especially eating out	Requires more planning & preparation
Severely restricts carbs	Allows most carbs in moderation
“Cheating” produces strong cravings	“Cheating” is easier to manage
Does not restrict calories – no counting	Moderately restricts calories – must count servings of food though not calories
Does not restrict fat	Moderately restricts fat
Better choice if unable or unwilling to exercise	Works best when combined with exercise – best choice if training regularly

*A paper describing The Blood Sugar Balancing Diet is available from our office or at www.ihs.eu.com.

Even with people for whom I recommend the Low-Carb Diet, I invariably wean them off this onto the Blood Sugar Balancing Diet. It’s a much better lifetime diet.

Some facts about obesity and diet:

1.      Almost all obesity exists because of metabolic imbalances

2.      The basis of this metabolic disturbance is high blood insulin levels which result from eating too many carbohydrates, especially simple carbohydrates like sweets, refined grains, potatoes, and sugar – it has little to do with how much fat is in your diet

3.      Some people are more sensitive to the effects of carbohydrates on their metabolism than others. You can bypass this metabolic “defect” by restricting carbohydrate intake

4.      The “calorie theory” says that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, and that obesity results from eating too many calories, regardless of what type of calorie they are (carb, protein, or fat). The calorie theory is essentially false, however. Calories from fat or protein in the absence of carbohydrates actually induce weight loss – no matter how many calories you eat.

5.      A carbohydrate-restricted diet results in faster fat loss than does water fasting (eating nothing but water) because the metabolic rate does not slow down as it does with fasting.

6.      High blood insulin levels, caused by overeating and especially overeating of carbohydrates, contributes to the development of diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.

Based on the popular “calorie theory”, most nutritionists think that obesity results exclusively from over-eating. But this theory has been largely discredited in light of the simple observation that different types of dietary calories produce different hormone responses. Carbohydrates are the main stimulus for insulin release, whereas proteins alone tend to increase glucagon release, and fat alone induces a panoply of hormone responses (like leptin) that we are only just beginning to understand. In short, these different macronutrients affect our physiology quite differently. Even so, the calorie theory is not entirely wrong: when you eat all three macronutrients in large amounts, calories do count very much, and caloric intake correlates with obesity.

            One of the biggest mistakes in nutritional medicine in the past century was the general recommendation to people from 1970’s-1990’s to reduce their dietary fat intake. This simple recommendation may have done more to accelerate the obesity epidemic than any fast food chain could ever think of doing. The problem with this recommendation stems from the well documented phenomenon that anyone who is placed on a low-fat diet with no other restrictions will eat about 20% more total calories than they he or she previously ate on a high-fat diet. People eat more on a low fat diet because they never feel full. Understanding why we feel hungry and why we feel full is critical knowledge for losing weight and keeping it off.

Appetite – Hunger – Satiety

Simply put, you feel hungry when your blood sugar levels drop and you feel full when your blood fat levels rise. Falling blood sugar and rising fat levels stimulate the hypothalamus in the brain, and the brain then responds to these changes by making you feel hungry or full. This way your brain monitors your body’s blood chemistry and tells you what you need to do to stay healthy and alive. In animal studies, if you block the satiety center in the brain, the animal will literally gorge itself on food until it dies, and if you block the appetite center, the animal will eat nothing until it starves to death.

            Now think of the typical Western diet, what I sometimes call the Standard American Diet (SAD) or the British Average Diet (BAD). It’s high in sugar and refined carbohydrates and additionally very high in total calories. From 1975 to 1990, as the world’s nutrition experts recommended restricting fat intake, red meat and fat consumption declined about 20% but refined sugar intake in the USA, for instance, increased from an already world-leading 118 pounds (53.6 kg) per person per year to a whopping 137.5 pounds (62.5 kg) per person per year. That translates to an average of about 680 calories per day from refined sugar alone! Meaning that roughly one-fourth (¼) of our daily caloric intake comes from sugar – not counting all other forms of carbohydrate. Of course that was 1990. It’s even higher now.

Why are sugar and refined carbohydrates like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, and fruit juice such a problem? They all cause a rapid rise in blood sugar when they are absorbed from the gut. The rapid rise in blood sugar causes a rapid release of insulin. Insulin drives the blood sugar into the cells and this in turns causes a precipitous drop in blood sugar. Do you remember what a drop in blood sugar does to you? It makes you feel hungry. So, about 3 hours after eating, you feel hungry again, and the cycle of overeating and feeling hungry continues. Most overeating is caused by low blood sugar, which is caused by overeating.

This cycle is made worse by eating low-fat foods. In this case, you never feel full, sometimes not even right after you’ve eaten. Furthermore since low-fat foods are generally high in carbohydrates, you’re likely also promoting wild fluctuations in your blood sugar and insulin levels, and this leads again to hunger and overeating and gaining weight, especially around your middle.

One of the benefits of the Low-Carb Diet is that while your blood sugar levels stay quite low, after the first 2 days, they don’t “fall”, and since you’re eating all the fat and protein you want, your blood fat levels remain high and you feel full most of the time. In fact, what most people notice is that the first couple of days are difficult – your body is trying to maintain blood sugar levels and your brain tells you that your are hungry. But in about 48 hours, once you enter ketosis (the burning of fat as you main fuel), your hunger usually vanishes. Within a week people notice that they’re not usually hungry even at mealtime. They will eat roughly the same amount of meat and non-starchy vegetables that they would have eaten before but without any bread, potato, grain, or sweet. In reality, they’re eating a fraction of the calories as they used to eat, and are feeling little if any hunger.

Low Calorie Diets:

            What about just eating less? Generally speaking, eating less is a good idea. Remember, the average person in Europe and America eats at least 50-100% more food than they need to thrive. People who eat less on a regular basis are healthier and live longer. But severely restricting the amount of food you eat in order to lose weight is generally not successful. Why? Because if you eat fewer calories than your body needs to function in a day the body responds by producing less thyroid hormone which in turn, slows your metabolism, so the few calories you are eating goes further. On top of that, you’re usually hungry the entire time you are on a severe calorie-restricted diet, so the drop-out rate is quite high. On top of that, when you resume a “normal diet” you will quickly put weight back on because your metabolism is now slower than it was.

Fasting:

            What about avoiding food all together and drinking nothing but water? Water fasting has many medical uses. Water fasting stimulates a lot of internal repair processes in the body. It is an excellent therapy for getting irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, colitis, or rheumatoid arthritis under control. After 48 hours with nothing but water, the body will shift to burn fat as its primary energy source. This promotes rapid detoxification as well. However, because no calories are going in the body, the body believes it is starving (rightly so). In response, the body will produce less thyroid hormone and slow metabolism. In fact the metabolic rate will drop about 1% per day when someone is on a water fast – up to about 30 days. So as a weight loss method, fasting is also not very good, since when you resume eating, your metabolism is much slower and you will regain weight quickly.

The Low Carb Diet:

            The low carb diet acts like water fasting in that by removing carbohydrates from the diet it forces the body to burn fat for energy. However, by continuing to supply protein and fat in the diet, it prevents the metabolism from slowing down. So fat loss is rapid, detoxification is rapid, the body shifts over to “repair mode”, and when done properly, there is little rebound weight gain afterwards when you return to a sensible lifetime diet like the Blood Sugar Balancing Diet.

            The Low Carb Diet works best when there is a quick start phase of about 2 weeks where carbohydrates are severely restricted to about 20g per day. (To give a point of reference, one slice of bread has about 15g of carbohydrate.) After the quick start phase, the amount of carbohydrates allowed is relaxed gradually up to about 40g per day. The Low carb Diet will not work if total carbohydrates go above 40g per day, since at this level one leaves ketosis, and the preferential burning of fat for energy will stop. In fact, between 40 and 200 g of carbohydrate per day, a significant amount of muscle loss occurs since the body converts protein to sugar.

Before starting this diet, you should be examined by a physician and have some blood tests run, especially for liver and kidney function,  to make sure your body is up for the challenge of a Low-Carb Diet, and have a body composition done to determine how much of your body weight is fat, how much is muscle, how much is water inside cells and outside cells. Only then, will you be able to monitor your progress and make sure that you are losing fat and not muscle.

Download and print the full Low Carb Diet here.