It’s out in paperback now. Pretty sure you’ll find it a fascinating read.

I remember those tight-budget university days. I ate a lot of mustard sandwhiches.

@ Dana: The accepted ketogenic threshold is at 100g carbs. Atkins says it’s 40g because it forces you into ketosis a lot faster and gets you used to the low-carb lifestyle, which admitted is a little difficult to adjust to after years of carb obsession. Generally speaking (i.e. for a 150 lb average build person) 100g is the ketogenic threshold.

Protein as a macronutrient does raise insulin in the bloodstream because, as I said, insulin’s not just the super-evil hormone that makes you fat, it also plays an extremely important role in protein synthesis, breakdown, resynthesis, and placement in the muscles and organs. Does it raise it as much as pure carbohydrates? No, especially if you’re insulin resistant, which most of the crowd that this website seems to target (overweight individuals) probably is. It does raise insulin a measureable amount, and raises it even more when paired with fat in a meal.

As for the satiety issue, you’re absolutely right; I misspoke. Fast food is both calorically dense AND unsatisfying, primarily due to its low protein content, since protein is the most expensive macronutrient. The higher protein that generally occurs with a low-carb diet (higher protein than the average high-carb diet) is what keeps people feeling fuller, combined with the high fat content, which delays the emptying of the stomach.

Incidentally, the reason high fat/low carb works well for your anxiety (and for mine, when I don’t have time to exercise in order to manage it) is that a heavy influx of carbohydrates causes a large release of seratonin into the bloodstream, another reason that carbs can be so “addictive.” All SSRIs do are prevent the reuptake of that massive dose of seratonin, which tends to cause anxiety.

“Big Fat Lie” was a long article Gary published in the New York Times (linked on this site). I was referring to his book “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” in which he examines 100 years of dietary science and explains how the low-fat recommendation took hold. (Hint: not because the science backed it up.)

If you check my food log, you’ll see that I kept my protein intake high. I learned my lesson during my vegetarian phase, when I could down a big plate of pasta and still be hungry soon after.

We get lung disease from factory- and coal plant-polluted air, too. But the wind sometimes blows it away when you’re outside. There’s no wind in the house.

Now for Matt. Wow. Sheesh.

Atkins said that the ketogenic threshold was at 40 grams, not 100g. That’s why he set Induction at 20g. He wanted to make sure his dieters hit that threshold, and I’m sure he knew people fudge their carb counts (no pun intended), either because of natural variations in food or just because life happens. He did say that if you’re going to get a GTT while on his diet you should first up your carbs to 100g a day several days beforehand, otherwise you’d skew the results, but that doesn’t mean you’d achieve ketosis at 99g, necessarily. Maybe some very efficient glucose-burners would, I don’t know.

What is this about eating protein raising your insulin? I know you can make glucose from protein via gluconeogenesis, but if your insulin is elevated you can’t do this. Insulin inhibits gluconeogenesis. Insulin also inhibits the release of fatty acids from adipose cells and the use of fatty acids and ketones for energy. If eating protein automatically causes insulin release then there’s no way in hell a low-carb diet would work to cause fat-burning, or it would not work consistently. I guess the big questions here are, Does protein cause an immediate insulin release? (Doubt it.) And, How quickly do insulin levels drop if the previous is true? (Irrelevant, I’d wager.) Too bad they don’t make home insulin test kits or we could verify this. I don’t have health insurance to go ask a doc to make me into a guinea pig, unfortunately.

I hate calorie theory. Calorie theory assumes every bit of food you eat is either burned for energy or stored as fat. Or it looks that way, otherwise we wouldn’t be told to cut back on fat intake because fat’s nine calories a gram. Do these yo-yos really think we don’t use fat for anything else but the energy content? No wonder the SSRI and fertility drug makers are rollin’ in the dough now. By the way, high-fat/low-carb works just as well for my mental health as being on Lexapro, without the, ah, unpleasant side-effects.

As for the idea that people get fat on fast food because it’s calorically dense, *bzzt* try again. What makes food easy to overeat isn’t its caloric content but whether it induces satiety. If I cut carbs way low and snack on things like cream cheese, I get full quickly. Cream cheese is calorically dense. Fried cheese, my low-carb chip substitute, is calorically dense. Steak is calorically dense. So is salad dressing. So are pork rinds. But eating these things in the absence of high carbs doesn’t put weight on me. Precisely the opposite. There are good biochemical reasons that eating fat + glycemic carbs causes more fat storage: you need both fat and sugar to make a triglyceride, which is the form in which fat is stored. Minus the sugar, you don’t have that central axis for forming the triglyceride and the fat just stays in fatty acid form for the most part and then gets burned for energy or used to make substances or tissues. Or excreted. I also found, for my part, that I have no problem with constipation on Atkins if I eat properly high-fat because fiber isn’t the only substance that keeps you regular. Go figure.

I don’t like smoke either — when I was a road comedian, I’d leave a club with watery eyes and smelly clothes. But the research that supposedly linked second-hand smoke with lung cancer was agenda-driven and pretty awful. Here’s the stat that matters: non-smokers who live with a smoker have the same lung-cancer rate as non-smokers who don’t. I’m against bad science, whether it supports my goals or not.

Satiety is the key, indeed. As Mike Eades pointed out in one of our interviews, he’s treated thousands of patients for obesity, and no one ever binges on steak or eggs. They feel too full, too fast.

Matt, I don’t think Tom hails insulin as the be all and end all of weight loss, merely a tool to explain why carb-loading is not really a good thing.

Tom, I don’t think Matt is arguing for calorie counting as a be all and end all of weight loss, just that it is more important that he thought you made out.

I think you would both agree on a couple of points:

1. The human body is a complex system. It is way too interconnected and interdependent to say that any one thing (likely any ten things) will be a sure fire way to weight loss. Too many extraneous factors confound any study and any anecdotal evidence, yet these are too often ignored.

2: There is no set value that is good. Ideal calorie intake for any one person will vary on genetics, activity, diet, history, environment… I could rave on for pages. “100 grams is exactly ketogenic”. This is probably true for someone, but you cannot say that this is exactly the case for Tom. I would argue that the ketogenic effect of the Zone diet would have been minimised by his moderate carb restriction immediately before the diet, therefore the glycogen/water hypothesis, while a component of his weight loss, is not the entirety.

3: Calorie restriction is in general, not great. Every doctor, nutritionist, dietician and personal trainer that I know or trust says that increasing exercise, choosing good food (unprocessed) and increasing metabolism are the key to healthy weight loss. This means eating enough for your body to not feel it is starving, exercising to burn fat and building muscle to increase your metabolic rate. The only people that seem to think calorie restriction is good seem to be non-professionals.

People need to realise that everyone is different and only by considering ones own situation can one make a decision about the best diet. Hell, I’m on over 3000 calories a day at the moment, which would work for very few people, but it does for me.

It seems we now have two relatively intelligent and informed people arguing semantics when they would probably agree on a number of points, mainly as outlined above.

I’m pretty sure Matt and I would agree more often than not.

As for the exact threshold of when a diet becomes ketogenic, even if it is 100 grams of carbs, that was only my average intake. There were days when I exceeded 120 or even 140 carbs (my food log is availabe in the links), so it’s unlikely I was in ketosis for 28 days.

Type I diabetics and Jay Cutler lose/lost weight due to a lack of insulin, yes, but not just because insulin stores fat. Insulin also stores glucose (as glycogen) in muscle, and is an important part of protein synthesis, breakdown, and resynthesis. The massive weight loss in the aforementioned individuals is due to a lack of storage of energy in the muscle, which then causes tons of free fatty acids and ketones to flood the system, and a lack of the rebuilding of muscle. This applies to the teenage diabetic girls scenario as well; they’re not losing (just) fat, they’re losing serious muscle, and putting themselves at risk for diabetic ketoacidosis.

When you take in less calories than you expend, your body’s natural mechanisms for starvation kick in, however slightly, and slow your metabolism down to compensate. In addition to this, your brain releases hormones that make you feel more tired than usual, and hormones that increase your appetite significantly. Also, if that study is based on self-reported caloric intakes, I’d bet serious money that a significant portion of those women were not being honest. Do you have any idea of the odds that thousands of women would stay at the exact same caloric intake for EIGHT YEARS? They more than likely didn’t take into account the protein intake for those women, the overall dietary practices of those women, and the exercise habits of those women.

I never said all of your weight loss was due to water. I said water AND glycogen depletion, the rest of cutting down to the exact level of carbs that the brain alone needs to function every day (before the adaptions to ketosis take place). Unless your protein intake was rather high in the first couple of weeks on that diet (150g+), I’d wager that some of that loss was muscle, too.

Do you know what else raises insulin in the blood? Consuming meals of protein. Because, like I said, insulin is an extremely important part of protein synthesis, breakdown, and resynthesis. And, if you add fat to the mix, it gets even better: more insulin. The gluconeogenesis pathway more than compensates for the lack of glycerol from cutting carbohydrates; with glucose left in the bloodstream, more glucose can be made indefinitely by breaking down protein from muscle tissue.

I’m not saying counting calories is everything, because you’re right, it’s not. You have to take into account individual hormones, metabolic rate changes, exercise patterns and types, etc. All I’m saying is, it sounds like you’re crediting insulin with being the god-hormone for weight loss, and that’s simply not true, to the extent that it will always be around for one reason or another, no matter what you do, unless you’re a diabetic. And you can’t discount the fact that calorie-counting is by far the easiest method for maintaining weight.

Also, are you diabetic?

I’m also not saying that low-carb diets don’t work, because they do. I LOVE them. They’re so easy to do and taste great, though I admittedly get sick of bacon and chicken and cheese after a while. They also cause a spontaneous drop in calories consumed due to a generally higher protein content. But unless you’re seriously eating carb-load levels of carbohydrates every day, they simply don’t change that much.

If you want to name a god particle, hook yourself onto protein. That’s where the fat loss is.

I agree that protein is a crucial component of a good diet. But it doesn’t raise insulin to the degree that simple carbs do, and it also raises glucagon, which encourages fat-burning. Insulin isn’t the whole story, but high insulin can certainly slow or stop any attempts to lose weight by calorie restriction alone.

Out of curiousity, have you read Taubes’ book?

I equate Morgan Spurlock with Michael Moore. Avoiding fast food wouldn’t be a bad thing for most Americans, as the caloric density of the food makes it easy to overeat. Which is not to say it’s not possible to maintain or even lose weight on a diet consisting entirely of fast food, something you and several others have accomplished. It seems like there’s something that would make losing weight on fast food possible… Oh, counting calories.

So if I understand you correctly, it’s all about the calories, period. There is no genuine extra fat loss caused by bringing down insulin levels, despite the fact that insulin encourages the body to store fat, and is in fact necessary for the body to store fat.

Is that your position? Okay, I’m convinced. Back to counting calories.

I’m not sure if 100 grams of carbs per day is exactly ketogenic, but from what I’ve read, all weight-loss diets produce an initial water loss, which means some of my weight loss on the Zone diet would’ve also been water. According to the “it’s all about the calories” theory, if I lost 6 pounds per month on the Zone diet, I should’ve only lost 3.6 pounds per month on my fast-food diet, given the extra 300 calories per day. Would I really lose an extra 8.4 pounds of water by cutting carbs from 175 to 100? Perhaps, but I have my doubts, especially since I put lots of salt on my food. (Yes, I salt my McDonald’s burgers and salads, too.)

Also, with the stats in your movie (average American 8lbs heavier or whatever), are ther any correlating stats on average height over that time? Cause that’s going up too. Food for thought.

My wife has endured many an outburst from me after I’ve spotted yet another badly designed, badly reported study in the media.

As I’m constantly telling my wife, “I can’t figure out if this reporter is intentionally dishonest, or just plain stupid.”

Not being hungry is key. If you eat and you’re still hungry, it means your body is storing the calories as fat, and your cells are starving. That’s what happened to me when I tried the low-fat nonsense.