Perhaps it is something you ate....

I've been reading a great deal about nutrition lately, and it seems the widespread idea concerning low-fat diets is largely mistaken.

Long story short, when consuming carbohydrates, the body metabolizes them first as sugars (they are sugars after all) and eventually stores them as fatty acids. This tends to increase the manufacture and use of insulin, too, in order to keep blood sugar levels reasonable. Whereas fats get processed rather differently. The idea is to reduce carbohydrates in favor of fats.

Now, nutrition in people is a remarkably difficult subject to study, but the evidence seems to be piling up.

This is really hard for me, as I've made low-fat into an art form of sorts, and have learned to embrace carbohydrates in all forms (see my blog). The mere thought of not choosing the leanest cut of meat, not favoring chicken breast, not eschewing cheese and butter, all seems unnatural, forced.

Who knows, I may go all in with the Paleo diet, too ;)

There has NEVER been sufficient evidence of a low fat diet being beneficial and there has always been some shaky evidence that it was very dangerous for young males to be on a low fat diet (suicide, assaultive behavior, homicide).

Insulin is more dependent upon sugar substitutes since they are what changes your gut bacteria.

Low fat diets have always been an attractive myth. Most sensible people stuck with butter rather than margarine. And low cholesterol means low sex hormones so why would anyone really choose a low cholesterol diet?

I gave up carbs 2 years ago and never
looked back. Not a diet, a lifestyle
change. Nothing with any kind of
flour, no corn or rice or potatoes.
I eat lots of fatty meat, like bacon,
sausage, pork and beef roast, burger.
Lost 40 pounds and am never going
back to carbs.

Right now in the slow cooker is sauerkraut,
cabbage, green beans, onion, and 2
pounds of polish sausage. Some carb in the
onion and beans, but its irrelevant. I keep
it under 25 grams a day. Most people eat
hundreds of grams a day. Eskimos flourished
on extremely fatty meat and little else.

I eat lots of eggs and cheese too. You get used
to no carbs, there are so many choices it's easy.

Quote: Evenbob

Right now in the slow cooker is sauerkraut, cabbage, green beans, onion, and
2 pounds of polish sausage. Some carb in the onion and beans, but I keep it under 25 grams a day..

I think that would qualify as a ketogenic diet.

There's also been some criticism about counting calories. I never really got into that, though I paid attention to the percentage of calories from fat in many foods.

The idea of calories has always puzzled me a bit. A calorie is a unit of energy. Now, it makes sense to measure energy in food, as one function of food is to provide energy, and it makes sense as a measure of activity, because you expend energy when exerting an effort.

But how does energy relate to body mass?

Put another way, do less calories equal less weight gain? Conventional wisdom has it so, but is it so?

One time I asked myself: If you eat 100 gr of anything, what's the most weight you can gain? The common sense answer is 100 gr, and that's wrong. The body also breathes, and oxygen is used a lot in organic molecules. So 100 gr. of X food will combine with how many deciliters of air? How much of that will be used by the body either as raw material, as energy or as energy store?

Further, 100gr of carbs contain 400 calories, while 100 gr of fat contain 900 calories. Does this matter?

I need to do more reading on the whole matter, but it seems I'll be changing my diet a bit, and exercising more. I've found that regardless of what I eat, I loose weight if I exercise regularly.

Quote: Nareed

Further, 100gr of carbs contain 400 calories, while 100 gr of fat contain 900 calories. Does this matter?

The body burns fat immediately as energy. If you
eat high carbs and fat at the same time, it will
burn the fat for fuel and store the carbs as fat
for future fuel. Works the same with alcohol,
it burns it for fuel right away and stores the
carbs you ate as fat.

Cut the carbs out and you will lose weight. But
people love carbs, sugar and grains and high
carb root vegetables is what they survive on.