What I've learnt about weight control..

What I’ve learnt about weight control..

Before I took up LCHF I learnt the following the hard way..

1. Exercise is very poor for losing weight. It takes a 100m bike ride per week to do it.
2. Exercise is essential in large amounts to keep weight off if you’re on a high carb diet.
3. High carb diet is not as effective for long distance cycling as mixed carbs and protein/fat.
4. You will always be hungry at a lower weight on a high carb diet.
5. Genetics is very important in weight, until you lower your carbs, if your family is fat.
6. A huge feed of carbs won’t satisfy you for long.
7. Some “foods” like Pringles, Potato Crisps, rich cakes, ice-cream lead to over-eating in a big way.

After I took up LCHF.

1. This food is intensely satisfying and the effect lasts for hours.
2. If you watch the carbs, the rest autoregulates and you naturally lose weight. In my case, 28lb in about 22 weeks. At your natural weight, the weight loss stops.
3. If you keep the carbs low, the weight does not go back on and you stay satisfied.
4. To sustain this diet, you must make a bit of an effort to keep the diet at a high quality. To me, this means making omelets, adding all kinds of ingredients, seeking out fat and fatty meat and fish, adding fat to vegetables etc. Eggs are IMO, a must.
5. If you don’t exercise on this diet, your appetite drops correspondingly. My weight has been rock steady for 7 months. It varies within about 3 lb (normal fluid variation).
6. LCHF has a profound beneficial effect on mood. Mine is much more even and is better. This is the experience of most people who do it. It is possibly due to suppression of brain inflammation.
7. You feel much more energised. High carb diet makes a person lazy.
8. I don’t sleep better. My sleep is the same.
9. I cycle a lot and after a couple of weeks my cycling was as good as ever. I can cycle all day on no carbs at all and my day to day muscle recovery is better. I no longer bonk. If I need to eat my energy drops a little and is rapidlly restored by eating.
10. It’s common to get a hugely fat man tell you that the Atkins diet is dangerous because Atkins died of a coronary (which he didn’t, though he may have had one previously (he had been very fat)). One of these days I’m going to tell one to take off his shirt and go belly to belly with him and ask him which of us is more at risk…
11. While you would think that it should be easy to persuade someone to try it, the vast majorty won’t. Three people in particular I can think of who absolutely should be on it, and they won’t even stick their toes in the water.
12. No matter how much brilliant science is done by greats like Volek, Phinney, Westman, Feinman and loads of others, pompous fools will continue to spout their usual nonsense about happy clappy wholegrain delights, ethical turnips and vegan lions etc.
13. I’m full sure from my own experience that Gary Taubes’ explanation that appetite is stoked by a lack of flow of fuel to the cells, the simplest of explanations, is correct.
14. All my family in the last two generations, has tended to be fat. My father and all his family were fat (9 in the family) and his mother and one brother has T2DM. He didn’t. I’m pretty sure that their ancestors weren’t, before the potato and sugar entered the Irish diet. A huge amount of sugar was consumed with tea, in Ireland.
15. If you’re trying for the sake of your fellow-citizens’ health, and I am, to persuade the population to try a lowcarb diet, the best way you can do it is to stay thin. My two tips for this are to be ruthless about carbs and to measure your waist more than your weight. Most have found this to be a better way to monitor their status.
16. There are video resources online to recommend to people who’re considering going on LCHF. Two I’d really recommend are those of Tim Noakes and Bob Briggs (Butter makes your pants fall off).
17. For those who’re worried about fats, read Nina Teicholz’ brilliant Big Fat Surprise.
18. If you want to know more about biochemistry etc., Ivor Cummins (@Fatemperor) is a good place to start.
19. I’d given up sugar previously but I gave up sweet things and sweeteners. I found this hard but persisited and got used to it. I think that that’s important.
20. I used to be a doctor. Doctors read much less than you would imagine. That’s one of the problems but they are too busy. Retired doctors are really good at digging through the literature!