Have you ever had a great deal of weight to lose or has 15 pounds been it? If you ever had to work at it for as long as I did, you would know that there is only so much you can eat of anything and then you gain weight.

I think the point is being missed. I'm sure that Schwarzbein and Atkins have worked with people who had a great deal of weight to lose. I don't see how my personal situation is relevant. (But to answer your question, I have not had to lose more than 15 pounds). This is not about being sensitive or insensitive to someone's situation.

Let me be clear: I am not taking a position on this matter. I am asking a question in order to resolve a conflict between Atkins-Schwarzbein and the Eadeses. (Does anyone disagree that there is a conflict?) This is about physiology. Do fat calories matter or not? I'm seeking an answer based on science. I'm not the one who first raised the question. It is is raised in the very literature we tout.

Cheers,

Sheldon

Sheldon....

Let's look at what the authors have to say. The Eades' say not to worry about calories or fat grams unless you're not losing weight which would mean to me that if you're not losing weight, you need to start counting calories and/or fat grams because you are, in fact, eating too much. Dr. Atkins also says not to worry about counting calories, but also cautions that the metabolic advantage of low carbing is not to be used as an excuse to gorge yourself; "eat until satisfied (ie no longer hungry), not stuffed". If calories don't count, why the caution to not gorge yourself on protein and fat? So far, I don't see any disagreement here.
Then we have Diana Schwarzbein (who I have to confess, I haven't read yet and don't even have any of her books other than her cookbook) who maintains that it's impossible to overeat protein or fats because they are self-limiting and to a certain extent, I believe they are (although I'm not one to ever say that anything is impossible, especially when we are talking about human behavior). If you don't think so, try sitting down and eating an entire stick of butter sometime. If you succeed in eating the entire stick without getting sick, then you have a far stronger constitution than I do.
Okay...so one author says you may have to count calories if you aren't losing weight, one says don't count calories, but don't gorge yourself either and the third says don't count calories because you won't need to...the way you're eating is self-limiting. Does this mean that one of them has to be wrong or does it simply mean that they are reporting what their experience has been in their respective practices? Dr. Schwarzbein, if I remember correctly, deals primarily with women who are very focused on counting calories as a whole and also usually very portion-control minded from previous dieting experience. I honestly don't know for sure.
Some people, however, either don't listen to or simply don't recognize the "I'm full" signals that their bodies send them. Those are the ones that I think probably would benefit from counting calories to avoid overeating.
Each of these authors has a slightly different perspective on calories, but I don't think that they necessarily disagree with each other and I think that the best place to go to resolve the "conflict" as you see it is to go to the authors. How about sending an e-mail to Dr. Schwarzbein asking directly how many calories a day would be appropriate for weight loss assuming that your body does not tell you when it's had enough and see what she says? I honestly can't speak for her and why she says what she does.
Personally, I think that calories DO matter. It only makes sense that if you take in far more calories than you expend, that unused energy has to go somewhere. It doesn't pass unused out of your body (most of it DOES get digested) and they don't just magically disappear simply because you are following a low carb WOE, so what is your body to do with the excess? Store it. The metabolic advatage is simply this: your body uses more energy to burn fat and protein for energy than it does to use carbs and sugars, so you can consume slightly more calories on low carb than you can on low fat/high carb and still lose weight, but that doesn't give you free license to go hog wild. Fats and proteins are far more satisfying than carbs and sugars and in the case of many people (although not ALL) are self-limiting. Most people can only eat so much of them before they feel uncomfortably full or nauseated, but there will always be a few who can eat far more than they need.

The question of whether a conflict even exists is dependent upon how complete you want to assume each author is being. Let's assume that for 95% of the population that they can eat without worrying about calories at all because a combination of mechanisms will come into play to prevent them from overeating.

So one author that is primarily trying to address that 95% says that you don't have to count calories. They are trying to emphasize the "proper way" to approach things that is appropriate for the vast majority of people. Are they claiming that calories absolutely, positively do not matter? Not necessarily. They are stating a general rule that applies to the vast majority of their readers. They may then just ignore the other 5% or they may have a section for further reading that goes into more detail for those 5% who are not being successful using the general rule.

Another author chooses to address the calorie issue up front in order to be more complete even at the risk of overwhelming many people with too much information or leaving people confused about whether they should count or not count.

Is there a fundamental conflict between the information being provided? Or is it simply a different style of presenting information relevent to a certain target audience?

You have to look at what the main gist of the underlying principle is and who the target audience is.

Audience: People that have been, for the most part, totally focussed on counting calories as the end-all, be-all of losing weight.

Main Principle: That with a low-carb diet, counting calories is not important for the vast majority of people for a combination of reasons:

a) The body will not use dietary fat for energy in a highly efficient manner and hence a greater number of dietary calories will be wasted.

b) The body will have a hard time storing excess calories as fat (hard time does not equate to absolutely impossible).

c) With a high intake of fat, the body's satiation mechanism will normally come into play well before the total intake of calories becomes excessive.

Because of these factors, the vast majority of people do not need to worry about counting calories because, if they follow the plan, they will tend to not consume enough for it to become an issue.
The authors are trying to break their typical reader away from a very deeply engrained mindset and also need to keep their approach reasonably simple to understand, comprehend and apply. Hence they emphasize the "rules" that will work for the vast majority of people and rely on side-notes and such to address the people that do not fall into "the vast majority" - or ignore the issue altogether. Each author must decide how much detail to go into, when and where to go into greater detail, how much simplification is too much simplification, what fraction of all readers they want to cover. Each author comes to a different set of answers and a different approach on how to address these areas.

Dr. Atkins' method is a good example of this:

Yes, on page 73 he says to count carbs and not calories. And that is the central theme of his approach. But to read from that one statement that he maintains that calories don't matter is to ignore several other parts of his book.

For instance:

Page 143: "Athough there is no need to count calories, they do matter." He then proceeds to explain why how a low-carb program stacks the calorie deck in your favor and concludes with the statement, "But understand that this does not give you a license to gorge."

He then proceeds to address the minority of people for whom the "count carbs, not calories" rule doesn't work in the section on Metabolic Resistance.

On page 272 he states, "I realized that a small but intensely suffering segment of my readers would need to know how to overcome metabolic resistance." He then goes on to say, "The Fat Fast is one controlled carb program where you do have to count calories."


Are you seeing how it isn't so much a matter of the authors contradicting each other - at least not in the big picture, certainly they are not all in 100% agreement with each other on all of the details and it is unlikely that they ever will be - nearly as much as it is a matter of each author making decisions about what subset of the total information to include (as there is NO WAY to include it all) and making choices on how to present it.

Individuality is the Key
 

I think that even tho, there may be some similarities in losses, and gains, it all falls back on the individual metabolism. My son, is 22 y.o. w/ CP, he eats 3000-5000 calories a day,both high carb, high fat & high protein, and it is like "pulling teeth" to get him to gain weight! He has no aerobic activity or exercise to burn it off...
I have been on Induction since last Friday... I don't know how many calories I am eating in a day... I generally eat something about every 2 hrs., why? Because the very act of eating boosts metabolism, & since I have no exercise to speak of,(not beyond my normal day to day mommy duties :) ), I want to help my metabolism out a bit.
When I get through with this Induction thing, then I will evaluate if I am satisfied with the results, if I want to stay on it, or keep with it. I am not having a problem with the foods I eat, and am even getting over the "kill for a candy bar" feeling :P If I get into a stall period, then I will evaluate & tweak it if I have to.
I think anyone can gain given the RIGHT COMBINATION of foods that it would take for them to gain! My son, how I WISH he would gain some more, but then I have the other side of the coin,where it would be harder to lift him,do transfers and the such. He is healthy,& the dr. remarked that he is one of the healthiest individuals with Cerebral Palsy that he ever seen as far as weight. Those w/ Cp will have a 25% faster metabolism than the general population.. wish I could bottle his metabolism & sell it~ I'd be a millionaire!
I hope that I made some sense and conveyed what I was trying to, without all the fancy gobbledeegook and technical talk about how our bodies do this or that. :wave:

calorie counter : protein ? fat ?
 

My understanding is that it is true that although carbs may be absent in a diet, too many protein calories -> glucose conversion -> insulin -> fat storage (or at least cessation of fat loss). A reason for many stalls.

So theoretically, if fat excess does not follow the same path as protein excess, does going on a 100 % fat diet of unlimited quantities of fat mean that weight loss is inevitable ?

The answer depends on what the body does with excess fat in the absence of protein and carbs. I'm not sure anyone knows for sure but the logical answer seems likely to be that excess fat calories over the bodies energy requirements are discarded. However why should the body look to its existing fat stores for energy in the presence of sufficient dietary fat ? and people do get fooled: they look at their purple Ketostix and think they are losing fat, however in the 100 % fat diet described, the Ketones would be largely being generated from dietary fat.

The short answer would then be that logically, calories do count: the body is happy for you to consume fat only if you want, but if you consume equal to or greater than its energy needs, you will lose nothing.

In summary: you need to go into calorie deficit to lose weight: but if you eat just enough protein for your bodyweight and add additional fat such that your total calories are less than the bodies requirements, you will lose. But all of the rules that apply to high carb, low fat calories restriction diets apply here too: eat too few calories, metabolism will slow, muscle gets utilized.

Just my views of course, but it's starting to make sense ...

I don't think there's one absolutely right answer here. A friend of mine and I are both following the LC lifestyle, and both of us wanted to lose about 5 more pounds. We both switched from half and half to heavy cream in our coffee, which saves a couple of carbs per cup but triples the fat calories. He lost weight, I gained, because the extra fat put me over 12x my body weight in calories. I went back to half and half and am now re-losing the weight I gained. FOR ME, the extra fat calories were worse than the few carb grams I saved. For him, it had no effect.

Schwarzbein says you can't overeat fat? My personal experience would seem to indicate otherwise. YMMV.

Thanks
 

Thanks, everyone. This is exactly the informative discussion I had hoped to stimulate. Very helpful, indeed.

A couple of comments. According to Atkins, "Fat Fast" is an extreme solution for those suffering metabolic resistance, a disorder. We should keep that in mind.

I see that, theoretically, Schwarzbein does allow that excess dietary fat could be stored. I say "theoretically" because she also seems to argue that in practice, this will not happen because of the body's reaction to excess dietary fat at a sitting. (Do people continue to eat even when nauseated? I ask this purely for information.)

Here's the relevant passage, from p. 128, "But if the snack is made up of protein and fats, your body can use these foods first for building materials (cells, enzymes, hormones and so on), leaving fewer calories to be used as energy or stored fat."

She makes this point in her discussion of why a fat calorie is not equal to a carb calorie. This section is worth the price of the book. Since calories are measured under laboratory conditions (i.e., it's a measure of how much water is heated when the food is broken down into its elements: hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon), it tells us little about what happens when fat is ingested. Why? "But when you eat the same piece of chicken, your body does not break the chicken down into its basic elements. The protein and fats in the chicken are only partially broken down into amino acids and fatty acids, which are then used to build new proteins (muscle, hair, skin) and fats (myelin sheaths, cell membranes and hormones).

"Since the chicken was never broken down to its basic elements but instead was reconfigured into new proteins and fats, all of the bonds were never actually broken. Therefore, all of the potential energy was never released as it is in a laboratory setting. Because proteins and fats are not broken down into energy and are used instead as building materials, little or none of the proteins and fats goes to fat storage."

Carbs are different because they are not used as building materials.

This makes sense. But I am not a physiologist or an endocrinolgist (unlike Schwarzbein), so I can't be sure. That's why I raised the issue.

I'll leave it at that. Thanks again.

Sheldon

I see that Sheldon and I were posting at the same time, so this post is primarily in answer to peterj's question about "fat only diet leading to weight loss".

In the 1930's there was an experiment in New York where Arctic explorer V. Steffansson & a colleague were monitored by Bellevue Hospital. For one whole year, they ate only meat (protein and fat) with NO carbs at all and totalled about 2500 calories per day. At the end of the year, Stefansson had lost 6 pounds and was found to be in very good health. This was one of the earliest studies on low (or no) carb eating, based on what he found among the Eskimo/Innuit of the Arctic.

Since the body can convert protein and fat into whatever it needs and there are vitamins and minerals in the fresh meat, this experiment shows that weight maintenance is possible and will not necessarily result in endless weight loss, even at the no carb level. And yes, the body can synthesize a form of Vitamin C from fresh meat. (Sailors used to get scurvy on long voyages because they ate mostly preserved/salted meat.

No, you would not do well on a "fat only" diet. You would lose pounds but the body would be cannabilizing its own lean muscle mass to try and keep the heart and other organs going. Eventually, the organs would fail and a person would die, albeit weighing less than when they started the 'fat only' eating.

Protein is essential to life, and so is some fat. Only carbs can be dispensed with, although there are side effects of doing that.



:wave: