http://www.menshealth.com/cda/artic...-0-1303,00.html


An interesting article that actually raises some serious issues. Over-eating even when on a LC diet can lead to weight gain, especially with all the "LC treats" now on the market.

We've heard this warning before, but I remain unconvinced that the trend interest in lc will impact people like the low fat fad did.

Even assuming you do low carb the wrong way - that is, the low fad way of eating tons of junk food, snack bars, ice cream, etc and calling it a "diet" - you still are better off than you were before if you had a carb problem.

Let me give a personal example. Just a few minutes ago I indulged in a LC treat. It was 75% a glass of carb coundown milk (about 2 carbs and 75 calories), half an ounce of walnuts (1 carb and 90 calories) and 1/16 an entenmann's carb counting brownie loaf thing (5 carbs and 90 calories... if you count the sugar alcohols as part of impact carbs, then it was actually 9 carbs)

My treat was 8 (or 12) carbs and roughly only 250 calories, yet I feel positively stuffed. I feel like I binged, and it was a normal portion size!
If this were a year ago and I were eating regular higher carb lower fat food, I would have inhaled that tiny treat and not have known the difference. I might be tided over for an hour, but I'd be hungry again soon.
I thankfully never experienced low fat, but I imagine if it were low fat and high carb eating it would have made me hungrier :lol

Anyway, I do agree that doing LC the wrong way won't get you very impressive results. Still, I think if you are one of those people who had a totally wrecked sugar metabolism & hyperinsulinemia (i.e. MOST obese people!), you should show some improvement on LC, even doing it the wrong way.

As fun as it is to blame people fat people for being disgusting fat slobs who are the way they are because they eat when they aren't hungry, my experience is it's just not true. People eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full. No one eats when they are satisfactorily full. The behavioral/emotional component of having a weight problem is overemphasized... in my personal experience, it was 75% physical and 25% behavioral/emotional (oh, and it's worth noting that most of the behavioral problems with food were caused by spending what I can remember of my life afraid of low blood sugar & being incredibly hungry all the time).

Basically I feel that because LC snack food doesn't affect the body quite like regular snack food, I think most people will maintain their weights eating it without thought to anything but carb count. Very few could or would want to eat an entire box of LC treats because you would become overstuffed before that happened.

not to mention you have that nasty side effect with sugar alcohols... that is a sure fire way to keep you from eating the whole box of em

I know for myself I would eat when I was full, stuffed, to the point of making myself physically ill. I mean I think of the way I was able to eat and it sickens me to this day. I would starve myself most of the time. 500 calories or less a day with fast days in between. Sometimes they were total fasts and sometimes they would be liquid fasts like soup broths or crystal light.

Eventually at some point I would go insane. I consider it some type of mental disorder, binge eating disorder, whatever you want to call it. These days might be planned in advance or they might be totally random. If I would plan them in advance I might take off work or school for that day, go to the store when no one is around. Go to multiple stores to buy different things because I wouldnt want anyone to see how much food I would by, and eat till I made myself physically ill. And then I would force myself to eat more. At one point (and I cant even believe I am admitting this) I was so full and already vomited about 3 times just from the volume of food, I couldnt eat any more, so I put food in the blender and mixed it all up so it would be some horrible liquid mixture, just so I can drink it because I couldnt eat any more. Of course I wasnt able to drink it, but just the thought and that I would attempt to do that sickens me.

I am actually amazed that I have not had any urges to binge like this on LC. I mean I have gone through this binging for most of my life since I was a kid. Of course for most of my life I was also on the thinner side, with periods where I would gain large amounts of weight from too much binging and then fast for extended periods of time to lose it.

I feel free from this horrible cycle for the first time in my life. Sometimes sugar alcohols could trigger me a bit and I would eat more than I should of the LC stuff, but I try and avoid those for the most part and thats nothing like one of my binges. I cant even contemplate eating that much food now, low carb or otherwise. Before, those binges would be what keeps me going since I was starving all the time, I knew my metabolism was getting wrecked and I did it anyway.

At one point my weight dropped below 90 lbs and I was fainting all the time and was rushed to the hospital once. I spoke to a psychiatrist who had me speak to a dietician. I told the diatician of how much I ate and she flat out accused me of lying and said that I couldnt possibly eat that much food at once.

Its sick, but its very real and very scary to feel so out of control and its like you are drugged and you dont know whats going on, and something inside of you is pushing to eat all of the food very quickly. I was terrified of anyone ever seeing me eat like this, and I think that may be one of the reasons I always felt I had to finish it fast, just in case someone came by and saw me. I wanted to leave no trace of it... I dont really know all of what triggered me to do that. I just know that its one of the worst, scariest experiences and no one wants to go through it. And I never ever want to go through that rollar coaster again. I am finally free from it and I am not going back!

I've had the same experience as you, ItsTheWoo. I can still overeat on Low Carb, but not even remotely to the extent I can on low fat. It leaves me feeling nasty full and even until the next day.

I also have a "dessert-box". That's an area in my tummy that almost never seems to be full no matter what else I've eaten that has room for dessert. But, with lowcarb, the dessert box actually can get full!

The problem I see coming is not so much with true lowcarbers but with ordinary people who aren't really eating low-carb but are reaching for that low-carb snack because they perceive it as being healthier or not weight inducing. If you start adding low-carb snacks to a regular diet you will probably gain weight since low-carb is rarely low-calorie.

After all how many people used to do that with low-fat items. They would buy snackwell cookies or something similar thinking they were safe because they were low-fat.

I think the low fat foods were different for the reasons ItstheWoo mentioned. They didn't provide any saiety so you could easily eat an entire box of them. That isn't something I find I can do on the low carb foods. Not only that, but the insulin spikes the low fat foods would have you going back for seconds a short while later.

LC foods may have their own problems, but I think comparing them to other LF snack foods isn't accurate.

I think I could take down a pint of LC Ice Cream Just as easily as a LF ice cream pint. I think when it comes to snack food LC still have on average from what I've seen about 6 to 9 grams per serving net. Eat three or four of those on a regular diet with elavated blood sugar and away you go. I see it as the exact same thing as LF. You can't be doing a sometime LC diet, you'd never get anywhere close to ketosis and you'd be eating fattier foods with high carb intake and thats what got us all overweight to begin with isn't it?

That's the upper stomach. As a child, the family naturally often ate at grandma's, and lets face it, grandma's foods are the best. And plentiful. And always include desserts. So my parents asked me once whether I had room for dessert at all, the answer was (so I've been told, was too young to remember it myself):

It goes into the UPPER stomach!

http://www.vienna-doctor.com/ENG/Ar...or_dessert.html

Why there’s
always room
for dessert

Brain scans show we can be full of one food, but not another


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WASHINGTON (Reuters), Thu August 21, 2003
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

Scientists who trained volunteers to react like Pavlov's dogs to peanut butter and ice cream said on Thursday their brain scans help explain why we fill up on dinner yet have room for dessert.

The volunteers were conditioned to become hungry when they saw certain abstract pictures, just as Pavlov's dogs salivated at the sound of a bell, the researchers said.

"Instead of using a bell and meat powder, which is what Pavlov originally used, we used visual pictures of little intrinsic significance and coupled those to food smells," said Dr. Jay Gottfried of the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience at University College London.

Gottfried was trying to explain what he calls the "restaurant phenomenon."

"You sit down to your eight-course meal for your birthday and you have gone though all the appetizers and entrees and just as you feel you can't fit one more thing in your tummy, then they bring the dessert menu or the dessert cart rolls by and suddenly you discover you have room for the chocolate fondant," Gottfried said in a telephone interview.

"This is specific satiation -- you are full of one thing but not another."

The phenomenon may help explain why diets fail, but it also sheds light on how the brain works. Gottfried, who reports his findings in Friday's issue of the journal Science, said he wanted to find out how the brain learns.

"We wanted to look for brain regions that showed decreased activity going from pre- to post-feeding," he said.

LIVE BRAIN SCANS

The 13 volunteers underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging -- a way of looking at brain activity "live" -- while doing what they thought were simple computer tasks.

Gottfried and colleagues showed them abstract, computer-generated images while at the same time wafting their way the odors of either vanilla ice cream or peanut butter.

"At various points before, during and after scanning we asked them to give us pleasantness ratings for the smells," Gottfried said. Unconsciously, the volunteers began to associate the images with the smells.

Then they fed them either peanut butter or ice cream.

They imaged the brains again and found strong emotional responses to the smells got weaker after the volunteers ate the corresponding food.

A person's response to the peanut butter odor changed after eating some peanut butter, but a vanilla smell made the brain light up again. Eventually, the abstract picture associated with vanilla evoked the responses, but again they weakened after the volunteers ate.

Gottfried said specific brain circuits are involved in this process. The researchers found heavy involvement of the amygdala -- the area of the brain best known for processing emotions -- and the orbitofrontal cortex.

"If every time you drove past a McDonald's and saw the golden arches, you felt compelled to go inside and get a Big Mac, this would be destructive after time," he said.

Something must tell the brain when to respond and when not to, and this does not necessarily stop at food.

"Whether we are talking about food or sex or even things on the aversive scale such as dangers and threats and predators, the brain also needs to know how to update ... and modulate these associations so you don't get stuck in a rut."

© Copyright Reuters 2002

I don't find that to be true at all for me. When I am stuffed I am stuffed. I will not have dessert no matter how appetizing it looks. I might look at it with big puppy eyes full of longing, but I won't eat it. Even if I could somehow stuff it down, I know that I will pay by feeling uncomfortably, almost painfully, full.

All too often however, there IS room for dessert and that's when it gets hard to resist.

I can certainly overdo on LC foods, but no, not like I could on the LF variety. The other difference is that the fullness from a LC binge lasts well into the next day for me. On a LF binge, it'd last an hour, maybe two. Then I could start again.

I don't think I'm in ketosis all that much right now since I'm in OWL on Atkins yet I'm managing to lose weight and avoid the blood sugar swings. While binging on LC food definitely stalls me out my body reacts completely differently than from a LF binge.

I have to laugh about this. Low carb is making me lose weight and I know I'm not the only one

Interesting points everyone. I think low carb has killed my ability to eat dessert when full. Here's an example that just happened last night.

Stopped at Safeway to buy pork chops for dinner. Also bought 2 boxes of Keto Go Nuts ice cream treats. I was fully expecting to eat one of those ice creams last night after dinner. I had pork chop and zucchini for dinner. Sat down on the couch to watch Survivor and NEVER EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT DESSERT!

That is an amazing event for me. I have treats occassionally, but if I eat a good dinner, I don't have the desire for more. In the old LF days, I would have eaten 1/2 the box of those ice creams. 1 would never have been enough.

I hope I'm not the only one experiencing this. It would be VERY DIFFICULT for me to gorge myself on LC food the way I used to on LF.

Reading so many of your experiences, I can't help wonder which came first for us: did the emotional problems & behavioral eating disorder (binging, urge to eat even when stuffed) cause our blood sugar & insulin problems, or did living with insulin and blood sugar instability cause the eating disordered behavior?

Personally, I think they reinforce each other synnergistically, however in most cases I think it was our high-carb diet that was the innitiator. The blood sugar instability and hyperinsulinemia was a catalyst which caused the over eating to the point of being stuffed. It caused us to mythologize food, to become over-fixated with consuming it, thus allowing us to abuse it for emotional reasons too.

I remember what it was like. Should I be put in a situation where I might go a few hours without nibbling on something, I would feel like I was going to die. Dizziness, fatigue, irritability, shakes, confusion... sugar would plummet. It was the worst feeling in the world to me, and it went away with eating. I learned to eat a lot because I would not be satisfied with a little. Eventually huge meals looked like normal meals. A couple of times, given the right situation, I would even eat till physically uncomfortable.

Even though I started using food in excess to satiate physical discomfort, it soon became emotional. The feeling of satisfying a great physical discomfort with food then bled over into my using food for non-physical reasons.
However, if I didn't have blood sugar problems... if I never was in a situation to look at food as this panacea for what felt like death ... it is much less likely that I would have developed the emotional connection to use food for other reasons. I loved food so much not just because it was fun and it tasted good, but because my body's "on empty" singles were grossly distorted and exaggerated. I know this is true because once I began low carb everything changed. Hunger feels like a nagging annoyance that needs to be taken care of (which is what I imagine most people feel), not a life threatening emergancy. Now that avoiding hunger is much less important in my life, my focus on eating is also less important. It's not that I don't like LC food either, I think I eat great quantities of better tasting food on average than before . Before, ramen soup juices cheap snack cakes and fruits made the bulk of my diet, supplemented with starchy side dishes and some meats & dairy at dinner... blech.

It's kind of strange because my behavior with food is like a broken loop. I still have the urge to take unnecessarily large portions (behavioral conditioning from blood sugar instability), but then when I do I can physically tell I've taken too much (the blood sugar instibility has been resolved, and I no longer really "need" the food to feel normal).