A fitness instructor who was trying to scare me off of Atkins told me that when you deprive your body of carbohydrates for so long, as soon as you eat them again, your body stores them immediately as fat. So he says the minute you exceed your CCL, you blow up and get fatter than before.

Can your body really selectively store food as fat? Has anyone heard this?? Does this make any sense???

Jennifer

I'm no scientist, but to answer your questions in order, 1) not to my knowledge, 2) nope, 3) uh, no.

NO! Eat losts of carbs and you are just back to low-calorie low-fat.

How can you possibly store any calorie as fat unless you're eating more than your body uses? Of course, eating too many refined carbs is what caused insulin swings, which made me eat more calories than my body burned, which is how I got where I am right now.

Where'd he get his degree in nutrition, out of a cereal box?

This hawgwash about "depriving" your body of carbohydrates. Never forget that there is NO minimum amount of carbs we need. Zero. Fall below a certain amount of protein and you will become miserable and die a painful death. Ditto for fat. But as Steffensson proved, you can live indefinitely on fat and protein.I worried for a while because "The Glucose Revolution" basically a book friendly to our WOE says something similar - stay off the carbs and then you can't tolerate them at all. But think about it - when you're insulting your metabolism with tons of sugar, you have lots of circulating insulin and a few more carbs don't make all that much difference. Eat more rationally, you'll have less free insulin, so of course that 20 grams of carbs in a piece of bread is noticable. If eating more sugar helped us to cope with sugar, there'd be no obesity, diabetes, etc.

Hey all,

Just what I suspected. It seemed absurd. Another Anti-Atkins lie!! I think some of these "professionals" just want to promote their way of doing things and will say anything to get you to go along with their program.

Jennifer

Never heard anything about what you're trainer said (bunch of hooey to me )

The only thing I've read is if you cut out protein from your diet totally for a long time, your body stops producing the enzyme that breaks it down. So suddenly eating animal protein again will make you sick.

OK, the first carbs you eat when you "go back" will be immediately burned, knocking you out of ketosis - fat burning.

The first excess carbs (carb-loading) you eat will be stored as glycogen in your liver, adding 3-5 pounds of water weight for each pound of glucose up to 5-10 lbs total.

The next round of excess carbs will flood your bloodstream, driving up your insulin levels as your body struggles with the excess glucose. The insulin/glucose flood will trigger the conversion of this excess into fat.

The very process of dieting (any diet) is believed to increase the number of fat cells in the body by maybe 20%. (Precursor cells are allowed to mature into fat cells - the new cells are smaller, but there are more of them.) These extra cells make it easier to regain lost weight and harder to lose the weight the next time around. That is one reason why yo-yo dieting is so destructive long-term.

The instructor therefore was only partly right, at best - not the first carbs, but rather the first or second big glut of overeaten carbs will be turned into fat.

The point is this - IF you go on a diet - STAY on the diet!! The yo-yo-ing and cheating are not benign variations - they are deadly. Our WOE needs to be a WOL in order to keep the weight off.

Ummm...not quite true. If you exceed your critical carbohydrate level for maintainance you will gain weight, hence the definition of critical.
Exceeding your CCL (critical carb level for losing) only means that you will stop losing, not necessarily that you will immediately start gaining.
Another question would be why would you deliberately exceed your CCM knowing that it will cause weight gain?
Or another good question to ask that instructor is "what happens when you exceed the number of calories that you need to maintain when you are on any other diet?" You gain, right? Now...why would you want to do that? Low carb is no different. Calories don't matter quite as much (although they do matter in the long run), but once you determine your CCM, don't exceed it except on rare occasions and you should have no problems maintaining.

Fat can only be stored as fat. Fat will be stored as fat if your body is loaded with carbohydrates which the body burns first. When you burn off all the carbs and eat more carbs, your body will continue to burn carbs and store fat.

The human body is not an alchemy machine. You can't turn lead into gold and the body cannot turn carbohydrates into fats. Also, when someone puts this diet down, I will ask them which phase of the diet are they referring to. I guarantee you that anyone who puts it down can't explain it. They see the half brained version presented on the news and they think that they know it all.

Its a conspiracy I tell ya..............

Of course a trainer will want to keep u eating carbs, or he might be without a job.....

so does diet this and diet that.......whats the cheaper food out there...its carb loaded. How long has the diet industry known about what carbs do ???...yet we have no anti carbs campaign.
Kinda like with oil, we have better science...but look at all the jobs and markets that would disappear.

lol.....like I said its a conspiracy ......

Yes, it is a conspiracy, but high-carb diets are a government-promoted conspiracy based on a not-quite-scientific idea about weight gain/loss and a large bunch of pro-carb marketers.

20 years from now, will it be the "meaty conspiracy" and whatever else?... NO. IMNSHO.

The good news is that we will have much more science on our side - the high carb folks have almost nothing legit in their favor.

The ONLY food I've ever heard of being "stored as fat" was sugar. Well now, that's not exactly rocket science is it, since your body has no real need for refined sugar!

Otherwise, it's like Dr. Atkins says: you gotta do the maintenance thing to keep the weight off!

This isn't true in my case...that you will gain it all back as soon as you reintroduce carbs... because i switched from Atkins to CAD...I sometimes exceed the amount which would be my CCM and I do note water gain but I have lost weight on CAD and not regained the 40 pounds I lost on Atkins

Gotbeer:

That makes complete sense to me. Dieting might increase fat cells because when your body exists in a deprived mode, it prepares to grab on and keep the food it has been missing the next time it gets enough. So it overproduces those fat cells and gets ready...Got it.

But the carbs turning immediately into fat is a load of horse manure. Excess carbs just make it easier for fat to happen.

For me, the bottom line is that when I eat a lot of carbs, the particularly bad, empty carbs (white flour, sugar, cereals, etc), my body just doesn't like it. I do agree with those folks who think eating that way just isn't natural. Hunting and gathering didn't include looking for the Snickers bar.

Thanks! Jennifer