Mon, Feb-25-02, 00:31
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Senior Member
Posts: 8,723
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Plan: Atkins-ish, post-WLS
Stats: 408.0/288.0/168.0
BF:
Progress: 50%
Location: Southern Colorado, USA
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You definitely don't want to do low-fat and low-carb. That is one of the classic mistakes made (or attempted) by so many beginners.
Think of it this way:
Your body can either burn glucose or it can burn ketones. By and large just one or the other at any given time. It can also burn protein indirectly by first converting it to glucose.
So...
You want to keep the carbs low enough to prevent providing a ready source of glucose.
You want to keep your protein high enough so that your body's need for amino acids and such are met without having to cannibalize your own muscle but you don't want to eat so much protein that you start converting some to glucose.
If you satisfy only the above two conditions your body will be calorie starved and start going into a starvation mode and begin using your lean muscle to meet its energy needs.
So you want to eat enough fat so that your body recognizes that you are not starving.
As long as you are in this mode (ketosis or nearly so) you will not have the insulin necessary to store your dietary fat as body fat, so the dietary fat is burned as fuel (at a pretty inefficient rate of about 50%) with the balance being made up by body fat which, do to the low insulin levels, can exit the fat cells readily.
As for the energy in versus energy out debate, the first thing that must be understood is that the only major constraint that is imposed on the process by the fundamental laws of physics is that you CAN NOT put on muscle or fat weight without consuming AT LEAST that many calories of food and that if you expend more calories than you consume, over time, you WILL lose weight. Between those two bounds there are a LOT of other possibilities that do not violate the Principle of the Conservation of Energy.
It is not a violation of the laws of physics to think of a pill that would "melt" fat off so that you could consume 4000 calories a day and lose ten pounds of fat a day. All it would mean is that something is exiting your body that still has a LOT of potential energy in it. This doesn't mean that such a pill exists or ever will exists - it may well be impossible biologically for something like this to work.
One thing that a lot of the "calorie is a calorie" folks overlook is the body's metabolic responses to both the type and the quantity of the calories.
Think about a person that has a very stable weight year after year. Does this mean that this person is somehow eating exactly the number of calories they are consuming? If this were true, it would mean that their average daily intake was stable to within just a few calories - and that's an absurd conclusion. Your calorie intake varies dramatically day to day - give or take about 1000 calories about the overall average. It makes a lot more sense that their body adjusts their metabolism and the fraction of calories that are extracted from the food stream in response to changes in diet - both short term and long term.
So now we can refute the "Special K" diet that has received so much play time in the media over the last few months. According to this rather well orchestrated marketting campaign, if you eat a bowl of Special K instead of your normal breakfast you can expect to lose 10 pounds a year without changing anything else. They imply that it is something special about that particular serial but in the more in depth interviews or news snippets they reveal that this is based solely on the assumption that a bowl of Special K is going to have 100 calories fewer than your "normal" breakfast. Do the math - if their basic assumption is correct then this works out to ten pounds a year. But their basic assumption is faulty - not to mention that it is also dependent on the assumption that your average calorie intake is somehow magically matched to your energy expenditures down to the 1 calorie level.
On average, for people near their ideal weight, the body expels about 10% of the absorbable calories it takes in without absorbing them - some people are a lot higher. For most people that's about 200 calories. So if your body needs more calories it can get some of them by simply absorbing some more. After that, it simply reduces the number of calories that are being burned solely for heat and after that it slows your metabolism a bit.
It's pretty astonishing when you think about it - the same people that go on and on about how the differences between simple and complex carbohydrates are so critical and how the differences between HDL and LDL are so critical can't even entertain the notion that the body responds to calories very differently based on source and quantity.
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