Living Low Carb (3 page)

And most of all, I believe that the most important thing to “fight” for is the elimination from our diet of the food equivalent of “weapons of mass destruction”—sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and processed junk carbs.

Everything else is details!

So where do we stand now?

In the above paragraphs, I talked about eating carbs responsibly and about respecting what they can do to our bodies. Even the fact that we now talk about such things shows how far we’ve come since our wholehearted—and uncritical—embrace of high-carb dieting some forty years ago.

Let’s recap.

The Biggest Nutritional Experiment in History

The high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet has been the longest uncontrolled nutritional experiment in history.

The results have not been good.

Perhaps you’ve noticed.

Perhaps you have been one of its victims. You’re unable to lose weight—or, if you have lost, it certainly hasn’t been easy. You found yourself constantly fighting cravings, you were hungry a lot of the time, and you suffered with feelings of deprivation. You felt fatigued, like you were running on empty, and were still always battling the bulge, mostly unsuccessfully.

Maybe, like a lot of low-fat, high-carbohydrate dieters, you’ve noticed that your hair is dry, your nails brittle, your energy low, and your vitality sapped. And guess what? For all that, the weight
still
doesn’t come off—or, if it does, it comes back on with a vengeance and you’re right back where you started, except this time you feel even more discouraged.

Or maybe you’re lucky enough to have never been on this delightful seesaw that I’m describing. Maybe you’re just curious about all the fuss that’s being made over low-carb diets and you want to learn more about how they work. Maybe you’re thinking that you could stand to knock off a few pounds and are interested in low-carb dieting but don’t know where to start. Or maybe you’re already convinced that low-carb diets are for you but are concerned about some of the health implications that well-meaning people have warned you about.

Well, you’ve come to the right place.

Living Low Carb
will help you understand three things:

1.  What low-carb diets actually do to and for your body, and how they do it

2.  Why some programs work for some people (and don’t for others)

3.  How you can adapt what you discover in this book to your own lifestyle

While I’d love to think that everyone who reads this book will devour it from cover to cover for its scintillating content and wealth of information, realistically I know that, with the possible exception of my girlfriend and my mother, few people will actually approach it that way. So I have designed
Living Low Carb
to be used like the
I Ching:
open it anywhere, and it will—hopefully—give you information you want.

I imagine that some of you will be interested in understanding more about the different popular diet plans, how they work, how they differ from one another, and what they offer. You guys should go straight for
chapter 7
, “Thirty-Eight (Mostly) Low-Carb Diets and What They Can Do for You,” find the plan or plans you are interested in, and read about them. You may find that reading further will spark some questions, which you’re likely to get answered in
chapter 10
, “Frequently Asked Questions.” Maybe, as you dig deeper into the book, you’ll find yourself wanting to know more about the hormonal mechanisms in the body that drive weight gain and weight loss; you will find those issues addressed in
chapter 2
, “Why Low-Carb Diets Work.”

Some of you may have already been on one of the plans discussed in
chapter 7
but want more in-depth information about the questions, concerns, and controversies you have been hearing about—for example, cholesterol or ketosis or bone loss or kidney problems. You might head straight for
chapter 6
, “The Biggest Myths about Low-Carb Diets.” When you get those concerns addressed, you may want to go back to
chapter 2
, “Why Low-Carb Diets Work,” to read more about the science behind low-carb eating and how it actually does its good work in the body.

The permutations are endless.

I also expect that there will be some dyed-in-the-wool low-carbers who have already experienced myriad health benefits, including weight loss, and simply want some tips for staying motivated, not getting bored, finding new things to eat, or breaking plateaus. All that information will be found in
chapter 10
, “Frequently Asked Questions,” and
chapter 11
, “Tricks of the Trade: The Top 50+ Tips for Making Low-Carb Work for You.”

Because I have designed this book to be extremely user-friendly and because I want you to be able to skip around as you like, some of the information and issues will be discussed in more than one place. For example, the subject of ketosis, which used to be so central to the Atkins diet and has been such a focus of criticism from the establishment (and which has caused such misunderstanding in the media), is discussed in three places. You will get a brief overview of ketosis in
chapter 2
, “Why Low-Carb Diets Work”; but a much more in-depth discussion, which answers the criticisms leveled at ketogenic diets, appears in
chapter 6
, “The Biggest Myths about Low-Carb Diets.” You will also find an abbreviated discussion of ketosis in
chapter 10
, “Frequently Asked Questions,” since ketosis is definitely one of the topics about which I get the most questions when it comes to low-carb dieting.

Here’s a brief guide to what you will find in
Living Low Carb.

Chapter 1: The History and Origins of Low-Carb Diets

Guess what? Low-carb dieting did
not
begin with Atkins! Low-carb diets actually date back to 1864, when William Banting wrote his famous
Letter on Corpulence
(in essence, the very first commercial low-carb diet). But Banting’s diet wasn’t known as a “low-carb” plan; in fact, there was no such label until the USDA decreed, in its 1992 Food Guide Pyramid, that the perfect healthful diet for Americans includes six to eleven servings of grains and starches per day. From that time on, any program that disagreed with this extremely elevated high-carb orthodoxy of the dietary establishment was by definition disparaged as “low-carb.”

This chapter covers the breadth and evolution of low-carb diets over the decades, including the discovery in 1940 by Dr. Alfred Pennington that some individuals simply cannot metabolize carbohydrates as efficiently as other people do; Dr. Herman Taller’s
Calories Don’t Count
(the high-protein reaction to the fashionable mania for counting calories); Dr. Irwin Stillman’s
The Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet
; and, of course, the introduction in 1966 of the CEO of all low-carb plans, the Atkins diet. Told against the background of “mainstream” nutrition, the chapter also considers the philosophy of the über-dean of high-carb proselytizers, Nathan Pritikin, and his heir apparent, Dean Ornish.

I hope you’ll also begin to get a sense of why stances on nutrition can be so political. I also hope this chapter will help you gain a better understanding of where the lines in the sand are currently drawn regarding theories of weight loss and healthful diet.

Chapter 2: Why Low-Carb Diets Work

Low-carb diets are based on the fact that food has a profound effect on hormones—including the fat-storage and fat-release hormones. The hormone that gets the lion’s share of attention, with good reason, is insulin, but there are others that come into play. The foundation of the low-carbohydrate movement has been the theory that controlling these hormones with your food choices is
at least
as important for weight loss as calories are (the establishment continues to insist that “it’s the calories, stupid”). This chapter discusses:

•  How insulin operates and why regulating it is central to the theory behind all low-carb diets

•  Controlling blood sugar

•  Insulin resistance

•  The role of insulin in heart disease and why a low-carbohydrate diet can reduce your risks

•  Hypertension (high blood pressure) and how it can be reduced with low-carbohydrate eating

•  Obesity and how low-carbohydrate diets can help

•  Type 2 diabetes and low-carbohydrate diets

Chapter 3: Fat, Cholesterol, and Health: Have We Been Misled?

We all know about the fat that lives on our hips, butt, and thighs, but many of us remain confused about the nature of fat in our diet (and are particularly confused about the relationship of dietary fat to the fat around our middle). Since one of the biggest arguments against low-carb diets made by traditional and conventional dietitians and physicians centers around fear of fat, understanding exactly what fat is and what it does (and what it
doesn’t
do) is critical to understanding why low-carb diets are nothing to be afraid of. I’ve added this primer on fat and cholesterol to this edition of
Living Low Carb
to arm you with knowledge about this terribly misunderstood component of the human diet and to hopefully get you to reconsider some of the prevailing myths about fat, cholesterol, and health.

Chapter 4: So Why Isn’t Everyone on a Low-Carb diet? (OR Why Your Doctor Doesn’t Know about This Stuff)

If low-carb diets are so great, you might well ask, why isn’t everyone on them? Why does my doctor still warn me about them? Why do I still keep hearing how “unhealthfly” they are?

There are many, many reasons why low-carb diets haven’t reached a critical mass of acceptance in the general population, let alone in the medical and nutritional establishment (though huge progress has been made). This chapter briefly considers some of the many reasons why so many people continue to be misled or uninformed about what low-carb diets are (and aren’t). This includes, sadly, most doctors in America.

Chapter 5: Is There Such a Thing as the “Metabolicn Advantage” of Low-Carb Diets?

The so-called “metabolic advantage” is the idea that you may be able to eat slightly more calories on a low-carb diet and still lose weight. It’s one of the most discussed (and controversial) concepts in carb-restricted dieting. It’s also highly misunderstood. This chapter tells you exactly what the metabolic advantage really means, what the science shows, and how to use it to your own personal advantage when it comes to losing weight!

Chapter 6: The Biggest Myths about Low-Carb Diets

There are a lot of common beliefs about the dangers of high-protein or high-fat diets. Does a high-protein diet cause osteoporosis? How about damage to the kidneys? Is ketosis a dangerous condition that should be avoided at all costs? Doesn’t eating all that fat lead to heart disease? What about cholesterol?

In this chapter, I’ll share what the science
really
shows.

Chapter 7: Thirty-Eight (Mostly) Low-Carb Diets and What They Can Do for You

In this chapter, 38 well-known diet plans are exhaustively analyzed and compared. Not all of them are truly low-carb programs (for instance, the Zone diet), but if they have been portrayed that way in the press, you’ll find them in this section. The format for each discussion allows you to see what the plan is in a nutshell and gives an in-depth look at how the plan works and the theory behind it. You’ll also learn who it might be good for (and who should look elsewhere). Finally, I give you my evaluation of each plan (“Jonny’s Lowdown”) and a rating of zero to five stars.

In the years between the paperback edition of
Living the Low Carb Life
and this revised edition, there have been hundreds—possibly thousands—of diet books and fitness plans published. Although some of the diet books reviewed in this section make no real claim to being low-carb (and aren’t even represented that way in the media), I wanted to examine some representative diet books from the past few years in order to see just how much of the valuable information we’ve learned about low-carb diets has made its way into the mainstream without much fanfare. And in some cases I’ve included books that take a firm stand (usually badly misinformed) against low-carb: I tell you exactly what I think is wrong with them.

Worth noting is that some of the diets that were in the original editions aren’t in use much any more—the Stillman and Scarsdale diets, for example. But they’re of interest historically, and many readers may remember them and want to compare them with what’s being written today, so I’ve left them in. And in some cases, a diet was perfectly sensible and workable but never caught on—for example, the GO-Diet—but I left that in too, just so you can see what it was about.

Full disclosure: in nutrition, as in politics, it’s rare to find two people who agree on every dimension of every issue. I mention this because, after almost twenty years on the national scene, I’ve found that it’s not unusual to get an e-mail saying something like “How can you recommend So-and-So when he thinks soy is a great food and you don’t?” So let me be perfectly clear: my ratings and reviews are not based on whether I think the authors are 100% “right,” but rather if I think they’re making a valuable contribution to the field and have pretty much created something worth paying attention to—even when I may quibble over a detail or two.

At the end of this chapter, you will know the exact differences among the various programs, and you’ll have a much better idea of which ones speak to you and which ones leave you cold. You’ll also learn who each program might be good for (and who should look elsewhere).

The thirty-eight plans and their architects are:

1.  
The Atkins Diet
—Robert Atkins, MD

2.  
The All-New Atkins Advantage
—Stuart Trager, MD and Colette Heimowitz, M.Sc