I think this is not so surprising, given that the calories are not restricted in the study. High carb, low fat foods I think are not satiating relative to low carb, high fat foods. As an example:
Weight isn't the product of calories in vs out, that's an overly simplistic model that doesn't account for the effect of hormones on how we metabolize different compounds and nutrients. This area of nutrition science is nascent and unsettled, and fraught with research funded by parties with conflicts of interest, but here's for example a pretty good talk that discusses some of the research https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKC3hiyLeRc&t=159s
I used to be very interested in the speaker (Jason Fung) too.
But after getting much more interested in nutrition over the last few years, I now think he is someone to avoid. He is basically outside of the scientific mainstream, and continually says things that are just not supported by actual studies. And there have been many studies on this.
Weight is a product of calories in vs out, both in the trivial sense (conservation of energy), but also in the sense that if you control the amount of calories you eat, and keep it below your calories out, you will lose weight. It's true that calculating your actual calories out is basically impossible, but you can estimate it, and then just reduce more calories if you're not losing weight.
This has been proven multiple times in real experiments with real subjects. This is agreed on by basically everyone who's actually in the field. There is also ample anecdotal evidence that this is true (every athlete, bodybuilder, etc that wants to gain or lose weight can do so basically at will, on a set schedule they plan months in advance. It's almost precise and very scientific.)
It's simple enough to be useful and applied. If you continue to reduce your calorie intake, you will lose weight. This is a fact. Build a model to explain weight gain/loss and calorie intake will always be the most influential variable full stop
I don't think that YouTube cites any sources that show there's scenarios where metabolism is significantly different for net weight and other health outcomes, when it comes to low fat vs low carbohydrate diets. There might be some genetic disorders causing some pathway to be inhibited, but on average, if we want to give generic advice for every individual, I think it's best to say to reduce calories and choose the appropriate method that satisfies your lifestyle and allows you to adhere to the diet, to improve your health.
I don't think it's sustainable to do a keto diet if you live and partake in society. You might encounter many scenarios where food options are carb heavy, and in this case, keto is not an option whereas caloric restriction is.
Here comes the CICO cult to lynch you. They never seem to understand that your body regulates its CO by reducing/increasing movement and NEAT, so how can you really measure it?
Every time I see some study anchored in dietary impositions, I can't help but wonder:
How have we managed to complicate diet and health so much?
We are humans. We are supposed to move. A lot.
Eat mostly whole food and move. Walk. Walk uphill. Lift if you can. Run if you can.
Buy food in the produce section. Buy food in the meat section (if you eat meat). Buy whole grains. It's not expensive. Maybe it takes time to prepare. Try to find value in that time. Do it with family and friends. There's no food product, diet, or gimmick that's going provide a greater marginal benefit
I think this works but only in a vacuum. I’m a single human with a humans natural stressors, getting dopamine from food. Food these days are literally engineered to maximum craving/hunger/whatever, with a bunch of ads and marketing also designed by people with literal lifelong studies of how to get people craving junk. Armies of em.
This isn’t even talking about what sort of thing forever chemicals are doing to me. No idea what microplastics in my bloodstream are up to.
Im just a dude, my dude. I didn’t make the game so hard.
Maybe whole grains are not expensive, but the outside walls of a grocery store (produce, meat, eggs, dairy) are very expensive, and have gotten a lot more expensive on the last two years. Especially if you are buying higher end (organic, pasture raised, etc..) stuff. Nuts and seeds, also very expensive right now. Good oils like olive oil also expensive.
"The percentage of the population who can afford the least-cost diet adhering to food-based dietary guidelines (henceforth ‘a nutritious diet’) increases from 15% (at the median) in countries with rural and informal food systems to nearly 100% in countries with industrial and consolidated food systems (Fig. 1). We estimate that nearly all residents of industrialized countries and a median of 82% in countries with an emerging and diversifying food system are able to afford a nutritious diet"
Besides, the question is relative to what? What percent of your income is worth spending on healthy food? Put a number on it and then we'll talk.
We're also fundamentally lazy creatures. Useless expenditure of energy does not promote survival. We're predisposed to do nothing. Couple that with our ability to amuse ourselves with endless entertainment and it's tough to get people moving.
The root cause for a lot of people is being addicted to the sugar hit. And for a reason: We like to perform. At first for baccalauréat, then for exams, then at work. I need my sugar hit, because I love being a good coder, focussed and in the flow. I love feeling clever. Sugar is a bit like cocaine, if I understand well, in terms of the way it works on dopamine. And our society demands a lot from us.
I wish I got into slow living, but I don’t have enough friendships to be happy with less work. Vicious circle ;)
Coach potatoes spend approximately the same amount of calories as modern-day hunter-gatherers. The current thinking is that a body has an energy budget to spend. If one does not move, that energy is spent on other things like hormone synthesis. Conversely walking or even running for 5 miles each day will not decrease the weight.
So been overweight is really about eating too much. This does not mean that one should not move. That has a lot of benefits, it is just loosing wright is not one of them.
Having a higher cardiovascular capacity increases the number of potential calories you can burn per hour.
Weight loss strategies that don't include exercise can work, but it is silly to do so. Exercise improves longevity, mental health, and expedites weight loss. All things equal, if you add a 5 mile walk to your daily regiment, you will lose weight faster.
Except those that regularly take part in physically strenuous activities are often very much aware that excess weight makes those activities much harder (particularly if you're at all competitive), which provides extra motivation for being concerned with what and how much you eat. Anecdata, yes, but everyone I know that was overweight in the past and has now lost it and kept it off has done so by taking up some sort of sport/regular physical activity (mostly cycling). I don't know anyone who's done so just by dieting alone.
> walking or even running for 5 miles each day will not decrease the weight
This is so wrong. Humans have come up with calories as a measurement of how the body burns fuel. Food is the fuel and burning that fuel is spending calories. You can reduce the calories consumed and/or increase movement to burn more. A quick google indicates 1 mile walking is about 100 calories burned for a 180lb person. So walking 5mi is burning roughly 500 calories and if done daily, this would mean 3500 per week which is roughly 1lb of loss. If you replace that 500cal loss per day with 500cal of ice cream then yeah you’re not going to lose weight. So if someone decided to just eat all the same stuff they currently eat but go walk 5mi day they would likely lose weight.
Calculating weight loss is mathematically very simple and software devs should be familiar with feedback loops. The simple formula is track calories, weigh yourself, adjust calories for loss, weigh self. Daily tracking works. The LoseIt app does this for you and adjusts calorie budget when you lose weight (less weight means lower budget).
Exercise is not solely about living longer, though an additional four years on average isn't exactly trivial.
The anecdotes abound about the positive impacts. Dismiss them in favor of scientific studies at your own peril.
My own anecdote: I lost 90 lbs and started lifting and it's done wonders for various aspects of my life. I recognize that my experience may not apply to everyone but it also seems reasonable given our evolutionary history that regular movement would have benefits.
Yet another useless study clouding peoples minds. Stop eating ultra processed foods, meat is okay, rice is okay, most bread from the store isnt (look at the ingredients). Potatoes are possibly the most nutritious vegetable provided you dont deep fry them in seed oil. Stay away from cheap oils like canola, corn, soybean, safflower.
Stick to olive oil, coconut oil, tallow, lard, ghee, etc BUT KEEP IT LIMITED.
No need to go on a restrictive keto or carnivore diet, it does have some benefits yes but you're missing out on variety.
what is the difference between a processed food and an unprocessed food? what degree of processing makes a food ultra-processed? what ingredients should I be looking for and why? what is so nutritious about potatoes, and why does frying change anything? what is special about seed oil?
"Processed" is a slightly confusing shorthand for "has undergone processes which either damaged its nutritional properties or added a ton of unhealthy shit for the sake of becoming more appealing and/or easier to preserve and consume".
A chopped apricot or a smoked salmon are in a literal sense processed food, but nobody is referring to that kind of processes. Rather, they're referring to the processes that turn an apricot into a Sachertorte, or a salmon into spreadable salmon-flavoured cheese. Dehydrating, extensive cooking, adding massive amounts of salt/sugar/fats - processes that destroy vitamins and other nutritionally important characteristics and mix the original food with large quantities of unhealthy ingredients.
Just be aware of whats in your food. I don't look for specific ingredients just learn what the makeup of your food is and decide if you should be eating that. Awareness is 80% of the battle.
Boiled/roasted potatoes are really satiating for their calories. But most people associate potatoes with a lot of fat, like french fries or mashed potatoes which make them very high calorie.
Deep frying anything I think should be a special occasion, you shouldn't be having deep fried food every day or even week, it adds a lot of useless calories. Stir frying is healthier
Seed oils (modern oils like canola, invented in 1974) are suspicious. There is a lot of conspiracy theories out there and not a lot of data, but I try to stay away from it. After all we've been using olive oil for thousands of years, no need to stop.
Generally speaking, I think of processed foods as anything padded with sugar, salt and/or fat. Food which comes from a factory, not a farm. Processed foods are digested quickly which has issues. They have a high caloric density with low nutrients due to the sugar,salt+fat.
Think candy, chips, soda, bread, cured meats and things in bags. Low in nutrition, high in calories.
Coconut oil is not a healthy choice because of its colossal content of saturated fats [1]. It's fine for use in cosmetics.
Olive oil is great fresh, as a part of sauces, dressings, etc, but care should be taken not to burn it when frying things [2].
Deep-fried stuff is a traditional part of many cuisines of Eastern Asia [3], where people often live pretty long [4], are usually less overweight, and experience less heart diseases than in the US. Quite possibly it's not the most nutritional choice, but often the safest for street food in hot climates. Likely other parts of East Asian diets, like abundance of fresh vegetables, somehow offset whatever detrimental effects deep-fried food items may have, in a way they don't in a typical US diet, especially at lower income levels.
Interestingly, canola oil is officially considered somehow beneficial for health [5].
Potatoes are a brilliant food. They're filling, contain an appropriate amount of calories, a lot of nutrients and a lot of potassium which helps balance out all that salt we're eating.
Why is rice ok? It is processed, high carb, low fiber. Good if you are starving, tastes good, but seems like it should be skipped as much as a typical junk food.
Unless you think there's something wrong with eating carbs (there isn't,) there's nothing particularly bad about rice. In fact, it's a great source of calories and carbs.
"Typical junk food," on the other hand, usually contains a lot more calories (and sugar/carbs and fat), sprinkled with various things that make them super-appealing. It's not impossible, but not incredibly appealing to overeat rice. Overeating a bag of Doritos on the other hand is very easy.
Effect of Calorie-Unrestricted Low-Carbohydrate, High-Fat Diet Versus High-Carbohydrate, Low-Fat Diet on Type 2 Diabetes and Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease
Result:
The mean age was 56 years (SD, 10), and 58% were women. Compared with the HCLF diet, participants on the LCHF diet had greater improvements in hemoglobin A1c (mean difference in change, −6.1 mmol/mol [95% CI, −9.2 to −3.0 mmol/mol] or −0.59% [CI, −0.87% to −0.30%]) and lost more weight (mean difference in change, −3.8 kg [CI, −6.2 to −1.4 kg]). Both groups had higher high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and lower triglycerides at 6 months. Changes in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol were less favorable in the LCHF diet group than in the HCLF diet group (mean difference in change, 0.37 mmol/L [CI, 0.17 to 0.58 mmol/L] or 14.3 mg/dL [CI, 6.6 to 22.4 mg/dL]). No statistically significant between-group changes were detected in the assessment of NAFLD. Changes were not sustained at the 9-month follow-up.
Meaning the diets were not maintained (on avg) after the trial? Can't imagine how difficult it must be to run a properly controlled dietary study. Even if you feed the participants, how can you be sure they're not ingesting additional food outside of the experiment for months on end?
I did a Keto diet for 4 months and lost 45lbs. Those pounds started coming back quick after I eased off of it (my triglycerides and cholesterol numbers were getting worryingly high). I also found it incredibly difficult to jump back into Keto for any sustained period of time afterwards. Tried and failed within a couple of weeks multiple times, kind of like whenever I try to go off of caffeine.
Been finding just eating lower-carb (not as low as keto, and some days where there have been carb binges) and focusing more on whole foods and not eating high-fat foods and my triglycerides and cholesterol numbers are back to normal levels, and I'm back to losing weight again, albeit a lot slower (down 25 lbs this year).
I know another guy who lost 107lbs off Keto (he was my initial inspiration to try it, in fact) and he eventually went off it and he had regained about half of that when I saw him last (according to him).
I'm sure there are people who have been able to keep the weight off, but it was difficult for me.
Exactly why it is normal that nutritional science is taken with a grain of salt, not cause researchers are slacking or producing bad studies. Just the fact they have data sources with a giant astrix attached.
Imho i think this also plays into the misinformation in the space. It's hard to prove anything and I find I mostly wait for a good meta analysis before putting my eggs in that basket
Many comments so far responding with a reader's personal feelings on how all people should eat. This was a study of the effect of these diets on diabetics. As such, it's not a huge surprise that low-carbohydrate, high-fat would come out ahead, given diabetes is a disease that prevents your body from properly processing carbohydrates. The authors here have made no claim whatsoever that anyone who is not diabetic would see any of these same effects and would even want to see these same effects (note that the only thing that might matter here to a non-diabetic is the LDL change, which was worse for the high fat diet). It's just too bad the participants that saw improvement still didn't stick with it and all benefits disappeared 3 months after the intervention was complete.
I think there are a lot of different types of people who react in a lot of different ways to various diets, and you can't just say this or that is the best without specifying which person you're talking about.
Doctor said my cholesterol was getting high, so I radically cut saturated fats. Suddenly I was losing weight at a pound a week, eating as much as I wanted. Shed 25+ lbs that way.
Would that work for everyone? I sincerely doubt it. Find what works for you, I say, and to heck with the naysayers.
And it's not just what works for people in the biological sense (since any diet that's restricting calories will make you lose weight.) It's really what diet works for you psychologically or situationally.
If eating in a time-restricted way (Intermittent fasting) causes you to lower total calories, and is easy for you, great. If cutting out carbs is easier for you, great. If counting calories and eating only a certain amount of calories works for you, great - that's what I personally prefer cause it's the most flexible, though counting is a pain at first.
> It remains unclear if a low-carbohydrate, high-fat (LCHF) diet is a possible treatment strategy for type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM)
N=1 personal non-random uncontrolled experiment: 4+ years of drug-free diabetes control to below pre-diabetic levels via an LCHF diet, regularly measured with continuous glucose monitoring. I suspect that the success rate among self-selected followers is higher than among the randomly assigned.
N=2 10+ years of ultra low carb diet, but not quite as high fat as the study (obviously a greater percentage of protein). My BMI has been ~18 and I've been a runner my whole life, but (like my father), had neuropathy and 'fuzzy' vision in my 30s, and eventually found out that I was glucose-intolerant with large 'spikes' in my glucose levels after meals with carbs. Two weeks after cutting out carbs, vision fuzziness went away, and pins-and-needles subsided (although I still can't tolerate heat or cold in my feet).
Never looked back. Never went on any drugs, running is slower, but can last much longer. Don't really feel hungry - just eat to my activity level and snacks.
Eating is simple - if it has more than 2g of carbs per serving, then I don't eat it. Only supplements required are chlorides: sodium - that's easy, potassium - from NoSalt, and magnesium - an occasional capsule.
How did you get the continuous glucose monitoring? I have only found it available through a prescription. (I'm in the US.)
In OTC A1C tests, I reduced mine from 10.6 to 7.6 to 6.0 over the course of 6 months with keto. I wanted to get a continuous glucose monitor so that I could discover if any foods were unwittingly sabotaging my efforts, but I can't find any that I can buy without a formal diagnosis and prescription.
I haven't gone to a doctor yet b/c I don't have a primary care physician and, to be blunt, it's expensive, even with insurance!
Agree, and I succeeded with that too, but for a shorter period. As a raw vegan my blood sugar was low, but I developed brain fog and intense cravings after about six months. I believe that path is sustainable for people with lower protein requirements and a healthier digestive system than mine.
A carrot, a cabbage, a bell pepper or a butternut squash will contain a significant amount of carbs, all of which is in the form of simple sugars (glucose, fructose and sucrose mainly) so they avoid those foods?
I'm not OP, but I also adhered to an LCHF diet for ~8 months a few years ago. I found that, early on, maintaining a consistently high ratio of fats was hard, but over time, it simply became a natural aspect of things like e.g. eating normal/non-extra-lean beef.
For the first while I found that using coconut oil or olive oil was a trivial way of adding just pure fat to my daily numbers. Both of them are relatively cheap (though high cal) and can be added to any heated drink like coffee or tea with minimal impact on for flavor. Over time, this just became unnecessary, but it was helpful early on as it was trivial to prep a small container with n grams of oil every morning.
There are also nutrient bars that are explicitly higher on fat and protein and lower on carbs for this very purpose, e.g. 'good fats' bars.
Unlike what others report, while I felt generally good and had energy for day to day things, I simply could not ever work up enough energy for more rigorous cardio or weightlifting, compared to when I'm on a normal/carb-rich diet.
Readit News
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36051903/
Any type of caloric restriction will improve health outcomes.
But after getting much more interested in nutrition over the last few years, I now think he is someone to avoid. He is basically outside of the scientific mainstream, and continually says things that are just not supported by actual studies. And there have been many studies on this.
Weight is a product of calories in vs out, both in the trivial sense (conservation of energy), but also in the sense that if you control the amount of calories you eat, and keep it below your calories out, you will lose weight. It's true that calculating your actual calories out is basically impossible, but you can estimate it, and then just reduce more calories if you're not losing weight.
This has been proven multiple times in real experiments with real subjects. This is agreed on by basically everyone who's actually in the field. There is also ample anecdotal evidence that this is true (every athlete, bodybuilder, etc that wants to gain or lose weight can do so basically at will, on a set schedule they plan months in advance. It's almost precise and very scientific.)
I don't think it's sustainable to do a keto diet if you live and partake in society. You might encounter many scenarios where food options are carb heavy, and in this case, keto is not an option whereas caloric restriction is.
How have we managed to complicate diet and health so much?
We are humans. We are supposed to move. A lot.
Eat mostly whole food and move. Walk. Walk uphill. Lift if you can. Run if you can.
Buy food in the produce section. Buy food in the meat section (if you eat meat). Buy whole grains. It's not expensive. Maybe it takes time to prepare. Try to find value in that time. Do it with family and friends. There's no food product, diet, or gimmick that's going provide a greater marginal benefit
This isn’t even talking about what sort of thing forever chemicals are doing to me. No idea what microplastics in my bloodstream are up to.
Im just a dude, my dude. I didn’t make the game so hard.
Maybe whole grains are not expensive, but the outside walls of a grocery store (produce, meat, eggs, dairy) are very expensive, and have gotten a lot more expensive on the last two years. Especially if you are buying higher end (organic, pasture raised, etc..) stuff. Nuts and seeds, also very expensive right now. Good oils like olive oil also expensive.
"The percentage of the population who can afford the least-cost diet adhering to food-based dietary guidelines (henceforth ‘a nutritious diet’) increases from 15% (at the median) in countries with rural and informal food systems to nearly 100% in countries with industrial and consolidated food systems (Fig. 1). We estimate that nearly all residents of industrialized countries and a median of 82% in countries with an emerging and diversifying food system are able to afford a nutritious diet"
Besides, the question is relative to what? What percent of your income is worth spending on healthy food? Put a number on it and then we'll talk.
I wish I got into slow living, but I don’t have enough friendships to be happy with less work. Vicious circle ;)
So been overweight is really about eating too much. This does not mean that one should not move. That has a lot of benefits, it is just loosing wright is not one of them.
Having a higher cardiovascular capacity increases the number of potential calories you can burn per hour.
Weight loss strategies that don't include exercise can work, but it is silly to do so. Exercise improves longevity, mental health, and expedites weight loss. All things equal, if you add a 5 mile walk to your daily regiment, you will lose weight faster.
This is so wrong. Humans have come up with calories as a measurement of how the body burns fuel. Food is the fuel and burning that fuel is spending calories. You can reduce the calories consumed and/or increase movement to burn more. A quick google indicates 1 mile walking is about 100 calories burned for a 180lb person. So walking 5mi is burning roughly 500 calories and if done daily, this would mean 3500 per week which is roughly 1lb of loss. If you replace that 500cal loss per day with 500cal of ice cream then yeah you’re not going to lose weight. So if someone decided to just eat all the same stuff they currently eat but go walk 5mi day they would likely lose weight.
Calculating weight loss is mathematically very simple and software devs should be familiar with feedback loops. The simple formula is track calories, weigh yourself, adjust calories for loss, weigh self. Daily tracking works. The LoseIt app does this for you and adjusts calorie budget when you lose weight (less weight means lower budget).
> Walk. Walk uphill. Lift if you can. Run if you can.
AKA waste half of your life to prolong it by 3%
The anecdotes abound about the positive impacts. Dismiss them in favor of scientific studies at your own peril.
My own anecdote: I lost 90 lbs and started lifting and it's done wonders for various aspects of my life. I recognize that my experience may not apply to everyone but it also seems reasonable given our evolutionary history that regular movement would have benefits.
No need to go on a restrictive keto or carnivore diet, it does have some benefits yes but you're missing out on variety.
A chopped apricot or a smoked salmon are in a literal sense processed food, but nobody is referring to that kind of processes. Rather, they're referring to the processes that turn an apricot into a Sachertorte, or a salmon into spreadable salmon-flavoured cheese. Dehydrating, extensive cooking, adding massive amounts of salt/sugar/fats - processes that destroy vitamins and other nutritionally important characteristics and mix the original food with large quantities of unhealthy ingredients.
Just be aware of whats in your food. I don't look for specific ingredients just learn what the makeup of your food is and decide if you should be eating that. Awareness is 80% of the battle.
Boiled/roasted potatoes are really satiating for their calories. But most people associate potatoes with a lot of fat, like french fries or mashed potatoes which make them very high calorie.
Deep frying anything I think should be a special occasion, you shouldn't be having deep fried food every day or even week, it adds a lot of useless calories. Stir frying is healthier
Seed oils (modern oils like canola, invented in 1974) are suspicious. There is a lot of conspiracy theories out there and not a lot of data, but I try to stay away from it. After all we've been using olive oil for thousands of years, no need to stop.
Think candy, chips, soda, bread, cured meats and things in bags. Low in nutrition, high in calories.
Olive oil is great fresh, as a part of sauces, dressings, etc, but care should be taken not to burn it when frying things [2].
Deep-fried stuff is a traditional part of many cuisines of Eastern Asia [3], where people often live pretty long [4], are usually less overweight, and experience less heart diseases than in the US. Quite possibly it's not the most nutritional choice, but often the safest for street food in hot climates. Likely other parts of East Asian diets, like abundance of fresh vegetables, somehow offset whatever detrimental effects deep-fried food items may have, in a way they don't in a typical US diet, especially at lower income levels.
Interestingly, canola oil is officially considered somehow beneficial for health [5].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_oil#Health_concerns
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_oil#Culinary_use
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_frying#Asia
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan#High_life_expec...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed_oil#Nutrition_and_hea...
"Typical junk food," on the other hand, usually contains a lot more calories (and sugar/carbs and fat), sprinkled with various things that make them super-appealing. It's not impossible, but not incredibly appealing to overeat rice. Overeating a bag of Doritos on the other hand is very easy.
Deleted Comment
Result:
The mean age was 56 years (SD, 10), and 58% were women. Compared with the HCLF diet, participants on the LCHF diet had greater improvements in hemoglobin A1c (mean difference in change, −6.1 mmol/mol [95% CI, −9.2 to −3.0 mmol/mol] or −0.59% [CI, −0.87% to −0.30%]) and lost more weight (mean difference in change, −3.8 kg [CI, −6.2 to −1.4 kg]). Both groups had higher high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and lower triglycerides at 6 months. Changes in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol were less favorable in the LCHF diet group than in the HCLF diet group (mean difference in change, 0.37 mmol/L [CI, 0.17 to 0.58 mmol/L] or 14.3 mg/dL [CI, 6.6 to 22.4 mg/dL]). No statistically significant between-group changes were detected in the assessment of NAFLD. Changes were not sustained at the 9-month follow-up.
Been finding just eating lower-carb (not as low as keto, and some days where there have been carb binges) and focusing more on whole foods and not eating high-fat foods and my triglycerides and cholesterol numbers are back to normal levels, and I'm back to losing weight again, albeit a lot slower (down 25 lbs this year).
I know another guy who lost 107lbs off Keto (he was my initial inspiration to try it, in fact) and he eventually went off it and he had regained about half of that when I saw him last (according to him).
I'm sure there are people who have been able to keep the weight off, but it was difficult for me.
Imho i think this also plays into the misinformation in the space. It's hard to prove anything and I find I mostly wait for a good meta analysis before putting my eggs in that basket
Doctor said my cholesterol was getting high, so I radically cut saturated fats. Suddenly I was losing weight at a pound a week, eating as much as I wanted. Shed 25+ lbs that way.
Would that work for everyone? I sincerely doubt it. Find what works for you, I say, and to heck with the naysayers.
And it's not just what works for people in the biological sense (since any diet that's restricting calories will make you lose weight.) It's really what diet works for you psychologically or situationally.
If eating in a time-restricted way (Intermittent fasting) causes you to lower total calories, and is easy for you, great. If cutting out carbs is easier for you, great. If counting calories and eating only a certain amount of calories works for you, great - that's what I personally prefer cause it's the most flexible, though counting is a pain at first.
N=1 personal non-random uncontrolled experiment: 4+ years of drug-free diabetes control to below pre-diabetic levels via an LCHF diet, regularly measured with continuous glucose monitoring. I suspect that the success rate among self-selected followers is higher than among the randomly assigned.
Never looked back. Never went on any drugs, running is slower, but can last much longer. Don't really feel hungry - just eat to my activity level and snacks.
Eating is simple - if it has more than 2g of carbs per serving, then I don't eat it. Only supplements required are chlorides: sodium - that's easy, potassium - from NoSalt, and magnesium - an occasional capsule.
In OTC A1C tests, I reduced mine from 10.6 to 7.6 to 6.0 over the course of 6 months with keto. I wanted to get a continuous glucose monitor so that I could discover if any foods were unwittingly sabotaging my efforts, but I can't find any that I can buy without a formal diagnosis and prescription.
I haven't gone to a doctor yet b/c I don't have a primary care physician and, to be blunt, it's expensive, even with insurance!
I believe that the common denominator is nearly zero sugar.
For the first while I found that using coconut oil or olive oil was a trivial way of adding just pure fat to my daily numbers. Both of them are relatively cheap (though high cal) and can be added to any heated drink like coffee or tea with minimal impact on for flavor. Over time, this just became unnecessary, but it was helpful early on as it was trivial to prep a small container with n grams of oil every morning.
There are also nutrient bars that are explicitly higher on fat and protein and lower on carbs for this very purpose, e.g. 'good fats' bars.
Unlike what others report, while I felt generally good and had energy for day to day things, I simply could not ever work up enough energy for more rigorous cardio or weightlifting, compared to when I'm on a normal/carb-rich diet.