He was in ketosis. Consider that insulin is the most anabolic hormone in the body, and it’s presence in a caloric deficit is most welcome from the perspective of muscle-preservation for a lifter (the primary reason why carbs should be placed periworkout).
Ketogenic diets lack this inherently due to being restricted to trace carbohydrate intake.
You’re not giving any credit to either psychological development or hormonal conditioning of the reward center of the brain. Dopamine addictions to food, emotional eating, habits like eating out of boredom - these things are hugely impacting. Weight loss and maintenance of healthy weight is a tremendously complex and personal thing. Generalizing theories like “low-carb or low-fat is better” doesn’t tell the full story.
For example, maybe the reason Stacey can’t lose weight isn’t because her low-fat diet is at fault...it’s because she is recently divorced and tends to smash an entire box of vanilla wafers and a pint of fat-free custard before bed when she is especially lonely, like her grandmother would give her in the summer time as a child when she was down. See what I mean?
I think you are kind of missing what I'm saying - I am NOT implying we don't have choices and that we can't just overcome this all by brute force. Calories In/Calories out rules. It's the basic laws of thermodynamics. I think we agree here. I also agree that reward and addiction, etc. can have dramatic implications on our actions. This isn't a "do this one thing and everything will be better" statement I am making.
What I am saying is, that IN SPITE of everything else, people who have become obese have broken chemical processes. And the insult here is that some of those broken chemical processes are actually made WORSE by dieting.
But yes, as you said, maintenance of a healthy weight is tremendously complex - something we have very little clue about because it seems to have a lot of moving pieces - pyschological anchors, habits, addictions, body processes and even societal influences are all factors.
And also - I'm not saying low carb or low fat is better - what I am saying is that some of the underlying assumptions about ketosis are "incomplete". That's all. It's a tool in the toolbox. I mean - who am I to judge anyone's choice of diet really? You're talking to the guy who spent how many months on PSMF and took how much heat by some people on here? If I was worried about being "right" I would be in big trouble
What about Eskimos? They hardly get any carbs, ever, right? Never saw a fat one, must be working for them.
Here an interesting article about their diet -and the
consequences:
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Interesting stuff my man.
Okay, now I was very specific that yes if you are talking about weight loss then yes burning 1000 calories of carbs will cause more TEMPORARY weight loss. I did add in the temporary just now to really try to illustrate the lack of value in what you are suggesting.
I see where the thought process is coming from but where it lacks is that there is absolutely no body composition improvement involved in your process. No one unless cutting weight to make weight is just trying to lose weight. They want to lose fat specifically.
You are not going to be burning any fat while giving yourself 1000 calories worth of carbs. It changes the hormonal setting to an anabolic one so catabolism /lipolosysis is not going to be happening.You are just going to burn carbs which causes you to lose water, water is part of what makes up your LBM so effectively burning 1000 calories of carbs increases body fat percentage due to the sudden drop in LBM. Now if referring to stored glycogen which would not increase insulin and stop the fat burn then you still have the issue that the body treats the glycogen as preferential fuel and will burn through that during exercise before fats... Again creating another delay in the fat burning process.
The only way to burn fat is to burn fat. Thats it. Thats the end of it. You may eat in enough of a deficit while eating carbs to still burn fat, but burning fat is simply the only way to get rid of it biologically that is.
I would love to see this evidence man. Can you refer me to some of it?
No someone who is fat already is good at storing fat already. They tend to have insulin sensitivity issues which unfortunately does not make fat cells less sensitive.
The best thing to be is metabolically flexible, where you can add in carbs and use them at specific times then switch right back to efficient fat burning. However often to achieve this the person has to cut carb back or out for a while to help restore insulin sensitivity and then introduce carb cycling and timing.
Fahk you man. LOL. Obviously kidding - you're the man, I love the challenges. Please keep in mind I've been wading pretty heavy into some theoretical research (at least, heavy for me - some of what I think is complex is 101 stuff to some of the people I've spoken to about this). I don't know that I have a complete theory but I'm starting to see some holes in the dogma that is out there.
For one - I get what you're saying about temporary weight loss, but I'm not saying what you think. Energy = Mass. They are the same thing, and calories are a measure of heat/energy, which requires mass to generate. At the end of the day, we are going to burn mass to generate energy.
So basically fat is rocket fuel. Carbs are gasoline. It takes way more gas than rocket fuel to move something. Now, we ultimately want to burn fat - but once we've become adapted to burning fat, we have to burn 2.25X as many calories in order to lose the same amount of weight. Whether it is stored as fat or carbs does not make any difference here. Now, you are right - we may lose additional water weight too - but I'm speaking strictly energy/mass conversions, not excretions.
And of course, if we burn through all of our carbohydrate stores and have no carbs to replenish glycogen, we will adapt to burning fat; this is one of the keys behind ketosis. But, let's make a slight change in our thinking - what if suddenly we could no longer utilize fat for energy directly? What if THAT system was broken? What would happen? We would have to convert the fat to carbohydrate and burn it.
First off, traditional biology says you cannot really convert fat to glycogen because there are not enough carbon molecules to support the TCA cycle - which is why we need ketosis actually - the acetones lend carbon molecules to support/bypass this issue. So, in a way, you can't convert fat to carbs, except you can and this is one of the reasons we have ketosis to begin with.
But back to converting the fat to carbs, let's assume we can upregulate this somehow - so now we're burning ONLY carbs and we cannot burn fat. Our body will have to then do the OPPOSITE of what Ketosis does. It will have to take a gram of fat and convert it to a gram (or less) of carbohydrate. You can't get 2 grams of carbohydrate from 1 gram of fat because...yeah, thermodynamics.
So without taking it any further you've essentially wasted 5 calories of fat for no gain. None at all.
But, if you're keto adapted, you are kind of doing the opposite. You're good at burning fats, so you're doing the opposite - you are converting a 4 calorie gram of carbohydrate to a 9 calorie gram of fat. Of course I realize these aren't direct conversions - but if you're looking to switch your metabolism to "burn fat" - then this is really what you're trying to do. You're trying to burn 9 calories per gram instead of 4 calories per gram. Sounds great to be burning 9 instead of 4, but you're still only losing a gram of mass.
And, let's face it, mass is mass. If you're losing energy from stored glycogen in your muscles or energy stored in fat, you're still burning energy.
I get the disconnect, because it's a little hard to make the jump from "burning glycogen depletes muscles and I want to lose fat and build muscle" to what I'm saying. But the key is, I'd rather convert fat to carbs and then burn them.
And it is well known and quite logical that obese people are actually worse at storing fat and better at burning it. First, of course, insulin resistance makes it harder to store anything, not easier. But more specifically, PDK4 is elevated in obesity - which makes sense, you want to turn up fat burning in the presence of an abundance of fat - and this is basically the "switch" that turns on fat burning and turns off carbohydrate burning for fuel.
And of course, the other time PDK becomes elevated is during starvation, which makes sense because you need to turn up fat burning when the only thing you have to create energy is the fat that's on your body.
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I can dig up plenty more evidence, which you are right to request. I just don't have time at the moment.
But your final statement - metabolic flexibility is what's important - is dead on and that's the why what I'm saying is a big part of the puzzle. People who go on ketogenic diets aren't being flexible - they're making things worse. But it works because...while they're making things worse they're also avoiding feeding the broken system altogether.
And to be clear - still not against keto - it's a tool. I just question some of it...
Guys let's not for get the keto/ low fat diets significantly decrease insulin sensitivity, when done for any length time. This can definitely factor into weight loss. Personally I notice WAY less FAT loss while eating low carb, than with other form so of dieting. I've found carb cycling to be the best for me.
Imo it comes down to insulin sensitivity.
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This - a lot of people miss this point. Keto actually increases insulin resistance.