Alright, now that I’ve got your attention…
Seen anything resembling the above post title in any magazine ads or infomercials lately? Any two-page spreads in your newspaper’s Sunday coupon section with bikini-clad babes and skinny dudes holding the waistband of their old fat pants out two feet from their abdomen with giant blurbs claiming that you (yes, YOU, tubbo!) can lose up to 80 pounds or more and trim away 18″ of unsightly fat in just SIX WEEKS!!!?
Where are they, these commercial low carb weight loss ventures? In a world filled with Jenny Craigs and Weight Watchers and Nutrisystems, where are the CarbWatchers and L.C.Megalosses?
Those of us living low carb the way it should be done know it works. Surely, a commercial program would be a certain success, and it probably wouldn’t need as much fine print (”results shown in this ad are not typical; your personal results may vary significantly”) and it wouldn’t have to include caveats like, “when combined with the recommended physical exercise program (see booklet and video enclosed).”
There are LOADS of books out there with scads of weight loss plans of every type. Every magazine with women as its demographic target has some sort of amazing new weight loss secret splayed across its cover each and every month (I’ve been looking while I’m standing in line at the supermarket, so prove me wrong). You can even go online and sign up with eDiets.com or dietwatch.com (to name two) and get a personalized weight loss program for a fee.
The South Beach Diet venture has probably come the closest to pseudo-low-carb commercial success of all the low carb plans. I’ve eaten a few of their frozen products that had fit into my OWL lifestyle, but for the most part, the net carb counts are too high for doing true low carb. But while they have plenty of products out on the shelves, there isn’t any commercialized program like Nutrisystem that hawks them AND gets you to pay good money to be included in their enterprise as a member. Weight Watchers, on the other hand, was doing fabulously well even before they came out with their own line of commercially-available food products; WW works, so it’s said, not because their plan is any better or worse than any other diet plan, but because adherents stay with it longer due to the “social” nature of the program (group meetings, support advocates, etc.).
In the heyday of the last real low carb boom, Atkins Inc. was selling frozen meal “programs” out of their catalog, delivered to your door for what I thought was a pretty penny and out of reach for most folks. A lot of their other products were more reasonably priced, though. Their website had lots of success stories and testimonials, and I wonder if things might have been different if they’d taken the slightly lower road and went the way of the two-page color spread with bikini babes and skinny dudes wearing fat pants. Maybe the Atkins Nutritional Approach would today be as powerful a force as some of the other programs.
Personally, I’d like to see CarbWatchers ads sometime soon. I’d like to see little logos on hundreds of food product packages proclaiming the number of “CarbWatcher Points” in them. Wouldn’t it be great to read that some glitzy celebrity who wanted to lose a few pounds became a spokesperson for CarbWatchers after dropping four dress sizes doing low carb?
Filed under: Atkins, Food, Induction, Megamas, Mindset, Starting on Low Carb, general health | Tagged: Atkins, low carb, South Beach, weight loss
I have a theory why these don’t exist, namely that low carb is a) relatively easy, and b) successful at keeping weight off. Weight Watchers makes money by (amongst other things) providing significant support for starving yourself. And of course, once you go back to eating the food pyramid, it’s not long before you’re knocking on their door again. A low carb diet business is doomed to failure, precisely because it would be successful at getting people to lose fat and keep it off.
Dave, I had the same thought. What typically makes a “diet” business successful is the number of clients they can convince to return for Rounds 2, 3, 4, 5, ad nauseam. I’d mentioned in another post how every six months after my ex and I had lost significant weight at a local diet clinic, we’d get postcards inviting us back “if need be.” Well OF COURSE we needed be, but we weren’t going to spend that kind of money again to step on a scale, get our weight recorded and get a slap on the back and a vitamin pill if we did well.
But as far as low carb being a panacea for all of us chunksters, it’s hard to find testimony saying it comes any closer than any of the other plans. Consumer Search (see link below) has a review of diet reviews that will tell you which (quite a few) of the main medical establishments oppose Atkins simply because it goes so against conventional dietary guidelines. It’ll also tell you that, after time (usually a year), weight lost on any of several diets, Atkins included, was about the same. I’m not going to beat the “keeping it off” drum because I myself fell back into carbs and didn’t keep it off, just like many other people on many other diets. http://www.consumersearch.com/www/health_and_fitness/weight-loss-programs/
My daughter is a WW starver. She even worked their meetings part time for a while. She did lose a lot of weight and kept it off for a while, but she’s constantly ravenous to the point of lunacy, and when she can’t keep herself from gorging on carby foods, she gains the weight back and then has to do meetings again. This is a dietary lifestyle? But I can’t convince her to do low carb for some reason.
Great post – great insights.
OYB
My blog: Kimorexia
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Hi Megamas. I believe that all diets achieve the same results in the long-term, if the dieter sticks with the program long enough. They all have to work by the same mechanism: reducing insulin (or more accurately, controlling the ratio of insulin to other hormones, like glucagon), because we know in great detail how insulin and glucose work together to store fat; or conversely, how reducing insulin and glucose allow stored fat to be released and used for energy. “Standard” fat-loss programs, like WW, achieve this by cutting intake across all macronutrients, thus creating a caloric deficit with all of the attendant unpleasantness (constant hunger, metabolic slowdown, etc.) I guess the “upside” of these programs is that they feed some puritanical masochistic urge: no good comes without sacrifice and suffering
WW and their ilk provide plenty of physical, mental, and financial suffering.
Of course, if you get off the low-insulinemic program, be it Atkins or WW, and return to eating foods that crank up your insulin, the fat will return. The key is to keep that insulin under control for the long-term, while maintaining a satisfying diet. There’s another lifestyle angle here as well, also related to hormones: reducing stress. Insulin comes from the parasympathetic endocrine system, and tends to depress stress hormones. That’s why comfort foods are almost always high-carb: they crank up your insulin, drive down stress hormones like cortisol, and make you feel better. But it’s only a temporary fix, and comes at a high price. Any non-dietary measures to manage stress will (I believe) help you to maintain a low-insulinemic diet.
My own key for success has been thinking of diet in terms of the effect on insulin, that too much insulin is bad whether or not I’m fat. Obesity is simply the most visible side-effect of poor insulin control. Insulin is one of the most powerful and ancient metabolic hormones, controlling not just glucose metabolism, but also other processes like growth, cell differentiation, and cell division. Insulin receptor structure is remarkably consistent across species. Even the “lowly” hagfish has insulin receptors that are very similar to humans’ – and I’m pretty sure the hagfish doesn’t need it for controlling blood sugar due to ingestion of carbohydrates
Anyway, the insulin angle works for me, but I’m a science nerd, so it may not be for everybody.
Dave, I have to be sensitive here because I know a few guys who are married to hagfishes, lowly though they may be.
While I’m in weight-loss mode, I have decided to not be concerned with leaving the “induction” phase, keeping my daily net carbs around 20 or less. One of the reasons for this is exactly what you said, that maintaining low blood sugar levels and therefore low insulin secretion is paramount to dropping pounds of fat while sparing lean muscle mass. I don’t find it at all difficult as long as I watch the glycemics on the few veggies I ingest. Eggs, meats, and hard cheeses, these are my lifeblood; with a little bit of chocolate and red wine to sweeten things, it’s a lovely lifestyle.
I don’t tend to lose as quickly as some people do on low carb, for whatever reason, but I’m satisfied with my pound-plus per week average since the beginning of the year. If things continue to progress this way, I should be closing in on my primary goal of a 30 pound loss before my next physical in July.
I don’t know this for sure, but I would suspect that insulin sensitivity is a double-edged sword for fat loss. When you start off obese, insulin sensitivity is reduced, thus eliminating carbs makes it easy for the fat to flow out of fat cells. But as insulin sensitivity increases, the fat cells will be more inclined to hold on to fat at lower insulin levels. I suspect that’s the source of the low-carb “stall” so many people (including myself) experience.
The good news (maybe) is that increased insulin sensitivity means that even small reductions in insulin can get things going again. I recently cut back on diet soda, and promptly dropped another five pounds and have kept it off. By the same token, I would guess that weight training, which increases insulin sensitivity of muscle, could also have a significant effect, not only by improving clearance of dietary carbs, but also increasing the rate at which insulin is cleared. It’s interesting to note that it is currently thought that insulin resistance manifests itself differently in different tissues. In muscle, if I’m not mistaken (don’t have the metabolism book handy), the origin is thought to be reduction in the movement of glucose transporters to the surface of the cell membrance, while in adipose tissue it’s a problem in the signal chain.
Just guesses . . .