To think too few people understand the role of insulin with regards to weight loss?

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So I am an advocate of low carb but I know plenty of people who have used slimming world, or weight watchers or any other diet to lose weight. I have seen though people being really negative regards low carb diets and I don't get it.

When you understand how your body deals with different nutrients it because clear that all diets need to lower insulin. How you do this is up to you but ultimately all weight loss diets do it.

When insulin is elevated then you can't burn much fat and instead rely on mostly burning sugar from your diet. If you want to burn mostly fat from your fat cells your insulin needs to be lowered.

People say eat less move more without understanding that for someone who is insulin resistant this is really hard. The body cells stop responding to insulin so stop taking up sugar from the blood. This effectively means the cells feel like they are 'starving' as they can't get enough sugar and this drives hunger signals. It also makes the person feel lethargic and lacking in energy, so exercise is harder.

You can reduce insulin levels by fasting, reducing carbs in the diet, reducing consumption of refined carbohydrates, cutting calories etc but the key is your insulin.

No @MrsTuxedo he died after a fall on the ice.

On his death certificate:

''blunt impact injury of head with epidural hematoma''

@TarasChoc not according to the leaked autopsy record....in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday of details from Dr. Atkins's confidential medical report. The report concludes that Dr. Atkins, 72, had a history of heart attack and congestive heart failure and notes that he weighed 258 pounds at death... 18.5 stones,

I think people did eat less wheat years ago, and it wasn’t so processed.
Yes, people ate quite a bit of bread, but there weren’t breakfast cereals, for example, and people didn’t eat the copious quantities of pasta they do now. Meals were generally meat, veg and potatoes.

Breakfast cereals were invented in the 1800s. In the 1960s, when people in general were still much slimmer, people ate the most sugary processed breakfast cereals imaginable, copious toast, sandwiches for lunch, and it wasn't some sort of stonemilled bread made by maidens, it was super-processed and white as a rule. There is much more variety nowadays. And yet there were very few truly fat adults around, certainly few morbidly obese ones, and hardly any fat children. One per entire school, for instance.

It isn't wheat.

And that’s why it’s so damaging. It’s preventing people educating themselves further on every level

ah, the “educate yourself” issue.

what’s preventing people educating themselves is it’s far too complicated an area for the layman to understand. Unless someone wants to embark on a degree and PhD in the field they won’t even come close.

”eat less, move around more” may be more nuanced than that, but it is the basic bottom line. People are physics, they can’t generate energy out of nothing. Eventually if they decrease input and increase output they will lose weight. It will just take more for some than others.

personally I also think obesity is increasing because we don’t move as much any more.

20 years ago in my office job while we were still computer based I was up and down all day. Down the stairs to go and talk to someone, across to the library to photocopy papers, walk down to IT, back to the library to load up the research CD’s. Pop to the shop for lunch. Over to another department to hear a speaker.

now I literally sit at my desk. No need for photocopying. Communication with colleagues over teams. Library access all on line, with immediate download to my desktop. Zoom to hear talks and attend meetings.

i don’t need to physically go shopping. Days off I’d wander round the city centre nearly all day. Now I order online and it gets delivered.

i go to the gym, i cycle commute to work. But those 2 hours are nothing compared to being on my feet the majority of the day. And the amount I need to eat reflects that.

Yep. There's a lot of weirdness re weight loss here!! 😂

@MapleLeafForever I’m trying to follow a similar thing to you, actually. Do you mind if I ask what a typical day looks like for you in terms of meals?

For me, I’ve been trying to do something like - overnight oats or a banana for breakfast, and then for lunch and dinner, something like roast veg and chicken with quinoa or buckwheat, veg soup or chilli con carne, with a bit of fruit and yoghurt to finish. I started it as a way of trying to increase my fibre intake, as I realised I don’t eat anywhere enough fibre, or enough fruit and veg in general.

I’ve also had a couple of days each week where I’ve relaxed my eating quite a bit, and had a takeaway or lunch out (unhealthy but delicious!)

I’m trying to do the whole ‘in moderation’ thing, but still quite new to it, as only about a month in (my diet was awful before!!)

Yes - for breakfast it's usually full fat plain Greek yoghurt with blueberries, and a latte or two (small, made at home, so not that much milk!). Lunch is often a salad with lots of mozzarella, avocado, tomatoes, mushrooms. More lattes. Dinner is something like roasted aubergine with mozarella and chickpeas, or some kind of chicken piece with a couple of veg (often the ready-to-cook chicken with various sauces that various supermarkets do, like ready meals but not yet cooked). Some pecans, or maybe a square of dark chocolate, and a cup of tea as a snack in the evening. If I am out after one of my hobby nights, a glass of wine and nibble on crisps as my treat. Or something like that - a couple of times I've been out for dinner somewhere and just eaten normally. I don't know what my HbA1C is now as I've not had it tested lately. I hope it's gone down, as after all this effort it better have. I find it a miserable way of eating!! I choose food that I don't hate, but it's not exactly anything I look forward to much.

There is a YouTube video using Lego bricks to demonstrate how the body metabolizes different sugars.

I do think not all carbs are equal, so although fruit has fructose it also has fibre and vitamins.

As for people in Asia not getting fat, is that diet or is there a genetic component?

I'm thinking most of the world is lactose intolerant but northern Europeans mostly aren't. Have we evolved differently in regards to other food?

Eskimos traditionally eat a high protein high fat diet.

@44PumpLane agree - “why we eat too much” is properly brilliant. That guy has really researched the science of weight loss.

@Reallyreallyborednow people aren’t physics. They really aren’t. If you put energy into a machine, it can’t modify its output, but bodies can. We’re not cars. We have many, many more outputs than motion - healing, inflammation, body temperature, building muscle mass, digestion - literally hundreds. A calorie can fuel, or not, any one of those instead of being stored. Where it’s used is controlled. And if you reduce calories, especially a moderate long term decrease, those other outputs are preferentially decreased over weight loss. And they don’t all recover, leaving people more susceptible to weight gain in future. Understanding why that happens and how it’s controlled could really help people lose weight and keep it off. Less blame would really help people get better support. But reducing it to ‘eat less, move more’ consistently telling people it’s really simple, but they are greedy and lazy prevents people looking further. You don’t need a PHD. You just need to stop comparing people to cars. It’s a really unhelpful analogy.

You just need to stop comparing people to cars. It’s a really unhelpful analogy

i didn’t.

i said you can’t create energy from nothing. So if you reduce your energy intake to less than you’re expending you will lose weight.

issue is we have no easy way to measure this. It’s mainly guesswork. So if you aren’t losing weight you need to reduce what you eat or increase your output.

if you’re eating processed crap it’s
likely you’re eating way more calories in an easily accessible form than you think.

yes hormones play a part, and calories is a very crude measure of the energy content of food. But as we have no way of individually measuring this, it’s always back to reduce your food intake if you aren’t losing. If you find you lose easier on protein and fat than carbs, then great.

Also insulin blocks the leptin receptors and prevents your body understanding how fat it actually is.

So if you reduce your energy intake to less than you’re expending you will lose weight.

Why? Its a gross over simplification to assume a body’s only option is to use stored fat when intake isn’t high enough. It can (and often does) reduce literally any other one of hundreds of functions, increase drive to eat or sleep, reduce drive to move, increase efficiency, utilise other body sources. Lots of things. Any specific calorie can be used to fuel any one of a million things in the body. How it’s allocated (not just to or from fat storage, but to any bodily function) is the key question here. Hormones aren’t part of this. They are ALL of it. Hormones direct how every calorie that goes into your body is used, and have a very significant effect on how many you consume in the first place (as hormones control drive to eat and feelings of fullness) Just as water or salt balance are wholly hormonally balanced (and well understood because they are single substances). Rachel Battram measured hormone levels following gastric surgery and could correlate levels with weight re-gain.

(Also, I meant people generally as opposed to you particularly, sorry)

It would be a more useful analogy to say that people pay fewer taxes to the government and NHS services will be cut. If you pay few enough taxes, they certainly will. But how fast and by how much depends how that money is allocated, and that depends on other pressures and who’s in government and how good they are at it. There are far more variables than most people can even guess at. I say again, people aren’t machines.

What we know about carbs is the that they raise insulin in your blood. Insulin promotes fat storage. You can’t be in fat storage ‘mode’ and a fat-using ‘mode’ at the same time. So if insulin doesn’t fall you can’t use fat. Even if you are eating fewer calories than you need. Something else has to compensate. There are protective factors in some carbs, which largely mean that insulin is raised more slowly and falls more quickly (chiefly fibre, which almost always occurs in natural carbs. Only we keep taking it out nowadays)

Processed foods have their own problems which encourage both overeating and weight gain. Kevin Hall’s experiment showed that really well in the short term. The current theory seems to be that ‘extract’ of whatever primes your body to expect the nutrition that goes with it, and the drive to eat would normally be switched off by detection of those nutrients. But ‘extracts’ don’t contain the substances, so you are driven to eat more, for longer than if you ate real food.

A really nice and accessible round up of the current theories and experts is ‘A thorough examination’ podcast by Dr Chis and Dr Xand. (PHd not required!)

In fifty years ‘eat less, move more’ will be regarded the way ‘smoking is good for colds’ is regarded now. I’d bet on it. But it’s going to take that long, I think. It’s utterly embedded. But it’s nice and simple, cheap and easy to trot out.

Interesting explanation, and clearer than many things I've read. It sounds a bit like the "don't eat too little or your body will go into starvation mode" advice that was often heard when I was younger, though I think that has been somewhat discredited now (or has it?)

so do you think that if someone has pre-diabetes, that their body can eventually reset how it responds to insulin? Rather than just having to avoid carbs to avoid getting high blood glucose levels? It would be nice if avoiding carbs and losing some weight now meant that eventually I could add back in some carbs - even just the brown rice and whole wheat type at first - but eventually smaller bits of white carbs/sugar and trust that my body could now deal with that amount by producing and respnoding to sufficient insulin in a way that it perhaps can't at the moment.

@MapleLeafForever have you read the book 'why we eat too much' by Andrew jenkinson?

Not sure about pre diabetes specifically but he has some suggestions for a sustainable low carb non keto way of eating at the end.

if someone has pre-diabetes, that their body can eventually reset how it responds to insulin?

@MapleLeafForever I'm hoping to find out in a year or two, as I have a lot of weight to shed.

i haven't, no, but I"ll add it to my reading list!

I have written an absurdly long rely and it wont copy and paste. I’ll keep trying.

I would really like to understand this more. I had a huge bowl of veg and chicken soup at lunch yet come 4pm I was still absolutely ravenous. It was thick soup too, not a broth.

Yet not so long ago, I had a bowl of leftover pasta at brunch time, it kept me full until dinner.

I do know that I love pasta and if I'm told to give it up I'll want it more. I have to find a way to keep it in my plan. And lose weight.

I think the idea that it's the protein and fat that keeps you feeling full. So you just had mainly carbs (the veg), and soup (mainly water!) with perhaps a small bit of chicken (protein). And the volume of it all might not have been that much either, which doesn't keep you feeling full for that long.

But it's true that pasta is just so much nicer and more comforting, and even when I eat lots of protein with fats, I still constantly crave the carbs. Really frustrating, but they definitely satisfy something else for me, whether it's taste or psychological or feeling filled by volume or whatever. Or just that knowledge that you can't ever really have them again. I could easily have eaten an entire bowl of pasta with nothing else for dinner. Or rice. Or porridge.

*I would really like to understand this more. I had a huge bowl of veg and chicken soup at lunch yet come 4pm I was still absolutely ravenous. It was thick soup too, not a broth.

Yet not so long ago, I had a bowl of leftover pasta at brunch time, it kept me full until dinner*

pasta is bulkier with more fibre. Not a lot, as it’s processed, but more than soup. This will keep you fuller as it takes longer to digest, and will stay in your stomach until it is broken down to a more liquid consistency. Which also means it will be slower release so your blood sugar levels will raise more slowly and for longer.

So pasta isn't the diet demon?

Sounds interesting can you give an example of a daily diet plan? I’m interested in what you would have on the menu if following this?

So pasta isn't the diet demon?

depends who you ask 😂. O/p and the other low carb evangelists will disagree.

if it keeps you full so your overall intake is lowered and you lose weight then there’s no issue.

That's a great post @Eeksteek! I don't think I've ever seen it put quite like that. The point about what your body chooses to do about a calorie deficit, and the fact that it doesn't necessarily choose fat loss , is a bit of a game-changer imo.

I think it's also important to see the drive to eat more food, and more calorific food, as the body's natural reaction to being deprived of nutrients (either due to dieting or due to a poor diet full of processed crap) rather than just 'lack of willpower'. Our hormones are in charge.