Re: FITNESS: Diet and Exercise

From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Thu Apr 24 2003 - 19:30:46 MDT

  • Next message: spike66: "bayes"

    Damien Sullivan writes:

    > Hmm. The Atkins diet has basically no carbs and you lose weight. Does that
    > weight loss magically stop at some point or are you supposed to include carbs
    > again to stop?

    Well, the short answer is that you're supposed to include carbs again
    to stop. You gradually increase your carb quota by 5 gm/day, one week
    at a time, until your weight loss stops.

    However in practice I don't think you would shrink away to nothing
    under Atkins. Some people fail to lose weight on it, or lose weight
    for a while and then stop. A recent meta-analysis suggested that weight
    loss on low-carb diets is primarily due to lower caloric intake rather
    than the low carbs themselves. It's possible that the absence of carbs
    makes it easier to tolerate and stick to a low calory diet.

    This meta-analysis article was described here:
    http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-04/sumc-srr040303.php

    the abstract is here:
    http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/289/14/1837

    and I put the full text online here:
    http://www.finney.org/~hal/jama_atkins.pdf

    (Actually on scanning over the full article and its tables, it looks to
    me like the summary statements are oversimplifications. The data seems
    consistent with low carb diets being better for weight loss even at
    similar caloric levels. The problem is that the many different studies
    analyzed all did things so differently that it is hard to compare them.)

    Hal



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