In October 2016, I was weighing 72 kilos (158.73 pounds). I am still maintaining that same weight between 70 to 72 kilos since then. Incase if it is relevant, I am a 29 year old guy with a height of 172 cm (5 feet 7 inches).
Along with that, I got several other benefits such as being more energetic, not feeling sleepy all the time, general improvement in mood etc.
All this just with stopping of sugar and nothing else changed.
I can share even more side benefits which I got, but it will seem more unbelievable because I have observed that the general population is still unaware of the extremely harmful effects of sugar.
EDIT: I had typed October 2017 when I had intended to type October 2016. It was just 7 months.
My exercise didn't change much: Cycling to work every day. I got a new bike, but it didn't make me go that much faster.
Within a few months, I went from 175 to 150 pounds (about 79 to 68 kg), and have kept it off.
Now, this goes against the current "ketogenic" hypothesis, and is actually kind of puzzling, but I realize that butter makes things tasty, and I was just eating a lot less food overall because it was less pleasant. So it probably was a reduction in carbs.
It took more than a year before I could enjoy a piece of toast without anything on it.
So, a keto diet is fine. Eating bread every now and then is fine. But, something like a fast food meal consumed with a sugary soda may be particularly unhealthy and may cause you to eat more and crave more similar foods.
I don't know all the mechanisms at play, and I don't think even experts have a really good understanding of how our very complex digestive and metabolic systems (and the bacterial colonies that live in our guts) interact. It's clear that caloric reduction works for weight loss, even if you're eating mostly carbs or mostly fats. Some people report better management of cravings and hunger on different kinds of diets, and the research indicates that a low-fat or low-carb diet results in weight loss at about the same rate (contrary to popular belief about low-carb diets lately).
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/low-carb-v...
But, really, if you run a caloric deficit, you'll lose weight. Cutting arbitrary foods can do it for some folks. Some folks like keto or other relatively extreme restrictive diets. Some folks do intermittent fasting (I've been intermittent fasting for several months and have lost a little over 20 pounds). No matter how you do it, if you cut 500 calories off of your diet, you'll lose weight at a healthy clip.
Could you share how much butter you bought per month and what the package size was?
No, it was a reduction in calories, quite simply. If anything, butter is very heavy on fats and low on carbs...
Examples:
Started walking.
Started cycling.
Cut out processed foods.
Switched to a specific lifestyle diet.
Took up some kind of sport.
Cut out sugar/went Atkins/Keto/Paleo.
I don't think there's a wrong way to break a series of bad habits and build new ones, and I think the hardest part is deciding to do it, and sticking with it.
One of our employees decided to cut out fast food completely. Total weight loss in over 6 months of doing this? 0 pounds.
Why? Because his at-home diet was still full of sugar and carbs (and he admitted as much..."I'll never give up bread!")
Meanwhile, I did a low-carb "lazy Keto" diet where all I did was keep carbs under 20g net per day. I continued to eat fast food at least a couple times a week (I ate a lot of burgers with no buns.)
Total weight loss? 25 pounds over 8 months, and have kept it off. I started the diet December 1 of last year, so it's now been almost a year.
It really is the carbs and sugar that do you in, no matter how organic or home-cooked/homemade those carbs may be.
I'm a sugar bug, I can buy a bag of Reese's and eat the entire thing without problem. When I eat more sugar, I gain weight, when I eat less, I lose weight, and exercise obviously has its natural results.
Jaggery seems to be 50% sucrose, and honey is mostly glucose and fructose. Shouldn't it have the same effect on blood sugar levels?
...which are also 80+% sugar.
* I did the same at the beginning of the summer, cutting out most processed sugar (glucose) and corn syrup while increasing fruit intake (but not by much).
* I also starting skipping meals/moving meal times around, and eating less at dinner, but otherwise did not change the things that I ate.
* I am exercising a lot less than before, owing to a foot injury in the middle of the summer.
I've dropped nearly 20 pounds, from a starting point of just above 200 pounds to between 182 and 185 (varies by day). I think a decline in daily caloric intake owing to fewer sugary foods and smaller meal portions can explain the weight loss. I hope I can keep it up, because I do like sugar and because we have kids there is a lot around the house.
I mentioned this to a relative who is a GI doctor and researcher and he says it's easier for men to lose weight than women through diet.
The natural in sugar is irrelevant. Sugar is sugar; as in fructose is fructose, and glucose is glucose.
I assume you mean you cut out white sugar? Sucrose?
It freaked me out initially, I didn't expect such a large (or any) drop.
Had you been overeating something other than sugar (eg fried food) and eliminated that instead the outcome would have been the same.
Whether this is true is up for debate, but you haven't brought any evidence to the table.
I'm being a bit pedantic because it's important to understand that moderation is the key, not trying to completely eliminate one family of molecules from your diet.
No you absolutely would not. Your body can synthesize glucose from protein and fat, you can survive indefinitely on zero sugar. This is called ketogenic diet.
This is completely false. Indeed, depending on your body composition, you can do a water fast for two weeks and be completely fine. I've done it, I know.
Getting this stuff right can change lives; please think twice about engaging in uninformed pedantry and FUD.
I think a significant cause is that testing blood glucose is thought of as something that only diabetics do, and as a result, most people have no idea how their bodies respond to meals they'd consider normal. The feedback loop is completely open. A typical Chipotle burrito has ~115 grams of carbs, often consumed in 20 minutes[2]. For some people, that's fine, and for others it's not, but the only way to know (other than waiting for problems) is to actually measure one's own blood glucose an hour later.
Until blood glucose testing is either (a) thought of more as data collection without fear or stigma, like a bathroom scale, or (b) made blood-less and automatic, like is rumored about the Apple Watch[3], many people won't learn the answer to that question until a symptom of pre-diabetes appears.
If you're reading this and haven't had your fasting blood glucose tested as part of a regular checkup, get that done. It's not nearly as informative as post-meal testing, but it's much better than nothing.
Also, if you're a diabetic who created a side project/hack because you wanted it, and at scale, that project could mitigate the public health impact of diabetes, feel free to contact me. I'd consider helping make it mainstream[4]. My interest is improving societal health (this will be a massive problem in 20 years if nothing happens now), not personal or financial.
[1]: CDC National Diabetes Statistics report, 2017: http://cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/national-diabet... (page 7)
[2]: Chipotle nutrition calculator: https://www.chipotle.com/nutrition-calculator
[3]: "Apple CEO Tim Cook test-drove a device that tracks his blood sugar": https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/18/apple-ceo-tim-cook-test-drov...
[4]: https://twitter.com/troyd/status/920747116703518720, https://twitter.com/troyd/status/921409373661884416
I'm Director of Marketing for an early stage startup focused on this exact issue. Our founder's grandmother was diagnosed type 2 and he was aggravated with the pain points in the experience, along with the lack of information and tools. Then after doing research and running a health coach practice he realized the scope of the diabetes epidemic.
We're taking top notch educators and putting their knowledge in an app. We have many features to add along the way in our product map, but we're already starting to form partnerships and see value.
Company is called KingFit (https://kingfit.io). Drop me a line and I'd love to introduce you to the founders.
I've just started using Freestyle Libre[1]. It's quite affordable even though it's not as accurate as blood measurements. It's possible to have one sensor attached for up to two weeks. This should be enough time to assess your body's reaction to carbs.
I don't know how you would test for pre-diabetes but to test for diabetes you can basically just drink a lot of sugar-water and see what your blood does. There are levels you can't reach unless you're diabetic.
Personally I've switched to a mostly carb-free diet because managing sugar levels is much easier that way.
[1] http://www.diabetes.co.uk/blood-glucose-meters/abbott-freest...
Taking the measurement by washing your hands or wiping off your finger with an alcohol wipe, let dry, prick finger, squeeze to produce a small blood droplet, touch the end of the strip to the blood.
As far as interpreting expected results an hour after a meal; it depends on about a half dozen primary factors.
- Baseline fasting glucose level - # of carbs consumed - Ratio of simple/complex carbs and how much associated protein and fat in the meal
8 carbs of juice will spike blood sugar a lot faster than 8 carbs of ice cream because fat/protein/fiber can all slow down absorption of the carbs.
But in general healthy glucose level is 90 - 120 mg/dL and I'd imagine an hour after eating you should be a bit higher maybe up to 140.
Yes, it's doable with over-the-counter products. You need a meter and lancet device, and then for each test, a single-use lancet insert (tiny needle) and test strip.
These are usually bundled together in a pharmacy for $25-$75. However, if you look or ask the pharmacist, there's often a 100% money back refund right in the store.
Additional test strips are $0.75-$1.75/strip in packs of 25, 50, or 100. While that sounds expensive (and for diabetics, is), for the purposes we're talking about, one could probably only test after high-carb meals and a few days of fasting readings. The included 25-50 test strips may yield enough data to act on, and if not, one more 25-50 pack probably would.
https://www.diabetesselfmanagement.com/blog/what-is-a-normal... has more about when to test (basically, 1 and 2 hours after the start of a meal) and what results to expect. Feel free to ask the pharmacist to show you how to use it and interpret the results.
Important note: this feels nothing like a blood draw. It's barely noticeable at all and not anything I'd call painful. There's a depth adjustment on the lancet, so it's the tiniest imaginable prick on the side of a finger. It yields less than a drop of blood, then immediately closes, ie, no bandage or bleeding.
I did this myself as an extension of quantified self in 2012 (https://twitter.com/troyd/status/281931325471068161), just because I wanted to see the readings and the process. I did it again this year to see whether the testing process had improved (no) or my results had changed (no). Other than some puzzled pharmacists who aren't used to people buying a meter for cash, there's really nothing to it. It'll also give a tiny peek at a process that millions of people do all the time.
It's fascinating to see how one's body responds, particularly to meals that aren't obviously unhealthy (and depending on the person, may not be). Some examples: sandwiches (especially on big hoagie/grinder-style refined bread), burritos (tortilla+rice+beans), any meals with 2 significant sources of carbs (sandwich with fries or potato, breakfast with toast and hash browns, etc), and pasta. These aren't inherently unhealthy, but they all significantly raise blood glucose, and the only way to see how much is to test. More on "glycemic load": https://www.google.com/search?q=glycemic+load
Continuous blood sugar monitoring is probably overkill given how easy and cheap a1c tests are now.
Blood pressure, on the other hand, is still a nightmare. A good way of reliably and simply measuring resting blood pressure would be a game-changer.
Most doctors won't know about various antibody tests that can help refine a diagnosis, and avoid a mis-diagnosis of Type 2 when you really have adult-onset Type 1. If you test pre-diabetic, search on diabetes antibody tests.
Fastest results back to "normal" for most (not all) Type 2 and pre-diabetics come from cutting out net carbohydrates (far below what the ADA recommends), combined with strength training (weightlifting) and supplementing with HIIT cardio. It takes a serious time commitment to do that: 90-120 minutes a day, 3-5 days a week. While I'm diagnosed Type 2 for over three years, for the past two I've not been on any medications, my post-meal ("post-prandial" in medical lingo) glucose stays below 90 at one and two hours after the meal, A1c is 5.3, and cholesterol numbers are in the normal range; I keep my net carbohydrates below 20g per day, roughly half a single, unadorned bagel (my diet is mostly animal protein and green leafy vegetables). Intermittent Fasting helps, as does outright water fasting for 24 hours or longer, for many (again, not all) people.
My personal big revelation was learning the difference from limbic and true hunger, and my personal satiation patterns. Calories In Calories Out is true, but a vast over-simplification because it doesn't address the satiation issue. For me personally, I've settled on hitting at least 200g of animal protein per day, and as much Romaine hearts as I want, with 28g of grated Parmesan and a tablespoon of Caesar dressing on the side, mixed together and used a dip for the Romaine hearts. After that, I can manage the satiation issue with ancillary food. YMMV.
There isn't one single treatment path for everyone, though there are lots of commonalities; I suspect diabetes is a catch-all for a class of a multitude of metabolic disorders, either that or our individual body metabolisms are more wildly different than medical science admits so far. The key to getting back into the normal ranges is apply the scientific method to your body, try one change at a time, measure, repeat.
One point to make from the article, though: "They suggested that the physician-authors were trying to con the obese with the fraudulent argument that they could become lean without doing the hard work of curbing their perverted appetites."
If you want to really confuse what's going on, turn to moralism. Desire to judge and to avoid being judged completely messes with incentives and people will line up to the "hard working" side while avoiding the "lazy" side, regardless of what is actually true.
Sugar, usually in the form of HFCS is added to almost any processed food these days, to make it more delicious and to make the food more profitable. HFCS is very, very cheap to produce. You're eating more sugar without perhaps even knowing you are. Low fat foods, introduced in the late 70's have the same amount of calories, but sugar was added to make the food more palatable.
Sugary items, like sodas, are also coming in larger portions, as well.
Sugars from fruit are less of a problem, as the fruit also contains fiber, which slows down the absorption of the fructose, and helps to not overload your liver.
Calories in the form of glucose are digested differently than fructose or HFCS - the latter two which are processed in your liver. You shouldn't worry about eating too much bread - you should be looking at if the bread contains added sugar.
Good video to watch:
Fruit?
I'd put my money on a relation between abundance of food plus obesity because too high calorie intake is the main culprit of obesity.
From Wikipedia.
Sugar has been around far longer than our very recent obesity epidemic.
The end goal I would like to see is healthy off the shelf long lasting processed food that tastes great. It runs contrarian to "eat local and natural, big food is evil" but it solves a huge problem.
Of course on the way imperfect models will yield bad results and heuristics are all we have. When doctors refused to wash their hands because they didn't know germ theory despite the massive heuristic evidence, people needlessly died.
Most of our popular models of diet are basically unscientific quackery. Maybe they are bad models? You are right of course in simply having a set of rules to follow seems to help.
> Most of our popular models of diet are basically unscientific quackery.
The most conventional holds up: the one that consuming too many calories causes one to gain weight, and consuming not enough calories causes one to lose weight.
If I'd go with what's popular on my gf's FB, I'd end up believing vegan diet is the panacea. We're living in our bubbles. Your mistake in thinking is the assumption that diets like keto and atkins are popular. They're not popular. They're just hypes in certain circles like silicon valley.
Another thing you'll find is that there are government (based on science) recommended daily intake on things like vitamin D, iron, vitamin B12, etc etc and with a keto diet or high carb diet or whatever diet this may be difficult to reach. Although that's not directly related to weight, it is related to health.
My personal rough rule of thumb is once you reach the low 20s percentage body fat, you either keep increasing cardio (preferably HIIT), or dropping counted calories, until your moving average weekly weight keeps trending down. Fit keto around that or even drop it, and it won't matter (unless you're the same subtype diabetic like me, and then keto is an essential ingredient to avoiding medication).
If you go in once a quarter for a VAP lipid panel (the most extensive lipid panel I could find), then as long as those numbers trend in the right direction, keep on doing whatever works for you. After being diagnosed with Type 2 and having to figure out myself how to beat the fucker into remission, I've concluded that medical science can give rough guidelines for describing metabolic processes, but it is up to each of us to hack our own bodies. Try one change, test the change with measurements, and repeat; commit the changes that work, fork away from the changes that don't, accept failures and setbacks as signals of what not to do, and move on.
Taubes would be hard pressed to explain how you could lose weight on a diet of Twinkies or how those subsisting on high carb, low fat, low protein diets that fail to meet their caloric needs in famine-afflicted regions remain thin.
The way insulin works and the way the body requires a caloric surplus to gain weight are not remotely mutually exclusive ideas and to suggest otherwise requires cherry-picking the literature in a way that's scientifically irresponsible.
[0] https://examine.com/nutrition/what-should-i-eat-for-weight-l...
Nobody is suggesting that CICO and the insulin theory are mutually exclusive; what the author is saying is that CICO is a profoundly unhelpful statement for people looking to lose weight, improve their health, or reverse diabetes/heart disease.
> Taubes would be hard pressed to explain how those subsisting on high carb, low fat, low protein diets that fail to meet their caloric needs in famine-afflicted regions remain thin.
Thin doesn't mean healthy. We're talking about disease, not necessarily weight, and you can have metabolic syndrome even if you're considered 'thin'. Most people who are thin with a poor diet have visceral fat (fat around the organs) which is far worse than subcutaneous fat (as a risk factor).
I'm not denying that there are other reasons to eat a diet with greater nutritional density, but trying to convince people that CICO is wrong is far more harmful than trying to convey that it is literally the most important factor in trying to modify your weight.
If you want to make changes in your life, you need to know the right things to measure, and your caloric intake relative to how your weight changes is the single most important factor for people trying to lose weight. If you're not even doing that, it's unlikely you'll succeed, as millions of people who struggle with their weight will understand.
Once you've convinced people of the value of that, it then becomes more productive to go into the value of high protein intake and strength training to further improve body composition, the importance of eating a diet centered around fruits and vegetables, etc.
For people that are severely overweight, getting their weight down will have the highest impact on their health.
>Nobody is suggesting that CICO and the insulin theory are mutually exclusive;
Taubes literally argued this in the paragraph where he quoted the biochemistry text.
While true (it’s simply a restatement of a law of thermodynamics after all) It’s an unhelpful, apparently mostly irrelevant model.
https://www.marksdailyapple.com/artificial-sweeteners-insuli...
Fung, Jason. The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss (p. 172).
The problem with studies... is that they confuse correlation and caution [sic] then make some wild unsubstantiated stab at causation..."
Fruit and vegetables contain carbohydrates, but their impact is completely different from refined carbs.
I was overweight and had an appetite out of control a couple decades ago. For other health reasons, I adopted a natural night (real dark, can't see you hand in front of your face) and exactly the same lights on and lights off time. My extra weight vanished. My appetite didn't just lower, it changed away from salt fat and sugar (exactly what you want when starving) towards veggies and salads.
(Ten hour nights recommended as your sleep will bifurcate.)
Recommended. Nature ain't all wrong, it turns out.
I get similarly suspicious when people talk about how going on keto radically changed how they felt. Maybe it is true, but in an sea of anecdotes, it's really hard to figure out what is real. Do you notice how almost all of these turn into "this is how nature actually works"? That similar belief has led people to not get cancer treatments and then die horribly, so there's gotta be more than "this is how nature works".
Congrats on your weight loss, regardless.
A more interesting test is to measure the difficulty of trying a certain anecdote yourself. How easily can you 'black out' your bedroom and sit, lay, or sleep in it for a 10 hour window at night for 30 days in a row?
If you can do such a test easily, and you are invested in seeing a certain change that you think may result from it, then it does you no material harm to try it. Worst case scenario, you lose sleep for a few days and abort the experiment. Best case scenario, it has a positive impact. The results could be anywhere between those two endpoints.
So, that makes this a 'safe' test to apply to your own personal body system, which is not necessarily applicable to any others.
Anecdotes that require you to alter what you ingest (food, water, supplements, medicines etc) are much riskier, yet people constantly try these out endlessly under the rubric of "diets" without a second thought for the potential of months of damage to their gut biome, muscle mass, hormone levels, and so on. It's been demonstrated by a vast array of people that it's relatively safe to cut out all the sugar from your diet, but you have to make sure you don't let your blood sugar levels fall too low in the process.
Anecdotes that require you to alter your body (e.g. stomach stapling) are even riskier than those, as we have very little experience in this space compared to diets or other non-consumption non-modification approaches.
You are absolutely correct to be suspicious, but consider also the level of suspicion appropriate for the context. "Try blackout curtains for a month at night and charge your phone face down" is a far lower bar to be 'worth a shot' than "Remove all carbs from your diet". And if you see others failing to take this into account, remind them of the inherent level of risk in what they're considering. It's not always about being right or wrong, but instead about e.g. "how much harm could come to me if I try keto diet?".
EDIT: There's very much a personal overtone to these risk assessments as well. My personal mental stability hinges critically on getting enough sleep, so I am unusually wary of anything that messes with sleep, because I need mental stability far more than I need the benefits such an experiment may or may not produce for me.
EDIT: Harness the placebo effect! Believe that what you're trying could help when you try it. If you're doubtful and pessimistic and cynical about something you're trying, be especially careful to focus every day on why you're trying it. Doing so makes it more likely that the placebo effect will enhance your results, and less likely that the nocebo effect will diminish them. This relates directly to a lot of "woo-woo" thinking, but apply my logic above. What's the level of risk of trying a placebo-welcoming approach? You could mislead yourself into thinking something helped when it didn't. Keeping a careful journal about your experiments is an effective treatment for that problem for many folks, and the placebo effect is really powerful. No point in setting aside a useful tool just because it's mind-body.
What happens to overweight people has NOTHING to do with lean people who exercise.
do provide sources. the one such episode i recall was demonization of John Yudkin in 60s when he tried to point out how bad sugar was.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/16/health/brazil... , about: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/insider/as-global-obesity...
All the kids are eating the coke and Doritos as a meal, and of course there is nobody telling them not to, or that they should be brushing their teeth or anything like that. It's a massive, massive disaster.
I have one of these thought leader doctors on board. Would love any feedback or help from the community to get this made.
Well, in the best case I guess, seems you think the textbook is just a bunch of lies and there won't even be half of the pages left in there?
Just hoping that you won't further the spread of the many myths about nutrition that are so popular today. There are for instance actually still people who don't think calories in vs calories out determines weight change.
The relevant question of course is what determines calories in and out if you aren't counting it manually.Author contrasts two explanations of the obesity and diabetes crises: A) that the root of the issue is caloric intake stemming from low-self-control or B) that the root of the issue is high blood-sugar and its subsequent effects.
Author explores the long history of this debate and presents points for both sides. Author admits the thermodynamic validity of caloric math but cites that at a cellular glucose levels cause insulin levels to rise that cause the cell to take on fat. Author cites other research, such as increased appetite among obese animals, suggesting a systemic effect. Author cites ketogenic diets as evidence (which restrict sugars but not total calories).
Author contrasts the moral interpretation of each theory. Proposes the caloric consumption model places blame on the individual, whereas the glucose explanation places blame on the FDA.
Not that I know anything, I've just watched and read Robert Sapolsky's material.
In that time, I lost 45 lbs, going from 210 to 165. I didn't exercise or do anything else. That weight came off in about 3 months.
I am now commuting 11mi by bicycle most days, I feel better than I ever have. I fit perfectly into a few things I owned in HS (I'm in my 40s and was a skinny kid).
Sugar is the worst.
#74 — What Should We Eat? Waking Up with Sam Harris Duration: 2:07:24 Published: Sat, 06 May 2017 20:30:08 +0000 URL: http://traffic.libsyn.com/wakingup/Waking_Up_74_Gary_Taubes....
In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Gary Taubes about his career as a science journalist, the difficulty of studying nutrition and public health scientifically, the growing epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the role of hormones in weight gain, the controversies surrounding his work, and other topics.
