My Live Call-In Show with Jimmy Moore is Now a Podcast

You can now hear my latest interview with Jimmy Moore as a podcast. Find it HERE or download it on iTunes.

The topic was "Overcoming Low Carb Problems." Not surprisingly, most of the questions were about not losing weight.

As most of you know my take on the Low Carb diet is that it is an effective way to lower blood sugar. Flattening blood sugar makes us lose the raging hunger that makes so many people with diabetes and prediabetes overeat and gain. So when most people normalize their blood sugar and stop eating the high carb, high calorie junk foods that they used to rely on, they lose weight. Often a significant amount. For a while.

The data I've reviewed, and my years of participating in online diet discussion groups have convinced me that normal weight loss on a low carb diet goes through three phases. A quick weight loss phase where as much as 20 lbs can be lost within weeks--all glycogen, and not body fat, a slower phase lasting up to 6 months when weight comes off at a reasonable pace (a pound a week, for example) and the final phase where weight loss slows to the point where many people can't detect it, get discouraged and quit, though in fact if they stick to the diet they'll lose 1/2 a pound or a pound a month for quite a while longer.

Some people have better results, but since these are the average, for everyone who does better, someone does worse. This isn't because they're doing it wrong--though the doctors who profit mightily from selling magical diet dreams often use that as the explanation for why their magical diets fail real people. These conclusions are supported by lots of academic research and the testimony of decades' worth of online dieters, including that of the small group of people honest enough to admit that their diets haven't lived up to their hopes even when they've pursued them religiously.

Many people have a false idea of how their weight loss should proceed on a low carb diet because the online Low Carb and Paleo cultures are dominated by young, fit men, and doctors whose only experience of weight loss is knocking off 10 or 20 pounds in middle age. You rarely hear the voices of older women and those with serious metabolic problems. (Jimmy is a refreshing exception to this rule, but he's also an outlier. Very few people lose 200 lbs their first year on this or any other diet.)

So newbie dieters in the latter categories often assume that they will experience the same results as these vocal, young, healthy proponents of the diet who can lose steadily eating 2500 calories worth of delicious high fat food every day. But this ignores the fact that a 220 lb 35 year old man with a healthy metabolism may easily be able to lose weight while eating twice as much food as a 200 lb 55 year old woman. No matter how often that woman goes to the gym or how low her carb intake.

That's why many of the questions on this call in show were from older women and people with metabolic issues who thought there was something wrong with them when they couldn't lose on the kind of regimen that works for the outspoken, young, male proponents of these diets.

There isn't. For most older women with serious weight problems, losing weight means cutting way down on calories no matter what the macronutrient composition of their meals, and even then, weight loss will be slow--half a pound a month is not unusual after the first five or six months. Cutting carbs eliminates the appetite problem that make it so tough to cut back on food, but cutting carbs without cutting calories only works during the heady first few weeks and months of the diet. After that, it's time to get out the food scale, weigh portions, look up the nutritional value of what's on your plate, figure out how much your body burns daily, and eat significantly less than that amount every day for months and perhaps years to come.


This argument explains why my book Diet 101: The Truth About Low Carb Diets isn't a runaway bestseller.  But it also explains why it's getting rave reviews on Amazon from people who say things like, "No BS here, folks" and " It was almost shocking to read a book that was completely honest on this subject -- no pie in the sky promises, just realistic statements and expectations supported by fact."

Another issue I discuss in response to questions on this live show was something the diet and weight loss surgery do their best to keep you from learning: most people never get to their diet goals, even when they amputate their stomachs and make it impossible to eat anything but an ultra low carb/low food diet.

I dug in and looked at some stats from WLS studies and found that a surprising number of people did not lose more than 50% of their excess weight even on these extreme regimens that force people to eat low carb. At best, most people lose 80% of their excess weight. If that's the best people can do on a forced ultra low carb/low food diet, it makes sense that a free range low carb diet is not going to get most people to their weight loss goal--because most people's weight loss goals, when they start out very overweight, are simply not realistic.

My own experience with polling the Low Carb community is that while there are some lucky people who do get to their goals, they are few in number. Most people lose 20% of their starting and then weight loss slows way, way down. If they stick to it, some can lose more, but if they push too hard, some end up with weight losses that can only be maintained by staying on a very rigid, low calorie diet for the rest of their lives. It's much harder to maintain on that kind of stringent regimen than it is on one that lets you feel like you're eating a reasonable amount of food.

That's why I often advise people to lose what you can lose without starving yourself, then work on maintaining that loss. Appreciate your victories. If you've normalized your blood sugar you won't end up with diabetic complications, even if you still weigh more than you'd like. Focus on maintaining what you have lost, however much it is. Maintaining a modest weight loss for a decade or more is a huge achievement--far healthier, harder, and more impressive than losing a lot of weight and regaining it all five years after your weight loss effort began.

All this is discussed in this podcast, but if you want to go into any of these topics in depth, I'd suggest reading my book, Diet 101: The Truth About Low Carb Diets. If you only get the simplified, pre-chewed version of diet advice that fits onto a web page or an interview, you will never learn all you need to know to truly understand your metabolism. We live in a society that caters to those who are too lazy to dig in, read, study and think. But it is by doing just that that you'll put yourself in a situation where you won't have to ask any expert or rely on their advice no matter how wierd, because you'll have the tools needed to evaluate all claims and chose the health strategies most likely to work for you in your own, individual circumstances.