Amazing (and Not So Amazing) Low Carb Feats

Preface:  When I write posts such as this one, that I know some will take in ways in which it was not intended, I usually spend a bit of time contemplating hitting the publish button.  This post comes off rather more wet blankety (is that a term?) than even some others.   But as someone who has struggled with the after effects of yo-yoing, LC and not, I do think it is worthwhile to shine a light on the reality of what is being promoted out there.


I've been criticized for my "personal attacks" on Jimmy Moore.  If pointing out hypocrisy and the like is attacking, so be it, but discussions of Jimmy Moore's weight and diet are not personal any more than discussions about Richard Simmons' or Jillian Michaels' would be.  He is not only "a" public figure in the low carb world, he is arguably *THE* public face of low carb.   There may well be tons of other advocates and such out there, but all combined, when it comes to internet presence, name recognition, and all that jazz, Jimmy beats them all hands down and perhaps combined.    Nobody would be cutting Richard or Jillian or anyone slack, and one can't help but be reminded of the nastiness aimed at one Tara Parker Pope (at the hands of Peter Attia and Gary Taubes) for not "fixing herself" with the proper low carb diet.

I tend to think that as Jimmy's weight problems mounted, there were many on the Love LowCarb Boat who were quietly worrying about what was to become of their coattail franchises.  These people no doubt encouraged him behind the scenes to keep up the good fight and search for the solution to his metabolic mysteries.  They also defended him publicly.    So what if he's 300 lbs, he brings so much information to the people.  Nevermind that he is STILL using a 2005 picture on the official LCDU tour!  I mean really, they're going to see him as he is today, a much improved version of where he was six months ago.  Why still that picture?  That's a rhetorical question with an answer I think most of us intuitively know, but it would take endless paragraphs to put to print with no guarantee it would express the thoughts properly.

Now that he's turned it around there's talk of folks like me needing to eat crow and such.  Umm ... Look, this is really nothing new for Jimmy.  As it stands now, it is history repeating itself only with a longer cycle.  I wish for his sake this is a different chapter with a different ending a few years down the road, I am just not optimistic.

Meanwhile his friends are cheering him on down the tunnel of ever-more extreme dietary restrictions, with totally unknown long-term safety and "nightmare" lipids he not only attempts to minimize, but describes as "stellar".   But let's leave the health implications aside for a moment and focus on weight and body composition.

This was the focus of the original post.  Look at the 12 month Atkins weight loss + 20 months maintenance 240 pound Jimmy Moore of August 2006.  Then look at the 250 lb Jimmy Moore of 2012, who has now shared  detailed body composition data.  It is not a pretty picture indeed, and I'm not referring to the visual aesthetics  here.    His friends can tout his success and go along with the healthfulness of his new diet and all of that.  Nobody will hold them accountable anyway ... there are all those disclaimers, anyway.

So folks, the post that follows is for the newbie ... the person who has just now come across low carb or paleo ... so that you can go in eyes wide open, with reasonable expectations, knowing the actual results of the most famous n=1 formerly morbidly obese low carber out there.

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ORIGINAL POST

Tom Naughton must have amazing biometric eye sight, and Jimmy Moore must have amazing arms.  That is all I can conclude from Jimmy's DEXA scan reveal and Tom Naughton's recent post.  

When Jimmy started losing weight again after cutting back on protein and adding more fat to his diet, I was happy he’d reversed the creeping weight gain that had baffled him, but I wondered if the lower protein intake would lead to muscle loss. That fear was put to rest when Jimmy and Christine visited us last week. His arms looked thicker than when I saw him in July, not thinner.

Now we've all been told -- and it's true --  that a pound of fat is larger than a pound of muscle.  I went looking about Google Images for examples of this, and the difference is rather astounding:

Now according to Jimmy's post, he lost 1.68 lbs of fat in his arms while gaining 2.05 lbs muscle.   Even with the most generous comparison above, his arms would have, if anything, gotten thinner, and not thicker, between DXA scans.

The test showed that during those two months, Jimmy shed just over 16 pounds of additional body fat while gaining just over six pounds of muscle. He gained two pounds of muscle in his arms alone.  If that doesn’t sound like much, try this little thought experiment: picture a one-pound lean steak. That’s how much meat Jimmy put on each arm.

Wha ... humma na humma na ... but but ... oh I didn't mean that, eh Tom?  Well, did Jimmy's torso and legs also look thicker to you?  After all among "the notable changes from September 2012 to November 2012" were 2.05 pounds of lean muscle mass gain in my arms, 3.05 pounds of lean muscle mass gain in my legs and 5.20 pounds of lean muscle mass gain in the trunk area."  There's no overlap in these regions on the DXA, so I do wonder about the numbers here -- 2.05 + 3.05 + 5.2 = 10.3 lbs which is a bit more than the 6.19 lbs of total lean mass gains.  Somewhere, in a missing slice, Jimmy must have lost about 3.9 pounds of muscle.  (Notably also, 1.68 + 3.54 + 9.65 = 14.87 lbs, so Jimmy also lost 1.39 lbs of fat in this mystery region).  

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But, did Jimmy seem thicker about the middle after building five one-pound lean steaks there?  Were his legs thicker too with 1.75 lb steaks smacked onto each of them?  Not quite the July-to-November differential, but here's his  50 lbs lost update from May-to-October.  (Whatever the weird aspect distortion of the after pic)

Look folks, there's no doubt Jimmy is losing weight, and this DXA snapshot shows that, for now, in the past two months, he's not losing LBM.  Perhaps the way to gain LBM on a ketogenic diet is to do intermittent fasting, eat large insulinogenic (dairy) meals after lifting in the fasted state, and have your weight fluctuate quite a bit so that you are in caloric surplus/gaining weight for days at a time.  You might also want to quit weight lifting for the first four months after doing it regularly for a couple of years and then take it up again with gusto between DXA scans, and have your baseline DXA done after losing like 85 percent of your total losses to date.

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I'm thinking that if Jimmy's arms showed noticeable changes, he would have posted a picture of them, instead of the one at right on his 5 month update.

But stop insulting people's intelligence by overhyping what Jimmy Moore's recent revelations show. What they really show is that if one believes he was ever anywhere near 11% body fat, they are as easily bamboozled as Jimmy Moore is himself.    That is what he believed back in October 2005, however, when he weighed 230 lbs. 

A little math, shall we?  I did this with a simple spreadsheet working from Jimmy currently weighing 250.4 lbs including 155.92 lbs lean and 85.43 lbs fat tissue, and 9.05 lbs bone minerals.   His DEXA report calculates his current fat percent (of tissue mass) at 35%.  So  I did two calculations for what his weight loss would have to entail to attain a respectable 20% bodyfat composition.

Scenario One -- He's able to maintain his current fat-free mass and loses just fat.  

• He would have to get down to 204 lbs
• He would have to lose 46 pounds of fat, or over half (54%) of his current body fat to reach this goal.

Scenario Two -- He's able to sustain the current "recomposition" rate of 0.38 lbs lean gains for every 1 lb fat loss:

• He would have to get down to 224 lbs
• This would involve losing 42 lbs of fat (49% of current stores) and gaining 16 lbs of muscle to make up the net 26 lb weight loss.

Back in August of 2006 (when his weight had crept up to around 240), Jimmy posted the following on his blog:  

Is This The Body Of An Obese Man?

Along with the picture at right.  Roughly six years ago, and only 10 or so pounds less than he weighs today, that is what the formerly 410 lb Jimmy Moore looked like, roughly 20 months post his 180 lb weight loss.  (BTW, how many sizes does he have this shirt in?)     At the time he wrote:

According to the BMI calculator I used, this puts me in the 79th percentile for my age and height group which means nearly 8 out of ten men in their 30′s who are 6’3″ tall weigh LESS than me. Really? Jimmy Moore is “obese?” LOL! Oh, that’s a good one. ROTFL! Hee hee! Sigh…what’s sad is there are people who actually BELIEVE BMI is the BEST way to determine if someone is obese or not.

Take a good look at that picture at the top of this blog post I had my wife take of me today right before I went to the gym to workout. Is this the body of an obese man to you?

If I’m obese TODAY, I wonder what they would describe me as in 2004 when I tipped the scales at 410 pounds with a BMI of 51.2 in the 99th percentile?!?!?!?! M-m-m-m-morbidly obese?!?! This is why the BMI as the measurement of determining whether someone has a weight problem is ridiculous and irresponsible. That is why the move is on to change from BMI to the waist-to-hip ratio instead since it is a better measurement of obesity than BMI.

Not only have  I transformed myself radically from that lazy fat slob I used to be into an energetic athletic man who is now in shape, my body fat was measured last October after livin’ la vida low-carb for nearly two years at 11 percent.

Now, I can certainly relate to Jimmy and to the BMI being a poor measure of individual obesity.  I'm a BMI outlier myself, but I've never kidded myself that there's not fat left to be lost if that's something I wish to dedicate my energies towards.  Jimmy is also quite tall, and like all tall people, he carries his weight better than a shorter person.  Put that same fat mass on a shorter frame, and the person is looking quite a bit fatter.  You "big guys" get away with more than your shorter counterparts can (consider yourselves lucky).  But Jimmy, like many men, puts very little weight in his limbs.  I have no doubt that the test used to measure body fat at his company was a standing impedance device -- the circuit being through his legs, and no formula that accounted for his fat distribution above the belt.  Surely he had questions about the accuracy of this test.  Tell me he surely did?!  Right???

While Jimmy is rather pleased with his recent DEXA results, I'd be rather less than pleased if I were him.  Not only does he have years of written records he all but ignores in his crazy searches for mysterious metabolic damage that somehow mandates more drastic measures to combat, but he also has years of pictures to look at for reference.  And unlike yours truly, Jimmy is not camera shy!   While we cannot know what his real body composition was back 6 years ago we have some pretty telling pictures from which to guess.  You've been forwarned, I'm about to show you some shirtless pictures from the yesteryear days of LLVLC blog, and I'm not doing this to shame or embarrass Jimmy, but to put the current situation into proper context so that anyone just tuning into this nutty ketosis experiment has proper context.

First up, about four months after the the "Am I Obese?" post, in January 2007, Jimmy shared some pictures of his loose skin. In 1/07 he weighed around 220 lbs, having lost 20 lbs since the previous August.  It wasn't until the end of that year when he untertook his first resistance training in earnest.  From this post, we have more pictures.  But first some excerpts of the text that went with them:

In my book about my weight loss experience, I wrote a chapter called "Exercise Is Not A Dirty Word" and it's true. As much as people moan and complain about not having time to exercise, lacking any energy to commit to a regular routine, and any number of other useless excuses that are bantered about by the usual suspects, the fact is there is no excuse good enough for NOT taking care of your physical body. After all, God only gives you one, so you need to do what you can with what you've got.

For me when I was losing weight, that meant cardiovascular exercise galore. As much as I HATED the treadmill when I first started and was gasping for air after 15 minutes at 3mph, today I can easily go 30-45 minutes on an elliptical machine at 8-9mph with 12 resistance and get a good workout.

I'll admit that in 2007 I have been a little slack with my regular cardio primarily because my free YMCA gym membership I used to get with my old job expired and I never renewed or joined elsewhere. I still play volleyball on Tuesday nights at my church for a good FREE two-hour workout, but that was pretty much it for exercise during the week for most of this year. I didn't think much of it, though, since I'm only maintaining my weight now and not actually losing anymore. Thoughts that I didn't really need a lot of exercise anymore made their way into my cranium 

Boy was I wrong! 

Although my weight has remained pretty steady over the past few months, I've noticed it start to slowly do the creepy crawly thing.

He mentions that he's experienced regains several times since he began maintenance in 2005, which is not a crime, and only human, and all of that.  However, talk about the king of forgetfulness and transparency here.  Would anyone reading the above have thought that Jimmy had begun 2007 at 220-ish pounds, gained up to 248 lbs before going on the crazy crash Kimkins diet, which took him down under 215 sometime circa July,  and now weighing ??  We learn from the updates that he was 235 in these shots. (screenshot from that post, you can click to enlarge). 

Folks, I certainly have loose skin as well, but I'm not kidding myself as to how much of my remaining weight is indeed just excess skin leftover.  Those "love handles" and his thick trunk are indicative of a fair amount of rear subQ fat, and quite a bit of visceral fat.  He can kid himself and try to kid his audience about this all he wants.  Now Jimmy updated his progress at one month, three months, and six months.   After three months, Jimmy wrote:

The first thing you’ll notice from this front view comparison is my neck, shoulders and arms are noticeably bigger. I’ve been working those three areas of my upper body very hard for the past three months or so and that investment is paying off.

And at 6 months he wrote:

My neck has DEFINITELY gotten bigger because my collared button-up shirts are getting tight around the top button when I put on a tie. The muscle growth in my upper body has been pretty extraordinary. The same thing about the tightness in my clothes is happening in my shoulders and upper arms as the muscle growth continues to progress well in those specific areas.   Here you can see where I’ve put on the extra weight in my stomach, but you can also see the muscles in the neck, shoulders, and arms that weren’t there before. When we figure out what’s happening with my weight and get it back down again, then I can’t wait for even more definition to start showing up in my upper body, including my chest and abs.

In case anyone's wondering, the first two pics are more "before", the second three are at 3 months, and all the rest are at 6 months where  Jimmy was weighing 264.  Sometime after this, he gave up the weight lifting.  He does appear to have put on some shoulder muscles here.  OK ... so let's fast forward.  He didn't post pics of his progress after the eggfest in 2010, but he had to have weighed somewhere in the 250's or low 160's then, and in 2011, after the beef/egg/CO/chocolate challenge he was 267.

I dunno, you tell me, what's going on here?  To me, at least while LC, he gains and loses mostly in his trunk, and I look at the "after" 50 lb weight loss picture above, and he appears to have that slightly emaciated about the shoulder region look, but otherwise his cycling and/or persistant low carb diet have increased his trunk adiposity over the years.   Oh, one more picture.  Despite repeating this lie that he hasn't weighed this little in 5 years (a few times now, so not inadvertent), Jimmy Moore did get down below the 250 mark, however briefly, with his 6 day fast at the end of April 2011.  I don't know how much weight he put on in a couple of weeks before the cruise that year, but here's his arms for those still reading.  

And so here we are around 18 months later and Jimmy gained up to 306 lbs over the first year of that time period, and he's now down flirting with the 250 lb mark after 6 months of an extreme diet.  One can certainly not argue with the weight loss, but I do believe there's room to argue about the healthfulness of his approach (and the results on the lipid front).   Unless he's lying on that front as well, Jimmy has never strayed far from LC, being LC all but a day or so here and there for going on 9 years now, and truly VLC for most of and extended periods throughout the years.  I certainly hadn't seen Jimmy report anything over 50 g/day on his now-wiped-clean menus blog other than a pizza binge or two.  Also, near as I can tell, the one thing he kept doing by all accounts since he took it back up a couple of years ago, is lifting weights.
   

He is currently only around 15 lbs heavier than he was in the Dec 2007 "before any weight lifting for real".  If he lost that 15 lbs of only fat, he'd be at 31% body fat, and if he lost 20 lbs of all fat, he'd dip just below 30%.  If he recomposes at the rate of the past two months, he'd be at 27% body fat at 235, and 24% body fat at 230.  I've already shown the rather more daunting task to get to 20% body fat, and for the upper limit of "fit" for a man -- let's push it to 18% -- he'd need to get lighter still.  For Scenario One (maintaining current LBM), he'd have to dip into One-derland at 199, losing 51 lbs or a whopping 60% of his remaining fat mass.  For Scenario Two (recomposing per past two months), he'd only need to lose 29 net pounds, losing 47 lbs fat and gaining 18 lbs muscle and weighing 221.  

Them's sobering numbers folks, I almost hesitate to post them they are so depressingly so.  But post them I shall, because if we learn anything, it's that if you don't want to go through life kidding yourself about your body composition and the effectiveness of your diet, you need to get it measured accurately.  And then you need to be realistic with yourself and, ultimately, your audience.  In this regard, though I don't think it was his intent, I'm glad that Jimmy posted the real deal of his DXA.  Jimmy did look rather less obese in the arms-up am-I-obese shot than he does today, and he's only about 10 lbs lighter there.  So it is both a humbling lesson and a cautionary tale in terms of what one can do to themselves by cycling, and perhaps doing compounding that cycling with carb restriction and unrestrained fat consumption.

We're told Jimmy was eating too much protein that got him up over 300 lbs.  We also know from the Bray overfeeding study that when one overeats protein, they put on about the same amount of fat, but also add lean tissue.  If this occurred under the "low insulin" conditions of low carb, then one would expect Jimmy had added a lot of lean mass when he packed on 55 pounds in around 8 months after his fasting experiment.  And if his weight losses of the first 4 months of nutty ketosis (with no exercise) in any way spared lean mass, one would expect him to look more like the 2007 Jimmy than he appears.   I can only speculate that perhaps my "Insulin paradox" is at play here.  Despite eating a lot of protein, Jimmy was partitioning more fuel to fat in the face of carbohydrate starvation while the surplus protein was used to maintain glucose levels.  I dunno.  That is purely speculating.

One last comment on the body composition per se.  Jimmy himself believes W:H ratio is better than BMI as a risk predictive measure.  This DXA should be all the more disconcerting.  He is clearly pre-disposed towards abdominal obesity, and only Jimmy knows how he looked after the 1999 160 lb weight loss on low fat, or other times in his life when he weighed 300 pounds etc.  But it seems that whatever he's been doing for the past 9 years of low carbing is, if anything, further concentrating his adiposity in his abdomen (and back).  Thus his percent body fat is even misleading at that, because with his build in order to have normal abdominal adiposity he'd probably need to be closer to 15% body fat, perhaps below that.  In his case, weight may be more important than "health", because it will be the major factor in improving health.  Just something for him to consider, but Jimmy was never one to listen to advice he doesn't want to hear.

So I guess the best I can hope for with posts like this is that some of these low carbers who are cheering Jimmy on and perhaps climbing on this bandwagon along with him, think critically about it.  Can you sustain it?  More importantly, should you sustain it?  Will it get you to goal?  Jimmy's lipids say otherwise for him, even if he can envision himself eating like this for a lifetime.   And more importantly still, if you're reading this and just beginning on your quest to solve the mystery of your so-called damaged metabolism, please jump in, if you must, with your eyes wide open after having taken an honest self-appraisal.  There's no need to blog about it or share it with the world, just learn from this one prominent example of what happens when you rationalize yourself into delusion. 

Lastly, I'm sure Tom Naughton thinks he's being a good and supportive friend to Jimmy, but he's not doing him or anyone else any favors with the gross exaggerations.  I've already spent too much time on this so I won't bother with one last montage.  Watch the two videos of Fat Head Open 1 in July, and Two around Jimmy's 6 month mark.   Compare the pictures here with Jimmy wearing the same shorts and a similar tee as in the Two video.  Yes, he's notably thinner, but not quite as much as Naughton's descriptions would lead one to believe.  More importantly, however, there's no change in his arms near as anyone can tell in a loose t-shirt.

I hope for Jimmy's sake that he finds a livable and more moderate way to maintain his weight loss this time around.  That he keeps going with the lifting and perhaps realizes, especially with his sedentary job, that it may be time to kick up that cardio again.  The frisbee golf walking around is great, but it probably only compensates for the movement time back when Jimmy worked outside the home and traveled to the gym near daily.  To me, the pictures really are worth more than anything I could say anyway.  What he did in latter 2004 to drop from 300 to 230, and whatever it was he was doing in 2005-6 for maintenance, seemed to be working better for Jimmy's body composition (even if the 11% was never realistic) than whatever he's done since.  Listening to Gary exercise-is-useless-for-weight-loss Taubes and every "up your fat" suggestion that's come down the pike and "exercising the right way" has not impacted him positively.   Following his lead is likely to do the same for you ....

It may never be realistic for us formerly really obese to return to a normal weight, size, etc.etc.    Or perhaps we can.  Or perhaps what it would take to do that is simply not worth the quality-of-life trade-offs.   I've been there done that every which way.   But let's just not kid ourselves, and others in the process.