Fast or Feltham ...

The title of this post is a play on "feast or famine".   One of the things about blogging, for me anyway, is that over time you accumulate a draft bin full of posts that never get published.  Some of these are on studies I never got the chance to fully flesh out, others are on the "goings on" during a particular time that never seemed appropriate to hit Publish on by the time they were ready.  They are the closest thing I have to a diary and it can often be interesting to read back through the draft bin.  

It is hard to believe that I've been blogging over three years now, and involved in this community for more than another year longer than that.  Barely a blink of an eye compared to some but my how times have changed.  This time four years ago Mark Sisson published Primal Blueprint and Jimmy Moore weighed around 245 lbs after getting down to the mid 230's earlier in the year.  Nobody would have known about or considered eating nothing but eggs for weeks on end ... they would have to wait almost a year and 35 more pounds for that stunt.  This was the hay day of CarbSmart and other companies selling all manner of LC fair from Dreamfields to Julian Bakery to Chocoperfection and more!  

The low carb community was still in recovery from the low cal low fat scam that was Kimkins (and never forget Jimmy's role)  and newcomers (like me) would only get snippets and hear whispers.  Survivors, as I call them, still used their After pictures as avatars and the non-updated tickers in their signatures ... most had unfortunately gained their weight back, the most fortunate among them still weighed less than pre-KK.  Meanwhile blog posts about the fiasco were gathering dust on vacated blogs or had disappeared entirely.   Yet the legacy haunted ...

You see, KK was "dangerous" because it was low carb and low fat and low calorie.  The advice of the day if you hit a plateau?  Up the fat and calories.  There were some that suggested ditching wheat and you heard a bit here and there about that paleo stuff, but you would have to pry the Splenda out of Dana Carpender's cold dead hands at that time and everybody, probably Dana herself, would have laughed at the idea of her writing a Paleo cookbook that would be flashed across the TV screen on Dr. Oz!    Any mention of calories was quickly met with "Gary Taubes tells us ..." along with a link or two to Eades' blog for some sage advice from Dr. Mike.   

Jimmy's forum was full of people who couldn't lose but an ounce after months on 1000 cal/day of LF but lost 20 pounds in a week eating 3000 cal/day of LC.    The more things change .... the more they stay the same, eh?   Well, almost.  Through the years, the LC "crash diets" came and went.  Egg fasts and induction challenges and HCG ... or good old Atkins but counting calories.  Oh it was somewhat frowned upon to mention the "C" word, but the Kimkins survivors knew better.

Now four years later, Taubes' hypothesis smashed but somehow living on if only in the dreams of venture capitalists, Jimmy is "skinny" once again after eating an 80+ percent fat diet for a year and fasting 18-24 hours between fat bombs.  He went paleo and is no longer, but somehow he's considered a paleo blogger.  Who woulda thunk that!  Dana is thinner thanks to HCG, Welbutrin and alternate day Fat Fasts.  The Fat Fast being Dr. Atkins "secret weapon" for the "metabolically resistant" -- 85% fat 1000-1200 cal/day.  For a few days only he advised.  A temporary boost to get you through that plateau and pummel your pancreas into its final submission or somethingorotherlikethat. 

There's a new cookbook out by Dana on Fat Fasting.  It is published by CarbSmart and co-written by Amy Dungan and Rebecca Latham.    50 Recipes for mini fat bombs or something like that.  There is a woman with the blog tagline "Nutrition Science meets Common Sense" averaging about 1000 cal/day of nothing but chicken or turkey, zucchini and duck fat, and there's another who has finally lost stubborn weight by eating 1000 cal/day, less sometimes.  While Eenfeldt and Briffa and countless others are still mocking the calories and bemoaning the starvation diet, all around them low carbers and paleo types are eating just that.  Only it's LCHF or done with an IF flare or paleo panache.  Perhaps it's even LF wrapped in a loin cloth so nobody notices.  Matt Metzgar has been blogging about this of late.    It's that dirty little secret hidden in plain sight that nobody dares mention.  All of this adrenal fatigue about the community?  ....

And then along comes Sam Feltham to rescue the polar opposite.  Because we cannot ever forget the real supposed metabolic advantage of shunning the fattening carb:  You might not lose weight but you can stuff your piehole, so long as it's not with pie, with fat and protein (or exercise gluttony as Taubes once put it) and you won't gain weight.  That's something to write home about ... or video and write about on HuffPo.  This guy just completed an experiment (science he calls it!), eating 5000 calories a day for three weeks of low carb.  (I have a post upcoming on that).  He only gained like a pound and apparently lost an inch around his waist.  This is about as interesting as Jimmy Moore gaining 6 pounds of lean mass in 2 months.  But , as Fat Head predictably weighs in:

Predictably, the calorie fanatics who commented on his experiment are insisting that he simply has a super-high metabolism.  ...  In two of my posts about the low-carb cruises I attended, I mentioned that despite eating three and sometimes four meals per day – larger meals than I typically eat at home, by the way – I didn’t gain any weight.  ... People who insist weight loss and weight gain is all about counting calories like to point to studies of semi-starvation diets – people consuming 1,000 calories per day or thereabouts.  ... But in my experience, the advantage of a low-carb diet isn’t in losing more weight at a very low calorie intake. It’s in not gaining weight at a high calorie intake.

I wonder what the newbie considering trying a low carb diet thinks these days when they come upon sites and stories like this.  LC = effortless weight loss, but when it stops working here, try this 1000 cal/day lean meat and veggie "paleo" version  (usually with some number and the words whole or detox attached) and just pretend it's not a low fat diet ... or go the opposite and eat a stick of butter and three sardines over a nice bed of  glucomannan fiber plumped and formed into your favorite pasta shape with calcium hydroxide, and call it a fat fast.  You see this is how you transform a "starvation diet" into doing something to improve your health for which kudos are sure to come!

But never forget!  You can eat all you want and never gain weight.  Just look at Seth and Tom ... and Jimmy.   Which should have the newbie wondering:  Why does anyone need 50 recipes for a 1000 calorie a day fat fast anyway?    And the veterans must be wondering what ever happened to the Dr. Eades who once cautioned against caloric torpedos.