Is LC Morphing to HAES? Part III: Why so many "Heavy" Low Carbers

It's not like I've been the first one to ever notice or ask about the troubling observation of low carbers.  As I've written before, many low carb aficionados tend to:

• Lose a little or no weight at all - remaining obese or overweight

• Lose significant weight but plateau out at a weight that is still obese or overweight 

• Struggle to maintain weight loss and regain despite adherence to the low carb WOE

While I see some positive messages from the HAES movement, I also see some dangers as well.  There's a giant chasm between striving for ultimate perfection and just accepting one's obese state.  I also believe there are health consequences to a certain degree of excess weight.  Obviously this is highly individual, and there's probably no single optimal weight for any of us.  Most of us can probably be "healthiest" at a rather broad range of weights.

I'm also highly sympathetic of the whole BMI = BS argument and the notoriously flawed height/weight charts.    I'm a BMI outlier yet, I'm under no illusions that there's not excess fat that I could stand to lose, that would improve my health in some areas - e.g. if nothing else, spare my joints some wear and tear!  Two years ago this was my purpose in seeking out the LC internet community because I was (and remain) that second bullet point above.

Responses to my questions frequently were some mix of "maybe you're not meant to be skinny" or "the important thing is eating healthy" or "we're not all meant to be perfect", etc.  So I don't see the HAES thing as new per se, but it seems to be gathering steam and overshadowing weight loss as a primary focus of late.  As I've shared, I had never even stepped on a scale until after I'd lost most of my weight, so it's not like I had some arbitrary number in my head or some unrealistic goal weight in mind, or some silly round number in my head of pounds to lose in some period of time.  Right now I'm thinking that ideal is probably somewhere in the 170's but that's not my focus.

Dana Carpender is fond of posting pin-up pics from bygone eras - as if changing standards of beauty really has anything to do with whether she's at a healthy weight for herself.  For all their protestations, many low carbers continue to try to lose weight so in a way this healthy angle has a bit of a phony whiff to it.  This is acknowledgement that they (and I) remain overweight while trying to rationalize away the fact that just low carbing is not working for them.

So anyway, this is enough of an issue that Jimmy has addressed it in two major blog posts in the past.

The first concerned Regina Wilshire, Dana Carpender and Lora Ruffner.  Two of whom have apparently fallen off the face of the internet.  In order, weight gains were attributed to carbon monoxide poisoning, a trio of an accident, hypothyroidism & a fibroid, and an insulin secreting tumor and other life issues respectively.  That's two out of three attributed to "disease" BTW, though nobody seemed to catch on to that.  This is not an insignificant detail in the context of this discussion.  First, because had these been prominent advocates of "mainstream" diets and cookbook authors - say Denise Austin, Jillian Michaels and Paula Deen everyone would have been quick to fingerpoint at their diets and/or weight.  Secondly, a blood lipid level may be predictive of future health complications, but they are not necessarily indicating that you're "unhealthy" at the moment.  Two of these three were *currently* in a state of ill health.  Did their diets contribute?  The answer is that we don't really know. (Edit 7/13:  Regina is still around, she blogs a bit at Weight of the Evidence and can be found on Facebook.  Her inclusion here is solely due to Jimmy Moore having listed her on his menus blog.)

More recently, Jimmy addressed this question directly from a reader.  He first rattled off a list of "low carbers" that are not heavy.  I'm sorry, but let's limit this to the formerly significantly overweight/obese for starters - professional and ex-pro athletes really aren't representative.  Nobody is saying that there are NO normal weight representatives in the low carb community.  They are questioning, rather, why *so many* representatives are.  Sorry, but when one becomes an evangelist for a WOE or whatever, they are setting an example with their appearance.  Nobody expects the formerly obese to have any more or less perfect body afterwards than they do for other methods. But we need to apply a consistent standard here folks.  Low carbers who remain overweight seem to want to apply a different standard to themselves now that they're eating a "healthy diet".  Yet they can be awfully brutal about, say, Oprah's weight issues at times.  This seems to stem from Oprah's stupidity in not going low carb years ago and not giving that electrifying personality Gary Taubes his own talk show. (Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz)

For some reason I'm wondering at the moment why the Drs. Eades needed their 6 Week Cure for their middle aged middles in the first place?  But I digress ...

Back to Jimmy's blog posts.  At the time Jimmy wrote that one last October, he had put back on more weight and finished that year having regained almost 80 lbs from his lowest weight (Jimmy doesn't like to highlight, for some reason, that he was actually down in the low 210's at one time).  He writes:

Keep in mind that most of us who have found low-carb were either very heavy prior to changing our lifestyle or severely metabolically damaged in some form or fashion–and perhaps for some of us we have a more difficult time fixing what has already been broken because of our past choices.

And this differs from, say, contestants on The Biggest Loser how?  Jared Fogel?  I mean I've read a zillion times how nobody would want to see Jared shirtless based on his wearing baggy shirts in his photos like the one below left.

And the internet was somewhat abuzz when Jared appeared to put back some weight a while back as shown above right.  Ooooh - see?  Low fat doesn't work and I'll bet his triglycerides and blood sugars are through the roof!!  The person pictured below is much healthier!

You see, if low fat ELMM'ers regain, it's a failure of their strategy, and if they don't?  Well the heavier low carbers are inherently healthier than the leaner low fatties?  Dana Carpender chimed in on the comments:

I know that I live every day of my life with the knowledge that all it would take would be 18 months inattention to diet and exercise and I could be a size 24, no problem. It scares me, how quickly I could become morbidly obese. And not only do I have a strong genetic tendency to obesity — my father was obese, my sister has been obese — I’m also just plain short and stocky, with a ridiculously short waist and a huge rib cage (and rack). You could starve me for a couple of years, and I wouldn’t look willowy, I’d look like an emaciated fire hydrant. Not to mention the fact that I’m hypothyroid, and rapidly approaching menopause, which sure doesn’t help matters any.

Well, Oprah is 56, has thyroid issues and sports a rack when she's heavier!  Big ribcage and short waist?  Umm ... perhaps you're storing fat around your organs that's pushing your rib cage out?  I'm not getting all this rationalizing here.  I'm not sure you can get a whole lot worse in terms of messing up one's metabolism with yo-yo dieting than Ms. Winfrey, yet here she was at 50:

 but now Dana?  

That's Healthy Low Carb Living's Amy Dungan on the right there in early 2009.  How's she faring?   Her before/after are shown below.

Yep, there's an awful lot of rationalizing going on in LC circles, of that there can be no doubt.  But you just can't apply a different standard to low carb representatives than you do to advocates of other lifestyles.  And I'm not buying this whole somehow uniquely "healthy" thing, because looking past the outdated and/or professionally photographed/retouched or carefully posed head shots, candid pictures not only don't reflect a particularly slim group, but they don't reveal a particularly healthy *looking* group as a whole either.

Certainly no more or less so than many of my friends and relatives of similar ages - some of whom eat pretty SAD diets or certainly aren't shunning all carbohydrates - that I get to see up close and personal at that.  

Kent Altena has commented on my previous installment that I'm focusing on a few prominent low carbers and somehow ignoring vast swathes of success stories.  I don't know.  Low carbers who remain significantly overweight or obese as of this post:  Jimmy Moore, Laura Dolson, Dana Carpender, Amy Dungan, Kim Eidson, Big Daddy D, Brian Cormier, Ramona Denton, LowCarbConfidential dude, CarbSmart's Andrew Dimino.  I'm sure the list can go on.  Kent, himself, still has a little spare tire action going on beneath the baggy shirt ...

... tough I would consider him an inspiring ambassador for the lifestyle (as long as he hasn't gone up and down the scale radically like so many others).   Seems Kent's not a fat-phobe, but he also doesn't seem to be on board with the slather and smother trend either if the few recipe vids of his I've watched are any indication.   And to be fair, there are examples of men and women who have become lean low carbing and stayed that way.  Linda Genaw comes to mind.  But she's not a powerhouse in the "movement" so to speak.  She's not out there blogging and writing books and whatnot pushing the health angle.  Which is sad, in a way, because she appears to be the exception of someone who got truly lean doing an Atkins-style LC diet (however she now is pretty much a zero carber and doesn't use her own recipes much near as I can gather from some of her postings over at Jimmy's forum) .  She eats mostly ground beef and reserves (eats) the drippings.  She's not adding 12T of fat to two pounds of ground beef! Ultimately, this is not, however, what I'm addressing in this series.   I'm addressing "the movement" - the PROMINENT "movement" such as it is - increasingly cultish in it's repetition of mantras.  I'm addressing the direction it is taking to promote the "proper" high fat version of this diet for health even when it falls short - often far short - for weight loss and MAINTENANCE in practice.  Those claims are dubious at best considering the sources at this point.   The claims of superior healthfulness are simply not substantiated.  The science demonstrates that longer term "Atkins-style" low carbing - like 2 years but NOT permanent induction level carbs - is more or less equivalent to other approaches for weight LOSS.  No study exists on long term very low carbers.  None.  And since these folks aren't seal eating Inuit, you can't use that "proof" either.   Therefore promoting this as a healthy longterm lifestyle remains nothing but speculative. As such,  the appearances of these "real life" low carbers matter greatly and speak for themselves. Lean and healthy?  As FNC would say:  I report, YOU decide.

Oh ... speaking of ex-fatties running marathons, I'll leave you with one last Jared pic. 

  Dang that low fat lie!!