Why is it never their diet for "Healthy" Low Carbers?

Before I get to the subject of this piece, allow me to remind older readers, and inform newer readers of "where I'm coming from".  I used a VLC diet (with planned cheats) to lose a ton of weight several years ago.  After plateauing out, I wanted to assure myself that the way I was eating was the healthiest for me in the long term.  That way was such second nature to me I truly wanted to find that it was optimal.  Now two and a half years into that inquiry, I still don't have all the answers, but I have become more and more skeptical that a VLC diet is advisable for the long term.  I remain a huge fan for the approach for weight loss.  

I've been criticized for being critical of the weights/appearances of low carb advocates.  While possibly fair, I think these critics don't really get the point here.  If So-and-So is saying "my diet rocks, baybeee!", goes on and on about how they are never hungry, healthy as a horse, etc., etc., I would say looks and results most certainly matter.  I'm also well familiar with the fact that, without surgery, it is almost impossible for someone who has been truly obese to return to a normal weight/size and not have lingering baggage (aka sagging skin and such).  And many of us struggle mightily with weight as we reach middle-agedom regardless of our diets.  I get it.  Really,  I do.  

One need only follow along with some journals and blogs to pull the curtain back just a teensy bit to see that all is not peachy keen with many of the most vocal advocates.  Since early on, I've been interested in the progress of one Dana Carpender, because she is only slightly older than I am.  In 2009 she was again significantly overweight although she has slimmed back down quite a bit since.  Still, while advocating this diet, we now discover she turned to HCG in years past and recently.  And we discover that she has developed issues with her blood sugar levels to where she was once on two diabetic meds, and, at last update, she is alternating 1000 cal/day Atkins fat fasts with regular VLC days to manage the issue.  Could it be that 15 years of eating higher and higher fat has progressed to a pathological degree of hepatic insulin resistance?  Perhaps yes, perhaps no.  But what bothers me is that there is never a consideration that the answer could possibly be yes.  

Another long time low carber who would rather you not connect the dots in his story is the inimitable Jimmy Moore.  He has just posted the first in what is sure to be a series of posts on trying to figure out for once and for all what's going on with his metabolism and weight.  Reading the comments there is painful, really.  Despite a totally normal thyroid test in 2010 (if memory serves, though it is possible it was in 2009), Jimmy got a prescription and took Armour thyroid medication for a while.  Is he perhaps hormonally imbalanced as he is about to turn 40?  First, I find his calling that "old" even in joking fashion, a bit insulting to all of those older folks.  It wouldn't be if he were tackling this issue for the first time, but he's been at this since 1999 (and likely before that) when he registered his first triple digit plus weight loss success -- that would have been when he was 27-28.  Whatever his start and end weights were back then (one gets the idea that they were lower than the 410/230 from his description of his serious rebound), someone who is able to lose 170 lbs in 9 months is not "metabolically deranged" -- or at least their obesity is not caused by some underlying metabolic defect.  Still, five years later, at age 32-33, a metabolically "young" Jimmy lost 180 lbs in 12 months in 2004 on Atkins.  When folks read his blogging back then, it's like a whole different Jimmy.  A Jimmy who would have shunned his current "I'm obese but healthy" argument, and a Jimmy who credited exercise for his weight loss success.  The truth of Jimmy's weight loss, is that he's only maintained it through various crash diets, including where he got to a low weight of 212-213 lbs after KimKins (you can see in the comments Jimmy doesn't like folks to realize he has really regained more than 70 lbs from the low).  One can still scan over three and a half years of Jimmy's menus.  It is plain as day for anyone to see that when Jimmy eats a normal amount, he loses weight like gangbusters, and when he stops his extreme "minor tweak" of the year, he regains it.

Thus, Jimmy finally informs his readers that as 2011 comes to a close, he is back up around the weight he started averaging around 285.  But after 8 years of eating low carb, he has long since declared himself metabolically deranged or broken.  It's a "medical mystery" why he can't lose the weight?  Oh but he can, and I would think that by now even his most ardent fans might get a little tired of his blame game.  But here's where I'm going here.  IF there really is something to this "broken metabolism" of Jimmy's, what caused it??  The first 30-ish years of SAD eating (and then some) didn't break it or he would never have been able to lose 170 and 180 lbs.  So what broke it?  Well, if it is indeed broken, one must look to his diet for the past 8 years ... no?   He bragged in 2005 of being able to eat 100g carb/day, and now he claims he's ultra sensitive to carb.  He had a low fasting insulin level a few years back, now he's hyperinsulinemic?  What could be causing this??  Any objective observer who didn't know the name and whatnot would look at the picture of Jimmy today and think "before" picture.  Someone on his discussion board commented on how his picture on Wikipedia is unflattering and he should see if he could get that changed.  Why?  That IS how Jimmy looks today.  The "intellectual hand on chin" picture is like 6-7 years old!  Why does he keep recycling it??  In addition, any objective observer would look at his lab results he's posted over the years and say that his biomarkers, however imperfect such measures can be, have been getting worse.    Were he Durian Rider, for example, don't you think someone might be blaming the bananas for this metabolic downturn?   Worse yet, Jimmy's current censorship of even well-meaning suggestions leads unknowing new readers to presume his case really is a mystery.  

Jimmy is the quintessential example of someone who keeps doing the same thing expecting a different outcome.  I'm often described as being anti-LC, which isn't true.  I'm anti-dogma, I'm anti-gimmick, and I'm anti-Science Krispies.  If you are reading this shaking your head thinking I'm trying to tell people who are successful and look and feel great on LC to ditch the diet, stop shaking.  I'm not saying that.  What I am saying, however, is that all around us on this internet are examples of LC advocates for whom LC no longer appears to be working.   That they are taking folks along for the ride chasing some "mystery" is ...  (I'll let y'all fill that blank in your own heads).

EDIT after initial publish:

I forgot to address the strawmen (plural) arguments/statements that Jimmy makes in his piece.  I'm not sure whether Jimmy really believes this to be true, or he's so deluded that he can't see the simple solution to his dilemma has been solved many times over the past few years.  But here's what I want to comment on:

Sure, there will be the negative naysayers who will laugh and scoff at your strident dedication to low-carb when you go through a rough patch.

The only thing that some laugh at Jimmy is when after cutting calories and losing weight, then increasing calories and gaining weight, you can still cling to the ridiculous notions that have you proclaiming after all these years things like {paraphrase}:  'I'm still not convinced that calories have anything to do with bodyweight'.  Oh ... and your takehome message from the Swedes on the last LC cruise being to add like 12 pats of butter was quite laughable.  

But let them have their giggles and make their flimsy points about how cutting your carbs is useless citing you as an example of the failure of low-carb diets.

I don't know of anyone who is critical of LC *dogma* who thinks cutting carbs is useless.  It's how I lost a ton of weight, it's how you lost it too.  It is ONE way of reducing one's intake and establishing a caloric deficit.  But it is but one way of doing that.  And as your weight gains over the years have demonstrated, it doesn't always work!  If you consider that a flimsy point to make, so be it.   It hasn't worked in the long haul for many, many people.

You know better because you’ve come so far in your journey. I’m amazed at how easily people forget that although I have gained some of my weight back, I’ve still kept off over 125 pounds for the past seven years! That’s what I call long-term success, baby.

Yes, it is a success to have kept off 125 lbs, and when reminded at every turn, it would be hard for anyone to forget that you were once 410 lbs.  But the wild weight swings involved in doing this are something to consider.  As open as he is when he wants to be, losing and regaining well over 300 lbs in the past seven years is at least a qualified success  

If low-carb isn’t what is helping keep that number from approaching 400+ pounds again, then what is? We all know the answer to that question.

I'd say having your livelihood tied to maintaining some measure of the weight loss may be the biggest factor here. Jimmy can't, and hasn't even tried to take back the subtitle of his first book:  "My Journey From Flabby Fat to Sensationally Skinny in One Year" .   The promoters of LC are not promoting going from morbidly obese to less obese, and perhaps no longer morbidly so (which at this point is Jimmy and Laura Dolson).  They are promoting magical effortless weight loss and now not just comparable health, but supposedly better health adopting a more and more extreme approach as time goes on.  

It's ironic, really, that as the Taubes' v. every other hypothesis debate rages on about the internet, there are fewer and fewer defending the science of the hypothesis itself.  What we're left with are the unverified accounts of folks who credit Taubes for saving their lives because they went LC and lost some weight after reading one of his books.  That's all fine and good, and if true and you want to give credit to a book author, that's fine.  But when did Jimmy's problems with maintenance seem to start?  Oh ... late in 2007.  From then on he started the "up the fat" campaign, the "high fat, moderate protein, low carb" mantra ... oh, and he stopped formal exercise completely despite the need for it all the more changing careers to working from the home in front of a computer.  For the leader of the "Free LC World" to exemplify how Taubes' mangled science can ultimately be detrimental to the *cause* is, indeed, ironic.  Jimmy Moore is the personification of what I'm talking about vis a vis the problems with gimmicks and misrepresentations.  They keep folks stuck in ruts pulling their hair out over mysterious metabolisms and such.  And then you have the Wheat Belly's and Rosedale's and Lustig's and likely Taubes again, scaring the beejeebers out of people who might otherwise try something new because they are convinced that an apple, and especially a banana will harm them, and that eating carbs will cause their insulin resistance (if they even have it) to progress to diabetes and all the complications thereof.

I hope for Jimmy's sake that he can remember what he did in 2004, and I've suggested to him many times that his answers lie in his own words from early blog years.  Yes, Jimmy.  When you ate less and moved more, you were thinner.  If only it were that easy?