Challenge Accepted!

I have a post that I keep re-working addressing this whole "Antagonism against LC" whine from one Jimmy Moore. Perhaps I hit "Publish" in a day or so.  For my newer readers, a little background.  I basically came to the larger LC/paleo/ancestral community from the LLVLC forum where I was a rather prolific participant.  After losing roughly 100 lbs with an Atkins Induction-style pretty Primal friendly diet with planned cheats from 2007-2009 (most of it in the first 10 months), I plateaued out and went looking for answers.  At that time Jimmy hosted a discussion forum, and it seemed a good fit for a while. Shortly after that I discovered and began following Jimmy's menus blog ... and I'm one with a good memory (something that drives even me crazy at times because I'll often remember exact wordings but not where exactly I read them ... part of the reason for starting this blog) so as I read tidbits there and on his other blog, inconsistencies began to arise.  Because of our podcast, but also before that a few other times, Jimmy and I had corresponded via email.   I've been criticized for "bashing" Jimmy, and doing so because I don't "know him".  But let me be blunt:  I do not like the man based on our personal interactions.  I think he is a two-faced opportunist with a mean streak he manages to keep under wraps in his public "aw shucks" persona.  Oh it's come out from time to time, that mean streak.  I think his "friends" just look the other way. His part in the Taubes/FatHead/Moore "confused, stalking, mentally unstable, female" campaign and violation of email privacy over a critical issue can be forgiven but not forgotten.  And I'm human so I'm sure part of those personal feelings are bound to come through when I write posts like this one.  Still, most of the criticism befuddles me given that I'm only pointing out the obvious, that is at least part of what underlies the rift in the LC and Paleo communities.

Jimmy has staked his claim to his Livin La Vida Low Carb webpire, and although it's clearly not working for him anymore,  recent pictures are really worth more than 1000 words regarding part of the problem.

This picture is from Ancestralize Me! blog.
Please go check out her blog and also check out her other pictures from Paleo FX  too!
She has extensive notes on her blog from the conference and links to FB where she's got much more.

In any case, I was looking on my HD for a file and came across a printout of this thread from Jimmy's forum dated a little over a year ago. I note Jimmy couldn't be bothered to even respond with the perfunctory "THANKS!  But I know what I'm doing" retort his menus readers might well recognize.  Some excerpts:
Jimmy Moore: Longtime readers of "Livin' La Vida Low-Carb" know that since my 180-pound weight loss experience in 2004 I've had a few struggles along the way. The silver lining in all of this despite the obvious fat accumulation in my waistline correlating with the weight gain on the scale has been my health markers have remained excellent. Nevertheless, how I look is pretty important because people view me as some kind of leader in the low-carb community. Starting on January 3, 2011, I began a new experiment to see what I could do to get my body to match my health numbers and how I feel on the inside. I've chosen to stick with three very high-quality foods that will nourish me with plenty of healthy fats along with a moderate amount of protein and very few carbohydrates--grass-fed beef, pastured eggs, and coconut oil. 
Upon seeing this new routine I've started, somebody who apparently has their reasons for hating me personally couldn't resist the urge to post the following comment on my blog:
Quote:I can't believe people are paying you to run a website as absurd as this one. My 2011 prediction is that you will be back to 295 lbs - 300 lbs in no time with your coconut oil, beef and egg diet. You have been obese for years on your moronic diet and yet you continue to believe it works. Wake up dude, science has put your idiotic diet to bed 30 years ago. You need a real diet, not a bacon and eggs and oil and beef diet.
I viewed this as a personal challenge and decided to do something I had not originally intended to do. I will keep eating this way every single day through Friday, April 1, 2011 and predict right now that I'll reach my goal of 230 pounds (or get pretty darn close!) subsisting on just coconut oil, beef, and eggs. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! This low-fattie obviously has a problem with fat, animal-based foods, or just me personally. Regardless of what leads him to believe I cannot succeed, I will take great pleasure in proving him dead wrong. Don't miss the conclusion of this challenge that just so happens to end on April Fool's Day! How appropriate!

While I don't condone the commentator's words, I too find it increasingly baffling that Jimmy is able to make a living at this here in 2012.  I also had the same (private) prediction -- if Jimmy was going to continue with his "challenges" of rapid weight loss he would end 2011 heavier than he started.  Frankly I'm surprised he wasn't over 300 lbs by the end of the summer, given how the older one gets and the more one yo-yo's, the more friends the returning pounds seem to bring with them.  But someone wondered if I was the person, which Jimmy stated was not the case but he asked my opinion.
No, it wasn't LCC/CarbSane. This person's name was something like Tray or whatever. He is obviously steeped in conventional wisdom regarding fat/animal-based foods causing obesity and heart disease. I would think LCC would love my diet since it has lowered my caloric intake. What are your thoughts about it, Ms. CarbSane? Smile
Frankly as I was kicked off LLVLC shortly after, I was surprised Jimmy left my reply to stand.  Since they are my words, I'll C&P them here in their entirety for posterity.  It's ironic that 295 lbs is exactly where Jimmy was at in his most recent update.   It seems Jimmy likes to deflect criticism by posting nasties by others.  I don't think my response a year ago was anything but an attempt to help someone with their struggles despite this being right smack in the middle of the shitstorm of antagonistic comments on my podcast over on the podcast site and his blog -- much of which were having to defend myself against misconceptions caused by Jimmy's deliberate mischaracterizations (blamed on the producer) in show notes and such.  


Low Carb Cheater

I had the post that follows "in preview" before Jedi's rude speculation (I've never posted anything anywhere to indicate that I would write something like that - to you or anyone!). Thank you Jimmy for clearing that issue up.

I think what you're doing is great! If zer0 carb and IF has you getting full on a half pound of meat, when you were eating 2 8oz = 1 pound as part of a typical meal when I first found you on the internet is a wonderful development. As I've commented on your menus blog, every time you've decreased intake, you've lost, every time you've increased intake, you've gained. If you go back and look at your menus circa that 25 pound gain in 6 weeks, its no mystery why you gained so much. You were probably eating like 5000 calories a day!! With your eggfast and this plan, it's very easy for you to keep calories consistently low w/o having to "count" them per se. If/when you transition to a more varied diet you'll need to find a way to keep this consistency up ... that may well require actually measuring certain foods instead of eyeballing and approximating.

What you have demonstrated time and again is that there is nothing particularly wrong with your metabolism. When you reduce intake you lose weight like gangbusters. As you'll read below, I do believe you need to focus the energy of your frustrations to answer the question "why can't I maintain my weight loss" for YOU rather than the "why am I gaining doing all the right things".

I have immense empathy for you Jimmy, and I can't imagine the added stress of you living this struggle out so publicly and making a career of it as well. I lived the yo yo for almost a quarter century, it's no darned fun. I truly believe you'll be healthier and happier at a stable weight, even if that is 280 lbs, than you will be with the massive weight swings. I don't want to see that another-word-for-donkey's prediction come true, but the longer you yo-yo, the greater the chances it will. Because when we yo-yo, the returning pounds almost always bring a few more friends.


My original reply:


Dearest Jimmy:

I mentioned this once to you over at your menus blog, I believe, but I think you REALLY need to go back through your blog and menus (and whatever weight records you may have that were not publicly shared) and look at the journey you've been through. While a net maintenance of over 100 pounds of weight loss is to be commended, your often dramatic weight fluctuations are simply not healthy. I implore you to focus less on weight loss and more on stabilizing your weight. For now, still under 40 y.o.a., your body is weathering the storm. But it's not going to get easier my friend. If you can't stabilize your weight within, say, a 10 pound range, it's going to catch up with you.

I've gone back and browsed through your menus and that "erratic" post linked to in this one. You ended 2005 at 225 - only you know the weight fluctuations to achieve this maintenance/slight loss. In 2006, (from his chart), you proceeded to 8 months gain 15, 3 months lose 25, 2 months gain 14, 9 days lose 9, 4 months gain 28 + ?? gain 5 (high 253 lbs before embarking on that diet that shall remain unnamed) , 1 month lose 30, 2 weeks lose 7, 4.5 months gain 23 before the "mysterious" 6 week gain of 25 more to reach 260 lbs in January 2008.

I did a little checking of my own from this point. Here's the summary from Jan 08-Jan 09: 4 months gain 14, 3 months lose 21, 10 days gain 13, 4 months lose 29, 3 months lose 15, 1 month lose 14 (we could lump those into 8 months losing 58 lbs but it included some challenges). This was the last stretch of sustained losses without a significant uptick in your weight. In Jan of 2009 you HAD succeeded in essentially erasing that creatinine-induced weight gain, and in March '09 you weighed 235 lbs with a 42" waist.

At this point someone named Jade threw down a challenge for you to get your waist to 37.5" or reach a weight that was more "normal" by that (faulty!) BMI standard. In one month you actually gained 13 lbs. In July 09 you weighed 248. Here is where you completely stopped reporting weights on the blog for whatever reason only losses. You had two experiments in the next months (half portions and 6WC) where in both you reported 15 lb in one week losses but no absolute weights so nobody knows the gains in between.

In December 2009 you wrote the following on your blog:
As I documented many times in 2008, a sudden 30-pound weight gain just refused to budge and come off of my body no matter what I seemed to do. In fact, the issue continued in 2009 and got even worse with another 20-pound weight gain for a total weight gain of 50 pounds over the past two years. What the heck is going on here?! This isn’t supposed to be happening

If one presumes you are using 230 as your *success weight* (it is the 410 - 180 figure), and you were 235 sometime in 2009, you gained 45 pounds in 2009, and net 32 of them in the last 6 months of the year with those intervening 2X 15 pound losses. My point? Your weight must have fluctuated 20-30 pounds along the way, and when does this happen most? Following a "challenge" or a "new plan".

So come 2010 you did the eggfast, lost a ton, gained it all back going up and down and up and down. Our friend Muata reached out to advise you to take a break and just try to maintain for a bit. I think you were in the 260's at the time. The result of your various plans has been to basically tack on almost 10 more pounds early in 2010 and end up basically back there by the end of the year.

So .... now you're doing well, losing weight like bonkers again in 2011 (doing, BTW, what so many have suggested to you in the past, but I totally support your doing what feels right to you thing Jimmy ... just it's worth mentioning) and some jerk comes along with his stupid email and what do you do? Throw down a challenge!! Complete with goal and arbitrary date and all.

Please Jimmy, look at these numbers - this is just the major swings
2006 & 2007 you gained 85 pounds and lost 71 pounds
2008 you gained 51 pounds and lost 82
2009 (and no doubt it was more), you gained 56 and lost 32 pounds
2010? it's at least +/- 50 pounds

All in all, in the past five full years you have, in "spurts" - not counting fluctuations daily and minor stints not worthy of emphasizing - gained probably 300 pounds and lost 250 ... this is NOT healthy. PLEASE stop doing this to your body!

Whatever your weight on April 1, I implore you to simply try to maintain that within 5 pounds for at least 3 months if not 6 months before the next challenge. Your long term health depends on it.


I just thought some of you who never read anything on LLVLC forum might be interested in some of this.  Again, despite asking my opinion, Jimmy never responded.  And here he is a year later ..... 

Comments

Tonus said…
Those fluctuating totals are pretty jarring. I would agree with Muata for advising him to stop experimenting for a while and simply try to maintain. I get the feeling that if he went with a basic maintenance diet and tweaked it slightly as he went along, he'd be slowly but steadily losing weight.
Funny this is coming up now. There a similar battle raging on Taubes' website, with someone challenging Taubes supporters to eat 5000 cals of fat a day to see if the insulin hypothesis works.

http://garytaubes.com/2012/02/on-the-greatly-exaggerated-demise-of-the-insulin-hypothesis/#respond
Adel Moussa said…
I won't comment on either Jimmy Moore's character or other aspects of his persona, but the way the low carb crowd worships Gary Taubes as their Jesus and his book as their bible is similarly ridiculous (even obscene) as people calling in asserting that they are "90% paleo" (I would say "100% moron", but that's just me)... in all that it is becoming increasingly clear that low-to-no-carb is nothing but an effective intervention for the insulin resistant morbidly obese - much like medication, something you would not want to take, when you are healthy again. Unfortunately not everyone realizes that the success people have in the first months allows, no it requires them to adapt their diet to make further progress. Instead people BELIEVE; they BELIEVE in their diet, they BELIEVE in their heros or I should say saviors and they BECOME missionaries and religious warriors
Alma said…
OMG is this is how he has 'maintained' the over 100lb weight loss he keeps going on about? Those numbers are gob smacking.
Sanjeev said…
Gary Taubes's most lasting impact will be the illustration of how powerful cherry picking is when combined with 800 pages of boredom to lull people into a gulled, near-hypnotic state, all added to the power of temporary results that support the cherry picking in the short term.

IMHO it's absolutely no coincidence that I get accused by the Taubesians, Homeopaths, Chiroquacks and theists of being closed minded.

"fellow" skeptics that I disagree with and whose positions I argue against endlessly never accuse me of that, and I've never accused anyone of it myself.
Sanjeev said…
> "of being closed minded"

or the veiled version "obviously you never read it" ...
Wright Mind said…
Did you see this tweet from someone named @UltraGrassFed? It is called, Jaminet vs. Moore. Safe Starch Debate.

http://bit.ly/GHe7ig

Too funny.
Dawn said…
That picture is worth way more than a thousand words!
Christopher said…
That picture settles the debate.
Sanjeev said…
Don't know why this never occurred to me before ...

read GT's blog again, and reading the words "good calories, bad calories" brought up a mental video of Gary rubbing a bagel in dog poo saying

"bad calories ! BAaaaad calories ... I'm going to rub your nose in it, you bad calories !!"
CarbSane said…
Case closed! No need for a "Safe Starch Symposium" at AHS12
CarbSane said…
It's amazing really how many folks have no clue about this. In 2009 I had no clue he'd regained any weight until I read about it in the menus blog someone linked to on his forum. For the longest time he described his regain to 275-280 lbs as measely, but he's actually gotten down to 212. On the jacket of his first book Jackie Eberstein hails how Jimmy has gotten off the yo-yo dieting, but he hasn't. In the recent Paleo Summit he spoke about escaping morbid obesity. Well, "morbid" or not, he's significantly obese.
CarbSane said…
Well said. Did you ever have your interview with Jimmy Prof?
Adel Moussa said…
you will be laughing Evelyn, but my interview will air next week (03-27) - we recorded it some time ago and my impression of Jimmy was and actually still is (I am not following any of the discussions in detail) that he is a little stubborn as far as the "all sugars are evil" hypothesis is concerned, but pretty tolerant towards people with a different opinion. In fact, he invited me in response to a post I made the #1st (and last time) I did actually participate in the discussion on one of his posts (usually not of interest to me, but this one on his problems with testosterone fell right into my area of expertise ;-) - I told him back then that I believe that the reintroduction of a reasonable amount of carbs is probably a necessity if he wanted to father a child...
Somehow, the whole interview did yet go into a very different direction (there were 3+ months between the post and the interview) and it is hard to argue against the notion that the message of the AHA and the ADA is flawed and that he has had quite some success with his approach... UNTIL he was no longer morbidly obese!
The recording of the interview is now again >1 month ago and I honestly don't really know exactly what I said, but when the show was over, I felt that I got in <5% of what I actually had planned to say. If I recall correctly, I did yet mention that low-carbing is the way to go, when you are pathologically insulin resistant, BUT that the reintroduction of carbs becomes possible and necessary once you have lost enough fat to be able to handle glucose again (I myself follow a diet that the AHA would consider "low carb", but the "chronic fatigue" that befell me, when I fell for the notion that "as long as you eat as little carbs as possible you are losing fat" has taught me that we are NOT designed to eat protein and fat only, just because we can survive on it // I don't know if Jimmy knows that, but you can probably survive even better eating only potatoes ;) ... in essence, part of the reason people get "stuck" is simply that their bodies are starving, when they are no longer fat enough. The pride everyone is taking in his low triglyceride levels, for example is simply stupid. I mean what is your body going to use for fuel, when you have low trigs and low FFAs, as the low-carb crowd is boasting off and you don't eat any carbs? You cannot burn the fat you eat directly at a high enough rate unless you are in 100% ketosis < now that is a starvation sign (part of the reason your body won't be willing to produce a child) AND it PRECLUDES eating large(r) enough amounts of protein to build muscle and shed the chubbiness, because the latter would kick you out of ketosis in no time and send you down the road of "chronic fatigue" and "adrenal burnout" < these + the words "Gary Taubes' book", "X% Paleo" and "Vitamin D" are all inducing a profound gag-reflex in me, as of late
ProudDaddy said…
Wow! My two favorite bloogers in one place! Regards to you both.
CarbSane said…
It's become apparent to me that a lot of Jimmy's new "friends" and "followers" have no clue about a lot of this background. Back when my podcast came out I was preoccupied with defending myself in part against this notion that all I do here is bash LC. It's difficult to defend oneself in an environment filled with FrankG's -- who someone has informed me is accusing me of commenting on Gary Taubes blog as under some male pseudonym. Taubes has rigged his comments so that mine go into the internet vapors yet allows free for alls there. Class act indeed. A year later, there are fewer of these folks around to shout down skeptics of long term low carbing. If Jimmy is going to guffaw at and about me on his podcast to thousands of people, I'm going to publish up as much of this background -- including the personal stuff -- as I see fit. I consider not letting this man become king-maker in a larger sphere of influence to be a valuable contribution to the "eat real food" movement and I plan to continue to do so. I'm thinking Jimmy regrets trying to take down that anonymous bunny-eared blogger ;-)
CarbSane said…
Hey Wayne, I call you P Daddy in my head -- hope you don't mind ;)

Prof: I look forward to the podcast. I read that one comment on Jimmy's. I think you probably raised his cortisol level a few notches with the suggestion to eat a more "sane" amount of carbs! LOL
Chris said…
Prof - what do you think of the way the interview was presented?
Lesley Scott said…
I thought the show notes were mendacious to a certain point, okay maybe more specious, but still, not accurate in terms of the context of what was actually said - especially during the part of the interview where Prof pointed out that these rat studies really showed that it was excess energy, ie calories in, that drove the weight gain. that just got guh-lossed raht ova, baybee. I noticed the same thing tho in the Kresser interview when he pointed out that the reason LC'ers gained weight if they reintroduced carbs & gained weight was b/c they didn't cut back in other areas, ie. calories in.
Woodey said…
Wow! I had no idea Jimmy's yo-yoing was that severe. When you break down the numbers like that it really is jaw-dropping. I followed the link Gunther posted and found some people leaving remarks that were well thought out. Thras' was particularly well put, but then he got people trying to tear him down. I really find the bickering to be counter-productive. For a person like me wanting to learn a thing or two it's hard to feel certain about anything I read when no one can come to some sort of an agreement. On the other hand Thras was so diplomatic and constructive that when the pooh-flingers came I didn't take them as seriously.

If I was Jimmy I would not be able to act like a figurehead on the low carb community, not with the issues he is having. I feel a bit slighted that I gobbled up the rhetoric when in reality he is doing no better on low carb than any other dieter out there having the same issues on WW. If I was someone who was shopping around for a diet and saw Jimmy's numbers I would classify low carb as any other kind of diet and nothing that had the upper edge on anything else.

I say practice what you preach, or as my dad would say, "crap or get off the pot." I won't shoot him down for being human and struggling with his weight, Lord knows I do and it hurts, but damn be honest and upfront. Damn I can't believe how much he is yo-yoing.

Thank you Carbsane for breaking it down and posting this.
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