The Carb-Sane Asylum

I've been poking around some eating disorder research recently due to the recent Elizabeth Licorish-Tara Lipinski kerfuffle (see also the follow-up ). But something else, that's seemingly always a hot topic when calories are discussed, is this concept of metabolic adaptation.  Quite often this gets referred to as having a "damaged metabolism".   I'm just going to use that term (and w/o quotes), and don't mean to imply that it is necessarily appropriate or justified, just that it's easier than explaining it repeatedly.  The damaged metabolism is thought to develop from frequent, chronic, and/or severe calorie restriction.  The mechanism is that the body down-regulates basal metabolic rate such that a 150 lb person who has dieted down from 250 lbs will require fewer calories to maintain that weight compared with a person whose normal, stable weight is 150 lbs.    So I was looking for some additional references about the "hamster wheel" (i...

Zoe Harcombe made a bit of a splash in the LC community thanks in part to the following article in the Daily Mail:   Everything you thought you knew about food is WRONG The subtitle:   Fibre's bad for you. Fat's healthy. And five-a-day is a gimmick to make fruit and veg firms rich. Or so claims a remarkable new book... Just say no to fruit and starchy carbs that the government is pushing on you ... right? Harcombe sings the praises of butter and eggs, and meat and *real food*.  She shuns the idea of dieting and restricting foods.   Clearly she's drunk the Taubes Kool Aid on calories and insulin. So her diet is fairly low carb and extolls the virtues of animal foods -- meat, fish, eggs, butter, dairy.

Let me start by saying I never heard of this guy.  But wonder, if LC is so great, why would one need a "Survivor's Guide"?  But I digress. This is my latest installment in response to Jimmy's roundtable of "experts"  on James Kreiger's series on insulin;   “Insulin…an Undeserved Bad Reputation” ,   Part 2 , Part 3 ,   Part 4 ,  Part 5 . Kosloff starts out with a long "preamble" directed to James as if he were corresponding with him.  I am not privy to their interactions and will defer to James to discuss this part when he has the time to draft his own rebuttals.  I will comment on my observation that Kosloff seems to come at this from the viewpoint of having bought into the carbohydrate hypothesis hook line and sinker, and basically he disagrees with "calories count".

In the course of a discussion over at Jimmy Moore's forum I came across something I did not know.  Anorexics -- the thinnest among us! -- can also become hyperinsulinemic!!!!   How can that be??   If it's all about the insulin causing fat accumulation, one would think this condition would result in any dietary intake getting trapped in the fat tissues, making it unavailable to the anorexic for fat-burning, resulting in voracious hunger.   But we would expect the anorexic to have very low postprandially-induced insulin levels.  No matter what they eat, they don't eat much.  So, where is this insulin coming from?   It would seem to be, yet again, a defense mechanism of our bodies.  I've come across quite a bit of contradictory observations on this. For example, in this article, anorexics had lower postprandial insulin responses and higher metabolic rates of insulin clearance  and describe anorexia as being associated with improved insulin s...

This is mostly a post of a personal nature, but I thought I would put it here on the science side of things because I'll try to tie observations and anecdotes in with some scientific backing/references. Personal background for my interest in this:   As a child I had a rather boyish body until around age 12 or so.  At that age my shape (butt and thighs) started coming out (not fat though), but I was a rather late bloomer.  I didn't gain my "puberty weight" until I was 16 or so -- perhaps 20 lbs -- again mostly in my butt/thighs.  Anyone remember Tracey Gold from Growing Pains?  That would be pretty close (pre-anorexia) to my shape.  I lost the weight then yo-yo'd most of my 20's on various diet plans (none of which were low carb).  Although cycling as high as the 200-210 range and as low as 145 during that time, my general body type did not change.  I would always gain or lose weight mostly in my butt/thighs only getting the back and belly bulge...