Living a Low Carb Life!

WEIGH-IN

2012-12-13T21:50:00.000-05:00

I hopped on the scale this morning hoping for some good news, don't we all? I decided to do my main weigh-ins twice a week instead of once a week like I was doing and I thought today would be a day to do it.

I always seem to have a hard time getting situated on the scale and end up with the dreaded "-E-" for error and have to step down and then get back on. Maybe it's a part of me that fears what this thing will show me almost as if I'm flinching lol.

I stepped on this one eyed oracle of the bathroom to have it tell me what I want to hear and was excited to see that I weighed in at 284.0. I have lost 15 pounds. I'm happy but as I told my wife I'll be a little more happy when I get to the 20 lb mark as I think that is a solid amount that will make me feel like I'm "in it to win it!" :)

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR DEVELOPS KETONE DRINK AMIDST ‘SUGGESTIONS ATKINS WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG’

2012-11-28T22:21:00.001-05:00

The UK’s Daily Mail is reporting that an Oxford University professor has developed a ketone drink on behalf of the US army that is being labelled as holding the key to weight loss and also as a possible treatment for diabetes, epilepsy and Alzheimer’s. The potential for the use of ketones is, the paper suggests, leading to a re-evaluation of traditional advice to eat a high carb low fat diet and suggesting Atkins might have been right all along….

We all have slightly raised ketone levels before breakfast because we haven’t eaten for a while. And if you fast for a few days or go on an Atkins-type high-fat diet, your body will start pumping out ketones. They are nature’s way of keeping you supplied with energy — especially your brain and muscles.

The clever trick Professor Clarke has pulled off is to have found a way to make ketones in the lab. This means that instead of having to follow difficult diets (with unpleasant side-effects such as constipation and bad breath), you can just add ketones to a normal diet — in the form of the Drink, as it’s known.

It’s a radical new approach, which flies in the face of more than 30 years of advice that a low-fat diet with lots of carbohydrates is the best way to lose weight, treat diabetes and protect your heart. It also raises questions about the demonising of diets such as Atkins, which are blamed for causing constipation and kidney failure.

So how do ketones help? They are the reason why high-fat diets such as Atkins seem to work so well. Without the energy from carbohydrates, your body starts releasing stored fat, which the liver turns into ketones for energy.

The pounds drop off faster than with a low-fat diet because you are actively burning up stored fat. But there are other benefits of these ketogenic diets, as they are called. Blood sugar levels come down because you are eating hardly any carbohydrates.

In a study published earlier this year, Professor Clarke found that rats given the new ketone compound ate less and put on less weight than those getting the same amount of calories from a high-fat or a high-carbohydrate diet.

In the first trial Professor Clarke has run on humans with diabetes, completed within the past few months, the effects were also impressive. In the week-long study, eight people with diabetes had three ketone drinks a day as well as their normal diet.

As with the rats, their weight dropped (an average of nearly 2 per cent of their body weight), but so did their glucose levels, cholesterol and the amount of fat in the blood. The amount of exercise they did went up as they had more energy. However, the study was small and as yet unpublished.

To anyone with diabetes, the idea of ketones being good seems extraordinary. That’s because they are usually warned that high ketones can be very dangerous. In fact, the danger is limited to cases where the diabetes isn’t controlled and the patient has very high blood sugar levels as well.
That’s rare these days with effective drugs. Indeed, very high-fat diets, which produce ketones, are being tested as a treatment for diabetes.

The Drink has its roots in ketogenic diets, which are designed to raise ketone production. One medical area where a very high-fat ketogenic diet is used as standard treatment is in childhood epilepsy.

A review by the Cochrane Collaboration found that in children who weren’t responding to drugs, it was as effective as medication would normally be.

This followed a major study conducted four years ago by Professor Helen Cross, a neurologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, which showed the diet was effective.

‘About 30 per cent of epileptic children don’t respond to drugs and they can have a dreadful time — 100 fits a day is not uncommon,’ says Susan Wood, a registered dietician who works for the charity Matthew’s Friends Clinics, which aims to make a high ketogenic diet available to all children who may benefit from it.

‘We see a big drop in the number of seizures in nearly 40 per cent of the children who go on the diet.’

It’s thought the diet helps suppress stimulation signals to the brain.

The problem is that ketogenic diets can be hard to follow. A typical high-fat diet for children with epilepsy, for instance, includes oil, butter, double cream, eggs, mayonnaise and cheese. Not to everyone’s taste.

Even more difficult on this sort of diet, you have almost no fruit or vegetables (most count as carbo-hydrates) — this can lead to mineral and vitamin shortages and a raised risk of heart disease from all the fat.

And this is where the U.S. Army comes in. Like other radical innovations, such as the internet, driverless cars and a battery-powered human ‘exoskeleton’, the ketone drink was the result of a commission from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is set up to research imaginative high-risk projects.

Not only could the drink help you lose weight, but it might also be an energy booster

‘Back in 2003 they were looking for an energy source that would improve soldiers’ mental and physical performance under battlefield conditions,’ says Professor Clarke. ‘Troops weren’t taking enough rations into action because they filled their rucksacks with extra ammunition instead. As their blood glucose dropped, they became confused and sometimes ended up shooting their own side.’

Professor Clarke had been working on ketones as a high energy source for more than a decade when she approached DARPA, who funded the research that allowed her to discover a way to make ketones in the lab.

‘No one had done it before,’ she says. ‘We called it DeltaG, which is the biochemical name for energy, but also has a military ring to it — Delta Force and all.’ She tried the new compound on rats and found it boosted physical and mental performance.

But that wasn’t all. The rats became much healthier. They lost body fat, had lower levels of triglycerides (fatty acids) in their blood and lower blood sugar levels. There were no signs of harmful side-effects.

U.S. defence chiefs are reportedly delighted with the Drink, but it’s expected to be a while before it’s taken up on a large scale by the Army.

So how does a drink that adds ketones help you lose weight if you’re not burning fat to produce those ketones in the first place? It is because ketones make you less hungry — they damp down hunger centres in the brain. This means you eat less and so you have the same weight loss as on a high-fat diet.

Meanwhile, because you’re eating less, your blood sugar levels come down (which is good for diabetics).

Eighteen months ago, Professor Clarke tried her ketones on rowers.

DeltaG ketones come in a thick, clear liquid that is very bitter, so in the trials on rats and humans, it has a little water added along with orange-coloured flavouring plus some sweeteners to make it more palatable — in this form it’s known as the Drink.

A group of top international rowers were given it shortly before they rowed on fixed machines in a lab.

After half an hour of hard rowing, those getting the Drink had rowed on average 50m further in the same time than when they had a dummy drink. This was an improvement of 0.5 per cent. It can be the difference between silver and gold.

Dr Scott Drawer, head of research at UK Sport, who helped design the trial, said: ‘Ketones have been ignored as an energy source in sport. We need to look at them seriously.’

WEIGH-IN WEDNESDAY

2012-11-28T18:17:00.002-05:00

I got up at 6:45 am this morning maybe more motivated than usual since it's my weigh-in day. I hopped on the scale and found that I did lose some weight, not as much as I had hoped but as I posted yesterday I thought my splurging on Thanksgiving might give me a setback but at 290 lbs, overall I can't complain. :)

I'm really looking forward to next weeks weigh-in! :) I'd really like to see the scale smile back at me saying 285.

7 POUNDS LIGHTER BEFORE THANKSGIVING, WILL WEDNESDAY'S WEIGH-IN REVEAL MORE?

2012-11-27T20:15:00.002-05:00

Last wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, I did my first induction weigh-in and was happy to have dropped from 298 to 291.2.

Tomorrow will be my second weigh-in since induction. I can honestly say I've only strayed from induction once and that was on Thanksgiving but I told myself it's only one day and a few slices slices of pumpkin pie, right?. :)

To be honest I'm a bit nervous for my weigh-in. Other thank Thanksgiving I've followed induction to the T. Will I have dropped any weight or worse yet will that holiday splurge cause me to have gained some back. I feel good body wise like I have dropped some. I have to wear my belt a notch tighter, my shirts feel a little looser.

I'll check in here tomorrow evening after work with tomorrow mornings outcome and thoughts. Wish me luck!

EATING MORE PROTEIN COULD HELP LOWER BODY FAT REPORTS REJECT FAT

2012-11-21T18:46:00.003-05:00

(EMAILWIRE.COM, November 18, 2012 ) San Francisco, CA -- A recent twelve week study showed that people who eat more protein in their diet lose 1.8 extra pounds as well as body fat, compared to those who eat a normal amount. The study revealed that while more protein meant weight and body loss, it did not result in change of blood pressure, cholesterol levels, or markers for diabetes risk.

The lead author of the study, Thomas Wycherley, of the University of South Australia in Adelaide said that the extra weight loss indicated by the group who ate more protein was “only modest,” but “it may still represent clinical relevance on a population level.” Wycherley indicated his findings in an email to Reuters Health.

The original protein study was performed by Wycherley and his colleagues and looked at 24 former trials, which included 1,063 participants.

The study’s participants were assigned a reduced-calorie, low-fat diet that was supposed to increase weight loss. While one half was given a diet of 85 grams of protein each day for a 150 pound person, the other half was given a diet of 49 grams of protein each day.

Each trial conducted was made to reduce the same amount of calories. The average weight loss depending on the study was anywhere from 2.4 to 25.1 pounds according to The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

There is no apparent reason why the findings concerning protein occur, and one obesity researcher even went as far as to question whether or not the study was thorough enough to proclaim such statements that it did.

"The studies are generally far too short to tell impact," Dr. James Levine from the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, told Reuters Health in an email. What's more, he added, "many are inadequately conducted to be relevant."

There are a few explanations of the findings given by Wycherley. One explanation is that the body uses more energy when processing proteins than when processing carbohydrates. Another explanation is that protein helps preserve muscle mass, which burns more calories even when the body is at rest.

The sources of protein in the study came from animal products and vegetables including beans and other legumes.

Wycherley says that protein, more so than carbohydrates, can help people achieve weight loss, or at least it is the best hope. However, because the study was so limited, Dr. Levine said, "it makes no real difference which of the (weight-loss) approaches one chooses."

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WHY DO WE FALL?

2012-11-20T17:59:00.000-05:00

That's the question that was answered in the movie Batman Begins directed by Christopher Nolan. Alfred asks Bruce Wayne, "Why do we fall, sir? So that we might learn to pick ourselves up."

That is my motto for this journey. I've fallen off the low carb wagon so many times and had literally given up. Well, I'm doing as Bruce Wayne did, learn to pick myself back up and I'm going to see this through.

I began this journey a week ago on Nov. 12th and started out at the grand old weight of 298 lbs. Seeing thaton the scale really hits one right in the gut. You can't help but to wonder why you did this to yourself. I let the thought pass and decided I'm picking myself up, I can do this.

I weighed myself this morning on Nov 20th and was pleased to see I'm down to 293 lbs. This is a solid start and really inspires me to keep going forward.

I'm really picking myself up!

LOW-CARB DIET 'MAY REDUCE HEART DISEASE RISK'

2012-11-16T23:13:00.000-05:00

A low-carbohydrate diet may help to reduce inflammation and decrease a person's chances of developing heart disease, new research suggests.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine looked at overweight people, aged 30 to 65 years, over a six-month period.

Participants were split into two groups, with the first following a low-carbohydrate diet and the second adopting a low-fat regime.

The researchers found that both diets were associated with a reduction in systemic inflammation, potentially reducing people's risk of heart disease.

In addition, people who followed the low-carbohydrate diet tended to lose more weight - and more abdominal fat - than those on the low-fat diet.

Colette Heimowitz, a spokeswoman for the low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, said there are misconceptions about the dietary regime, with many believing it to be non-heart-healthy.

'This is the first study of this scope that demonstrates a significant drop in the levels of all three measures of inflammation for those that lost weight and abdominal fat, with those following the Atkins diet losing more weight and belly fat,' she observed.

The findings were presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions earlier this month (November 5th).

Source: NetDoctor.co.uk