Six common beliefs addressed, Part 25

1. Should you take a break from low carbohydrate dieting and reintroduce carbohydrates for thyroid health?

This is complete crock, as the main things that damages the thyroid, during "dieting", is chronic caloric restriction, extended fasting, not getting enough protein and/or electrolyte imbalances. All of these are hallmarks of badly formulated diets. If you are following a properly formulated protocol, you should not experience any thyroid problems.

Trying to avoid these issues by adding carbohydrates back in, for a "break", is simply another excuse to resume eating carbohydrates again. Humans are at their most creative when trying to justify their actions, but just like with any other excuse, that sounds almost believable, this one also fails.

If you want to do this, keep in mind, you will have to go back to restricting calories, so you can avoid gaining weight. Carbohydrates are only benign in the context of starvation, so that they cause as little interference to blood glucose regulation as possible. So, you will end up doing one of the very things that is associated with thyroid dysfunction.

2. I restricted protein and started losing weight. How come?

You have definitely lost weight - from all the wrong places.

Restricting protein does not cause the loss of body fat. It just makes you lose everything else, that also has scale "weight" and prevents you from rebuilding it. Just because the body can break itself down, reducing its weight, does not get you to your goals faster, unless your goal is a specific number on the scale. You can cut limbs off to achieve that goal as well.

You don't want to lose weight, you want to lose fat. Fat accumulation is the pathology of metabolic disease. Protein restriction will not help you reduce it.

People who have metabolic syndrome experience hyperglucagonemia after eating protein, due to insulin resistance. This can interfere with blood glucose control. When they restrict protein, they see a reduction in weight, due to a temporary effect on blood glucose but this doesn't last. Metabolic syndrome is the inability to sustain blood glucose regulation so it will deteriorate once again, as it was never truly fixed, and the weight will begin to increase. 

Treatments that only deliver temporary results are not recommended as this will only cause metabolism to double down on its trajectory to pathology. You need to stabilize blood glucose for the long term, not the short term. 

3. Can you target another macronutrient, besides carbohydrate, to lose weight?

There are multiple ways of addressing metabolic disease and lose weight. If anyone tells you that there is only one way, they lie. If they tell you that carbohydrate restriction is not the best way, they also lie.

Below are some common reasons why carbohydrate is the best macronutrient to restrict, in no particular order:

• Carbohydrate is not essential. The body produces its own glucose, so you are not restricting a necessary macronutrient that might cause hunger or loss of energy.
• The foods that contain carbohydrate are not essential, as they are nutrient void and only add excess energy and bulk to the diet.
• Carbohydrates are not needed to metabolize any vitamins or minerals, so you are not inadvertently tampering with any necessary micronutrients, which might cause a deficiency. In fact, carbohydrates deplete micronutrients through different mechanisms.
• Carbohydrates are very easily consumed, so even though they have less calories than fat, you end up eating more calories when you consume them. It's easy to over consume calories as bread, but much harder to do so as steak.
• Carbohydrate intake displaces the other two important and essential macronutrients, protein and fat, disrupting hormonal balance and causing an obesogenic hormonal state that promotes fat storage instead of fat burning.
• Carbohydrate competes with fatty acid oxidation and always wins.
• Carbohydrate increases junk food consumption, since most junk food is carbohydrate based. This causes more hunger and frequent eating, as the body continues to demand its daily nutrient requirements.
• Carbohydrates are a conduit for excess energy intake, since they alone are not satisfying, nor palatable, and must be accompanied by fat. This leaves you with the very obesogenic carbohydrate + fat combination.
• Carbohydrate restriction eliminates the one carbohydrate that is the most harmful: sugar. Everything that is consumed along side sugar is more fattening than when eaten on its own. Even insulin becomes benign without sugar. This is true, irrespective of the amount of sugar consumed or the amount of calories the diet has overall. The presence of sugar, alone, is enough to generate a metabolic state that promotes weight gain, even if you only eat kale.
• Carbohydrate is the only macronutrient that is seasonal and our metabolisms evolved to take special notice of it. Carbohydrate directly signals metabolism to store energy or burn it, depending on future nutrient availability. In simple terms, the presence of carbohydrates is telling your body to store fat, in preparation for the upcoming winter famine, as the fattest will survive it. You want to avoid this type of hormonal signaling and avoid carbohydrates, so the body thinks winter is never coming.
• Carbohydrate is stored as glycogen (glucose), in the body, and consuming it will continue to create an excess in glycogen stores, which is a pathology of obesity and diabetes. The person with metabolic disease is already shuffling their glycogen stores, rather than depleting them, and does not need another method of adding more to them.
• Carbohydrate affects proper blood glucose homeostasis, which is the most important reason for eliminating them. 

The energy burning hierarchy, in the body, is as follows:

• First alcohol
• Then simple carbohydrates
• Next complex carbohydrates
• Eventually glycogen
• Finally fat (And only if blood glucose regulation is healthy enough for insulin to function properly and allow proper leptin expression.)

All of the simple and complex carbohydrates have to be first absorbed and utilized, from the gut, before the body even touches its glycogen stores. Unless you're an endurance athlete, you're in trouble. If you rid yourself of the alcohol, simple and complex carbohydrates, you can reduce glycogen so you can get to the fat. Everything above fat is interfering in the ability for it to be burned because everything above it interferes with blood glucose. 

As you can see, through simple carbohydrate restriction you address what the other weight loss strategies do not - long term blood glucose control. 

Until your blood glucose is normalized, weight gain is right around the corner,  regardless of how much you lose at first. Carbohydrates have a direct effect on blood glucose, irrespective of caloric intake. For this reason, it makes sense to target this specific macronutrient when trying to reverse metabolic dysfunction.

4. Insulin isn't fattening, because bodybuilders use it, all the time, and they are lean and mean, muscle building machines.

When insulin is dosed alongside other drugs that help stimulate the sympathetic nervous system, regulate the metabolic/endocrine system and sex hormone levels, you get the ultra muscular and super lean body of a bodybuilder. In this context, the injected insulin is used to act specifically on muscle mass, while the other drugs suppress its effect on the fat mass. That's the best situation to be in: very insulin sensitive at the muscle cell, but insulin resistant at the fat cell. This is the opposite of obesity. This effect requires pharmaceuticals that prime the neuroendocrine system to direct insulin in this way.

The average person does not see this effect, with high insulin, because they are not taking other drugs to counteract the effect of it on fat cells. Insulin just makes the average person fat as it disrupts fasting blood glucose rather than build muscle. 

As a side note, bodybuilders usually see a decline in this effect, as they get older or stop treatments, and there are plenty of metabolically impaired and diabetic bodybuilders, out there, that can attest to that.

5. Is protein intake just as fattening as carbohydrates and fat?

• Carbohydrates stimulate both bolus (after a meal) and basal (fasting) insulin levels to store glucose as fat from erratic blood glucose fluctuations.
• Fat stimulates basal insulin levels for storage and prevents further fat loss.
• Protein stimulates bolus insulin to build lean body mass, not body fat.

The fat contained in high protein foods is the culprit of weight stalling or weight gain. This is precisely why low fat diets, restrict protein containing foods. When you restrict protein containing foods you can acquire temporary weight loss. This weight loss is mostly the result of water and lean muscle mass loss. Whatever small amount of fat loss occurs, is directly the result of restricting the fat that accompanies the protein foods you are trying to avoid. The weight is then regained from the consequences of a chronically low protein diet, which causes edema and greater body fat storage in the long term.

Again, what insulin does, in your body, is at the discretion of your entire neuroendocrine system, not at the discretion of its mere stimulation or presence.

6. If the restriction of protein caused harm, the person would have serious symptoms.

The body adapts to low protein intakes by breaking itself down. Just because it adapts and learns to live in a low protein state, does not mean it is an optimal state to be in or conducive to long term health.

In some cases the symptoms of low protein are mistaken for other conditions, as no one ever thinks of protein deficiency (hypoproteinemia) as a real problem in modern society, but it is actually very rampant, as modern food does not contain adequate amounts, nor a bioavailable form, of protein.

The symptoms of hypoproteinemia can vary from mild to severe and include:

• Fatigue, weakness
• Frequent infections
• Thinning or falling out hair
• Loss of lean muscle mass
• Brittle nails and dry skin
• Cravings and constant hunger
• Poor thyroid function
• Feeling cold or inability to regulate body temperature
• Edema

These symptoms can be caused by other health conditions as well, but low protein should not be dismissed as a possible cause and must be diagnosed through medical testing. This is especially true if you have a tendency of disliking meat, have followed a vegan or vegetarian diet long term, have followed quack "keto" diets online, have practiced extended fasting or have been on a low fat, calorically restricted diet long term.