1. I recently came across a post Jimmy Moore wrote and I was hoping you would be willing to comment on it. I know you have said before that you avoid commenting on people specifically but there were a lot of things he pointed out that cause confusion for people who are seeking help. I myself have a multitude of questions about what he wrote but if I try to ask him, he will either give me wrong information or most likely block me. He doesn't like a challenge or any "dissent". Can you please review his statements?
I get a lot of questions about Moore. I understand why. He makes a great case study on obesity but people cannot leave this man alone. This is why I never reply to anyone who brings him up. I don't follow him, or anyone else in the low carb sphere, so I have no clue what they are up to. I just know Moore is a disturbed individual who unfortunately rejected any help he was offered, but badgering him is useless. He is as immune to badgering as he is to body fat loss.
I have a backlog of questions from readers so I usually do not address requests for me to review other people's posts but I have made exceptions in the past. I have decided to make another one here because Moore's post pertains to obesity and I can understand why it would cause confusion or leave unanswered questions for many.
Let's tackle each foolery by paragraph and hopefully, by the end of this, I would have addressed your concerns. More importantly, I will have prevented you, and others, from falling into the same hole Moore is in. I have attached a photo of the post in question, so you can all read it for yourselves. You can click on it to enlarge.
I can tell you, from the get go, this writing is full of nonsense. This man has no idea what obesity is or what he is even talking about. He uses catch phrases and code words to create a salad that looks filling but we know it has no meat. This is typical of the diet industry in general, so it's not unique to him. We see this everywhere.
In the first paragraph, Moore goes into his usual diatribe about how "calories as a means of managing your weight and health was one of the biggest mistakes that was ever made in nutritional health". Well, that's debatable. The premise was that if you are not obese, you can prevent obesity by simply restricting your overall calories. This might not be the best obesity prevention method there is but it's practical and people are more likely to try it as it is not too restrictive. The mistake was made when total calories were misapplied to the already obese. At that point, total calories are pretty much useless since obesity is not just a condition of "carrying extra weight". Unfortunately, a lot of people in the nutritional health sphere are just like Moore, ignorant of what obesity is and so they have no viable treatments to give.
Moore continues with his gripe against calories in the second paragraph claiming that restricting calories causes "hunger, mood changes, hair loss, down regulation of your thyroid, and a lack of energy, among many other things". This is all very vague and not necessarily true. Vague because these are symptoms of starvation, but he never mentions that. You cannot use caloric restriction to induce more starvation in the overweight/obese as they already are under starvation, so many of these people already have these symptoms without any caloric restriction in place.
Also, the reason none of this is necessarily true, is because most people do not experience these symptoms on caloric restriction at all. After all, a lot of people use caloric restriction successfully, from body builders to athletes, and they don't go into starvation. The main problem with calories and the overweight/obese is not the symptoms he mentioned but that these people simply do not lose enough weight to no longer be overweight/obese and so they give up. The lemon is not worth the squeeze, so to speak. This is not surprising as caloric restriction does not address blood glucose dysregulation, which is the root of the problem.
In the same paragraph, Moore makes the claim that with caloric restriction "you will lose weight for a short period of time but it will very likely come at the expense of muscle if you're not eating enough amino acids in those limited calories". That's incorrect. Most of the weight lost in caloric restriction is water. Aside from that, every method of weight loss puts muscle at risk but what risks muscle the most is simply being obese. You preserve muscle, not only through the consumption of adequate protein, but through proper exercise.
The reason you only lose weight for a "short period of time" is because the body compensates its calories-out by its calories-in. This is normal as calories-in are ultimately the determiner of what can come out. But the obese have an abnormal issue which always effect calories-out - an exaggerated under expression of leptin. The actual initial weight loss is what causes a doubling down of this effect. Calories have very little to do with this as it occurs with any weight loss method. This chronic under expression of leptin is what causes the eventual weight regain. This is why weight loss is not the cure for obesity.
Things are certainly not looking good in the third paragraph either. The statement to "instead put your focus on real, whole foods and get the best quality you can afford" is absolutely meaningless mumbo-jumbo. "Real, whole foods" are also not the cure for obesity. Instead, the right macronutrient composition is only palliative for the treatment of obesity because it helps reduce blood glucose dysregulation. Blood glucose dysregulation is what gets the obesity ball rolling and preserves its momentum. You can continue having blood glucose dysregulation eating "real, whole foods".
Moore then makes several statements based on incorrect assumptions. He believes in the simplistic view that "over processed junk food products" which are "devoid of nutrients" cause you to "overeat". Strange statement to be made by someone who doesn't believe in calories. Either way, he is living proof that is not true, unless he admits he has been eating junk food, which according to him, he has not. Instead, this man has been on the "primarily animal", "whole foods" diet he recommends for years and is still morbidly obese. But of course, my readers are smart and know that obesity is not the result of "junk food" as I have made this clear many times before. It's the result of poor blood glucose regulation.
Moore then seals the deal by claiming that "the body is not stupid". I have no idea why he said that but it is stupid. The body is extraordinarily stupid. That's why it gets sick, gets old and eventually dies. In fact, the body is so stupid that its own brain, which is a part of it, knows what it's doing wrong and it still does it anyway.
In the fourth paragraph, Moore goes on to give us a bit of good news by claiming that "these kind of foods are the ones that are naturally self-limiting when you have had enough". Really? So why can't he get enough? I remember his plates and they were far from "self-limiting". He himself is the N=1 research material that disproves everything he is saying but, incredibly, he is not self aware of this. Conveniently so.
Moore again makes the incorrect assumption that "sugars, grains and seed oils" cause some type of "cravings" or "hunger". I don't know where he gets this from but disordered eating habits are not coming from what you eat, they come from you. Sugar would be the only item on this list that can potentially be used to make this argument because of the way it disrupts dopamine. Of course, it doesn't cause general food cravings, it just makes you to crave more sugar.
In the final paragraph, Moore claims that "plenty of research has shown calories take care of themselves when you feed your body properly". No. Research shows that when your metabolism is healthy, it balances its own energy without your interference. It takes much more than just "eating properly" to have a healthy metabolism. Also, "eating properly" is subjective.
Then Moore states "listen to your body and give it what it wants". Again, he is the poster child that this doesn't work. He has been giving his body whatever it wants and the outcome has been disastrous. In fact, the disaster initially occurred because he gave his body everything it wanted.
If you have metabolic syndrome, you cannot listen to anything your body says because it's giving out the wrong signals. You have to take control instead and ignore your body as it will tell you it's hungry, even if you have had three meals a day. It will tell you it's not hungry, even if you haven't eaten in two days. It will tell you that a bottle of almond butter is a great meal, when it isn't. It will make you averse to meat, which is the main food you should be eating. It will even tell you that it's too tired to get up from the chair, even though you have been sitting for four days straight. The body, because it's stupid as stated above, tells you a lot of stupid things so you would be stupid to listen to it.
The time the body needs to be listened to is when there is pain or some other sort of abnormal/unusual symptom indicative of illness. There is also another very important time you need to listen to your body - when what your doing is not working. Moore needs to heed his own advice.
As you can see, Moore is completely ignorant of obesity, its causes and its treatments. I don't know if the ignorance is on purpose or not. It's very hard to believe that if he has been so called "researching" this subject matter for many years, he wouldn't have come to an understanding of obesity by now. Unless of course the only thing he has been researching is quackery and it appears that's the case. After all, quackery makes money and understanding the truth is not very self serving. When you aren't a real researcher, scientist or doctor, the only thing that's left is quackery as you will not have a voice in any academic circles.
If I wanted to make money out of this, I would have to turn to quackery as well because I do not have the credentials to speak at the next obesity research conference. It doesn't matter what my understanding of obesity is. I'm not a professional so I cannot monetize what I know, no matter how many people read my blog. But in the wonderful world of quackery, I can quickly become a "Low Carb Expert" which is basically a BS title, and create my own BS conference where I can talk all matter of BS without being challenged. That pretty much sums up the low carb community and people like Moore. This is why they have even made their own online "schools" so you can print out fake credentials, right from your computer. In fact, Moore created something like that once. Well, he had someone else do it for him, as is typical of him. He usually has someone else do the heavy lifting and he just slaps his name on it.
For the readers out there who have made it this far into this post, obesity is very complex and few truly understand it. But at its core, it can be explained in one sentence - chronic/exaggerated under expression of leptin caused by blood glucose dysregulation which abnormalizes insulin expression. That sentence does not tell the whole story of how this occurs and it is missing a lot of nuance but at its root, that's what obesity is.
So if these quacks are going to speak about "hormones" and "genetics" then they have to actually explain what hormones (leptin/insulin) and what genetics (fat cells). Unfortunately the majority of these people cannot because they view everything through the prism of either simple low carb and the failed carb/insulin hypothesis theory or the failed caloric theory. In other words - quackery.
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