1. My sister eats chocolate chip cookies because she says it doesn't raise her blood glucose as much as bread or crackers. I'm scared to try this myself.
Listen, some people have simple goals and are satisfied with minimal results. If not being obese for you is anything under 300 lbs. and your idea of blood glucose control is not allowing it to go over 200 mg/dL, then that's what you will aim for and will only put in as much effort as it takes to achieve both. There are a lot of "low carb" followers who follow the diet in this manner. In fact, unfortunately, they make up the majority.
These people are satisfied with a "lowering" of blood glucose and weight. They never lower their blood glucose enough to put their condition into remission and they never lose weight enough to become lean, but they don't care. As long as they are able to continue eating the junk they have always eaten and acquire minimal benefits, that appear positive, they are fine.
That's not what we do here. You can do this in the multitude of other blogs and pages out there that claim to be low carb. Here the diet is followed correctly and consistently or it's not. I cannot offer even a glimmer of hope for anyone who follows low carb as described in your statement. Those people are hopeless.
2. I would like to follow "keto", but all of the "keto" advocates I've come across so far are either athletes or very obese. Every time I look for a recipe, so I can start my diet, the owner of the page is still fat. I'm scared of getting even fatter on this diet.
People tell me this all of the time because the protocols that I recommend are low carb. First, you do not need any recipe to start a low carb diet. You just eat meat and above ground vegetables. That is all.
I know there are some pretty hefty people in the low carb world, giving out bogus advice, but please understand that none of those people are following low carb as they should. They are following fad diets that fall under the banner of low carb simply because they are carb restricted in some form or another.
These people are still fat because they have always been fat, and they will forever be fat. A lot of these people can't follow a proper protocol unless it is some type of fad protocol, which they follow for a short while and then return to the Standard American Diet (SAD), while they wait for the next fad protocol to come around. They just want attention and to be in the loop. It helps them believe they are doing "something about their weight" while really doing nothing at all. Many of them have disordered eating conditions and, it doesn't matter what protocol they follow, they just can't seem to eat properly or follow the protocol correctly.
There are many reasons for this. Biological, psychological, behavioral and most of all, ignorance. These people don't understand how metabolism works so any charlatan can come along and throw a few "sciency" words at them, which appear to make sense, and their desperation causes them to believe it. Then they begin treating their problem incorrectly. You can't treat what you don't understand and many of these people simply don't understand and won't ever understand obesity.
Metabolism is very counter intuitive, complex and a difficult system to understand. Even young, athletic, seemingly "smart" people get it wrong so what do you expect from an older, obese, metabolically ill person who has a very hard time understanding basic biology? They will understand even less. They will also be less willing to do the work because the work required takes them out of their comfort zone. This is why they gravitate to protocols that are "simple" and allow them to keep some of their habitual fare.
This is why you shouldn't follow anyone. You need to learn how metabolism works for yourself and set up your own protocol based on goals and results. You won't get any answers to your problem from athletes or fad dieters. I have many meal ideas and recommended diets on the right-hand side column of this blog.
Also, don't hold overweight/obesity against the person who is trying to give information on low carb diets. Yes, many of them are charlatans but don't assume that's the case with all. See what protocol they are following and what they are advising and let that determine if they are full of BS or not.
Some of these people are on their own journey and so it would make sense that they are still overweight/obese. Others are prime examples on how diet alone will not achieve proper blood glucose regulation in the vast majority of people. There are many other factors, besides diet, which affect blood glucose. Until they are addressed, the person can remain overweight/obese, never regaining proper leptin expression, while following a seemingly perfect diet. You do not have to be lean to give good information on obesity. There is plenty of bad information being given by very lean and healthy people.
3. I am following a "high vegetable" diet for the treatment of diabetes and obesity. It is similar to a protein sparing modified fast where vegetables are unlimited and the calories of both protein and fat are restricted. Since I started this diet, I have noticed my skin is no longer dry. I think the big bowl of vegetables I am eating is "nourishing" my skin and healing it.
This is all flim-flam, but congratulations. This is just anecdotal evidence and there is a lot of those circulating around when it comes to diet. There are many carnivore people who make the same claim, not only about skin but all sorts of different ailments that have been miraculously "cured" on their new diet.
Whatever benefits a person has from their new diet is almost exclusively caused by the elimination of something, rather than the addition of anything. If your new diet has eliminated the grains and sugar, that interfere with metabolism and cause all sorts of issues, then that's what's beneficial.
Who knows why your dry skin has suddenly healed but I can guarantee you that it wasn't the vegetables. Vegetables are very nutrient poor for humans. We basically can't use most of the nutrients contained in them. Bugs and herbivores can and then we can eat them and get the nutrients that way. But the human digestive system itself was not made to extract any nutrients from vegetables in any significant amount.
All of the vegetables in your supermarket weren't even around before the advent of agriculture. I hate to break this to you, but that big bowl of vegetables was not around before 12 thousand years ago. Remember humans have been around for 315'000 years. That's a lot of years with no vegetables in sight. So, 99% of our history had none of these vegetables around at all. We ate the fermented plant matter from the intestines of animals only. Plants are great when they are already digested for you.
Meat has all of the nutrients that humans need. That is why you can live off only meat, but you can't live off only vegetables. So, the best vegetables are the ones that have turned into meat.
4. If someone is fat in a wheelchair, then they are fat because of lack of movement.
If that was the case, Stephen Hawking would have been 900 lbs. at death. Instead, he was probably close to 90 lbs. if even that.
There are obese people in wheelchairs and there are slim people in wheelchairs. Sometimes the condition that put them in a wheelchair influences their weight, but movement has nothing to do with this. In fact, this proves that being fat or lean is completely at the discretion of your neuroendocrine system. Not movement, not calories but what your body does with both.
There is no question that movement and diet can help influence your neuroendocrine system to work as it should and store/burn its calories efficiently, but neither is the be all/end all of obesity or leanness.
5. I was told by my coach that the body stores fat because it is "waiting for carbs to come in and be used for energy".
Be careful with coaches, trainers and the like. They tend to take individual, textbook metabolic processes and apply them generally to the overall system. This completely ignores context and nuance that are necessary to understand a whole system in vivo.
Something is wrong with your statement. You might have misunderstood your coach. That is the utmost stupidest thing I have ever heard as of now, and considering what I have to deal with, that's quite a feat. Basically, if that was true, we could all eat nonstop loaves of Wonder Bread, in order to not store fat, since the body will store fat while waiting for you to eat the Wonder Bread. That's insane.
Let's get something clear, once and for all, because people seem to have a hard time understanding this. The body constantly uses both fat and glucose for energy. The body never puts to sleep its energy demands. It is always using energy unless you're dead. It just prioritizes energy differently, depending on the source and the task, but the body is a hybrid that can use both fat and glucose energy.
Fat is the body's most versatile energy because it is used for most of its functions, whether resting or not. It even burns fat while it sleeps. That's actually when it burns the most fat, while doing nothing at all. It burns so much of it that there is ketone spillover every night. Actually, it's simpler to say that the body uses fat for all its energy demands except when it requires explosive, high intensity activity.
High intensity activity is just that. High intensity. Think of HIIT (high intensity interval training) or a competitive sport like football or wrestling. Everything else is mostly run by fat, including all steady state activities of long duration, like gardening, walking, cycling and even jogging. The body uses fat for so many things that it must store fat in order to ensure it has it available when it demands it. Fat is so useful for the body that it will convert carbs into fat, so that it can store it for future use.
So no, the body does not "wait for carbs to come in". There is no need for that. The body can make its own carbs. The body always has a storage supply of glycogen available in case you do have to suddenly run from a lion or tackle a football. The body gets its carbs by converting protein and glycerin in fats into glucose which it can then store as glycogen. So even when no carbs are coming in, the body will always have glucose available to it anyway. It never runs out of glucose as there are certain cells that can only run on glucose and other cells which prefer it.
You need to get metabolic information from someone who understands human metabolism, as it works in practice, for the average non-athletic person and most importantly, for a person who is overweight/obese. A person who is overweight/obese/diabetic would only get worse or die on the diet of a football player, even though that is the diet that keeps football players healthy, at least in the interim, and able to play the game.
In overweight/obesity the entire mechanism, I just described above, goes haywire and no longer functions as it's supposed to. Instead of the body storing fat for future use, it stores it indefinitely and refuses to use it again, even when needed. It wants to live off glucose instead and it doesn't matter how many "carbs are coming in", it continues producing more of its own glucose through the uncontrolled catabolism of its lean muscle mass, primarily, converting it all into more fat.
Overweight/obesity is a fat sparing adaption. That is why it's called a "starvation adaptation" because it does exactly what it would do if it was starving. So, if you are someone who is in this metabolic state, you are making things worse by having "more carbs coming in".
6. Once I know my macros, can I follow them forever?
You need to recalculate your macros as you lose weight. The macros for a 300 lbs. person are not the same as for a 110 lb. person.