Fat-Fast

Luna said:

Not gonna happen. Low-carb has, apparently, permanently wounded my once
voracious appetite.

This has happened to me too. I can never get my money's worth at a
buffet anymore.

You *think* you would, cause you're not gonna eat the cheap starchy
fillers and are gonna fill up on meats, but it turns out you just can't
eat that much. And if you add in some salad, you have no chance
whatsoever of getting your money's worth.

Quoted message said:

My main take on this is that some people have very unreasonable
expectations. IMO, if you're not satisfied dropping 14 lbs in 5 to 6
weeks, then it's likely because you view LC as a quick fix to be gotten
over with as quickly as possible so you can go back to your old ways.
People who succeed at LC learn to enjoy eating LC foods like meat,
fish, many vegetables, and some fruits, and using them in creative and
appetizing ways. They don't go around doing needless fat fasts, with
restrictive menus that would make most people puke.

Exactly.

Treating low-carb like a fad diet doesn't make it any better than any
other fad diet. It's still stupid.

Low-carb is for life, as such, it ought not matter how long it takes to
get to goal; rather that one *stays* at goal for the remaining decades.

Doug Freyburger said:

And that path guarantees regain. Regain it all and the loss
may as well have never happened.

It's worse than that, it increases metabolic resistance to future loss.
And studies have shown that yo-yo'ing is worse for your health than
just staying fat.

Quoted message said:

Follow the DANDR directions to find your CCLL. Less isn't
more - Atkins is about right-sizing carb intake not blindly
reducing it. Anyone who imagines that Atkins includes
reducing veggie intake hasn't paid the slightest attention.

Read Protein Power by Drs Eades and figure out your minimum
protein grams per day. Dr Atkins appears to have figured folks
already eat plenty so he didn't discuss protein much. Use that
minimum as your target protein grams.

Find some reasonable calorie guideline and use that as your
target calories.

Do the math and fill the rest of your calories with fat.

That is very similar to what I've done. Not the CCLL bit, because I
use my bg meter to determine my carbs. While my bg readings are not as
good as I'd like, I've found the level of carbs that going below
doesn't make it any better, and that is my carb level. Turns out for
me, that's 40-50 grams/day.

The protein requirements are 70-80 g/day or so via the Eades and some
other reading.

Having decided 1400 kilocalories per day is good for me, the rest is
fat. So my diet runs around 70% fat. It *is* a high-fat diet by any
definition of the word, though nowhere as extreme as a fat fast.

And while the numbers look skewed, it really is a well-balanced diet.
My diet is less protein than I ate on high-carb, and I suspect it's
actually less fat too. Because it's primarily vegetables when measured
by volume or bulk, and since veggies are so low-calorie and low-fat,
the proportions are skewed towards fat.

More important than finding the ideal numbers is finding how to live
with them. Filling in the actual meals to be made up of foods I like,
enjoy eating, enjoy preparing and can live with for the rest of my
life.

This makes it a *liveable* diet, not a fad. My diet is *not* for
weight loss. My diet is for life and health and managing my diabetes.
Weight loss is just a side effect.

My diet is for... I promised my husband 50 years when we married and I
still owe him 45. 😉

Quoted message said:

Luna said:

Not gonna happen. Low-carb has, apparently, permanently wounded my once
voracious appetite.

This has happened to me too. I can never get my money's worth at a
buffet anymore.

Depends on the buffet. I was at a Chinese buffet last night that had
crab legs and crayfish, and I'm sure I got my money's worth.

Crab, yum.