borghe said:
umm.. you are missing a big important problem here with your ideas... insulin isn't generated non-stop just because you have simple carbs to break down. insulin is only used to move excess/unneeded carbs to fat reserves. too many sugars/grains lead people to fatigue because they cause massive insulin surges which is basically the sugar crash.. you're absolutely right. BUT, by being active, you mitigate the need for insulin release. I am certainly not an expert on it, but a good friend's daughter is diabetic and I've had long discussions with him on insulin and sugars. basically they have to keep track of every calorie of sugar she takes in, but doesn't concern himself at all with insulin injections if she is remaining active (she's 12 years old). it's when she is on down time that they have to make sure what she's eating, and getting injections if sugar gets too high.
That's true for some people, not true for others. Depending on the person's insulin sensitivity, they can quickly use carbs as fuel on the fly, store the rest as fat, and blood glucose goes down quickly along with insulin allowing glucagon to supply body fat to organs/tissue between meals.
Other people are more resistant to insulin, especially over time. It's an area being researched, but some stuff I've read suggests that the insulin receptor in some people gets worn off. When this happens, cells don't respond to insulin (except fat, they have infinite sensitivity because of the way insulin puts fat into fat cells is different). Because the cells don't respond to insulin, blood sugar levels stay high, more insulin may be produced to try to force blood glucose levels down. This is pretty much insulin resistance or "metabolic syndrome". Causes all sorts of problems.
And other people just eat carbohydrates constantly, making them a little overweight even if they are still insulin sensitive.
your metabolism is based on your diet, your body's expectancy of that diet (stability), AND your body makeup!!!! More muscle, higher metabolism, lowered fat, higher metabolism. More fat and/or less muscle, lowered metabolism. The thought that metabolism is controlled solely or majority through diet is a horrible conception. Your metabolism is your body's ability to metabolize food of which your actual body composition plays just as important a part in that as the food you're eating. You even said it yourself "If you're the type of person to [blank]". Well, only some of that [blank] is heredity and genetics. A lot of that [blank] is overall physical health and fitness. I'll use myself as an example. I said previously that I've had my share of bacon egg and cheese biscuits from McDonald's over the last six months.. not a ton, but that's not the point here. The point is even just a regular breakfast value meal from mcdonalds before was enough to "sedate" me before.. give me a BEC and hashbrowns and I would be full, and REALLY interested in just sitting there doing my work. Nowadays if I decide to cheat and grab a BEC meal, I am still able to (and most definitely have) go out and run 5-7 milse immediately afterward.
You're still looking at the human metabolism as an entire system with input and output. There are fat people that have a high metabolism and others with a slow metabolism, Taubes talks about it in his book.
My point is that chronic elevated insulin causes the metabolism internally to store calories as fat.
Instead of:
deltaEnergy = CaloriesIn - CaloriesOut
I'm expanding the equation to say:
0 = deltaEnergy = CaloriesFromFood - CaloriesBurntByLeanTissueInNormalMetabolism + CaloriesStoredInFatByInsulin - caloriesReservedByReducedMetabolism
More muscle or not, when the body is starving, it does things like reduce thyroid hormone output to conserve calories. So if you're eating a diet high in carbohydrate (sugar & grains in particular) and especially if you have become insulin resistant, your body increases caloriesReservedByReducedMetabolism.
Notice that deltaEnergy always equates to 0. The body always balances the equation.
So in a hypothetical metabolic scenario, say an adult with 2000 calories needed eats 2000 calories, but 60% are grains.
CaloriesFromFood = 2000
CaloriesBurntByLeanTissueInNormalMetabolism = 2000
Now because insulin is so high all of the time, more fat is stored than released. Fat tissue absorbs 200 calories per day.
CaloriesStoredInFatByInsulin = 200
0 = deltaEnergy = 2000 - 2000 + 200- caloriesReservedByReducedMetabolism
caloriesReservedByReducedMetabolism = 200
The reduction in metabolism would only happen if you chose not to act on the resulting hunger.
Think about what happens when this equation is reversed. Say someone has 30% body fat, and goes on a low carb diet. Because they have so much fat, and their body no longer has the insulin to keep it in check, free fatty acids gush into the blood stream. Lean tissue gets all of the energy it could ever want.
The effect is that a low carb diet decreases hunger because internally lean tissue gets plenty of calories. Energy levels go up, body temperature increases. Eventually as body fat % decreases, the lower levels of insulin start keeping fat in check more and more. This is why really obese people can lose weight so fat on a low carb diet and then as they approach 20% body fat the rate of progress slows down.
IMHO, and I sincerely mean IMHO, both of those plans are awful. the one is essentially maintaining a sedentary lifestyle trying to shock your body.metabolism into reaction... it may work at a chemical level for losing weight, but aside from weight loss there seriously can't be a benefit to your overall health with it. There's not going to be a whole lot of cardiovascular improvement, not a ton of strength improvement... it seems like the goal is to just shock your metabolism to adapt to a low carb diet to eat off fat a few times a week.
likewise, your goal on an elliptical should never be to "get to 600 calories as fast as you can". Stay at 60-70% of your max heartrate for 30-40 minutes a day three or four times a week and your cardiovascular health will shoot through the roof.. and trust me, 60-70% of your max heart rate for most people will be a mild jog even at their healthiest, and for someone incredibly unhealthy to start with, you're looking at not even a brisk walk to start with. When I started my program at 50lbs overweight, I couldn't even maintain more than 4mph for over an hour. I'd get 30 minutes under my belt and wouldn't have even burned 250 calories. No way in shit I was planning on doing that for another hour just to get over 600 calories burned. staying with it for 40 minutes 4 times a week I slowly went from 4mph, to 5mph, to 6mph, to 7mph, etc. I am currently at 7.7mph for 40 minutes on my short days and 70-90 minutes on my long days. It seems intense, but I do this 4 times a week max, sometimes only 3 times a week. There's weightlifting in there also, but because of my running very little of my lifting right now works on my legs.
All 3 of those were the same plan. Sisson recommends avoiding chronic cardio because it tears up the body. Stuff like joints, and chronically pushing your self to the limit can cause inflammation.
He recommends instead doing mostly low intensity cardio, but to do things like 20-30 minutes of sprints per week, and to do weight lifting. To give you an idea, here he is doing the sprints:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWiE0CNpoEk
The guy is nearly 60, gotta be doing something right.
The idea of sprinting, weight lifting, etc is to trigger an increase of testosterone, growth hormone, and to keep muscle mass. The amount of calories burnt in cardio relative to resting metabolism isn't that great, unless you do copious amounts.
people are sedentary today because of our lifestyles and society. Everyone owns a car, everyone would rather drive around the parking lot for an extra 5 minutes finding a closer spot rather than parking in the back and walking for an 2 minutes. The supermarket is 10 blocks away and you have to run and grab a couple of things, drive there, don't walk. Our parents do this, it's how we are brought up as kids, and it's how we behave as adults. It's not about carbs, fats, or proteins. It's about the way we are raised and society in general. Blaming it on carbs misses the fact that most people behave the exact way I pointed out just now. cutting out that spaghetti from dinner might burn off a pound of fat or so in the long run, but that someone would drive around for 5 minutes to save themselves 2 minutes of walking is the REAL problem here that needs addressing. That is definitely more of a contributing factor to their mental and physical health than 50g of carbs.
Your argument here is again tied to the idea that the human body is a furnace, that all calories in are the same and have the same effect on hormones. This was refuted in the 1960s when insulin was understood. We can inject rats with insulin and they die of starvation. They are obese, but because insulin locks away fat into adipose tissue, they cannot use it. They die because their hearts are cannibalized.
Overeating causes people to get fatter as much as overeating causes a child to grow taller. That's faulty causality.
So we should probably stop disagreeing with the various implications of our two top level hypotheses, and stick to the top level.
edit - in regards to the studies you posted, again you bypass the point that for the carbs to be converted to LDL, they have to be processed by insulin and converted to fat to begin with. I am NOT saying that carbs turned to fat are better than fat stored as fat. Of course that would be ridiculous (and incorrect) to argue. My argument is that in a healthy individual who consumes a reasonable number of balanced calories, those carbs will rarely be converted to fat to begin with.
Carbs aren't converted into LDL. They are converted into triglycerides. Excess triglycerides makes LDL small and dense.
Carbs are always processed by insulin, otherwise you have type 1 diabetes and you're pee is full of sugar.
When body fat goes into blood circulation, it becomes free fatty acid. Not
tri-glycercide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triglyceride
"Triglyceride (triacylglycerol, TAG or triacylglyceride) is an ester composed of a glycerol bound to
three fatty acids."
That glycerol bond is only possible from glucose metabolism. It creates glycerol-3-phosphate, which allows insulin to convert free fatty acids into triglycerides and put it into fat cells.
as for your insistence that one your body adapts to the low carb lifestyle that the energy generated from fat will be sufficient... yes, your body will adapt to survive.. but having talked to a TON of people who have no intention on promoting one lifestyle over the other, low fat wins out over low carb every time in terms of stored energy and how energized you feel over the course of the day. even people who insist on continuing low carb have admitted that they have more energy doing low fat, but do low carb simply, asI've been getting at, because they don't have the time in their schedule to maintain a regular exercise pattern. I mean if you are looking to keep fat off I suppose.... but it's just as easy for someone to be incredibly unhealthy at 160 pounds and 12% body fat as it is for someone to be unhealthy at 38% body fat and 290 pounds. That's why I always say.. healthy is NOT just being at a healthy weight. Healthy is being able to go out and sprint for 10 minutes as fast as you possibly can and not hitting your max heartrate, and then being at your resting heartrate within 2-3 minutes tops. If you can't do that, I don't care how little you weigh or how much fat you've lost, you're still looking at a pretty compromised and unhealthy lifestyle that will likely be filled with minor-to-major health problems down the road.
I'm not sure if this is a debate, you're just talking about what you think is true without anything to back it up.
Fat metabolism via glucagon, free fatty acids, and protein is extremely natural. Grains didn't exist before 10,000 years ago. Humans ate very high amounts of fat and protein as the basis of their diet up until then. I don't understand how you can think that fat metabolism is fringe without any evidence.
If you want evidence that a high fat diet, high protein diet is healthy, I've already posted at least two studies showing that such a diet improves all health markers when compared to high carb diets.
I could dig up studies on the Inuit, Eskimos, Pacific Islander tribes near New Zealand, and African tribes that all ate very high amounts of fat and protein, were then introduced to grains, got sick, and then when they returned to their old diet they lose weight and got healthy again. There are dozens of these accounts in Taubes book. The British Empire had a lot of missionary doctors that documented this between 1850-1920. But I don't think you'd believe it, so I'm not going to bother.
anyway, it's a subjective argument in a weight loss thread. IMHO it sucks that in many cases people only care about the weight and not really about the actual health, but it's their body and their right to care about what they want.. so I'll drop it. I just wanted to provide the counterpoints to your low carb information. Yes it has validity in weight loss and fat reduction, but studies have most definitely shown that it is potentially inferior and an unnecessary dietary method in an active lifestyle. Yes going low carb will prevent insulin from turning sugars to fat, but so will a very modest amount of exercise. I guess I'll leave it at that. peace.
Just to clear up any confusion, I'm not saying that all people need to eat low carb. I'm saying that people struggling with their body fat % should consider it, because insulin is the hormone that stores fat. Without it, the body cannot store very much (see type 1 diabetics untreated, skinny as a rail).
It's fine that we have a disagreement, but understand that I'm not promoting fat loss at the cost of health - at least that's not what I believe. You can disagree with the premise of insulin/leptin, but I would be interested in studies demonstrating that they don't matter, or studies demonstrating that high fat and protein diets are harmful.
Likewise I don't believe that you are promoting high grain diets at the cost of health for athletic performance because I don't believe that you believe that such a diet is harmful.
