Ignoramus3159 wrote:

In article , Dally wrote:

Low-fat isn't a great plan. A better plan is to find a calorie budget
that works for your life and eat a balanced diet, where "balanced" means
[very] roughly equal macronutrient ratios. A decent guess for a
starting place might be 45% carbs, 30% protein and 25% fat. You might
be startled at how full you feel on small portions of a diet like this.


Dally, you say that low fat is a bad plan, and then in the next
sentence suggest a diet with 25% of calories from fat, which is a low
fat diet.

It makes no sense.

I defined my terms. It's not my fault if you have "low-fat" defined
differently in your brain. 33% "/- 10% of each macronutrient is what I
call "balanced". It's not the "as little fat as humanly possible" that
typical idiot dieting includes. Ornish and MacDougal both aim for 10%
fat. Body for Life suggests 20% fat and the Zone Diet (which I've been
following more or less for two years) recommends 25% fat and is called
"a low carb" plan in mainstream literature. In practice any specific
day will range a bit around your goal percentages and I don't think it
matters all that much. At that point it comes down to recipe preferences.

Many of us have found the same thing with different terms: our portions
sizes are controllable and our bodies work best when we get roughly
balanced macronutrients. 33 +/-10=23-43% per macronutrient. Annabel
appears to be doing roughly 80% carbs. I think it's worth mentioning to
the OP that she's on the track that leads to low energy, deprivation,
food cravings, hunger, poor skin, low metabolism, muscle loss and
eventually giving all this up and regaining all the weight. Wouldn't it
be nice to skip that step and learn how to feed your body right the
first time?

My recent realization on low fat is that it works better for younger
people than for older people, since, as people age, their glycemic
control turns for the worse and low fat diets are not working as well
for people with poor glycemic control. This is not universal, as
various people deteriorate at very different rates, but generally, I
would expect it to be true.

My recent realization is that nearly all the people who followed low-fat
regained their weight. As far as I can tell NEITHER of us are involved
in large clinical trials, so your realizations are worth exactly as much
as my realizations, i.e., zilch.

Since Annabel is so adamant about continuing her diet of choice, I
decided to stop harping on her, but my expectation is that it won't
work in 4 or so months. She has a lot of willpower, so she might as
well prove you or me wrong. Who knows, bodies work in mysterious ways
and not every fat person is insulin resistant. There are studies to
this effect and they mention cohorts of insulin sensitive obese
subjects.

I think she'll lose weight if she eats less calories than she burns. I
just think she'll be miserable and inevitably regain it all if she does
it by forcing her body to be tired, hungry and deprived of essential
nutrients. I don't mean to harp at her, either, but I'll correct her
when she sends newbies down the yo-yo dieting path.

Dally