Living Low Carb (44 page)
Authors: Jonny Bowden
Calories are barely mentioned in
Protein Power
. The idea is that calories are self-regulating if you are eating the foods that put you in correct metabolic balance (an idea that runs throughout many low-carb diet plans). The Eadeses do warn you that since you may not be as hungry on a low-carb plan as you were before, you can easily
under
eat, so it’s important to be sure that your calories don’t fall below 850 to 1,000 a day. (The 850 figure seems really,
really
low—nearly every other weight-loss expert, including myself, uses 1,000 to 1,250 as the bare minimum, and some even suggest not dropping below 1,250. If the food eaten produces a hormonally balanced state and the calories are coming from good stuff, most women will drop weight on 1,250 calories and most men on 1,500.)
On the other hand, especially in
The Protein Power Lifeplan
, the authors explain that if you’re doing everything right (i.e., eating the minimum protein requirement and not exceeding the maximum carb allotment) and you’re
still
not losing weight, you might be consuming too many calories, especially calories from fat. Nuts seem to be a frequent culprit: since nuts are only fat and protein, many low-carbers munch on these with abandon because they have very little effect on insulin. But while a 1-ounce portion (which is pretty small!) may have only 160 calories and a few grams of carbs at most, three to four portions can add an awful lot of calories (and carb grams) to a diet plan and could effectively slow down or stop weight loss altogether. As with most low-carb plans, the message here is: though calories are not the whole story by a long shot, they still matter, so don’t ignore them.
Phase three is the maintenance phase, which is what you stay on once you’ve reached your goal. To get there, you add 10 grams of carbohydrate to your daily allotment in phase two, and stay there and stabilize for about 5 to 7 days. Then you add another 10 grams. You continue in this way until you find the amount of carbs you can take in and still keep your weight stable. The Eadeses have found that
most
people will stabilize when they’ve reached the point at which the number of carb grams equals the number of protein grams, but they discuss the exceptions to this general rule and tell you what to do if you don’t fit the template.
The maintenance phase is pretty cool. There is really no food you can’t have “in some quantity at some time.” The trick is knowing what you’re doing. As the authors put it, there are foods that are “so rich in sugars and starches, such potent unbalancers of your metabolic hormones, that you cannot have unlimited amounts of them any time you want unless you are willing to accept the consequences of that action.” They even have recovery guidelines for those times when you throw caution to the wind and have a “nutritional vacation,” such as on birthdays, holidays, and the like. You simply return to phase one for three days (or until you have lost any of the weight you might have gained), move to phase two for the rest of the week, and then return to your maintenance level of carb consumption.
The thing about
The Protein Power Lifeplan
, and to a lesser extent the original book, is that it is about so much more than just a diet. There is absolutely first-rate information about cholesterol and the “cholesterol hoax,” plus wonderful explanations of how insulin works in the body and its relationship to heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. There is a terrific exposition on the Paleolithic Diet. And in
Lifeplan
, the authors go into even more detail on all of these topics, plus they include discussions of antioxidants, leaky gut syndrome and autoimmune responses, sugar, iron overload, magnesium, brain health, and a further expansion of the nutritional plan.
Lifeplan
also has a cool concept. It suggests three levels of “commitment” to health: the purist, the dilettante, and the hedonist. All of these approaches share the same requirements for protein, the same need for high-quality fat, the same prohibition on trans-fatty acids, and the same limitations of carbohydrate grams (depending on what phase you’re in). (Even at the lowest level of commitment, the hedonist, you’re still way better off than you would be following the standard American diet or, for that matter, the standard high-carb, low-fat diet.) All of the levels should theoretically give the same weight-loss results. The difference is in overall health benefits.
The purist regimen is really restrictive and most resembles Ray Audette’s Neanderthin plan. Purists eat
no
cereal grains, or products made from them (à la
The No-Grain Diet
of Joseph Mercola). They eat
no
dairy or legumes (such as beans). They eat
only
organic fruits and vegetables and
only
natural meat and poultry—no processed foods, no sugars (except occasionally honey), no artificial sweeteners, no caffeine, and no alcohol. It’s probably the most healthful diet in the world to follow, but also next to impossible for most folks. However, for people with serious health issues, it may mean the difference between life and death.
Next up is the dilettante. You aim for organic foods whenever possible but are not obsessive about it. You still avoid some grains (wheat, for example) but can eat others (like oats and rice). You eliminate high-fructose corn syrup but can have some other sweeteners, even table sugar (in very limited amounts), and the prohibition against alcohol and caffeine is lifted. This is the program the Eadeses themselves follow.
Finally, there is the hedonist, where everything goes, within the limits of your carbohydrate allowance. You still have to keep to the basic parameters of the program, but you can fulfill those requirements with just about any foods you wish. Obviously, the high-carb content of some foods, such as potatoes, may make it impossible to fit portions of those foods into the phase one plan, when carbs are limited to 7 to 10 grams per meal and snack. But once you’re on phase two or three, you can eat anything you want, as long as you don’t exceed the maximum number of carbs for the day.
Protein Power as a Lifestyle: Who It Works for, Who Should Look Elsewhere
This is a great plan if you have a lot of weight to lose or any of the health conditions discussed in the book. In its maintenance phase, it’s a great plan to follow, period. But you’ve got to be willing to do a little figuring. You can’t eyeball portions on the first two phases (which you can on the Zone or on phase three of this plan). You’ve got to be exact about carb-gram content and about meeting your minimum protein needs. The calculations could put some folks off (although it’s a nonissue in
Lifeplan
). Having to check ECC for every food might be a pain, and could be a problem if you eat out often, unless you get familiar with the carb content of a lot of foods. If you’re willing to put in the effort, it’s worth it. If you’re not into counting, measuring, and keeping a record, this is going to be hard, and you’d be better off with a simpler formula.
JONNY’S LOWDOWN
It’s hard to find anything wrong with this plan and the concepts and theories behind it. In some ways it’s like the Zone with an induction phase, which may be why Barry Sears, whose Zone diet is way higher in carbs and lower in fat, is still able to endorse it (phase three, the maintenance phase of Protein Power, is not far from Zone-like eating). The only credible argument I’ve heard against this type of plan is from endocrinologist Dr. Diana Schwarzbein, whose dietary regimen is not considered high-protein but is definitely still on the lower-carb side of the fence (see The Schwarzbein Principle on page 226). Her concern is that too much protein without enough carbohydrate will raise the hormone cortisol, which has a whole other set of problems attached to it. It’s a fair objection, and only time and additional research will clarify these hazy areas. In the meantime, I’m continuing to recommend The Protein Power Lifeplan as a basic textbook to all my clients who just want to live a healthful lifestyle and manage their weight. It’s hard to find anything commercially available that’s more comprehensive.
WHAT IT IS IN A NUTSHELL
A novel higher-fat approach to low-carb that focuses on leptin, a hormone involved in the regulation of appetite.
About the Rosedale Diet
How can you fault any diet book that clearly states the following: “
The high carbohydrate–low fat diet being prescribed to diabetic patients is precisely the wrong approach
”? Answer: You can’t.
The Rosedale Diet is a gem. It’s the creation of Ron Rosedale, MD, the doctor who, when Mike and Mary Dan Eades (of “Protein Power” fame) left Colorado to move on to other projects, took over the directorship of their clinic for metabolic medicine. Rosedale has long been one of the most soughtafter educators in nutritional and metabolic medicine, and this book is his first entry into the popular diet world. And it’s a winner on every count.
While the Rosedale Diet is clearly a “low-carb” plan, it takes a somewhat different approach to weight loss, one that is focused on a hormone called
leptin
.
Here’s the deal with leptin. Back in the ’90s, researchers were excited to discover this protein hormone that seemed to regulate appetite. Leptin signals the brain that it’s time to stop eating. Rats that were leptin-deficient ate a ton of food and, when injected with leptin, lost weight easily. The excitement in the research community was palpable. Researchers at the Rockefeller Institute believed they just might have found the holy grail of weight loss. They reasoned that obese people must be leptin-deficient, and that if leptin (or a drug that mimicked it) could be given to obese individuals, their appetite would be regulated automatically and the pounds would drop off.
No such luck. Turns out that what worked in rats didn’t work at all in humans. Obese people, as it happens, have plenty of leptin.
The problem is, their bodies don’t “listen” to it.
They are, to use the term Rosedale uses,
leptin-resistant .
“Leptin is produced by your fat cells,” Rosedale explains. “It tells your brain when to eat, how much to eat and most important, when to
stop
eating.” Just as type 2 diabetics have plenty of insulin (but their cells don’t respond effectively to it), obese people have plenty of leptin, but all that leptin falls on deaf cellular ears. In obese or overweight people, leptin does not seem to be able to effectively communicate its message to “stop eating.”
Rosedale explains it elegantly: “
When leptin levels can be properly ‘heard,’ it alerts your brain and other body tissues that you have eaten enough and stored away enough fat, and it’s now time to burn off some excess fat. This feedback system is designed to prevent you from getting fat. In order for leptin to be heard clearly, however, leptin levels must remain stable and low. When leptin levels spike too high, too often, your cells stop listening to leptin. In medical terms, they become ‘resistant’ to leptin
.” In other words, your brain continues to tell you “be hungry, eat, and store more fat!”
The Rosedale Diet is all about getting rid of “leptin resistance.”
Interestingly, the same foods that aggravate insulin resistance—the central factor in obesity, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome—also promote
leptin resistance
: sugar and high-carb diets. The Rosedale Diet abandons the outdated classification of carbohydrates into “simple” and “complex” and instead classes them into “fiber” versus “nonfiber” (or what some people would call “slow-burning” versus “fast-burning”). Fiber, good; nonfiber, not so good. Not surprising, and totally accurate. On the Rosedale Diet, most grains are avoided (especially for the first three weeks), but nonstarchy vegetables are plentiful.