I usually put enough sugar in each of my 237 cups of morning coffee to kill a diabetic from 30 yards. Most people would classify me as 'thin'. Then again, 6'3" 215lbs isn't lightweight, but the height hides a lot of it.

I am drinking C2 though...

You might as well smoke 2 packs a day. Sugar is that bad for you. Taxes your insulin receptors, and you get diabetes, not to mention the fact that constantly elevated blood sugar is like a wrecking ball to your sytem. For example, diabetics lose limbs because the elevated sugar destroys blood vessels that carry blood to the extremities.

Even if sugar doesn't happen to make you fat because of other factors, it's still really bad for you. Also, excess caffeine intake drops your testosterone and kills willie function, btw. At least that's what Mrs. Marble told me.

I learned more about what those Atkin's type diets are supposed to do, be and achieve from this post than I have from a couple of years worth of fluffy news pieces. Thanks for putting this one together for us.

Stream of consciousness, no problem. Bear in mind that my post is still convoluted and only scratches the surface. the key to remember is that it changes the nature of your metabolism, not just reduces calories.

High cholesterol, in my opinion, is mostly hereditary even when I was in great shape and reduced my intake of fatty foods my cholesterol was still at 330, just like my father's before drugs.

I now take Lipitor, Tricor AND Zetia to control it.

Dude,
Well, I just don't know if I can agree with you. I mean, it seems like a lot of your insulin theory is just as fadish as are those pop diets. What we don't know about the human body could take up volumes.

So, your diet sounds good, I'm just not so sure the causal mechanism is as you describe it.

Mark that as my disagree with a blogger for the day.

I eat steak 1-2x each week. I eat eggwhite omelets for breakfast with a thin slice of ham. For lunch, I eat one of those Smart Ones from Weight Watchers. Snacks: a handful of almonds or some celery.

The rest of the week I eat chicken 1-2x and fish 3 times. Occasionally I'll have a turkey/ham wrap with bacon for lunch (maybe once or twice a week). On Friday I have pizza. Every night I drink about 24 oz. of Guinness.

That's it. That ok?

Yes Jeff, that's a pretty healthy diet. I was more referring to the folks that approach Atkins in the way that you parody ...

And Rusty, points for following the Commissar's advice, but pick a more ambiguous subject next time - you are wrong. The effects of diet on insulin are actually very well documented.

Also, JFH, of course high cholesterol is largely hereditary. EVERYTHING is largely hereditary, that doesn't mean that the majority of the population can't severely impact it with external factors.

Some folks will have an extremely efficient metabolism, and some folks don't. Does that mean that the natural fatty should gorge on pizza and ice cream? No. Fatty can do himself huge favors with lifestyle modifications.

The "genetics are king" argument misses a much larger philosophical point about health-related topics.

Do you have a reference on animal fat causing inflammation?

I've been on a fairly relaxed version of Adtkins for a while. Irrespective of my weight loss, having my blood sugar level off makes the diet worth while for me. The only down side is that coffee no longers gives me a strong buzz.

I am not convinced that eating fish is good for you. I've read too much about people getting sick after eating fish bought from a store.

Thanks for the post. I'll look into the other two diets you've mentioned.

The only thing that I would add is that I avoid regular ingestion of all frozen, processed, packaged food. That may sound like some health-nut extremity, but it's really pretty easy.

The reasons lie in the fact that those foods contain man-made substances that cause your body to go "what the fuck is this?" Anything that causes your body the urge to hide under the bed is, to one degree or another, a toxin.

I'll cover that in another post.

Fish is AWESOME for you. Problem is, many types of fish absorb heavy metals, like mercury. Also raw fish can naturally cause certain problems. The pollution problem can be balanced out by moderating your fish intake and/or attempting to eat wild (as opposed to farm raised) fish.

This can be expensive/hard, so a simple compromise is eating fish moderately, say 2-4 times a week.

But trust me, fish is amazing. Fish cures many types of depression for Pete's sake, among a zillion other things. No joke.

Also, the source on animal fat is in my head. For a specific technical source on how saturated animal fats cause inflammation, go to www.pubmed.com and do a variety of searches. Google seems to be down at the moment (weird), but google "animal fat causes inflammation" (or read one of the books I mention) and you should find plenty of material.

Bill -- I was asking seriously, not being flip. Forgot to mention that my desserts of late consist of sugar-free popsicles. That'll change during the cooler months, though.

I eat a lot of grilled and blackened tuna. I also eat rock fish (sea bass) and red trout quite a bit. My wife eats a lot of salmon.

My one weekness is Diet Dr. Pepper. Yum.

A colleague has been on Atkins (or a slightly relaxed version of it) for about a year. His total cholesterol has dropped something like forty points, his LDL/HDL ratio has improved significantly, and his triglycerides are way down. This isn't just guesswork; he had his levels measured before he started, and continues to have them checked periodically. So all you Chicken Littles out there: Talk to the hand!

Jeff -

Your diet (as you described it) is certainly way better than the average diet. If you wanted to tweak it a bit, you would eliminate all non-natural food, but that takes some sacrifice.

The biggest enemies are sodium and trans-fat, or hydrogenated fat, which is fat that has a hydrogen molecule added to it by cackling, evil scientists at General Mills. It gives many, many popular foods (peanut butter, frozen foods, margarine), consistency at room temperature, and it is absolute POISON to your body.

Diet sodas have some unnatural stuff in them that I wouldn't want to ingest daily, but, hey, can't browbeat everyone into submission. A human could improve their health vastly by only drinking water, green tea and the occasional coffee.

I would also ditch the celery (no nutrition, no point) and eat raw broccoli, carrots, etc. Tastes about the same and packed with vitamins.

Eat lots of steamed veggies -- generally broccoli and asparagus. I also eat lots of white onion, mushrooms, and red and green peppers.

Bonus. Throw some raw ones in during the day.

All you have to do is pick up a Muscle & Fitness magazine from the past 20 years and follow thier diet tips. Low carbs consumed early in the day, hiogh protein everytime else. There is nothing revolutionary about Atkins, just repackaged in a shiny wrapper.

Aaron - Atkins has been around for over 30 years. So it was, in fact revolutionary. And up until the past few years, M & F diets were obsessed with low fat, low fat, low fat, which is actually very bad for muscle growth. The body needs fat for fuel and for the synthesis of anabolic hormones like testosterone.

I can say with conviction that the way carbs are ingested (not just time of the day) absolutely revolutionizes the way a metabolism functions.

I started the South Beach Diet in early January of this year and have been very stringent in avoiding refined sugar (well, refined everything, really)-- and I haven't been sick since. Everyone else in my office came down with horrible flus and lingering chest colds, but I sailed right through. Also, my GERDs just disappeared.

Oh, and I've lost weight, too.

Exactly. The changes to health that can follow a great diet (like SoBe) are pretty startling. Almost makes you wonder how you put up with life any other way ...

I'm sorta doing the South Beach Diet now. Mainly because I realize that my eating habits up until recently are horrible. My mother suggested the diet, so I've not eaten any fast food for the last 2 weeks, except for salads during lunch break. I tend to eat alot of vegetables, mainly assorted peppers and onions. The only meat I eat is chicken and occasionally have Fish... which I'm not a fan of but try to have at least once a week.

I've noticed a difference so far and feel better, so that must be good.

Nice article a good read that explained some things I didn't quite understand.

Excellent article.
I'm severely hypoglycemic, and must keep to a low-carb diet. What I do is, instead of eating a lot of starches, I eat a lot of non-starchy vegetables instead (a salad, coleslaw or soup, and a cup of steamed frozen vegs with butter at lunch and dinner, and never more than 1/3 cup of whole-grain rice or pasta per meal).
I don't have anything with added sugar, and I avoid all artificial sweeteners since
1. they make me hungry
2. they give me cravings for more sweet stuff.
It works.

Yup. The thing with eating sugars, refined carbs is - they're addictive. Once you break away from the stuff, the cravings are reduced dramatically.

Just be careful with the meat thing. Someone who goes on Atkins without all the facts can end up in bad shape (like a friend of mine, who ended up with gout - one of those diseases you read about in books from the 18th century, I had thought.)

You've got all the theories here correct, although there's room to argue about some of it around the edges. Especially because a lot of it is merely conjecture. Not merely what Atkins says, but what anyone says. Nutrition is a poorly studied subject, it really is.

I ran a list for a long time on low-carb diets. It was not uncommon for us to see people eat a diet consisting mainly of eggs and red meat see a drop of their cholesterol, sometimes a dramatic drop. Others had a negative reaction to similar diets.

We know now from studies done that whatever the theories, many people who do the Atkins diet even for a year or more show improvements to their serum lipids, regardless of the fact that they eat plenty of eggs, red meat, butter, and so on.

Doesn't work well for everybody, but it does some.

I also studied paleo diets for a while. Damn I could write a lot on this subject, and must resist the temptation to do so. But let me just say this: if you want a *true* paleo diet, most likely the closest you will get is if you refuse to use anything that REQUIRES cooking to be edible. Not that cooking is not allowed, humans have been using cooking for meat for a long, long time. The point is, anything that REQUIRES cooking should be suspect. Most hunter/gatherers don't eat anything that can't be eaten raw.

That means, basically, meat, fish, eggs, fruits, nuts, and a few vegetables. It leaves out grains, beans, potatoes, and corn, because all of those require extensive processing and cannot be eaten in large quantities unless you're an agricultural society. And agriculture's only been a serious human hobby for about 10,000 years.

Thus to be "true paleo" you'll probably have no bread, no oatmeal, no corn, no beans, no potatoes. Lots of meat, lots of nuts, lots of fruit.

But even that's hard to do perfectly because most fruits today are much more sugary and less fibrous than the natural varieties, and the meats more fatty.

Heh. Best of luck. I strongly recommend Loren Cordain's book, and Ray Audette's is a lot of fun!

Re: "But let me just say this: if you want a *true* paleo diet, most likely the closest you will get is if you refuse to use anything that REQUIRES cooking to be edible."

I tend to eat most things (except meat, oatmeal and fish - really I refer to fruits and veggies) raw. Not so much because I'm a health nut (though health is part of it), but because it's easy.

The only thing I question about the paleo diet is how one gets enough stored muscle energy for strenuous exertion without hardly any complex carbs ... I'm not doubting it, I just can't think of the source.

A book that is REALLY interesting and thorough is Natural Hormonal Enhancement, by Faigan. It goes into great detail and has a very unique way to approach the paleo diet.

It's promoted as a bodybuilding book, but it's primarily a diet book. I tried his eating regimen for kicks, and it works AMAZINGLY well (it builds muscle very quickly), but it's too difficult for me to maintain.

The book has loads of compiled research and info, though.

251 Why is Texas holdem so darn popular all the sudden?

http://www.texas-holdem.greatnow.com