From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Thu Aug 23 2001 - 11:55:28 MDT
Hi folks,
Since there has been interest in the past on the topic of diets and
nutrition, I thought I would post the results/side-effects of my most recent
experiment with such things.
About five weeks ago I agreed to provide "morale support" to one of the
girls I live with, who insisted that she needs to lose five pounds (from her
petite 115-lb body -- go figure), by doing a low carb diet with her. I am
not in particular need of a diet, but I'm not super-lean either despite
spending much time at the gym, so I figured it would be an interesting
experiment. My normal diet tends to be a low-fat, medium dairy, medium
protein diet with lots of carbs and vegetables. I also attend the gym
regularly (at least for the last several months), so I also like to see how
various diets interact with my workout. My new diet is a high-protein
high-fat diet with lots of non-starchy vegetables and water. Note that I do
a "two days on, one day off" cycle for the diet; I eat plenty of quality
carbs on the off day.
1) It makes you lean with surprising speed. I've never seen anything else
like it -- the fat just melted off my body. This is the only diet I've ever
seen that actually produced results like this and at this speed.
2) It doesn't interfere with a heavy workout schedule. I've tried other
low-fat diets to try to become leaner, but they all seemed to have adverse
affects on my workout scheduling, either by making recovery take longer or
just making my muscles feel lethargic (a problem I've had with
vegetarian-ish diets in general). No problems here.
3) Dairy is bad. This was the only change I made to the diet mid-course.
Apparently a low-carb diet aggravates the negative effects of diary in the
diet and generally didn't make me feel that good, so I cut back on them
substantially and stuck with meat and veggies. I've always known that dairy
wasn't so hot, but this made it that much clearer.
4) No hunger. This is more than just an issue of an empty stomach. I
found that the time I could comfortably go between meals was greatly
extended beyond my normal diet as well. I am guessing this has something to
do with very stable blood sugar levels. Note that low-fat high-carb diets
always seemed to increase the frequency that I felt hungry.
In summary, I feel great, better than I do on my normal diet. Because of
this, it is extraordinarily easy to stick with it, and the adjustments have
been minor, particularly since every third day I eat carbs.
Given the quality of the results I've had, I will probably make lean meat
and veggies my standard diet until something better comes along; my body
seems quite happy with this diet. I'm normally skeptical of these things,
but only because most dietary changes appeared to generate adverse
consequences to my body and/or my lifestyle.
Cheers,
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:10:01 MST