The real key to weight loss is a non-insulin-stimulating diet in conjunction with strength and cardiovascular exercise. Even with minimal exercise I lost 7 kg since March. My weight loss hits a plateau when I am not exercising. It is essential to move your ass or lift things if you want more gains. Weight loss is not practical without some exercise.
A lot of Westerners are rediscovering amazing gains from the ketogenic diet, a low-carb diet. Foods with a very high glycemic index are the most commonly available foods in the Western world. These foods are largely responsible for health problems in the Western world. One has to go out of his/her way to avoid foods with a high glycemic index whereas it should be the default.
It lacked a control for comparison, and while the baseline diet was designed to keep participants at about the same levels of energy burn they experienced outside of the study, the participants started to lose weight on that diet too. So they were already slimming down by the time they started their low-carb month.
And while the study was designed to overcome some of the limitations of real-world diet studies, a highly controlled setting that amounts to confining people to a hospital and lab isn’t exactly representative of how people actually live and eat.
"These points, along with the small sample size and short-term follow-up, prevent the ability to draw conclusions about the effects of a very low-carbohydrate versus usual carbohydrate diet," said Deirdre Tobias, an associate epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Men's Hospital.
What’s more, one of the promises of the low-carb, high-fat diet is that when people start eating this way, they naturally cut back on calories because they’re more satiated (from the protein and fat in their diet). This study didn’t measure that either, since the participants were forced to stick to strictly measured menus.
Note the bit of GGP I quoted was around the the insulin hypothesis. That supposed connection between insulin from high GI foods causing weight gain (or reducing weight loss), that is what the studies referenced in the article disprove.
"According to the insulin-carbohydrate model, we should have seen an acceleration in the rate of body fat loss when we cut insulin by 50 percent," Hall said. But they didn’t, which he thinks suggests that the regulation of fat tissue storage in the body has to do with more than just insulin levels and their relationship with the carbs we eat.
The new results also echo a previous study of the insulin-carbohydrate model, where Hall found that people who cut fat in their diets have equal or greater body fat loss than those who cut carbs. (Here’s Hall’s new review of the literature on the carb-insulin model of obesity.)
"These studies represent the first rigorous scientific tests of the carb-insulin model in humans," Hall added. "The public needs to understand that this [insulin-carbohydrate] model now has pretty strong evidence against it."
(Sorry, I edited my post to clarify. I'm specifically referring to the 'insulin hypothesis', so the rest of the article's ramblings aren't all that relevant).
(And the so-called 'limitations of the study' according to the article, are that it was a controlled, scientific study apparently, yay journalism).
A lot of Westerners are rediscovering amazing gains from the ketogenic diet, a low-carb diet. Foods with a very high glycemic index are the most commonly available foods in the Western world. These foods are largely responsible for health problems in the Western world. One has to go out of his/her way to avoid foods with a high glycemic index whereas it should be the default.