The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Protein Restriction In?
In the 1930s, Walter Kempner treated over 18,000 patients with obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and renal failure by changing their diet. At the time, treatments for malignant hypertension were few, and those with the disease had a life expectancy of months. With Kempner's magic diet, many patients saw their conditions improved or reversed.
What was the magic diet?
And nothing else. The diet macros come out to about 4% to 5% protein (<20 g per day), 2% to 3% fat, and the rest was carbohydrates.
The diet was hard to follow. The alternative was death, and it was the 1930s, so Kempner famously whipped his patients to keep them on the diet (double blind study pending to see if whipping patients also improves renal function.)
But it worked. It fell out of fashion once people had literally any other option than eating rice and being whipped, but it kept many people alive who otherwise would have been dead. Kempner's studies also contributed to the body of work that Ancel Keys drew from when he declared Saturated Fat the enemy.
Cut to the Year of our Lord 2023.
Brad Marshal (pig farmer, French-trained chef, occasional Molecular Biologist,) has kicked off a craze in alternative nutrition. He has lost 14 lbs in 28 days by lowering his Branch Chain Amino Acids (BCAAs) to 8g or less a day. BCAAs are a group of protein that are especially high in muscle meat and low in gelatin.
Big deal, he cuts out a food group, eats less, loses weight, right?
He is eating "2800-3000 calories per day on average, some days more." Given his age, weight, and height, his Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) should be around 2,360. Yet, he claims to be eating more, and therefore his TDEE must be much higher if he is losing weight. If it's all water weight, then how is he depleting glycogen while eating 500g of carbs a day?
Another prominent case study and blogger is ExFatLoss, who has been tracking his weight and food intake for years. He has been running a series of diet experiments and has noticed that the more protein he restricts, the more weight he loses. He has also dived into the literature and discovered that protein restriction seems to improve metabolism in mice and human studies. The specific culprit is Isoleucine, which researchers are able to completely restrict in mice diets (less able to do so with humans without really intrusive studies.) When isoleucine goes down, fat stores go down and calories go up. Some mice are able to eat 80% more than controls and still lose weight.
This is Wellness Wednesday, not culture war, so I think I'll end the comment here.
I started giving this high-carb, low-fat, low-protein diet a go. I started losing weight almost immediately, but found myself feeling anxious/depressed after a couple of weeks (I think from lack of fat). At the moment I'm trying to up my fat intake but keep BCAAs (specifically isoleucine and valine) low to see if I can keep losing the weight.
agree. I find this 'fats are good' mantra to be overrated. i was able to lose a lot of weight and keep most of it off by limiting fats to close to zero as possible.
Well upping my fat didn't actually help in the end. I think the issue was a lack of tryptophan caused by the low protein diet.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link