Shootist said:
One CANNOT eat 'lots' of vegetables, on a low carb diet, and hope to lose weight. One cannot consume more than 60 carbs a day and hope to lose weight. In fact ~60 carbs a day is break even. One has to eat < 60 carbs a day. The diet starts off with 2 cups of lettuce and 1/4 cup of green beans (or asparagus, or brussels sprout) as the daily vegetable intake. After 2 weeks you are given the option to add more carbs to your daily intake, but it is an option.
What unit is a "carb" in your definition? 60 carbs? That's a meaningless number.
Perhaps our definition of "lots" of vegetables differs. 2 cups of lettuce and 1/4 cup of green beans sounds like a lot to me.
You do not have a lower caloric intake. In fact the whole point of the diet is to eat until you are full. My personal experience is eating as much as 4000 calories a day with daily carb intake below 10-20 grams.
4000 calories a day?! What weight did you start out with? And what was your caloric consumption prior to starting that diet? Or do you exercise constantly? 4000 calories is an extreme quantity of food, more than double what most people required in a day, consistent with those who become morbidly obese. It doesn't matter WHAT your source of caloric intake is when you're reaching that high of levels...UNLESS you're also doing extreme workouts. Perhaps someone training as an Olympic athlete would need to consume that number of calories or more while doing intensive workouts all day every day.
But, my point is that while you eat until you are full, you reach satiety (that feeling of fullness) on fewer calories when you're eating more fat and protein. Those are the foods that send the satiety signals.
But, you MUST have SOME carbs in your diet. This is why the original "no carb" diets have been modified to now be "low carb" because they weren't safe when they cut out all carbs. That was the gist of my post, that low carb and no carb are not the same thing.
Either way, my other point is the most important...any major change in diet should be supervised by a physician. Part of the reason dietary advice from any generic source is useless is that none of us knows what weight people are starting at, what percentage body fat they are, what their current habits are, what's realistic, what their energy usage is in a day (do they sit at a desk or do they do construction work or are training for a marathon), whether they have any dietary restrictions already due to allergies or intolerances, if they have any known metabolic disorder, are they diabetic, do they have any other pre-existing condition, etc. Or, they may not even know they have some condition that might contraindicate a particular diet or going beyond a certain caloric restriction, but might discover it when a diet exacerbates the problem.
This is the difficulty. For an average person who is generally healthy and just a little overweight, these diets are safe, but probably not necessary. On the other hand, someone who is obese or morbidly obese and in need of a diet to get healthy again is already, by definition, not healthy. As much as they need to lose weight, they also need to lose that weight while being supervised so they don't put their health at greater risk. These are people who may be developing diabetes, or heart disease already. A diet that might be healthy for one may not be healthy for another.
