Fat Fast Cookbook: 50 Easy Recipes to Jump Start Your Low Carb Weight Loss (2 page)
Read Fat Fast Cookbook: 50 Easy Recipes to Jump Start Your Low Carb Weight Loss Online
Authors: Dana Carpender,Amy Dungan,Rebecca Latham
by Dana Carpender
For decades we have been told that fat makes us fat. After all, the logic goes, since fats have nine calories per gram, while proteins and carbs have four calories per gram, if we slash the fat from our diets, we’ll be able to eat the same or an even greater volume of food and lose weight. After all, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. Right?
Wrong. Prepare to have your mind blown.
A Fat Fast is a diet in which a) caloric intake (joules, if you’re in that part of the world) is strictly limited, and b) the vast majority of those calories—ideally 90%—come from fat. In
Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution
, Dr. Robert C. Atkins recommended using a Fat Fast of 1,000 calories per day, 90% of them from fat, to break through metabolic resistance to weight loss.
A really brilliant crazy idea, and one backed up by research.
For over 3ingo0 years, we have been told that all that matters is calories-in versus calories-out; if we wish to lose weight, limiting calories is all that matters, not where those calories come from. That’s why we have
100 calorie packs
and ads for everything from yogurt to breakfast cereal to soup that tout, not how nutritious they are, but how few calories they contain. But is the calorie theory correct?
There’s little doubt that most people will lose weight if they restrict calories sufficiently, regardless of the source of those calories. If you ate just 200 calories per day of Moon Pies, you would very likely lose weight. Also your energy, your health, your muscle mass, and possibly your hair. But hey, you’d lose weight.
But will you lose an equal amount of weight with the same degree of caloric restriction, regardless of the source? Will the same percentage of pounds lost come from your stored fat mass, rather than your lean body mass? Or does the kind of calories you eat make a difference in how much fat you burn?
I assume that you’ve guessed by now that it does, or I wouldn’t be writing this. How big a difference? A really, really big difference. Dig this:
In 1956, a groundbreaking study appeared in the highly respected medical journal
The Lancet
. Two British researchers, Prof. Alan Kekwick and Dr. Gaston L. S. Pawan, decided to look at this question of whether the type of calories consumed affected fat burning. A few years earlier, Dr. Alfred Pennington published an article in the
Journal of Clinical Nutrition
regarding
his experience treating obesity with a calorically unrestricted ketogenic diet. Pennington asserted that his patients did not experience the drop in basal metabolic rate that usually accompanies caloric restriction, because
ketosis
allowed them to access their stored body fat, giving them all the energy—the calories—they needed to maintain the higher metabolic rate. (Ketosis is a physiological state where, because you’re not feeding it glucose—carbs—your body is running on fatty acids (fat burning, yay!), and a by-product of fat burning called
ketone bodies
, or ketones for short. Most of your body’s tissues can run on fatty acids, but some, especially the brain, cannot, but can burn ketones just fine.) Kekwick and Pawan wanted to expand on this information.
Here’s what they did: They put obese subjects on low-calorie,
balanced
diets, at levels of 2,000, 1,500, 1,000, or 500 calories per day. Each patient stayed on each version of the diet for seven to nine days. You will be unsurprised to know that the fewer calories they ate, the more weight they lost.
Next, Kekwick and Pawan put obese subjects on one of four different diets. The diets all had the same calorie count—1,000 calories per day—but the
composition of those calories
varied: 1,000 calories of a mixed or
balanced
diet, 1,000 calories with 90% from carbohydrate, 1,000 calories with 90% from protein, or 1,000 calories with 90% from fat. If it were true that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, then patients should have lost roughly the same amount of weight on all four diets. Did they?
No.
Indeed,
on the high-carbohydrate diet the patients actually
gained
a little weight, overallme, overa212;on just 1,000 calories per day. They lost some weight on 1,000 calories per day of a balanced diet, and even more on 1,000 calories per day with 90% from protein. But overwhelmingly, patients lost the most weight on 1,000 calories per day when 90% of those calories came from fat. Kekwick and Pawan concluded,
So different were the rates of weight-loss on these isocaloric diets that the composition of the diet appeared to outweigh in importance the intake of calories.
Finally, Kekwick and Pawan determined that a group of patients could maintain their weight on 2,000 calories per day of a mixed or
balanced
diet. Then they put them on a diet of protein and fat, but very little carbohydrate. They found that their patients could consistently lose weight on 2,600 calories per day so long as carbohydrate was sharply restricted. This was one of the early pieces of research establishing a standard low-carb, Atkins-style diet for long term weight loss and maintenance.
In the 1960s, Dr. Frederick Benoit, working at Oakland Naval Hospital, put seven obese men on a total fast for ten days. They lost an average of 21 pounds each, which sounds great—but it turned out that 14 of those pounds were lean body mass. The subjects were losing far more muscle than fat. Bad ju-ju. Benoit then put the same men on 1,000 calories per day, with 90% of those calories from fat. If a calorie really is a calorie, they should have lost less weight, and certainly less fat, than they did eating nothing at all.
But they didn’t. They lost less weight, yes—an average of 14 pounds in ten days. But only 0.5 pounds of that weight, on average, came from lean body mass. Benoit’s subjects had lost
nearly twice as much fat
eating 1,000 calories per day as they had eating nothing at all—and they’d protected their muscle mass in the process.
I trust the potential is clear.
As I write this, I have been eating a low-carbohydrate diet for 17 years—more than 30% of my life. It has been hugely beneficial to me, and helped me go from a size 20 to a size 12. However, like so many low-carbers, I reached a plateau—my weight was staying off, but I was still a little bigger than I wanted to be.
I had read about Fat Fasting in
Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution
,
and had also seen the work of Kekwick and Pawan, Benoit, and Pennington. It had been in the back of my mind that I needed to try it sometime, I just hadn’t gotten around to it.
Suddenly I needed to drop ten pounds, fast, before shooting a television pilot. I tried the Fat Fast, lost a pound a day, felt fine doing it—even had
a great weight-lifting workout
—and improved my blood sugar readings in the bargain. I was sold.
It’s funny how ideas seem to reach a critical mass, and suddenly take hold. In the past year, several friends of mine, long-time low-carbers, have tried eating a higher percentage of fat, with excellent results. It seems that the time has come.
In a word: No.
First of all, if you’ve been eating the Standard American Diet, you won’t actually be getting much more fat than you are already eating. The average American gets 45% of his or her calories from fat. If you’re eating around 2,000 calories per day—a not-unlikely number—then cutting back to 1,000 calories per day, 90% from fat, will result in your eating exactly as much fat as you’ve been eating all along. You’re not increasing fat. You’re just cutting out the other stuff.
If you’ve been eating an Atkins-style low-carb diet all along, you may well eat
less
total fat on a Fat Fast, for the simple reason that you’ll be eating less, period.
Some of you are thinking,
Shouldn’t I eat healthful fats?
Yes, you should—but you may be thinking of the wrong fats. Animal fats are just fine on a Fat Fast—and in general—and so are butter, cream, and cream cheese. It’s polyunsaturated vegetable oils, like soy oil and safflower oil, that you must avoid, along with hydrogenated vegetable oils, aka
trans fats.
Secondly, the whole
saturated-fat-causes-heart-disease
hypothesis has been largely discredited. According to the World Health Organization in 2010,
Intake of SFA [saturated fatty acids] was not significantly associated with CHD (coronary heart disease) mortality... SFA intake was not significantly associated with CHD events (e.g., heart attacks).
In the same year,
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
published a meta-analysis of 21 studies that looked at the effects of saturated fat consumption on coronary artery disease. The conclusion?
A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD (coronary vascular disease).
If you are a diabetic and taking any form of blood-sugar-lowering medication, especially insulin, DO NOT UNDERTAKE a Fat Fast WITHOUT MEDICAL SUPERVISION. Why? Because your blood sugar will drop so fast, your medication will need drastic adjustment within 24 hours or less. Your dosages
of insulin and other hypoglycemic medications are predicated on your usual intake of carbohydrate. If you suddenly stop eating carbs, those
dosages will be way, way too high.
Dr. Eric Westman
, one of the country’s premier researchers into low-carbohydrate nutrition, has worked extensively with diabetics. He cuts their insulin and other hypoglycemic medications in half on Day One of eating 20 grams per day or fewer of carbohydrate. They are told to monitor their blood sugar very closely, and medication is adjusted accordingly. Just about everyone has to reduce medication over time, and most need no medication at all if obesity was the cause of the diabetes.
However, YOU DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS UNSUPERVISED. Insulin shock can be fatal. Do not screw around.
We (the publisher, the authors, and CarbSmart, Inc.) recommend you find a doctor who is hip to cay Ois hip rbohydrate restriction for diabetes control, and get on a standard low-carb diet—Atkins,
Protein Power
, or the like—with that doctor’s help. Read
Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution
and the
Atkins Diabetes Revolution
to get a handle on the situation. Once your body has adjusted to carbohydrate restriction and your doctor has adjusted your medication accordingly,
then
you can consider trying a Fat Fast if you’re not losing weight, or if you hit a plateau—but we still recommend you have a doctor’s supervision.
