Living Low Carb (4 page)

3.  
The Biggest Loser
—Maggie Greenwood-Robinson, PhD, et al.

4.  
The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet
—Rachael Heller, MA, M.Ph, PhD, and Richard Heller, MS, PhD

5.  
The 7-Day Low-Carb Rescue and Recovery Plan
—Rachael Heller, MA, M.Ph, PhD, and Richard Heller, MS, PhD

6.  
Curves
—Gary Heavin and Carol Colman

7.  
Dr. Tea Diet
—Mark Ukra, AKA “Dr. Tea”

8.  
The Diabetes Diet
—Richard K. Bernstein, MD

9.  
Dr. Gott’s No Flour, No Sugar Diet
—Peter H. Gott, MD

10.  
Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less
—Walter Willett, MD and Mollie Katzen

11.  
The Fat Flush Plan
—Ann Louise Gittleman, MS, CNS

12.  
The Fat Resistance Diet
—Leo Galland, MD

13.  
GO-Diet: The Goldberg–O’Mara Diet Plan
—Jack Goldberg, PhD and Karen O’Mara, DO

14.  
The Hamptons Diet
—Fred Pescatore, MD

15.  
The Low GI Diet Revolution
—Jennie Brand-Miller, MD, et al.

16.  
The Lindora Program: Lean for Life
—Cynthia Stamper Graff

17.  
The Maker’s Diet and Perfect Weight
—Jordan S. Rubin

18.  
Neanderthin
—Ray Audette

19.  
The Paleo Diet
—Loren Cordain, PhD

20.  
Protein Power
—Michael R. Eades, MD and Mary Dan Eades, MD

21.  
The Rosedale Diet
—Ron Rosedale, MD and Carol Colman

22.  
The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle
—Michael R. Eades, MD and Mary Dan Eades, MD

23.  
The Scarsdale Diet
—Herman Tarnower, MD

24.  
The Schwarzbein Principle
—Diana Schwarzbein, MD and Nancy Deville

25.  
Somersizing
—Suzanne Somers

26.  
The South Beach Diet
—Arthur Agatston, MD

27.  
South Beach Recharged
—Arthur Agatston, MD with Joseph Signorile, PhD

28.  
Sugar Busters!
—H. Leighton Steward, et al.

29.  
The TNT Diet
—Jeff Volek, PhD, RD, and Adam Campbell, MS

30.  
The UltraSimple Diet
—Mark Hyman, MD

31.  
Women’s Health Perfect Body Diet
—Cassandra Forsythe, MS

32.  
YOU: On a Diet
—Mehmet C. Oz, MD and Michael F. Roizen, MD

33.  
The Zone
—Barry Sears, PhD

Fitness Books—Short Takes

34.  
Making the Cut
by Jillian Michaels

35.  
The 5-Factor Diet
by Harley Pasternak

36.  
The 3-Hour Diet
by Jorge Cruise

37.  
Deadline Fitness
by Gina Lombardi

38.  
The Ultimate New York Diet
by David Kirsch

Chapter 8: “My Big Fat Diet”

What happens when an entire town goes on a diet that looks strangely like a version of Atkins? And stays on it for a year? And loses 1,200 pounds in the process? This chapter tells the fascinating story of a real-life experiment at Alert Bay, British Columbia.

Chapter 9: Supplements and Diet Drugs

In this chapter, we’ll review the major drug treatments for obesity and overweight (phentermine, Meridia, and Xenical), and the first FDAapproved “over-the-counter” drug (Alli), and consider the arguments for and against them, as well as review the supporting science. We’ll examine the vast number of vitamins and supplements that are marketed for weight loss, such as 5-HTP, chromium, and L-carnitine. Which ones actually work, and which are bogus? And if they do work, how do they work? What exactly do they do in the body? Here you’ll find the science behind the advertising and discover whether there are any specific vitamins and minerals recommended for people following a low-carb lifestyle. You’ll get the real scoop on controversial herbs like ephedra as well as information about the new “ephedra-free” fat-burning formulas. And you’ll find out the
number one supplement for weight loss
.

Chapter 10: Frequently Asked Questions

Got cravings? Constipated? Bored with chicken and vegetables? This chapter reviews some of the methods low-carb dieters use to combat common problems and make their program work for them. We’ll talk about the use of glutamine to fight sugar cravings, mineral supplements such as potassium to fight muscle cramps, how much is enough when it comes to water, and if any of the “fat-burning” supplements on the market actually work. For easy reference, FAQs are organized by topic, including ketosis, food and water, plateaus, exercise, and more.

Chapter 11: Tricks of the Trade: The Top 50+ Tips for Making Low-Carb Work for You

The tips are organized into several categories, including food and drink, motivation, and general topics. You’ll find more than fifty of the best insider tricks for making the low-carb lifestyle—and a weight-loss program in general—easier to stick with and more enjoyable, too.

Chapter 12: What We’ve Learned about Controlled-Carbohydrate Eating: Putting Together Your Program

Now that you know the nuts and bolts and have decided that low-carb living is for you, how do you put it all together? Many of the authors of the top low-carb diet books disagree vehemently on some issues—coffee, artificial sweeteners, the number of grams of allowable carbohydrate, the need for ketosis, and the timing of meals, just to mention a few—and agree on others. But there are many basic principles that can be extracted from the literature as a whole. These principles can be used to craft an individual lifestyle program that incorporates the basic tenets of low-carb eating for vibrant good health and ongoing weight loss and maintenance. This chapter tells you how to individualize and customize your own plan to create a personalized lowcarb lifestyle using the principles discussed in
Living Low Carb
, as well as how to put the low-carb lifestyle into practice in the real world.

Resources and Support for a Low-Carb Lifestyle

In this section, you will find a comprehensive listing of resources and information pertaining to low-carbohydrate living. You’ll find sources for research; the most interesting low-carb–oriented blogs and Web sites; ways to calculate your body mass index; food databases in which you can look up calories, carbs, fat, protein, and fiber; articles about cholesterol and cooking oils; information on exercise; an extensive reading list of recommended books (and cookbooks) of interest to the low-carber and to anyone interested in health; and even the name of the best food-delivery service I know of.

CHAPTER 1

The History and
Origins of
Low-Carb Diets

T
he first bona fide low-carb diet book came out in 1864, and it happened only because William Banting thought he was going deaf.

Banting was a prosperous London undertaker of 66 who was so overweight that he couldn’t tie his own shoelaces. At 5 feet 5 in his stocking feet, he weighed in at 202 pounds and was so fat that he had to walk downstairs backward. On top of that, his eyesight was failing and he was having problems with his hearing. In August 1862, Banting took himself to an ear, nose, and throat surgeon named Dr. William Harvey, who examined him and promptly decided that Banting’s problem wasn’t deafness; it was obesity. His fat was pressing on his inner ear. Here’s what Banting was eating: “bread and milk for breakfast,
or
a pint of tea, with plenty of milk and sugar, and buttered toast; meat, beer, and much bread and pastry for dinner; more bread and milk at tea time; and a fruit tart
or
bread and milk for dinner.”

Harvey promptly put Banting on a diet, and by December 1862 Banting had lost 18 pounds. By August 1863, he was down to 156 pounds. In a little less than a year, he had dropped almost 50 pounds and 12 inches from his waistline. Banting also reported feeling better than he had at any time in the previous 26 years. His sight and hearing were now normal for his age, and his other bodily ailments had become “mere matters of history.”

Here’s what he ate
now
.

Breakfast (9
A.M
.)
: 5 or 6 ounces of either beef, mutton, kidneys, broiled fish, bacon, or cold meat of any kind except pork or veal. A small biscuit or an ounce of dry toast. Large cup of tea or coffee without milk or sugar.

Dinner (2
P.M.
)
: 5 or 6 ounces of fish, poultry, game, or meat, and any vegetable except potatoes, parsnips, beets, turnips, or carrots. An ounce of dry toast. Fruit. Two or three glasses of good claret, sherry, or Madeira (no champagne, port, or beer).

Tea (6
P.M.
)
: 2 or 3 ounces of fruit. Toast and tea with no milk or sugar.

Supper (9
P.M.
)
: 3 or 4 ounces of meat or fish as for dinner. A glass or two of claret or sherry.

Nightcap
(if required): a tumbler of gin, whiskey, or brandy with water but no sugar, or a glass or two of claret or sherry.

The man did like to drink.

Here’s what he did
not
eat: milk, sugar, beer, potatoes, or pastry. And what he ate
way
less of: bread (3 ounces total, about a slice).

The calorie as a measurement was unknown at that time, but we know now that Banting was eating about 2,800 calories a day—not exactly a lowcalorie diet. Banting may not have known much about the science and chemistry of food and weight, but he knew enough to observe that the
amount
of food he was eating didn’t seem to be the determining factor in his weight loss. In Banting’s words, “I can now confidently say that
quantity
of diet may be safely left to the natural appetite; and that it is the
quality
only which is essential to abate and cure corpulence.”

In other words: it’s
what
you eat, not how much, an idea that even then flew in the face of conventional wisdom. (It’s worth noting that Banting was not completely right—as it turns out, it’s
both
what you eat
and
how much.But he opened the door to the discussion that
quality
mattered as much as quantity, and that was a significant change from conventional thinking. Still is.)

Banting became a man on a mission. Excited and inspired by his results on this high-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet—which was made up almost entirely of protein, fat, alcohol, and what was then called “roughage”—he published, at his own expense, the first commercial low-carb diet book,
Letter on Corpulence
.
¹

Banting identified sugar as the main cause of his own obesity, and his physician, Dr. Harvey, promptly put both flour and sugar on the forbidden list.

It worked.

The book eventually went into 4 editions, with the first 3 selling 63,000 copies in England alone, and it was translated into French and German and sold heavily in those countries, as well as in the United States. The fourth edition included letters of testimony from at least 1,800 readers who had written to Banting to support his assertions and praise the diet.

Once I did some reading, I
realized that low-carb diets
aren’t brand-new—they’ve
been advocated by some
forward-thinking scientists for
more than a century.

—Gary S.

Banting, by the way, kept the weight off and lived comfortably until the age of 81.

With Banting’s book, the nascent debate—is it
what
you eat or
how much
you eat that makes you fat?—was born, and it continues, alive and kicking, to this day. But the controversy didn’t gather its full head of steam until Wilbur Atwater figured out how to measure calories.

It’s the Calories, Stupid! The Dominating Hypothesis in Weight Loss Is Born

Sometime between 1890 and 1900, an agricultural chemist named Wilbur O. Atwater got the bright idea that if you stuck some food in a mini-oven called a calorimeter and burned the food to ash, you could
measure
the amount of heat it produced. He called the unit of measurement a calorie (technically, the amount of heat it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water from 14.5 to 15.5 degrees centigrade). He went to town. He constructed vast tables of the caloric content of various foods. (It’s important to remember that calories are not actually found in food; they’re a measure of how much heat or energy can be
produced by
food.) The idea that the human body behaves exactly like the chamber used in Atwater’s experiments—that we all “burn” calories exactly the same way and our bodies behave like calorimeters—has been the dominating hypothesis in weight loss to this day.