CS your thoughts on LCHF ketogenic diet?

I was diagnosed with being insulin resistant and pre-diabetic several months ago. My friend told me about the LCHF (low carb, high fat) diet and how it resets your metabolic state and reverses insulin resistance by stabilizing your blood glucose levels and triggering ketosis, a state where your body uses it's fat for energy instead of blood sugar.

i have read numerous articles about how eating a diet composed of high fats, moderate protein and low carbs is amazing for your health and fat loss. Here are some detailed articles that explain the science behind it.

http://www.dietdoctor.com/lchf
http://www.buttermakesyourpantsfalloff.com/why-hungry/

CS- what are your thoughts about ketosis? I did a search on insulin resistance and there have been numerous discussions on here about the link between that and androgenic alopecia. I've also read that low carb can trigger further hair loss. Do you think this diet will help or harm my existing hair?

jaredbecker - For the majority of people really dropping the carbohydrate will do those things (reset), however, some 5 to 15% of people metabolize carbohydrates better.

On this page, has a link to self assess how you might fall in this category.

http://www.immortalhair.org/dietaryfactors.htm

Personally I think there are better and healthier ways to get into ketogenesis. But many would rather do a one-size-fits-all diet instead of a tackling a major lifestyle chance. Anyhow complex carbs aren't the enemy when they come from fresh vegetables. Your body knows what to do with it, unlike the refined engineered crap that continues to be passed as foods at supermarkets.

I tried LCHF and would advise against it. It didn't work for me and when I went back to eating carbs I was worse than before. I would recommend intense exercise (interval training) first with slight diet modifications like cutting out vegetable oil and other junk food. For exercise I found a hill that takes about 45 seconds to sprint up. I would warm up for 5 minutes then sprint up the hill and walk down. I did this 5-10 times. If you can't find a hill you can crank up an elliptical or exercise bike, run on sand, wear a weight vest or maybe use a parachute. You have to get to the point where you are really huffing and puffing, not just doing light cardio or weights.

what is the number one sign of good health ?

a good body temperature.

a ketogenic diet lowers it, carbs increase body temperature.

basically, living on meat, almonds and avocados is terrible.

u kill carbs u will increase your cortisol.. what will lower your cortisol then? question of the century to the low carbers. and you know what cortisol increase will do? it will decrease your testosterone.

you need carbs

get the honest jackson's potato chips

white rice eaten with coconut oil/butter

mashed potatoes

fruit juices

lots of people lose hair on paleo dieting, it's not worth it

The problem is that as someone who has tried every diet and has struggled with weight loss my entire life, low carb is simply THE only diet that works long-term (for me at least). Every other diet involves some amount of will power and more important every other diet involves portion control and will power. With low carb there is no will power involved because you pretty much eat whatever and whenever you want....just no carbs.

So for me it's a choice between hurting my hair and hurting my waistline. What a terrible choice to make

For the time being I am going to assume low carb isn't THAT bad for my hair because honestly my pants are getting tight for the first time in about 2 years and I NEED to lose the weight!

iuyyighghghgkh wrote:you need carbs

get the honest jackson's potato chips

white rice eaten with coconut oil/butter

mashed potatoes

fruit juices

lots of people lose hair on paleo dieting, it's not worth it

Those chips look great.  I've been looking for coconut or palm oil chips.  It would be nice if all deep fried food used coconut oil, palm oil or lard.  The Heart Attack Grill in Vegas uses lard and ironically that is better for you than vegetable oil.  Fast food restaurants used to use palm oil but switched to vegetable oils because of the myth that saturated fat causes heart disease.  Thanks CDC and AHA.

I think the problem with the carbohydrate debate is its always all-or-nothing. You're either Peat-ing or you're Paleo. So hundreds of grams of carbohydrate daily or less than 100 g.

The thing that is left out too often is timing. Carbohydrates should be cycled and the amount/timing relates intimately to your activity cycle.

I believe a good target is around 35% of total daily caloric intake. That means for (say a 2200 calorie diet), a little under 200 grams of carbs would be a good target (180-200 g). If someone is very active or training at peak intensities for performance, probably upwards of 45-50% daily contribution would be better on a work day.

Ideally, you cycle your carbohydrate intake with periods of lower carbohydrate intake followed by a higher carbohydrate intake. This can look different for different people, and you find what works for you. There isn't just one road to the sweet spot. Some people do this with an intermittent fasting regime, where you give yourself a feeding window of a few hours each day to get all of your food in. Other people do a more typical type of carb cycling with 2-3 days of low carb followed by the carb up day. I've trained with people who would do a single carb-up day per week. For six days they would eat at around 50% of their normal carbohydrate macro (so for the previous example of the 2200 calorie diet, you'd eat slightly less than 100 g of carb per day) and then on their carb up day it was no-holds-barred. There's physiological reasons why this can be effective. Other people I know do a strict work-rest day split, i.e. they work out every other day and only on work days do they get substantial carbohydrate.

So you can see, the way you cycle the carb is dependent on you and the way you train (schedule your activity). And on your goals. But the point is I don't think anyone should be trying high carb or low carb on a consistent basis. The body thrives on change and forced adaptation.

Ancestral man was likely to have experienced frequent transient changes in food (energy) availability and I think our energy systems reflect that. So try to approximate what a day of feasting looks like followed by a few days of famine time. Approximate the stress. Approximate the days going without. Approximate the hunt. And then the feast. Cycle carbohydrate. Make the body wonder whats going on with your energy intake at all times. Don't stretch out the "famine" so long that you're using survival systems (keto), but don't carb feed so frequently that you aren't getting any stress either.

Me personally? I say look at animals. You don't see a predatory animal make a kill and start calculating out its carbohydrate allotment for the day and what its going to leave for the buzzards. They feast. Ravenously. Try to imagine what led up to that. Probably several days of relative scarcity. And then dipping into energy reserves in order to exert themselves to make a kill. Then after that massive feast they sleep. Then they've got energy for a while. Pretty soon it starts to wane, and then its time to make another kill.

Depletion-Work-Reward-Depletion-Work-Reward. I usually go two days of low carbohydrate, most calories from fat/protein. Every third day I'll re-carb. The day of your carb re-feed, prior to eating, work your ass off training. Its the hunt.

Most of these theories I read on carbohydrate intake always assume a steady-state energy availability and acquisition, something that probably wasn't relevant to our state of being for a couple hundred thousand years. Its always bothered me how Peat has presumed that a diet of high, steady-state carb intake is ideal for people, when our organism evolved in an environment that provided NO SUCH THING for hundreds of thousands of years. From an evolutionary standpoint this makes no sense. Now, that's not to say that there isn't a better diet to be discovered out there. It could be that Peat's style of eating might be better. But I believe he makes a key mistake in his assumption that the stress of energy instability is a bad thing. It isn't. Just pumping glucose at the cells constantly to avoid any type of stress (while it makes sense on the surface) is not a long term solution for health, longevity, or optimum function.

If I could define being alive as anything, its a state of something which exists to respond to stresses. The environment provides the stimulus, that which is alive responds. People need to start seeing the stress state differently, imo. The process of receiving the external stimuli signal and mounting a response *is* a stress. Stress is how we interact with the environment. (please do not equate this to an ongoing chronic state of low-level psychological stress, which is different). You take away the stress, you start taking away that thing which defines your being alive. The stress is what makes you grow, adapt, thrive. Stress is what activates all of your systems for growth and repair. Sure, consistently loading with glucose might lower cortisol in the short term, but pretty soon you'll start creating other stresses. Better that you calculate the energy-shortage stresses you'll *choose* to incur than to create stresses of energy abundance. Your body responds well to one of those, but not the other. One problem is the semantics of it all. People hear stress thrown around in so many contexts its hard to tell that there are different meanings. Cellular and tissue-level energetic stress is not the same as psycho-social stress, although they can interact with one another. People hear about how Peat tells us we have to be terrified of stress, etc. etc., and they think its all the same. They hear on the news how "stress" is a killer. And they think its all the same. Its not.

The stress you are used to hearing about being a murderer is the modern stress of overcrowding, overworking, overstimulation, sardines-packed-in-the-can effect, 10 hrs. in a cubicle, 3000 commercials viewed a week, you aren't rich enough or cool enough, make more money kind of stress.

The Liberator wrote:The problem is that as someone who has tried every diet and has struggled with weight loss my entire life, low carb is simply THE only diet that works long-term (for me at least). Every other diet involves some amount of will power and more important every other diet involves portion control and will power. With low carb there is no will power involved because you pretty much eat whatever and whenever you want....just no carbs.

So for me it's a choice between hurting my hair and hurting my waistline. What a terrible choice to make

For the time being I am going to assume low carb isn't THAT bad for my hair because honestly my pants are getting tight for the first time in about 2 years and I NEED to lose the weight!

exercise man....

roddy did an all meat diet to save his hair

and said he wouldn't recommend it to people losing their hair

iuyyighghghgkh wrote:roddy did an all meat diet to save his hair

and said he wouldn't recommend it to people losing their hair

To save the hair that he may have never lost. Sounds like a faulty anecdote to me.

even if you know nothing about health and hair,

does living on meat, nuts and seeds and eggs sound good ?

no, sounds terrible

may have had minor loss on his left side, looking at pictures

4039 wrote:

iuyyighghghgkh wrote:roddy did an all meat diet to save his hair

and said he wouldn't recommend it to people losing their hair

To save the hair that he may have never lost. Sounds like a faulty anecdote to me.

fwiw, i started treating hair loss before it was ever visible to anyone for many years.

Roddy never had MPB.

If he's trying to push a particular diet, its a pretty simple matter to just say "Yeah, I tried a meat diet and it did bad things for me". Aka, I'm going to say I did all of the alternatives to what I'm trying to push and talk about how bad they were.

The fact is a diet of animal meats, fats, and eggs would be very pro health. Obviously, providing examples of taking things to extremes is just a ridiculous way to argue. Of course a diet consisting of *mainly* animal flesh would be supplemented with various fruits and vegetables. We're talking about relative contributions to the whole here. And a subjective judgment such as "Sounds terrible" has zero to say about the actual merits of the diet, just what you think of its palatability. Based on bioavailability, biocompatibility, and nutrient density, there's not much of an argument for any food being better for humans than other animals. Its just the way it is.

sanderson wrote:

The Liberator wrote:The problem is that as someone who has tried every diet and has struggled with weight loss my entire life, low carb is simply THE only diet that works long-term (for me at least). Every other diet involves some amount of will power and more important every other diet involves portion control and will power. With low carb there is no will power involved because you pretty much eat whatever and whenever you want....just no carbs.

So for me it's a choice between hurting my hair and hurting my waistline. What a terrible choice to make

For the time being I am going to assume low carb isn't THAT bad for my hair because honestly my pants are getting tight for the first time in about 2 years and I NEED to lose the weight!

exercise man....

For health, yes

For weight loss no

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/22/obesity-owes-more-to-bad-diet-than-lack-of-exercise-say-doctors

I would look at this short vid before taking on a high fat diet. It maybe doing more harm than good!

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/what-causes-diabetes/

Kazbar wrote:I would look at this short vid before taking on a high fat diet. It maybe doing more harm than good!

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/what-causes-diabetes/

Good fats in moderation are not the enemy, especially when getting one's self into keto. Unfettered oxidized fats are the enemy, especially when the process is not completely balanced.

The only people who speak so definitively about carbs/fats/protein being a negative are the misinformed and those with a sales agenda, imo.

I think it depends entirely on the individual in question. I've known some people who thrive on carbohydrate, and don't fare well on high-fat diets. Conversely, I know others who are the exact opposite. And yet both groups provide me examples of people who are healthy and functional. You could look at labs for people in both groups and probably find relatively healthy people eating diets on either side of the spectrum.

At the end of the day your own body provides you the best compass for what type of diet is optimum for you.

I know that a lot of the research on high fat diets was performed in irrelevant contexts, using impractical diets, with irrelevant food choices and relative contributions of other nutrients. The controls are often just poor and because of that, broad statements about the effects of high fat in a human diet are extrapolations.

If you want my opinion about where the malady of the modern diet lies, its in the combination of high carbohydrate with high fat content in the same meals, often occurring as "bad" forms of both, i.e. highly processed simple sugars (as added sweeteners) and hydrogenated vegetable oils.

Now take a diet that is a high carb diet featuring healthy food sources, calculated caloric intake, taking activity schedule and expenditures into mind. Or on the other side of the coin, a high fat diet in the same context. Well, you've got something else entirely. Essentially, its not enough to just look at people on a high fat diet or on a high carb diet. There is too much gray area in there, and too many ways to do it wrong. So a lot of the nutrition research on high fat diets has to really be broken down, and taken w/ a grain of salt.

it is suitable for no one

you don't get a medal on this forum for being a longwinded bore

If you don't like the post, don't read it.

Apparently you do get medals for hitting 50 bullshit supplement regimen posts. Keep pushing, man. You're getting there. And victory will be sweet.

you have the baldness pathology

jealous,bitter, angry, doing the same thing over and over and never doing anything new or different

internal change will create external change,

iuyyighghghgkh wrote:you have the baldness pathology

jealous,bitter, angry, doing the same thing over and over and never doing anything new or different

internal change will create external change,

Jealous? Nope. Bitter? Nope.

Angry? Yeah.

Your posts make me angry, because they're rife with absolute nonsense, lies, and bullshit cliches like that last one.

The baldness pathology? Haha. You're a funny guy.