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Hackers On Atkins
`Sean writes "Salon.com has published a story about Hackers on Atkins. Although going on a diet is the last thing on the minds of the stereotypical geek basking in the ambient radiation of multiple monitors for 15 hours per day, many hackers have been embracing Atkins because utilizing low-carb methods to modify the metabolism is analogous to hacking and overclocking the body. Others have been combining Atkins with other systems, such as John Walker's The Hacker's Diet. I've personally lost a hundred pounds so far and will toss in the obligatory if I can do it, anyone can ism."
The future of the stereotypical fat, bearded unix admin is in serious jeopardy.
Life in Orange County
From what I've heard, Atkins is extremely harsh on your kidneys, with some seriously bad side-effects when you use it for prolonged periods. Surely getting thin is not worth dying or having permanent renal damage for...
Daniel
Carpe Diem
The Atkins diet is really very convenient for hackers. All you have to do is order your standard pepperoni pizza, and then throw away everything below the pepperoni.
5 weeks. 15 pounds (so far).
I eat low carb cereal for breakfast, have meat, veggie and sugar free jello for lunch, more meat and a salad for supper. I have beef jerky, sugar free candy and sugar free jello for snacks.
I ate a lot of fat the first week. When I got used to it, I cut the fat. I walk around the block twice after supper.
Easiest diet I ever tried. I am aiming to lose 45-50lbs total.
If your arguement is don't use atkins diet because atkins died, it is a little disingenuous since Atkins died because he fell on some ice, hit his head, and had a brain aneurysm.
Veramocor
Also, its good to eat a regular portion. If you stuffed yourself, you probably ate too much. Most restaurants will give you a dump-truck full so long as you hit their price point or $5~7 per person.
IANAD, but that's just my thoughts.
the Atkins diet makes the body digest itself because of carbohydrate depravation.
If by "digesting itself" you mean "digesting its fat stores", then yes, you're correct. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that's what fat is for.
There's a reason our bodies have a such mode as lipolysis; it was meant to be used once in a while.
John Cash, who used to be with iD Software, once published this diet plan in his .plan back while they were developing Quake II.
Plan:
Busy, busy, busy workin' on Quake2. I wish I could tell you about it, but I can't.
For now, I'll introduce "the Cash diet" to the world. I'd never really formalized my secret diet before, but the guys and girls (w00p) in my clan dragged it out of me one night. So here it is. [drumroll]
The Cash Diet Plan
==================
What to eat:
Red meat
Lots of it. Cooked rare or medium rare.
Burgers, steaks, meatballs.. whatever.
No steak sauce, but gravy or juice is good.
Fried stuff:
Mainly potato chips and french fries.
Not those lame baked ones; real ones with
salt and oil and fat (and flavor) and maybe
bbq, vinegar, or something hot/spicy.
Dessert
Good stuff, not that low fat/low calorie crap.
Whipped cream is a definite plus. Important
note: you are not restricted to only one.
Feel free to start out with a dessert as a
pre-appetizer appetizer.
Appetizers
Loaded nachos, Buffalo wings, Onion rings.
What to drink:
Non-diet soft drinks (preferably with high
levels of caffeine)
Real beer
Snacks:
Yes, of course. Anytime you want. I find
a snack to be good right before or right
after exercising. Contrary to what you might
be thinking, fruit is actually OK as a snack...
as long as you "wash it down" with a candy bar.
Exercise:
Hey, what kind of diet doesn't include exercise?
This is the key to my diet. There is only one
exercise that is aerobic, burns lots of calories,
and you'll actually enjoy doing. As an added
bonus it can be singles, couples, or even teams.
I'm talking, of course, about good old fashioned
sex. The more the better (but take it easy when
working out alone!) BTW, here's where that
whipped cream on the desserts can come in handy.
There you have it. I think it'll catch on.. I mean,
what is there not to like?
So, I hear you thinking: sounds great, but does it really work? Well, it does for me. I'm 5'10" and
weigh 125 pounds. I eat what I want, when I want, and "work out" as often as possible (w00p!!!)
Warning: There is one possible side effect of this diet... ummm... I have two of 'em... both boys So practice safe dieting.
Obviously you have no idea what you are talking about, or at least have been misinformed.
1) Atkins is not a starvation diet in any sense of the word. Sure, there are things that you should not or can not eat when on it, but it is far less restrictive than many or most other options. Most importantly, calories are not restricted. You not only are not expected to starve youself, but doing so would go against the principals of the diet plan.
2) Dr. Atkins died at the age of 72. He slipped and fell on an icy sidewalk, fell into a coma, and died a little over a week later. Neither his death nor his 2002 heart attack were in any way related to diet, as research will show.
3) It is not just 'fatasses' who find the diet effective. Many bodybuilders use Atkins or cyclic variation on the ketogenic diet in order to keep their bodies in peak shape. My father, who was athletic in his younger days but now is disabled and, due to his disablilities, physically unable to exercise has dropped close to 50 pounds on the Atkins diet, and is because of this is more able to lead a normal life.
Remember: Not all fud comes from Microsoft. The ADA has spread more than its share of misinformation. Most of the newer studies showing the Atkins plan as safe and effective were actually done to try to show that it was dangerous or ineffective. The researchers were forced to acknowledge that based on their experiments, this was not the case and it is indeed a safe and effective dietary plan.
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines yet?
Alternatively, you can implement a life plan where you exercise and eat right (Atkins diet != right).
The key is to collect recipes for quick meals that are comprised of as few processed foods as possible. A George Foreman grill is a must. I suggest subscribing to the few men's fitness magazines that are out there, as they have both recipes and exercises for people in a hurry. The magazines are tailored for busy people. Buy the $16.95 Body For Life book as it is full of exercise and food tips.
Dumb bells and a weight bench are cheap, alternatively, you could just go for 30 minute walks. Avoid driving, when possible. Shitcan your pansy-assed Segway. Invest in a good bicycle.
Fad diets, like the Atkins diet, are just stupid shortcuts that work, somewhat, but don't think it's a healthy lifestyle. The Atkins diet is for lazy people who don't exercise much. You'll certainly get thinner, but not any healthier. And once you go off the diet, you'll just balloon up again. Whereas with exercise and more muscle, your body will burn more calories (and fat).
It's not a diet where you just quit when you've lost weight. It's a change in your way of eating, and you can have still have a very proper diet on it. Once you've reached your goals, you can introduce some carbs back in (healthy ones, like fruits) to keep you at your ideal weight. You don't just quit and start eating pasta for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And, many people don't exercise because they're overweight, so losing weight often gets people interested in being more physically active.
Our "modern diet" is killing us, and since the government has been preaching "low fat" the past few decades, things have only gotten worse. People are eating more because carbs cause insulin surges which increase appetite.
Okay, this is from the perspective of one who has done Atkins, and been successful at it. Not "I heard from this guy" or "my sister's friend told me". Real experience.
I've struggled with my weight since I was in high school over 20 years ago. I've been up and down, weight wise, for a long time. Tried low fat, exercising like crazy, and just failed at it.
Finally, in February of this year, I went on Atkins for the third time (first was just a fad that I didn't do seriously, back in the 80s, second took me from about 250 lbs to 230 about three years ago,) determined to finish the plan and get to my goal weight. I also began exercising by walking on my treadmill and walking when golfing instead of using a cart.
To do Atkins properly, you spend a minimum of two weeks on "induction," which reduces your carbohydrate intake to 20 grams a day or less. This forces your body to stop using simple sugars and other carbs for fuel and start burning fat. You will most likely feel like crap for a couple of days during this phase, but it will pass.
Right about then, two wonderful things happen very quickly which are what makes the diet successful for so many people. First, you will begin to notice, within those two weeks, that your clothes are looser and, if you are weighing daily, a pretty dramatic loss of weight. This positive feedback is mostly water weight, but not entirely, and you feel like you're making progress.
Secondly, and more importantly, changing from consuming mostly carbs to mostly fats and proteins has the effect of making you feel full on much less food. In addition, your blood sugar levels stabelize and most people see "food cravings" (like eating a box of cookies!) going away. A low fat diet simply replaces fat with sugars to make the food more pallatable, and you end up with a bunch of empty calories and you're hungry a short time later.
You're told that you can eat as much as you want, so long as you keep the carbs low -- I'm not sure that I agree with that, you still need to keep an eye on calories, but the point is that after a couple of days, you could eat ten burger patties, but you'll be full after two and won't want to keep eating.
Once you've gone through induction, you can either stick with it (as I did) or start adding carbs back, a bit at a time, until you're eating a more balanced diet but still losing weight. You do have to stay away from sugars and simple carbs, though, because that will screw up your blood sugar levels.
Now, onto the myths. First, I have never seen (and I've looked) any reputable study that says that kidney damage has resulted from a healthy person (healthy in that they don't have existing kidney problems or AIDS or something) following this diet. Pointers to such a report (not something sponsored by the "American Bread Makers Association") would be appreciated, if they exist.
Secondly, people will tell you that it's unhealthy because you can't eat anything but meat. That's crap. There are loads of veggies that you can eat during induction, and you can add more, plus fruits, as you progress through the diet. I stayed on induction for seven months, and enjoyed salad every day, along with green beans, cauliflower, broccoli, etc.
Again, the proof is in the pudding (sugar free, if you please) -- in September of this year, I finished the diet, weighing 180 pounds, the first time in about 25 years that I've been the weight I'm supposed to be for my height. Now, I just check my weight periodically, and if it starts going up, I watch things for a couple of days.
Finally, the greatest help for this (or any) diet is a website I'd encourage you to use. It's free, and it tracks your caloric intake, exercise and weight. It's at Fitday
Good luck to anyone trying to lose weight. Regardless of how you go about it, it's the best thing that you can do for yourself.
Remember when "Low Fat" products were all the rage? The only problem with "low fat" is low fat usually doesn't mean low calories... Take Snackwell cookies for example, low fat doesn't mean shit if you're planning on eating the entire box in one sitting. Low carb is just another trend that is totally meaningless if you think it keeps you from counting calories.
The only reason diets like Atkins work at all is simple: just about everything has carbohydrates in it! There's so few things you can eat if you strictly adhere to the diet that you inevitably end up eating LESS CALORIES.
Howstuffworks has an excellent article on dieting and the gist of it is, you guessed it - limiting your calories consumed.
If you are willing to tolerate counting calories and figure out exactly what you need to maintain your desired weight, you can pretty much eat whatever you want. 100 calories of carbs = 100 calories of fat. If you're the type of person that needs a "banned foods"-type list to really feel like you're on a diet, Atkins probably is for you. If you're the type that can push away from the table - you probably don't need to do anything more than watch your calories.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Atkins or any low carb diet will only work if you are fat. Once you get down to a reasonable 12-15% bodyfay, then the low carb diet will stop being effective. So you get to go through all of the annoyance of converting the keytones for energy instead of carbs, all of the discomfort, and without any of the benefits - BONUS!
Once you get to 12-15%, you are better off going to a isocaloric diet (even percentages of fats, carbs, and protein - where most all of the fats come from the Omega3/6/9).
If you go lower total calories on that during the week and then going high carbs on the weekend (or just one day if you are highly sensitive), then you can see an anabolic rebound which is beneficial to those that are weight lifting.
It should also be noted that if you are trying to compete at all in any sort of endurance event - doing anyting low carb diet at all is about as retarded as you can get.
If you feel that you are going to do that, at the very least, try to get a lot of fruit and fruit juices so as to be able to replenish your liver glycogen levels.
But again - if you are you competetive at an endurance event, you are likely under 15% bodyfat - which means that you are wasting your time on the low carb diet.
No matter what diet you are on, as long as the calories are less than your expendatures for the day (so you can also not diet at all and just exercise more), then you will lose weight.
If you are fat - then you will see fast and great results down to about 20% bodyfat or so - then after that, you will start seeing resistance.
Depending on how long you sat at your high bodyfat levels, your leptin levels might be your worst enemy at this point - the carb loading on weekends and caloric depletions on the weekdays will help counteract that.
Once you go back to normal eating, then your leptin levels will again come back to haunt you.
So you can't just diet and then go back to eating like a pig - it is a lifestyle change.
Or you could just live life on the edge and use DNP - again, no good for endurance runners - and really no good for anyone. Especially if you are inclined towards depression at all since it prevents the conversion of tryptophan to serotonin.
Generally speaking, there is a reason the FDA banned it from diet drugs back in the day - it is dangerous - although the most effective chemical in existance for burning fat.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I started trying this a year and a half ago, and
wrote the following after the first few months.
All remarks are still valid:
Alimentary, My Dear Watson
While I was on vacation in early July, I happened to read the NYTimes
magazine article by Gary Taubes which opened my eyes to an extent.
The import of the article was that modern dietary conventional wisdom
has it pretty much backwards, and that eating a low-fat diet is actually
the cause of the current obesity epidemic and a lot of heart disease
and diabetes.
Getting back home and doing a flurry of research revealed that Taubes
had published a similar article in in Science about a year ago.
What he documents is that the notion that fat is bad for you is
a political, not a scientific, result, and that the actual studies
don't show it at all. Since the NIH and FDA got the bee in their
bonnet about fat, they've spent more than a billion dollars trying
to prove it, and failed.
Consider an "epidemiological" study of cars. Let's assume that the
researchers believe that engine oil is a prime cause of engine trouble.
You could quite easily take a sample that showed that there was a
strong positive correlation between cars that dripped oil and ones
that broke down. Then you could just as correctly show that you
could prevent oil dripping by not putting any oil in at all.
Bingo! The "proof" of your presumed conclusion. That's about how
rigorous the basis for the antifat doctrine is.
The reality is much more complex. In fact, the famous Boehringer
Mannheim metabolic pathways chart covers an entire wall in finely
detailed arrows and chemical formulae. But a very simplified version
goes something like this: There are three basic classes of food,
called the macronutrients; they are proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.
Proteins and fats are essential for human life; carbohydrates are not.
Carbohydrates are all converted to glucose in your bloodstream. The
more you eat, the more glucose. The body reacts to glucose in the
blood with insulin, which acts to cause cells to burn glucose for
energy and convert it to fat to be stored.
A whole raft of hormonal imbalances can result when insulin is
constantly overproduced. There seems to be some general mechanism
that tries to balance anabolic and catabolic hormones. Insulin
is anabolic. Too much of it for too long and the body will either
overproduce catabolic hormones or underproduce the other anabolic
ones.
The upshot of long-term carbohydrate consumption is a phenomenon known
as "Syndrome X", so named by Gerald Reaven, MD, professor of medicine
at Stanford. It's a cluster of symptoms that tend to occur together,
including high blood pressure, high serum triglycerides, decreased HDL,
and obesity, and marks a risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Well, go to any grocery store and look what you'll find in the
so-called "heart-healthy", low-fat foods: carbohydrates. Loads
of them. Remember, it doesn't matter whether it's sugar or starch,
honey or whole wheat, it's all glucose to your bloodstream.
So it would seem that the arrogance and ignorance of the high
priesthood of health in this country has contributed to, if not
indeed largely caused, the current (real, well-documented) epidemic
and of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Oh, yes, one other thing for those of you who are into life extension
and know about the caloric restriction results -- one of the main
physiological markers for caloric restriction is low insulin.
Well, who can believe that? I did a bunch of research, and discovered
that there are more different opinions among dietary advisors than
among economists. The only thing that *everybody* agreed on was that
olive oil was good for you, and trans-fatty acids (margarine) was bad.
One of the more interesting subfields I ran across was the paleolithic
diet. The id
Heh.. that's not far off.. but for those of you who want to do Atkins and get stuck in awkward pizza-ordering social situations, I have two words for you:
chicken wings
Not breaded, not honey-garlic, but regular chicken wings will not 'knock you off' ketosis, and you can still eat with your pals.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
The Atkins Diet not what Mother Nature intended, and she always has her way in the end.
Mother Nature did not intend for us to sit on our asses all day, eating cheeseburgers and french fries. Compared to the previous thousand years or so, our race has been very sedentary and has eaten too much sugar the past hundred years or so.
Atkins is not about low carbs so much as balanced carbs, i.e. what humans had been eating before soda/cola was invented and the industrial revolution made [most of] us fat and lazy.
We might say the same for the typical American diet, with it's high sugar, refined carbohydrate and other oddities. If we did nothing at all, over generations (many of them) an 'American' genotype would evolve that was able to deal with the current toxins in the American diet (even pesticides), and thrive on them.
It would take a very long time, perhaps 1,000 years, for our race to evolve to the point it could consume carbohydrates without consequence. By that time, many generations would have died from diabetes and heart disease. Why wait? I am alive now.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
That's a really broken analogy - one of the cornerstones of the Atkins diet is that you need to do regular exercise. You aren't going to save money by dropping your gym membership - if anything you're going to spend more money on athletic equipment and membership fees.
Beyond that, there's been a number of studies that say ALL diets cause loss of muscle mass if you don't exercise... a loss which can usually be stopped by regular exercise.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Theoritical conjecture? No FUD allowed here.
Give it the damn "caveman test."
"Atkins," the "ketogenic diet," and whatever else people call it is not something new. It's not something 1970's. Think millions of years, and you'll start to approach how long it has been around.
It is simply one half of the citric acid cycle, which is part of metabolism. One half is the ketogenic, the other, glucogenic.
With respect to food and hominid metabolism, there are basically 2 states:
1. FOOD (ie. times of plenty, as in: I'm eating this starchy tuber I just dug up RIGHT NOW.)
2. NO FOOD (ie. starvation, as in: Hey Gog, remember how that starchy tuber tasted that I dug up 2 days ago?)
I'm not talking about weeks of starvation, but a time frame of only about 18-36 hours. Once you have burned through your immediate glucose stores and your liver has emptied most of its glycogen stores, what happens then? Gluconeogenesis happens then. Ketogenesis happens then. Fatty acids that represent your stored energy sources are broken down into pyruvate, alpha-ketoglutarate, succinyl-CoA, fumarate, or oxaloacetate are then converted into glucose and glycogen and wisked through the appropriate cycle to give you what you need to keep chasing that small furry animal and catch it, even though your last meal was 2 days ago.
Clearly, I can't compress 4 semesters of basic and advanced biochemistry and a few years of primary research into a single slashdot post, but the basics of human metabolism are accessable to everyone from their local public and university libraries. Go buy a text book, even. Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry is an excellent place to start.
Let's approach it from another way: There is no fat loss without lipidolysis, unless you cut it out. Whether you eat NO carbohydrates and take the nose dive into the ketogenic part of your metabolism all the time, or you eat like a supermodel (small portions of carbohydrate-filled food) and experience brief periods of the ketogenic half of the citric acid cycle, it's all the same thing, only at different rates.
Worried about your kidneys and the ketobodies? Drink the amount of water a human is SUPPOSED to drink every day, and you'll be fine. Constipation is only an artifact of the change-over from starchy foods to protein and low-residue foods. After a few days things are back to normal, and you poop the way your digestive system was supposed to, in relation to what the human diet was thousands of years ago. (clue: No McDonalds and other high-carbohydrate foods)
If your varied dietary intake + caloric control + exercise works for you, then that is absolutely wonderful (no sarcasm). I applaud your efforts, and you should feel lucky that you are a fine example of an ancient metabolism that survives in an overly starchy world. For the segment of the population that isn't so lucky, the option of carbohydrate starvation (yet eating a normal intake of fatty and amino acids) is there.
Y,IAAB. (Yes, I am a biochemist.)
There's a reason our bodies have a such mode as lipolysis; it was meant to be used once in a while.
It's been a while since my highschool biochemistry class, but I'm pretty sure that's not the only process stimulated by carbohydrate starvation. It's true, lipolysis provides needed energy, but on the Atkins diet you have a carbohydrate deficit, specifically a glucose deficit, so your body undergoes gluconeogenesis. The brain, testes, erythrocytes and kidney medulla run exclusively on glucose, so the body has to do something when there's no glucose input.
Gluconeogenesis takes pyruvates and oxaloacetates and converts them into glucose. You get these through catabolism of amino acids, chiefly from muscle tissue. The muscle is broken down and transported to the liver for gluconeogenic processing. Alanine, cysteine, glycine, serine, & threonine can be deaminated directly or indirectly to form pryuvate and asparagine and aspartate can be made into oxaloacetates.
But what of the other amino acids? Aye, there's the rub - they're not glucogenic they're ketogenic. During a glucose deficit, muscle tissue is not selected by amino acid type, it's done indiscriminately. So you wind up with all these extra ketones floating around that the kidney needs to deal with. In some people, this is expecially rough, perhaps even to the point of scarring.
There's no getting around it - Atkins breaks down muscle as well as fat and is tough on the kidneys. Possibly balancing this is that some people on Atkins get motivated and start exercising, probably replacing that muscle mass though exercise, but there are others who don't exercise and are actually drawn to Atkins for that feature; these are the people at greatest risk. This risk, of course, needs to be weighed against the risks of their obesity, but it's not sound to call Atkins a risk-free diet.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Now here's someone to mod up!
I think this is exactly the right answer. No one "diet" fits all. It is universally agreed that increasing exercise (at least from the typical American computer programmer level -- totally inert) is good for you. Now, if you are obese, you need to change the way you eat.
When I was quite young, I balooned up to just shy of 300 pounds. I went on Weight Watchers and dropped wieght like a stone. I got down to 190 pounds. Over the next 15 years, I gained wieght steadily (inert programmer lifestyle) up to about 270 pounds. Less than my max, but I got back to where just standing up for an extended period would make me perspire.
That is just not right.
Back on Weight Watchers I went. But I didn't lose wieght. I stopped gaining, but I didn't lose. Any fluctuation I saw in the scale was not only within normal variance for water weight, but frankly within the accuracy of the scale.
Atkins worked for me. I'm down to 210 and losing weight slowly.
I feel good and I look good (well, better than my former walrus-self).
The point is that to lose wieght, you must go into ketosis. Diets vary on how often and for how long. The insight that I think Atkins has that the rest of the world hasn't quite caught on to is the effect of wildly oscillating blood sugar levels on the pacreas and on the habituation of cells to insulin. I think his insight that it is better to eat lower on the glycemic index than higher, and better yet to let the body find its glucose through the longer slower lypolitic reactions is his main acheivement.
I scold him, though, for not being a scientist. He made an industry out of it, and more power to him, there's no reason not to profit from a good idea, but he didn't do the science. His work amounts to a collection of anecdotes.
His book cites a vast amount of scattered research that tends to support his thesis, but he had an opportunity to use his patients as a source of research data, and he never bothered. Heck, he could have had med students do the hard work.
Fortunately, studies on this approach are underway. The data will be there. But it will be ten to fifteen years yet before the data are in on possible negative effects (cancer rates, kidney disease rates, etc.). There's data on how it is good for heart disease, diabetes, artery disease. But there are long-term questions about cancer, kidney disease, and stroke that are simply not known.
That annoys me.
However, the risk of premature death from heart disease is so much greater than all other health risks (apart from toboacco -- the number one killer), that it seems reasonable to trade a small increase in colon cancer risk for a huge risk of heart attack.
Still, I think the person who "discovers" something like this should feel obligated to do the science.
Of course, I'm no MD. I get the impression this is a common dividing line: Research doctor versus practicing doctor -- similar to the line between law professor and practicing lawyer. It seems academic medicine and practice medicine are often separated.
Still, it is sad that Dr. Atkins' data aren't useful for population studies.
This old logical fallacy? Haven't you ever read "Candide", man? Modern civilization is THE TESTAMENT to the triumphs of technology over "Mother Nature". Try this on for size, ebusinessmedia1:
"Human beings did not evolve to hunt using guns, or to farm using plows. We evolved as hunter-gatherers who browsed and hunted for food without implements."
Fact is, evolution is NOT, NOT an intentional, planned affair, as your second sentence implies (and upon which your entire argument depends). Evolution produces, in each generation, an organism that can thrive in a range of possibile scenarios. The state of a current generation DOES depend on the conditions under which its parent population evolved, but that doesn't mean that the population can't deal with different conditions. Conditional changes occur in nature all the time that put organisms into environments that differ from the conditions under which those organisms evolved... in fact, that's what CAUSES evolution. They don't always deal well with it, but they thrive often enough.
So you build a "best of all possible worlds" fallacy on top of a confusion of "sufficient" conditions with "necessary" conditions, enough to reverse the factual relationship between the cause and the effect.
Look at the theoretical picture, by analyzing the whole class of phenomena: the human immune system didn't evolve in the presence of antibiotic treatments. But we're not objectively worse for the wear. Same thing with cars or horses (as opposed to walking). Sure, there are costs of these kinds of advances (pollution) or hidden risk-shifts (a population with substantially lower native bacterial resistance, after a while). And those costs may or may not outweigh the benefits of the technology. But by and large, technological advancement helps rather than hurts. As evidence, I would point out that the human race has generally exploited technology to minimize environmental threats and increase productivity, both of which contribute to a greater short-term and long-term survivability of the species.
I like the book "Hammer of the Gods" (ripped off as "Armageddon") for the super-example: the dinosaurs all died because they couldn't do anything about a massive asteroid impact. While humans may or may not be able to actually detect and prevent/minimize an asteroid impact, we can at least discuss the possibility and make a reasonable attempt. Give us 50-100 more years of technological growth, and we will certainly be able to stop an asteroid. We are the most successful organism in the history of the planet, because we have the potential to become nearly un-extinctable, as a species. All because we say "FUCK YOU!" and flip the finger to Mother Nature, and we try to take an active control over our destiny.
Oh, and for the record, I'm with you on the Atkins topic, specifically: they're just now starting to see cancer risk accumulations associated with regular pot smoking, but only over a 30-40 year span. I'll wait on Atkins until a substantially larger population has guinea-pigged it and found out the REAL risks.
OK kids, all crap aside, lets go back to basics:
Any energy that goes into your mouth goes one of 3 places:
1) You burn it. Literally - and burning food generates heat. Each gram of fat contains 9 Calories, which is equivalent to jogging for one minute. That's 9000 calories (little c) which will heat your average 200lb sysadmin 0.2 degrees F. There are 27 grams in an ounce - that's a half hour run per ounce of fat. Think about how sweaty that would make you. This is an important thermodynamic consideration we'll get back to.
2) You store it. One gram of fat in becomes one gram of fat on your ass. One gram of carbohydrate or protein in becomes 1/2 gram of fat on your ass. There's no magic here; joules don't vanish.
3) You excrete it. This is what chiral analogs of various energy sources do, such as Olestra. If this was happening, you would know it; the term is anal leakage. Sugars you cannot digest, like the sugars in beans, create equally socially endearing outputs.
Now the article claims that Atkins overclocks the body. Crap. If it did you'd get hot. Run a motor fast, it gets hot. Run your body fast, it gets hot. Take amphetamines, you start to twitch and sweat. Thermodynamics. You can't beat it. Atkins can't beat it. Atkins does not make you hot. If you burned an extra pound of fat you'd heat your body to boiling. It does not accelerate your metabolism, it does not perform any insulin magic. The whole thing is the stunningly ignorant optimism of the hopefully overweight.
But people do lose weight on it - or so it seems (statistically this isn't really borne out by actual controlled studies, but hey, who needs science when we can make choices based on anecdotes). Why? Because in a normal diet 60-70% of your calories come from carbohydrates and you cut them you and you're on a calories restricted diet. Bingo. Eat nothing at all and keep your activity level up and you'll lose about 1/2 pound each day (8.2oz of fat = 2000 calories). Eat more calories than nothing and prorate that weight lose. Joules are joules, they body isn't happy about wasting them, and if it does, bacteria won't and your cube neighbors won't be happy about that.
So much for the insulin magic and ketosis crap, but there's this wacky claim of "satiety " the claim that fat and protein is a high satiety food and that if you eat it, you'll eat less total. Could be. Maybe for some people, not for others. If it works for you, go for it, just don't make magic claims or act like the self-righteous health nuts who claim to Received The Counterintuitive Truth.
As for the health of it all, if you stop eating processed sugars, like every nutritionist including Atkins has been saying for 50 years, you'll generally lose weight, probably a lot of it, and you will be healthier. My mom used to call them "empty calories," but that's too kind. Sugars are bad, and Atkins is right about refined sugar (complex carbohydrates absorb more slowly, "glycemic index" crap aside) - you do tend to crash after (all nutritionists know this). Crash means metabolism temporarily slows. Slow metabolism means less calories burned. Not a lot less - watching TV burns 2.4 calories per minute, walking 2mph burns 2.8 - but a bit less, which means a small difference, a few grams of fat a day maybe. The big difference is eating less sugar - 4.5 Cal per M&M adds up fast.
As for the health of it, if you eat "too much" protein your piss will start to smell weird. If that happens back off. Otherwise it's not likely to kill you. Don't chow down on high saturated fats, the "Atkins helps heart disease" stuff is crap. If you lose weight your cholesterol level will drop, but that doesn't contradict about 50 years of very well documented data showing a direct correlations between saturated fat and heart disease, which strikes thin, otherwise healthy people too.
Skipping fruit is dumb, but it won't kill you if you're eating your veggies. All the vitamins and minerals are in vegetab
You can lose weight on reduced-calorie diets (NOT ultra-low calorie diets, those are unsafe and ineffective), but as much as 50% will be lean muscle mass, which is not the point of the excercise. It also yo-yos back a lot faster.
So you're right about the reduced carb lifestyle, it does work, and is much safer and more consistent in the long run.
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Gluconeogenesis takes pyruvates and oxaloacetates and converts them into glucose. You get these through catabolism of amino acids, chiefly from muscle tissue. The muscle is broken down and transported to the liver for gluconeogenic processing. Alanine, cysteine, glycine, serine, & threonine can be deaminated directly or indirectly to form pryuvate and asparagine and aspartate can be made into oxaloacetates.
Hey, that's great that you remember your high school chemistry, but the clinical data don't support your theory. Atkins focuses on foods hight in fat & protein, so there's always enough protein intake that the body does not need to break down muscle tissue. This has been gospel among body builders for 30+ years. Low-carb diets preserve muscle mass moreso than low-fat diets, and the fat loss compared to low-fat is probably more significant than current studies already indicate.
I've been fat all my life, peaking at 277 lbs eight years ago. I just finished my first year on Atkins. I'm down from 244 to 187 (that in the first sixth months actually), the same weight I was a as a high school freshman (15 years ago). Now that I've broken my carb addiction I've added healthy carbs (whole grains, vegetables, fruit) back into my diet. It's been a year now and I haven't had a donut, french fry, or any sort of sugar or junk food. My triglycerides are under 80. Is your diet that healthy?
If you say so. I just know what works for me and my personal experience. When I was religiously logging every single calorie and ounce of water that went into my body when I switched to Atkins, I found that 2000 calories per day gave me a weight loss of 1.2 pounds per week and 3000 to 3500 calories per day gave me a weight loss of 2 to 3 pounds per week. Add exercise to 3000 calories per day and I'd jump up to 3.5 to 4 pounds per week. This is well documented in various Atkins and low-carb forums where people have to increase their daily calories to get their bodies out of starvation mode.
I also know that, four or five years ago, I tried the 1200 calorie per day thing and gained weight. When I increased my caloric intake, I stopped gaining weight. At that time I was logging every single calorie and gram of fat using Excel spreadsheets so I wasn't fooling myself. Like I said, everyones' metabolism is different and each person reacts to fats, carbs, and calories differently. Atkins isn't for everyone (it didn't work for my wife at all), but it has worked wonders for me.
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
Another vote for bicycle.
Better for your knees & hips and you can actually get some upper body exercise.
Bikes let you see more of the world: you can go farther then jogging or walking, you see, hear & experience more of the world then you would ever see in a car (cars are very isolating).
Plus, a bike is pretty geeky. Alot of mechanical parts to tweak, tune your own gears, design your own lighting system, hook a generator up to your rims. Use your GPS, take a camera.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."