The FastDay Forum

Carbs are fine. However, in general beware of carb sources that are nothing but empty calories. Examples include bread, pasta, sugary drinks, and so on. When you are dieting, you are taking in less food, so you want to make sure the food you do eat has as much nutritional value as possible.

Green leafy veggies are some of the best foods you can eat. Spinach, lettuce, kale. They are packed with nutrition.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Art-Science ... 983490716/ or this one, which is about sports and exercise in a low carb context.

Ah, that is the sporty version as opposed to the other nerdy version! So which one would suit me better I wonder?

I don't think my low carb diet is as low as 10%. I think I'm probably going as high as 25% sometimes beacause of all the veg and nuts I eat. I can also run 10k's without bonking (there's got to be a better term for it).

"hitting the wall" ?

As we seem in this topic to be talking about something akin to a paleo diet here, I thought people might be interested in the Caveman Doctor website - see http://www.cavemandoctor.com/diet/.

A blog post of his about intermittent fasting can be found here.

Ahead of the curve or off the wall? You decide!

I read the Low Carb performance book, mainly because I'm intrigued after half a lifetime being told it was important to carb load before any exercise of duration over a couple of hours. Probably should have used the running term' hitting the wall' , too used to talking to cyclist. (It's not a myth, it happens, but V&P say it doesn't happen to those properly adapted) I'd recommend these authors in the sense they provide references for all claims, and make it clear when they're moved ahead to unproven 'hunches'. In contrast many low carb sources are decidedly flaky on the 'science bit'. For V&P carbs are not 'ok', even if low GI. The reason is they still cause insulin rises - in fact for longer duration than high GI - and insulin stops fat burning. However this is all controversial so you need to be aware there is another side (ie the mainstream); though to be fair V&P tackle that head on. The relevance of 52 for me is that the practicality of cooking without carbs are too difficult 7 days a week. For two fast days, on the other hand, it's easy to stay below 50g carbs. Hence my experimentation to see how that works for me. Fast days are certainly easier for me on low carb, but I'm going to ramp up the post fast exercise and see what happens over the spring. However I'll take an energy bar with me, just in case...
I'm also getting a blood lipid test to see whether my higher fat consumption has ended up in my bloodstream - or not.

Tim Noakes of S Africa, formerly a "carb loading for running" advocate, has now gone all low carb and kicked up some dust.

http://www.health24.com/Diet-and-nutrit ... t-20130210

http://www.health24.com/Diet-and-nutrit ... s-20130210

When I was 20-odd years younger I was doing long days in the hills as a natural progression from distance running. Road marathons took so long to recover from, the softer surfaces and less repetitive stride pattern meant less joint pain in the hills. On the other side of the coin, 3 hours on the road is sustainable on glycogen reserves but 24 hours is definitely not! This was a time before energy gels (although Tracker bars existed) and the problem of what to eat when the glycogen ran out was significant. Some people seemed able to still stuff Mars bars etc. down their necks when nearly exhausted, I certainly could not so for prolonged periods I must have been burning fat, and only able to move at 'bonked' pace as a result (although I could usually run downhill no matter how knackered). If we had known at the time about ketosis and optimized fat burning we would have tried the experiment as the irony of having a pacer carrying all sorts of tempting calorific goodies but no appetite or ability to eat anything with digestive processes shut down is quite irritating. Alas, all this fascinating research has come too late for me, the old joints are too creaky for long events, but I hope to find that some forum athletes make it to full ketosis successfully.

Well just to say that I was playing with Atkins before I discovered this approach, I found the low carb approach suited me well, I used to have alcohol at weekends so didn't lose as much weight as I could have done, then went crazy over Christmas, ate everything and put some back on. When I started this 5:2 approach I thought 'Oh good, I can eat NORMALLY' on feast days, tried that, sandwiches, potatoes, even chips on feast days and really it didn't work. I am now doing my revised lower - cal = lower carb and am losing a bit of weight, although slowly. I think your body gets used to a certain way of eating which is when you hit the wall and have to change to something else but for me, refined carbs are a no-no, although like caroress, I have to have the (very occasional) piece of cake!!

I'm struggling to see how a high-fat diet can possibly be good for you, weight loss or no weight loss. If your gallbladder doesn't pack up, surely your arteries will practically solidify, with death by coronary occlusion a likely outcome? Such concerns probably don't matter at 20, but by 40 they become important, and by 60 (if you're still alive) they are likely to be a major issue.

I'm struggling to see how a high-fat diet can possibly be good for you, weight loss or no weight loss. If your gallbladder doesn't pack up, surely your arteries will practically solidify, with death by coronary occlusion a likely outcome? Such concerns probably don't matter at 20, but by 40 they become important, and by 60 (if you're still alive) they are likely to be a major issue.

You're looking at it from a particular perspective that may be wrong.

My total cholesterol is 5.05 and HDL 1.7. My blood pressure is 112/60 with resting heart rate about 60. I'm 52. This puts me in the bottom left corner (lowest risk) on coronary heart risk charts.

You may have been taught that arterycloggingsaturatedfats are the cause of all our ailments, but this may not actually be the case.

The gall bladder is happy recirculating bile salts and getting rid of cholesterol from the bloodstream into the digestive system like it evolved to do http://courses.washington.edu/conj/bess/bile/bile.html

The books mentioned above may be informative, or have a look at http://www.dietdoctor.com/science

[carorees]

Lots of doctors predicted people doing Atkins would keel over with solidified arteries as you suggest. They were amazed to find that actually people doing Atkins had lower blood lipids than people doing low fat diets. A recent study compared low fat/high carb diet with a high fat/low carb diet and the Mediterranean diet. The high fat diet subjects had better blood lipid and glucose results and weight loss than the low fat diet folks. Blood cholesterol has little to do with dietary fat but lots to do with glucose metabolism and insulin resistance and so high sugar/high GI is more likely to solidify your arteries than a high fat diet.

If you would like links to recent studies supporting these statements I can provide them!

You're right - I'm looking at it from a particular perspective which *may* be wrong. But then, all perspectives *may* be wrong

My interest in the subject began many years ago when I lost a loved one to a heart attack to which a high-fat, Atkins-type diet was almost certainly a contributory factor. (This individual came from an exceptionally long-lived family, but died at 64 after being the only member of that family to switch to a high-fat diet. Neither the individual nor other family members had high sugar intakes.) Since then I've seen friends, colleagues and even family suffer from heart- and gallbladder-related health issues, and in my experience it has always been the ones on high-fat diets (either Atkins-type or simply proportionally very high fat intake) who have been affected. Moreover, those affected have usually been able to control/improve their condition by switching to a low-fat diet. Again, high sugar intakes have not been apparent, although it is only fair to say that, without 24-hour supervision, it is possible that some individuals have ingested higher amounts of sugar than is evident to an onlooker.

This is, of course, in no way a scientific study, but simply my experience. There must be people who can eat substantial amounts of fat without doing themselves any serious harm, just as there are individuals who can eat diets high in sugar - perhaps their specific genes protect them from damage. No doubt science will give us the full story in due course, and it's unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all diet.

But meanwhile (with the NHS performing 60,000 gallbladder removal operations per annum, and 103,000 people in the UK suffering heart attacks each year, and 94,000 people dying of coronary heart disease annually in the UK) I, personally, think it highly inadvisable to risk a high-fat diet OR a high-sugar diet. And that's just my opinion, nothing more.

[Statistics from NHS and British Heart Foundation]

[carorees]

As I said somewhere, we evolved in an environment where fat, carbohydrate (especially sugar) and salt were hard to come by. We crave them for that reason but our bodies are not able to handle them. I believe that a true Paleo diet would consist of mostly vegetables with small amounts of meat/fish/eggs and very little fat, sugar, grain and salt. And of course variations in availability resulting in feast and famine.

Of course I'm not following my own advice...(apart from the feast and famine bit)