The FastDay Forum

Article on the BBC News website, 5:2 is mentioned as well: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22145709

not a bad article, though Atkins isn't really high protein.

I wonder if Sian Porter of the British Dietetic Association would accept that there is some evidence from an uncontrolled long term trial of 60m subjects that the current dietary recommendations are somewhat obesogenic

[carorees]

The Atkins diet is another misunderstood diet. It's described as being high fat and protein but the fact that you are supposed to eat lots of vegetables, nuts and seeds is generally not mentioned...probably because that would maker it sound a bit too healthy!

LMAO PhilT, however, not all 60m of us are obese. There're at least a couple of hundred on 5:2 bucking the national trend by actually losing weight!

The guy who mentions the 5:2 diet says "I'm happy with how it is going but I know I need to find something that I can do for the rest of my life."

I don't understand, if it's working for him and it isn't a diet that causes you any real inconvenience, why he thinks it isn't something he can do for the rest of his life.

LMAO PhilT, however, not all 60m of us are obese.

Indeed not, we're all in the uncontrolled trial though.

To be honest I don't buy the "obesity epidemic" thing too much, trends over recent years have been a bit boring and certainly don't look like an "epidemic".

The guy who mentions the 5:2 diet says "I'm happy with how it is going but I know I need to find something that I can do for the rest of my life."

I don't understand, if it's working for him and it isn't a diet that causes you any real inconvenience, why he thinks it isn't something he can do for the rest of his life.

Exactly! That's the whole reason I'm following 5:2, because it's something I CAN see myself doing indefinitely. That's definitely not the case with most other diets.

I might sound a little harsh but here's my twopence:

When I was growing up, carbs were 75% (perhaps 80%) of everybody's diet. We had bread or fruit for school, bread with lunch (even if it was pasta), a sweet for a snack and dinner was either carbs-only or something-with-carbs.
Yet, there was not a single overweight kid in my school, there was not even a fat teacher now that I think of it. We didn't even know the word "obese"!

It's not the carbs that are bad for us, IMO. It's the fact that most carbs are badly cooked and are bad raw material. People eat cake from the supermarket instead of home-made (my recipe for cake has HALF the calories), they eat junk food, they add too much salt (no salt shakers in my childhood), they spend most of their lives sitting down, kids don't play out in the streets as they used to, even the flour for the bread is full of additives!!!

Did you know that most of the Americans who are coeliac can actually eat bread and pasta in Greece?

So, again, I strongly believe that it's our way of living and the kind of carbs that we eat that makes us fat. Otherwise, all my elderly relatives would be fat (they are thin), I would be fat, all my childhood friends would be fat and so on and on and on...

I lost a lot of weight on a sort of modified Atkins diet awhile back. I didn't limit non-starchy vegetables at all. I just cut out most bread, pasta, rice (things that are almost entirely carb). I gained it back, though probably not any faster than other diets I tried. I can handle the denial thing for quite a long time, but then I just go crazy...

I'm hoping 5:2 is different. It already feels pretty different...

Did you know that most of the Americans who are coeliac can actually eat bread and pasta in Greece?

So it's not made from wheat ?

It is, of course. My friend who is coeliac says that the problem is probably in the additives they put in wheat in the States because when s she comes here she eats bread, pies, pasta etc every day and she doesn't have a problem. When she mentioned it on a travel forum many fellow travellers said that they are experiencing the same thing.

Not sure what sort of coeliac goes round eating bread, pies and pasta - presumably someone with a very mild reaction and certainly not my MIL who would be on a medivac plane if she attempted such a feat !

The coeliac who asked a doctor and told them to try a few bits of Greek bread and see what happens. If nothing happens try some more, then some more and so on. On her first trip it was just 3 slices of bread but after her 5th she eats what I eat and she is fine. She still cannot eat any of that in the States.
As I said, it happens to many people who come to Greece from the States. I don't know anybody who did this coming from the UK, so I don't know what would happen with your MIL, nor I'm suggesting anybody to try it.

I mentioned this as an example of why we tend to think that wheat is bad for us. It's mainly not the wheat, it's the additives that flour contains. Many of the things that we eat nowadays, are not as pure as they were. But it's not the food itself that makes us fat, it;s what we add to it and how much more of it we eat.

If you read a bit regarding food allergies and the regions where they show up, you'll be surprised and yet you'll understand many things.

I notice that Sian Porter from the British Dietic Association says "many people are looking for a magic bullet, but there is no one size fits all solution." Surely the British Dietic Association is contradicting that statement when they only ever reccommend a high carb,low fat solution and are highly critical of any other approach.

While there are many who have failed on low carb diets even after initial success there are many others who have adopted it as a WoE and been successful in the long term as well as in the short term.

Low carb doesn't suite everyone but the recommended low fat, high carb approach doesn't suit everyone either.At the heart of the reccommended appraoch is the beliefe that carbs and sugar and the glucose they produce can be used up by vigorous exercise. While this is true, not everyone is able or inclined to persue vigorous exercise regimes.

According to the Livestrong website,if you run at 6 mph for 30 minutes, you will complete 3 miles -- a 10-minute-per-mile pace. If you weigh 185 pounds, you will burn 444 calories.I know fairly keen runners who would struggle to reach that sort of pace. After quite a lot of effort the calorie defecit isn't that great really. My point being that the reccommended diet is aimed at everyone regardless of the level of activity people are able to achieve.

I believe that the British Dietic Association and organisations like them are sabotaging individual's attempts at trying to achieve a healthy weight by routinly criticising other dietry approaches and insisting on reccommending an approach which clearly doesn't work for everyone.

Is it really too simplistic to just say it is the overall calorie count that matters, not where it comes from?
That is what I have found over many years of trying different diets.