[Arctic Mama]

http://live.smashthefat.com/why-i-didnt-get-fat/

Fascinating little self experiment I thought I'd share with the chickies. My own personal experience attests this to be true, too, though certainly to a lesser degree than Sam (thanks to my body's individual responsiveness to nutrients).

Thoughts? Discussion?

[ICUwishing]

Thanks for posting this, Arctic Mama. I'm glad to see that someone took the trouble to document at that level of detail. I have noticed that I can "overeat" many high calorie, fatty foods like avocados, olives, cheese and nuts without ever seeing a bounce on the scale the next day, in fact, they can cause a surprising drop. I may have to play with this more and see how well it works for me as opposed to a young, active male.

[JohnP]

Just glanced through the article. I'm a fan of low carb but this article is quite poorly written. Apparently people were never overweight until recently - that seems to be his point? I mean - no one ever got fat eating whole food diets? He doesn't even list his methodology.

Sorry - this article is only good for people who already have their minds made up and aren't interested in facts or science.

I am a fan of whole food diets and low carb diets. I am also a fan of science. These two things are compatible.

[Arctic Mama]

Oh, I agree. I enjoy self experimentation greatly, however, and am thoroughly sick of the sheer denial that composition of foods matters as much or more than just the caloric mass of them. A blog is not Pubmed, and an anecdote isn't equivalent to data, especially when there is a lone participant. That doesn't make it worthless for gleaning information, however. And since I've experienced much the same it's not entirely anomalous (weeks of high calorie diets putting almost no weight on me, modest calorie deficits dropping it like it is hot, but ONLY with a particular nutritional composition - moderate protein, high fat, very low carb, mostly whole foods).

He's selling something, so it should be taken within that context. But anyone who undermines the nutritional fallacies of the last century pleases me

[JohnP]

I have a major problem with information that is presented as factual when in fact it is false. He gives a disclaimer at the beginning but then goes on as if what he is saying is true when in fact he is making things up. Examples of things he says which are not true.

He says carbs spill over into fat. Not in humans they don't.

He says biochemically balanced people can eat a lot more because the extra calories go down some magic hole. No, they can't and no they don't.

Frankly - I suspect that Sam didn't even eat 5,000 calories a day for 21 days straight based on his menu. Those would be some large serving sizes.

[Arctic Mama]

I'd have to disagree - excess carbohydrate not utilized as energy immediately by the body does indeed become stored in the adipocytes - or are you going to seriously argue that one of insulin's primary functions is not the transportation of energy into cells? Paraphrasing that for the lay-audience in an imperfect word picture doesn't make it untrue.

'Magic hole' is also a bit inaccurate on your part - again, acknowledging massive wasting of calories by more efficient and normative metabolisms isn't false. He didn't get into the details of increase thermogenesis, but energy utilization vs. storage in someone with metabolic syndrome is markedly different than in someone predisposed to leanness and obesity-resistant. Where an obese person may respond to food with lethargy and then a quicker return to a hungry state, a lean person may become satiated or even nauseated and note a slower return of appetite. They may also respond with more movement and energy, which burns off those calories. Are we saying it is because the obese person is lazy and the lean person is not, rather than that their bodies take the same nutrition and respond to it differently? He oversimplified, I agree, but most people necessarily do. Simplification doesn't automatically make a lie, especially when breaking down biological systems. Otherwise the Calories In/Calories Out crowd is guilty of the very same, by simplifying down to an energy balance equation and ignoring the dynamism and responsiveness of the human body to the type and quantity of that energy, prior to its conversion to ATP.

And finally, for the record, Sam did indeed eat what he said he did - we calc'ed it out in another blog (unrelated to his) and actually came closer to 6000 calories per day with the food quantities he specified on the video and previous blogs. What was impressive wasn't the quantity of keto foods, as we'd call them, but that he could stand to do it more than a few days in a row without vomiting!

[luckymommy]

Thank you so much for posting Arctic Mama! I really enjoyed this little one man experience and it has motivated me to think differently about calories. Up until now, I have been quite convinced that a calorie is a calorie, but as I'm struggling to lose weight on this round of effort, I wonder if perhaps I should be eating more fat. I have resisted thus far because fat is so calorie dense and I don't feel satiated by it. A small bag of almonds is 200 calories and I'd rather eat egg whites with veggies and get just as full for less than half the calories. However, maybe I'll start to include more nuts and avocado as well as whole eggs to see what happens. Thanks again!

[beerab]

I have read that adding nuts to your diet won't contribute to weight gain (unless you are eating LOTS of it. TWO days ago I started adding about 1/2 a cup of mixed nuts (with low sodium) to my diet and noticed my weight go down half a pound.

I do agree some foods seem to not "hurt" you as much as others.

Maybe I didn't see it, but it would have been nice of him to document each meal with pictures and so on.

Also, he was already thin, so his body chemistry is very much different from someone who is overweight. It would have been more impressive to me if he were overweight and this helped him lose weight.

[JohnP]

Arctic I respect your opinion on many things but facts are facts.

De novo lipogenesis (carbs converting into fat) by humans is possible as the pathways exist but it rarely happens and the amount of fat created by excess carbs in humans is minute. Fat is absorbed, carbs are not turned into fat. That is my point and that is fairly well established by science. Carbs to not spill over into fat.

I realize it is popular to demonize carbs and insulin by low carb zealots but it is excess calories that cause us to get fat, not carbs and not insulin. Of course, this (I assume) is why you like this blog post. This one person claims to have eaten 5,000 calories a day and did not gain as much weigt as one would expect.

Assuming he did what he said there are many reasons his weight might not have increased as much as one might expect and all the things you're saying about energy utilization are correct but those are not things he is saying. He is saying that people are biochemically imbalanced because of their SAD. If that were true people who have always eating "healthy" whole food diets wouldn't get fat but people have been fat long before food came in plastic packaging. People can eat extremely healthy whole foods diet and never eat any pre-packaged food and become obese. As you say - some people are more resistant than others to gaining fat than others even given the same diet and lifestyle.

You're also greatly overstating the case for the calories in/out "crowd". If someone made a post on this forum, pointing to a blog post that said something to the effect that only calories in/out matter and fat people are just lazy and insulin resistance has no bearing on what diet one might find most effective I would take that person to task too.

No one here is saying what you're arguing against.

As to whether or not he ate what he said - who knows. I have no clue. I just tend to doubt people are honest when they make things up and report them as if they are factual.