A couple of days ago I ran into an old friend of ours, whom I hadn’t seen in about a year. She is a highly successful, intelligent, middle-aged woman who, the last time I saw her, was at least 30 or so pounds overweight. She is now slim and trim. In fact, I almost didn’t recognize her.

I told her she looked fabulous and asked her what happened. I knew that she had been a perennial low-carber, but, like so many people, never really got into it seriously for any length of time. She knew how much better she felt when she stuck to her regimen, but a million things kept coming up – parties, weddings, business travel, etc. – preventing her from really taking her diet seriously. As she put it:

There was always a valid reason that I couldn’t really get going. I had a friend’s wedding coming up, and I knew I was going to eat and drink. So, I put off starting until after the wedding. Then it was a business trip, then it was something else. It seemed that there was always something lurking in the future that kept me from getting serious today.

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There is an old joke that goes something like this:

Question: What is Mozart doing in his grave right now?
Answer: De-composing.

The same question could be asked of the living right now who are working hard on their diets and seeming to go nowhere body weight-wise.

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Despite the title of this post, it isn’t really about why low-carb is harder the second time around per se. It’s more about attitude toward dieting and why diets in general are difficult, sometimes even the first time.  What with it being a new year and all, I figured I would go ahead and get things stirred up early with my thoughts on the psychology of dieting.

I can’t begin to count the number of people whom I have seen in my office who have fallen off the wagon and who told me that they just couldn’t stick with their low-carb diet for any number of reasons.

A typical conversations goes something like this:

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The last few studies I’ve posted on here seem to have been designed by their authors to show that low-carb diets aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Of course none of these studies have used real low-carb diets – they’ve all used diets that are called low-carb, but really aren’t. They’ve set up a low-carb straw man, knocked it down, then crowed about it. These antics have left us all longing to see a study using a real low-carb diet.

Fate has dropped two studies into our hands that clearly demonstrate the superiority of low-carbs diets when matched against the high-fiber, high-cereal diet beloved of so many in the nutritional establishment and even against low glycemic index (Low-GI) diets.

In the same couple of week period two studies came out – one you’ve probably read about; the other you likely haven’t. By combining the data from these studies, we can see how these three diets match up.

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A recent, well-financed study shows the glycemic index (GI) to be a less-than-optimal way of managing diabetes with diet.  Meanwhile, a major name in the world of mainstream nutrition comments on this study and shows his own bias.  Oh dear.  Let’s take a look.

Before we launch into this study, which we’re going to just briefly review because I want to spend more time on the commentary, I want to propose to you a thought experiment.  Suppose I ask you to design a study to see what happens when subjects with diabetes eat low-GI carbs as compared to what happens when they eat high-GI carbs.  It seems pretty simple.  If you’ve got half a brain, you would recruit subjects with diabetes, go through all of the randomizing rigmarole to ensure that both groups of subjects were as alike as possible, i.e., subjects in both groups were about the same size, same ratio of sexes, same degree of blood sugar elevation, etc.  Then you would start the subjects in one group on an amount of carbohydrate, let’s say 220 gm per day, that were mainly low-GI carbs and the other group on about the same amount of carbohydrate composed of high-GI carbs.  You would teach each of these groups how to follow their specific GI diets and would have a way of monitoring for compliance.  Then you would set them to it and recheck them in 3 months or 6 months or a year or whatever you decided your study length to be.  Pretty simple stuff, right?

Just for grins, let’s throw in a twist.

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