Anyway, in response to a comment above, you said, “I pluck about half the comments I get out of the junk comment pile where they go when the commenter doesn’t type in ‘lowcarb.’”

Huh? Am I supposed to type ‘lowcarb’ somewhere?

Sorry for being so dense. Must be all the carbs I ate growing up. (Been LC since 1998.)

Hi Kathy–

No, the ‘lowcarb’ deal was when I was using a different blogging software.  There was a codeword that had to be entered to keep the spam to a minimum.  The codeword was ‘lowcarb.’  Now you can simply comment away and I should get them fine.

Cheers–

MRE 

Your blog is just the best! Between this blog and Jimmy Moore’s Livin La Vida Low Carb, I am in low carb heaven.

Can’t wait for this movie to come out, and also, I’ve been waiting for Gary Taubes book for MONTHS now!

Oh, by the way, speaking of fast food movies… I’m losing weight quite nicely eating those Carl’s Jr’s Low Carb Six Dollar Burgers (available here on the west coast). Sometimes you just can’t avoid fast food, but it doesn’t have to derail you!

Also, hope you have another book out soon. I read everything I can on lowcarbing.

Hi Sheryl–

Thanks for the kind words.

I hope you don’t have to wait too long for Gary Taubes’ book. If I had to guess, I would say it will be coming out sometime in 2007.

I’m on the West Coast a lot and I’ve been meaning to try on of the Carl’s Jr.’s Low Carb six Dollar Burgers, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Every time I get the hamburger urge I go to In-n-Out and get a double, double protein style, which comes wrapped in a lettuce leaf.

MD and I are almost always working on something new–we’ll keep you posted as it gets closer.

Best–

MRE

Just wanted to pipe in and give you a big THANK YOU for keeping our wonderful lifestyle alive. Having had aortic valve replacement and needing to lose a lot of weight and improve my health, I began my journey on WW. I did lose weight, but was ALWAYS hungry. I bought into the low fat myth. When my labs didn’t show much improvement (high cholesterol, triglycerides, BP), I came across Protein Power.

I can’t thank you and MD enough for such an informative book. My total weight loss is 135 pounds and my labs are wonderful with an HDL of 71, LDL 98 and triglycerides of 52! Amazing…

I’ve stalled now because of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (getting it under control takes time to get the right med level) and the onset of menopause. Once these issues get under control, I’m going for 20 pounds more!

I’m thrilled that this movie is being made and that Mr. Taubes will be publishing a book on the subject. This way of life needs to be in the forefront for everyone who needs and wants to lose weight without dangerous surgery. In fact, two days ago, someone who needs to lose a great deal of weight asked my opinion on gastric bypass surgery. I begged this person to get your PP Lifeplan book (or the 30 day Solution book) and give it three weeks or so before agreeing to such a drastic step as the surgery. I think I got through to him (hopefully).

Keep up the GREAT (life-saving) WORK! There are so many of us who appreciate it!

Hi Diana–

Thanks for the very kind words. It was you who did all the work and made all the sacrifices. Congratulations on a job well done.

Hang in there through getting the Hashimoto’s stabilized–that can be a real pain. After what you’ve already accomplished, the last 20 pounds should be a breeze.

Thanks again for the inspirational story.

MRE

You need to tell Gary Taubes then that the Amazon website states that his book coming is out on Sep 1, 2006. That’s quite confusing if it’s incorrect.

Regarding exercise, my sister lost 90 lbs on low carb more than seven years ago and changed nothing about her regular schedule during the two years it took to lose the weight. She went to work, took care of her husband and son when she came home, and that was it. She has a vision problem, which makes it hard to keep her balance, so I don’t think that there was any secret running or exercise routines she was hiding from me or her family –it would have been too dangerous to do by herself.

Dr Mike, I completely agree with you frustration regarding how people treat your book. One of the things that struck me when I first read the book, was the years you spent doing the work before ever putting pen to paper. When I bring up this point with others who have claimed to have read your book, this seems to have completely escaped them. There are plenty of diet books out there written by people who have no first hand experience with patients or have done shoddy research — yours isn’t one of them. I believe people just don’t take a deep breath and read thoroughly — they just skim and pretend they understood what they read.

I think the reaction to Taubes original article was purely instinctive — powerful accusations brought out by a journalist not in the diet industry –that scared a lot of people vested in the industry. While you may have been accused of writing your book for profit, Taubes had no skin in the game so to speak; people reacted to the information, and tried to find ulterior motives for Taubes having written the article. When that wasn’t possible, the controversy turned to the low carb plan itself and conventional diet doctors trying to CYA.

Hi LCforevah–

Yes, Gary knows that Amazon says his book is coming out on Sept. 1. It’s, for whatever reason, difficult to get that changed. I haven’t checked in 6 months or so, but the last time I did look for it on Amazon.co.uk, it was listed as already being available.

Your sister’s story is a common one. Exercise has a mutitude of benefits–weight loss isn’t one of them.

I understand the dynamics of the journalist verses diet book author situation. But, what if I hadn’t wriiten a diet book and had written an article similar to the Taubes NY Times piece? In the first place, the Times would probably never have published it because I’m not a journalist. If it were published and I had developed the whole idea theoretically as Taubes did, everyone would say, where are your patients? If I had a large practice with a huge number of patients following low-carb diets, academicians would have written it off as anecdotal, others would have assumed I was trying to attract patients or sell something, others would have said, where are your published studies? People don’t realize that clinicians–unless they are on the staff of a medical school–don’t do studies. They don’t have the funding; they don’t have graduate students running around to do all the grunt work; and they usually don’t have the time (if they have busy practices) to do it all themselves. What’s more, it’s difficult without an academic platform to get a paper accepted in a journal. About the only avenue left for a busy clinician is to write a popular book, which is the choice MD and I took. Then, of course, in the minds of many, we became charlatans out after the big bucks. It’s a strange business.

Cheers–

MRE

Victoria touched on a subject that I have trouble understanding. When viewing shopping carts, I have noticed the same thing, all carbs/obese people. However, I have also seen carb-laden carts (whole wheat bread, granola bars, juices, sugar filled yogurts, cereal, oatmeal = all those healthy carbs still = all sugar) driven by skinny people. They don’t look healthy, some have skin problems, but they are skinny, which in our society means = healthy. When I look at their cart I go into diabetic shock, know that eating that food exclusively will kill me within a couple of years, and yet these people eat it and remain skinny. Why is that? And not all of them are young.

Hi Hellistile–

I know what you mean. But, people can eat pretty much anything and stay thin if they don’t eat too much of it. I figure that the people with all that crap in their shopping carts eat it a cookie at a time, here and there. They don’t wolf down the whole box and wash it down with a large Coke.

I spent a lot of time watching my grandfather eat. He was thin until he died at age 82. He never watched his diet; he ate anything and everything he wanted. He just didn’t eat very much of it.

Best–

MRE

Sorry for the misunderstanding! I think the risk of these kinds of mistakes, at least for me, increased since I haven’t been able to ‘preview’ my comment before posting it. I still can’t see the word ‘lowcarb’ if I try to preview the post. I’ll be more careful in the future!

Hi Gabe–

No problem. If the inability to preview is giving you trouble, go ahead and preview your comment. I pluck about half the comments I get out of the junk comment pile where they go when the commenter doesn’t type in ‘lowcarb.’ It’s a lot easier for me to pluck four or five valid comments out of the 50 or 60 spam comments than it is to purge the 50 or 60 spams out of the legit comment file. So, preview your comment, and I’ll still get it.

Best–

MRE

That’s partly why I found Spurlock’s premise annoying; people make bad choices in full-service restaurants and at home as well. It’s silly to blame the growing rate of obesity on one fast-food chain.

Tom Naughton

I went grocery shopping today and was reminded again of America’s obesity problem when I saw the guy ahead of me in line. He was morbidly obese and in his cart was Gatorade (sugar), regular soda (sugar), a ton of potato chips (starch and fat), and as he passed through the register he grabbed some Twix bars (more sugar). There was no protein in his cart and he’s likely severely malnourished from his soda, chips, and candy bar diet. I have come to believe that most overweight people are malnourished; they are not eating the right foods and stuffing themselves with crap that doesn’t give their bodies what they need to function well.

What was in my cart? I got salad, meat (beef), cheese, lunchmeat, Hansen’s diet soda, cucumbers, and tomatoes.

Hi Victoria–

I know how you feel. I see these people all the time and I always think to myself that they could be so much less miserable than they are if only they would make some changes. But, they have to make them. The information is out there.

Problem is, there is a lot of misinformation out there as well.

Thanks for writing–

MRE

There is a pbs transcript:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/diet/interviews/taubes.html

of his interview where he states that he started to investigate the low fat diet, when, after interviewing some diet researchers, he realized that they were probably the worst scientists he ever talked to.

In light of the prevailing attitudes from these scientists and the media that protect them, he delayed the sale of the book, spending months double checking his research so no one can claim he is mistaken in his premise. Nowadays, the media take one little error and proceed to discredit the entire work — a great tactic — and rabidly dishonest.

I’m optimistic that with persistence, with movies like Tom’s and information from the Eades, Gary Taubes, Anthony Colpo and others the Paleo diet can become much more mainstream — maybe not tomorrow, or next year, but soon.

Hi LCforevah–

Gary Taubes is a friend of mine, and I just got together with him a week or so ago. His book isn’t coming out Sept. 1. I’ve read parts of it and I can tell you that it’s a tour de force, but it will be a while before it hits the stands. When it does, though, it will make an impact, I can assure you.

The whole Taubes article/book thing is an interesting phenomenon because of the way people regard him verse MD and me and Atkins and the other low-carb so-called gurus. All of us–MD, Atkins, Rosedale, and all the others and I–took care of a zillion patients and realized that the low-carb diet worked like magic. We all refined our own methods of administering it and wrote about our experiences and about how well the low-carb diet worked for our patients. We were all accused of writing our books to make money and, consequently, weren’t taken seriously. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people say to me, when I extol the virtues of a low-carb diet, ‘yeah, but your just hawking a diet book.’

Then someone like Taubes comes along, someone who has never taken care of a single patient, and writes up a piece saying that low-carb diets are good, and the whole world goes ga ga. I just can’t figure it out.

I can tell you, though, that his book is well worth waiting for.

Best–

MRE

Perhaps the next big concept to change is ‘calories’. As Mr. Naughton experienced himself, his caloric intake was far from being on the side of ‘deficit’, yet he lost weight. Or maybe I missed something and he did continue with his exercise, albeit moderate. In an interview with Stephen Phinney, Eric Westman and Jay Wortman (interview conducted by Shelley Schlender), it was interesting to hear Dr. Westman talk about people that he’s studying that lose quite a bit of weight on a low-carbohydrate diet without exercising.

While I agree that exercise combined with a low-carbohydrate diet (particularly if protein intake is not neglected) has synergistic effect on weight loss, I’m convinced that there are alternative ways to increase our metabolic rate without engaging in vigorous or even moderate exercise. In fact, in my opinion, when somebody is extremely overweight (not based on BMI but actual fat percentage), it may even be detrimental to engage him/her on vigorous exercise, at least in the way it’s normally recommended… jumping up and down and spend half of your day on a treadmill to ‘burn more calories’. These individuals may end up injured before significant or even appreciable weight loss is observed.

I don’t think there is any doubt that dietary protein has a key role in increasing metabolic rate and over and over, it is shown that satiety and thermogenesis have an important role in the process, even if the actual mechanism by which protein exert its influence still eludes us.

I don’t advocate for ‘no exercise’. On the contrary, but I can’t dismiss the fact that people can still lose significant amount of weight once they change their habits (hence their behavior and choices) towards a diet that is controlled in carbohydrate, with plenty of dietary protein and moderate in fat (moderate just means whatever fat comes with their protein choices plus a bit of the good ones not found there; a.k.a. avocados, nuts, etc.).

I look forward to the supersized laughs and a refreshing dose of good information from the film!

Hi Gabe–

Thanks for writing. I think you’ve misstated my position, though.

I’ve said at least a thousand times in talks, books and probably even in this blog that I believe that exercise is NOT a particularly good way to lose weight. Exercise has many health benefits; weight loss just doesn’t happen to be one of them.

I became involved with Slow Burn, and MD and I and
Fred Hahn wrote the book not because we thought Slow Burn would help people lose weight, but we thought it was the best way to gain strength and flexibility.

In our practice we never advocate that patients exercise to kick off their low-carb weight loss program; we always tell them not to worry about exercise at first, and that in time, as they lose weight and start to feel better, they will start to exercise on their own.

I agree completely with your comment.

Best–

MRE