Why Keto?

[Grizzly]

You've entertained me more than anyone else has in a long time.

1) Do you know how my day starts? My day starts at 5:30 every morning where i wake up and go for a jog. After that i walk back in the door, cook breakfast, eat, get ready, and make my 30 minute trek to class everyday.

I'm in class from 8:00a.m. to 8:00p.m. I come home, study/do whatever work i need to then cook dinner and watch the news. While i watch the news i do situps, pushups, and the like. After that i sleep, rinse, repeat, everyday.

Bro, I don't know where you go to college, but you must be taking 72 credit hours a semester. I, too, am in college and I'm done with class by noon everyday except monday or wednesday, depending on the teacher's whims. That's the greatest thing about college. It's a bodybuilders dream world, excepting true profesional status. Maybe I'm mistaken, but somewhere in your day you have time in between class to get some sort of workout in. You can't possibly have 12 hours of class everyday unless you are taking 72 hours and I've never heard of a university that will allow that, nor could you possibly do the work for 24 classes all at once.

Just a little helpful advices. Since it's a half an hour walk to class, you should walk very fast/jog to class which will give you an extra 20 minutes worth of cardio a day to help lose the fat. I know that I walk fast to class period, but when I'm dieting like I am now I get there an extra 5 minutes faster because I try to use it as extra cardio.

MS- Agreed. This is a diet discussion board, however, it's a sub-category of the Elite Fitness boards and Elite Fitness caters towards bodybuilders. That's why I said that. I was under the impression that the people who come to elite fitness are all about muscle. I'm not trying to trash anyone. That's just the impression that I was under. And, for the most part, the people on these boards are gym rats, by and large.

 

[Grizzly]

My responses - Have been why the above statements are false. Which is that, A) they are not effective, which is only half false depending on what your goal is. B) That the majority of people who lose on it are losing mostly water weight. Tell me that these people have only lost water weight, and i'll tell you your crazy .

Oops, I forgot a part. I'm not denying that you will lose fat on a keto diet. However, a large portion of the weight loss, atleast the initial 10 pounds, will be entirely water weight. Carbs are very watery and, I think I may have said this before, upon ingesting bind with 3 molecules of water for every 1 molecule of carb. Thus, by eliminating carbs completely you lose a shitload of water. Hell, when I started dieting 5 weeks ago I lost 6 pounds in 2 days simply by dropping my carbs from 450-500 a day to 200-250. Merely a water loss. That's why bodybuilders carb up before a show. It makes the muscles fuller by filling them with glycogen and water. Plus, the carbs that are ingested will suck up the water from beneath the skin which helps with definition. That's why I said that most of it is water. Most dieters need/want to lose about 20 pounds of fat. Well, they hear about his atkins crap and think "wow, 10 lbs in a week! Cool, I'll only have to diet for about a month." Then they go back to eating carbs and are immediately up 10 pounds from water retention and still need to lose 10 more pounds of bodyfat.

 

[MS]

"Atkin's is a quack" I agree wholeheartedly, but you cannot deny that many morbidly obese people have done well on it. There are certainly better keto diets out there, but no one has commercialized theie ideas as well as Atkins.

For one, I am GLAD I live in a borderline developing country. I don't own a car so I walk or bike everywhere unless I want to shell out more than I can afford for taxis/public transport. I also cannot afford junk food/fast food. Vegetables are CHEAP. I grow them in my backyard. Whole grain rice, chick peas, lentils, nuts, seeds and beans are CHEAP. The cheapest entertainment I can find for a weekend is to convince some friends to take me hiking somewhere fun. I am also American (ex-patriot) and feel very sorry for the rest of my family still in the USA. I can see that they are all going to die younger and in poorer health than they need to because of the easily available excesses put in front of them everyday. This is not a character flaw on their part, just a combo of poor lifestyle education, being surrounded by everyone else doing the same thing, and human nature. It takes a huge amount of willpower to say NO, and this is one of the biggest things that sets sucessful bodybuilders apart from joe average.

The best diet is the one that works for you and as MR BMJ said, everyone has different needs at different times.

I'm like you grizzly. I am sodium sensitive and on a high carb diet most of the year so when I cut my carbs in half (say from 300g to 150g) and cut out all extra sodium I also lose a huge amount of water weight in the first 2 weeks of a diet. It's all good as long as you factor in that is is water and not fat (well a little of it will be fat).

 

[Debu]

So can you tell us a little bit more about your vegan diet MS? I guess I'm paranoid of not getting enough protein on a diet like that so I tend to eat the chicken, turkey, etc.

 

[KWKSLVR]

Thats a half hour DRIVE to class (20 miles), not walk My god i wish it was a walk though. Keep in mind that my goal right now isn't to put on muscle, my diet isn't exactly good for putting on muscle. I DO run and i DO cardio, however, although i'm not sure on this, i don't think its wise for me to try and put any muscle on with my current diet. I don't have the funds for a gym membership right now, but luckly a good friend of mine is giving me all of his free weights to use down here after I hit my goal (around 180 or so)

On the calories thing, i agree, its all about calories until your on a keto diet. Re-read my above post. From the Atkins Book

It works like this. To lose a pound a week one has to be eating 500 fewer calories a day than one burns up in energy. To gain a pound a week, one eats 500 calories a day more. Harry had been gaining half a pound a week for the past 35 months, which means he was taking in 250 calories a day too many. He was eating 3 full meals with chicken and fish for dinner and he was taking in 2129 calories a day.

Now, on the Atkins diet, Harry was losing 3.9 pounds a week, which means that according to conventional calorie theory, he would have to be taking in 1950 fewer calories a day than he burned in energy. We already know that at 2129 calories a day, he was taking in 250 calories a day too many. Thus Harry's break-even point is 1879 calories a day. To lose 3.9 pound a week, he should be taking in 1879 calories minus 1950 calories, or -71 calories a day -- Clearly an impossibility since you can't eat less than nothing.

You've seen Harry's menu (it's on page 76 of the book). In fact, that menu calculates out to 1928 calories a day. Harry is eating 49 calories a day over break-even point and therefore, according to calorie theory, he should be gaining 0.1 pound a week, and after 13 weeks on the Atkins diet he should have gained 1.3 pounds, not lost 50."

The chapter goes on to discuss the metabolic advantage, and FMS. Basically, what i'm getting at, is that study's have found that calories are irrelevent on low carb diets. Now i'm sure that in the case of your diet, this fact is much different. However, don't forget that i'm talking about an Atkins-style diet only.

But your right, i sure as hell eat less than i used to. Not that i really ate that much in comparison to a lot of other people i know. But now i'm more full, and i rarely have the time to slow down and eat anyway. I usually eat 2 meals a day with a protein bar inbetween.

On water weight, its common knowledge that the first 10lbs of any diet is water weight. So i don't understand why you'd say it like its a bad thing? So i should feel bad that only 50lbs of the weight of lost is fat? Also, i lost 20lbs my first 2 weeks. I'm still on the Induction Phase, and i'm still losing about 1-2 lbs a week. The only people that gain more than they lost on Atkins are the ones that go from 20-40 carbs a day, to eating their old 400 grams a day. Heres a poll that i found last night that makes for good reading.

In fact, the whole news and research section makes for good reading

 

[MS]

It's pretty tough to eat vegan when cutting, but otherwise it is fun to work out a nutrition plan that incorporates lots of legumes, seeds, nuts and some refined products such as wheat gluten and soy powder. And of course those veggies always make a show.

Yesterday (this is my maintenance diet for a female ~160lb 5'5") I ate:
1 cup (raw measure) of whole cooked oats with a scoop of soy protein (30g). This is a standard breakfast for me.
2 peanut butter sandwhiches (4 slices rye bread and ~3 TBSP peanut butter). This is basically 2 snacks I eat mid-morning and midday and varies a lot.
1/2 a block of tofu in some stirfried veggies over 2 cups of brown rice Mid-afternoon meal. Could be lentil dal or a bean dish instead of tofu and rice.
1 Cup chick peas with more veggies. Evening meal which also varies a lot. I like variety so I try lots of different combos of foods.
I find myself eating a lot of pumkin and chickpea curry at the moment. Yum.

Total mixed veggies is anywhere from 4-6 cups

Calories 2400-2600
Carbs ~340g (55-60%)
protein~130g (20-25%)
fat ~ 65g (20-25%)

It's not an easy diet to prepare (lots of veggie chopping and grain boiling etc...) but it's tasty and keeps me full and lean 24/7. Oh yeah, and it CHEAP cheap cheap which is also very important to me.

 

[Grizzly]

"Atkin's is a quack" I agree wholeheartedly, but you cannot deny that many morbidly obese people have done well on it. There are certainly better keto diets out there, but no one has commercialized theie ideas as well as Atkins.

Call me crazy, but morbidly obese people ESPECIALLY should get into the whole exercise thing. I think that's the whole problem with the Atkins diet. It's a fucking fad diet. Just like any other diet that the general public gets into like the "Subway Diet." Try some exercise and proper eating habits people. Now one might say to me "Oh, that's easy for your big, muscle-bound ass to say, Mr. Buff" but I can say that because I was a 330lb fat-assed junior in high-school. How did I fix it? I stopped eating half-gallons of ice cream and pounds of licorice at a sitting and started practicing proper eating habits and lifting weights like a man posessed which is why I'm now 260 at 13%. I really don't think that the Atkins diet is a good lifetime diet and that's what it's all about. Fitness and looking good is a lifestyle. You can't do it for a few months and expect to go back to your old ways and still look good. I'm always amazed when people ask me if I'm still lifting weights and bodybuilding. I'm like "Well, yeah. How the fuck do you think I look like this? Do you think I got to this point and then stopped? What would I look like then?" To continue this rant: And that's one of the problems. "I'm on a diet." There's the problem. Watch what you eat for a couple of months and then eat like shit again. That doesn't work. It's a 24/7 365 deal. Ok, maybe only 24/6 340 thing. Everyone needs to fuck up and eat like shit sometimes.

 

[KWKSLVR]

How is a diet that is 30 years old and places emphasis on exercise a "Fad Diet". It goes back to my theory that most people have done ZERO research on their own on Atkins, and obviously are so thick-headed that they don't WANT to read the 20 links of scientific and other information on Atkins that i have provided in this thread and in others.

If you don't want to learn about something, then fine. But don't go around repeating false info that you've heard from other people posting on a forum who also know nothing. There are a lot of people who could benefit from Atkins, and MISLEADING them does them no good. Theres 10's of thousands of people who have changed their lives and their health on Atkins. If most of you would do real research, you'd find all sorts of new scientific study's that support it.

 

[KWKSLVR]

Hey look, in 30 seconds i found more on what Atkins has to say about exercise than most of you have ever looked up on your own http://www.atkinsdiet.com/faq/faq.asp


Scroll down to the right topic

 

[Grizzly]

Thats a half hour DRIVE to class (20 miles), not walk My god i wish it was a walk though. Keep in mind that my goal right now isn't to put on muscle, my diet isn't exactly good for putting on muscle. I DO run and i DO cardio, however, although i'm not sure on this, i don't think its wise for me to try and put any muscle on with my current diet. I don't have the funds for a gym membership right now, but luckly a good friend of mine is giving me all of his free weights to use down here after I hit my goal (around 180 or so)

Well, I would advise atleast some lifting. It doesn't even matter what your diet is right now because, as an untrained individual, you'll put on some muscle just because of the unusual stress on your body. It will raise your metabolism and make losing weight that much easier. Also, it will slow the aging process, which is largely due to loss of muscle mass that comes with age and lowered test levels. How about because it will make you look better? Who doesn't want to get laid a little more? You don't have to, and probably can't/won't ever look like Ronnie Coleman, but a little extra muscle has myriad benefits. Plus, I can tell you from experience that after losing a ton of weight you're going to have some pully, loose skin and if you fill it out with some extra muscle you'll be less pully and loose/flabby.

As for a gym membership, I'd imagine that you can probably use the one at the university which should be included in your tuition and fees. Either way, bro, try to hit some weights. The benefits are too numerous to list. And, now I know that you have atleast some free time in your day since you've been on this board and had the free time to post. Like Dorian Yates says in his book "Blood and Guts" "Excuses are for failures. Don't be an excuse maker. Be a success."