The Geek Guide To Low-Carbs

a modified Atkins plan
by Meng Weng Wong
October 3rd, 2003

When we talk about weight loss, we really mean fat loss. We mean getting rid of White Adipose Tissue.
- Apparently we also have Brown Adipose Tissue: it does not accumulate fat but instead burns it off. Conjecture: Maybe thin people stay warm by using this tissue to generate heat. In fat people, for some reason, Brown Adipose Tissue has gone idle, so they stay warm by using White Adipose Tissue as insulation. Or maybe it's their muscles that generate the heat, and not Brown Adipose Tissue. People are still studying it.
When the body turns fat into energy, that is called lipolysis. When the body uses up that energy, that is called ketosis. They are closely related. The Atkins folk have a FAQ on the issue.
You can actually tell when lipolysis is happening: you will feel hungry. But there are two kinds of hunger: hunger due to insulin, and hunger due to lipolysis. It is easy to tell the difference.
- Insulin hunger is a whole-body craving: you feel irritable and cranky, you cannot concentrate, your whole body is telling you that you need to eat. You may feel yourself sweating. The munchies. If you eat breakfast, you will feel this kind of hunger at lunchtime.
- Lipolytic hunger is a dull ache in the pit of your stomach. It is the hunger of "oh, I forgot to eat." You may feel this kind of hunger in the morning before breakfast. With a bit of willpower, you will find it easy to ignore. But after too long, you may start to get a headache.
To lose weight, you have to feel lipolytic hunger for at least some time every day. You can confirm you are in ketosis by going to the pharmacy and buying "Ketostix" to pee on.
The body will burn sugars for energy before it burns anything else. Sugars come from sweet things, like candy bars and soft drinks and fruit juice, and starchy things, like bagels and bread and pasta. These are all carbohydrates. In your body, they turn into glucose.
You will eventually enter ketosis if you stop eating carbohydrates. But it will take longer than you think, because the liver acts as a buffer for glucose. When you eat carbohydrates, they are broken down and turned into glucose. Some of that glucose goes into the liver and muscles and turns into glycogen. When you run out of blood glucose, your liver will convert glycogen back into glucose. Your muscles may burn glycogen directly. But either way, glycogen is preferred to fat.
Your body can store about 1500 calories of energy in the form of glycogen. This is almost exactly the amount of energy a human being spends in a day. This makes a lot of sense, because when we were hunter-gatherers, we couldn't always get food to eat every day. And the food we did get was mostly meat, fat, nuts, and veggies. Bagels and baguettes didn't show up until after the invention of agriculture.
Where does fat come from? Your body will turn glycogen into fat once the liver and muscles are topped up with their maximum capacity. A high level of insulin encourages your body to turn glucose into glycogen and glycogen into fat.
To start burning fat, you first have to empty out all the glucose and glycogen from your body. The easiest way to kick this off is by fasting. At first, you will experience insulin hunger: it will be very unpleasant, because unlike normal, you will not solve it by just going out and eating a meal. You will have to endure it. You should set aside a day to fast, alone, with distractions. Do not try it at work. You will be cranky and hate everybody. Instead, treat it as a spiritual experience: past this threshhold lies the new, thinner, you. Fasting is the hardest thing you can do. If you can handle a day of it, the rest of the diet is cake. I speak figuratively.
The bad feeling comes from having a lot of insulin and very little glucose in your blood. Insulin levels go up after you eat carbohydrates, and stay up after the carbohydrates are consumed. This is what makes you feel hungry a few hours after a big meal. The bad feeling will eventually go away, and as long as you don't hit the carbs, it will stay away. Most fat people have high levels of insulin most of the time because at any given time they will have eaten lots of carbohydrates not too long ago. And they keep hitting the carbs, so the insulin never drops.
Once you have emptied out the glucose and glycogen, your body will start turning fat into energy. Your body still needs a little bit of glucose, but it can synthesize this glucose from protein, and then it will only make as much as it needs. This is why you have to eat meat.
People often say, with a hint of scorn, "everybody knows that to lose weight, you just have to burn more calories than you consume." This is true, but there are two ways to do it: exercise more, or eat less. Because eating less is considered beyond mortal abilities, gyms have flourished. Why is it beyond mortal abilities? If you're still eating carbohydrates every day, only "less", your body will make you feel terrible every day, because of the insulin reaction. And you will have to spend a lot of time at the gym to use up the carbohydrates you did eat before they turn into fat.
Besides, counting calories is a hassle.
People on the low-carbohydrate diet can avoid all these bad things: insulin reaction, the gym, and the need to count calories. This is why it has been such a success. The following daily cycle has worked for me:
- In the morning, some mild exercise will clear out any glycogen left in your body. Walking down the stairs from my apartment, two blocks to work, and up the stairs to the office counts as mild exercise. I don't eat breakfast.
- During the day, I am in ketosis. It is strongest in the morning, but because my insulin levels are low, it doesn't feel bad. I do feel lipolytic hunger, but I also feel virtuous when I ignore it.
- At lunch, eat no carbs. This works for me because I love meat, love cheese. I have been buying good cold cuts and enjoying them with mustard. Meats I enjoy: Roast beef, prosciutto, Parma ham. Cheeses I enjoy: Prima Donna, Old Amsterdam, Parrano. You will note that they are all hard, but you are allowed to eat soft cheeses too, just not too much because they have more carbs. If you don't know what hard cheese to pick, ask your cheese man for an aged Gouda. Chicken tenders are good too.
- I once went for a whole week where I ate exactly the same thing every day. (Meat sticks in the afternoon, and a Cobb salad at night.) This was a really useful exercise in calibrating my appetite and satiety: it set a baseline so I learned exactly how my body responded to food and to lack of food. After that week, when I started eating other foods, I was much more attuned to how my body responded to those foods. So a dietary reset is an interesting experience that I recommend.
  - You should be eating more meat than cheese. If you eat too much cheese, your body will use dietary fat, not body fat.
  - But some amount of fats are very helpful. Fats make you feel full so you stop eating sooner. In fact, people who can't lose weight any other way are put on the Fat Fast: mayonnaise, bacon, pate, tuna salad. And yes, they lose weight.
- At dinner, have a salad or other vegetables. Fiber keeps you regular. I like (well, tolerate) asparagus and broccoli. Also, Cosi makes a very nice Cobb salad. A small amount of carbs is okay at this time, because you will burn them when you sleep, and if there's insulin hunger, you won't notice. But it is important that you don't have too much glucose/glycogen left in the morning. This means no big pasta dinners, no huge loaves of bread, no big bowls of rice: they will fill up your glycogen buffers and may start turning into fat. They will keep your insulin high and you will crave waffles and pancakes in the morning.
The first couple of days on this diet, as your glycogen reserves are used up, you will notice yourself peeing a lot. This is because when glycogen gets turned into glucose, a lot of water is released as a byproduct. When people say that the first few pounds you lose are water, this is what they mean. It is true.
You can expect to lose one or two pounds a week doing this. After you've reached your goal weight, you can start eating carbs again, but not so many carbs that you max out the glycogen buffers and start turning glycogen into fat. We'll still be metabolically disadvantaged compared to naturally thin people until we figure out a way to turn on our Brown Adipose Tissue. Once you reach your goal weight, start building muscle; this will increase your basal metabolic rate and burn more calories every day so you can eat more. Until I reach my goal weight, though, I am not going to go to the gym, because all the fat I carry around on me makes exercise uncomfortable.
Before you put anything in your mouth, ask yourself: do I really feel like eating, or am I doing it out of habit? If you're doing it out of habit, stop. If you're doing it because your mouth is itchy, stop. If you're doing it because someone has invited you to join them, say no-thank-you, politely.
If this diet works for you, write to me and let me know.
If you live within a hundred miles of New York City, before you start the diet, go to H&H and enjoy the best bagels in the world. (I love their everything and garlic flavours, with Philadelphia cream cheese.) When you reach your goal weight, you can go back to H&H and eat their bagels again. The thought of H&H bagels in my future keeps me on the diet.
If you have a lot of time on your hands, and a tolerance for self-indulgent prose, you may want to read The Hacker's Diet.