This week on Fitness Rocks I review an article from the New England Journal of Medicine that confronts the mythology about dietary macronutrients and weight loss. You’ll like it. What’s important in the quest for weight loss – fat, carbohydrate, protein, calories or sticking with a healthy lifestyle that includes a low-calorie diet and regular exercise?
Play Podcast 134
References:
Comparison of Weight Loss Diets with Different Amounts of Fat, Protein, and Carbohydrate
Related posts:
Celebrities who take on low-carb diets are already at a really low BMI – surely that makes a difference? If they ate the diet these people ate – they’d probably put ON weight!
I think what all the debates and “studies” fail to take into account are the great differences in physiology between races, genders, individual metabolic rates, etc. as well as several human factors such as access to healthy food options and ability to exercise. I have a hard time believing that any single diet will work for all people and on the flip side I cannot believe that any one diet is “bad” for all people. The question isn’t which is the better diet for everyone, but which is the best diet for you as an individual. For full disclosure, I have recently lost 95 pounds in about a year on a modified low-carb diet (my wife has lost 115) and I just got a clean bill of health from my doctor. While I can’t definitively say our weight loss was due solely to the mix of macronutrients we ate, it’s quite possible that we were successful more because we supported each other and stuck with it, I can say that for us the low-carb diet has worked better than the others we tried. My best friend, however, lost 80 pounds following Michael Pollan’s advice (the author of In Defense of Food) which can be boiled down to “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This was successful for him and seems to be more in line with the opinions of this podcast. My point is that the choice of macronutrients is probably very important but no study or survey will adequately measure the importance because the choice affects your individual physiology and psychology (for example, on the low-carb diet I never felt like I was truly hungry which helped me overcome the cravings) which can’t easily be quantified or compared. This is why most doctors and dieticians throw their hands up and say “macronutrients don’t matter.” Satiety was a major factor for me, while the general feeling of well-being for “eating green” was an important motivating factor for my friend. Our choices of macronutrients significantly affected these factors.
Gary,
Thanks for the observations. The real issue is health, and weight loss should be a secondary phenomenon to living a healthy lifestyle. Michael Pollan’s advice to eat mostly plants is backed up by decades of research on the issue of what people (of all backgrounds) should be eating to achieve the lowest rates of chronic diseases. Not being overweight is a critical element for good health – but this is where people get confused. Focusing on weight loss as the primary goal instead of health is what drives the fad diet industry. It is also why so many people experience “yo-yo” weight loss.
Fitness Rocks is a review of the peer-reviewed medical research that clearly shows the benefits of sustainable health habits – for all people. And this research is remarkably consistent over the past several decades.
Congratulations on your success losing weight.
Monte