Dr. Eric Westman presenting The Science Behind Low Carb High Fat

“Well, after 58 years I know what does and doesn’t work for my body nutritionally quite well. If things change I’ll then look to the source of that change. But there’s no such “reality” I have to deal with now.”

Remember, however, this discussion was not about you. The discussion was about people who do not have the ability to lose significant amounts of body fat by exercise. You wrote:

“Not really an issue if you exercise enough to burn it off as glycogen.”

As I originally observed, people experiencing metabolic syndrome lack the metabolic capability to reduce significant body fat by exercise.

"Remember, however, this discussion was not about you. The discussion was about people who do not have the ability to lose significant amounts of body fat by exercise."

No, my original post was in response to your blanket assertion, in response to someone else's comment about bacon, that eating meat would necessarily inhibit weight loss. Nothing in the title to this thread, the original article or your comment qualified the discussion to those suffering from "metabolic syndrome". And that's fine. I'll leave the discussion to only those suffering from this condition or interested in it. I only clicked on the thread out of a general interest in fitness and nutrition but I'm not that interested in a specialized condition that only applies to a limited number of people. For those who are interested in this, please carry on. I'll leave.

“No, my original post was in response to your blanket assertion, in response to someone else’s comment about bacon, that eating meat would necessarily inhibit weight loss. Nothing in the title to this thread, the original article or your comment qualified the discussion to those suffering from “metabolic syndrome”.”

You seem to be laboring under a misunderstanding. The original comments were:

“â€œis the all bacon diet I have dreamed of?â€”

“No. The proteins in meats convert to glucose in the blood raising blood sugars. So, meat/protein must be limited to only adequate levels.”

You came into the discussion and tried to say my comment was false because of your personal experiences with weight loss. What you seem to be missing here is the fact that you obviously 1. did not consume enough protein from eating enough bacon and other proteins and carbohydrates together for a prolonged enough period of time to induce metabolic syndrome as a consequence of the glucose derived from the proteins and carbohydrates to start the causal chain of fatty liver, fatty pancreas, insulin insensitivity, increasing blood glucose, increasing insulin, further insulin insensitivity, lipase inhibition, fat burning inhibition, progressive weight gain, obesity, cortisol stimulation, further insulin insensitivity, further elevated blood glucose, onset of Type II Diabetes mellitus, and so forth. It all starts with a diet high in glucose that prompts the development of the fatty liver and fatty pancreas. You are likely unaffected in part due to genetics giving you a higher sensitivity to insulin and lipase control than the general population. That brings us to where eyou wrote:

“a specialized condition that only applies to a limited number of people”

This is in no way a specialized condition. That is one of the important points to be learned in these videos. Insulin insensitivity and the way in which the lipase control sets up so-called metabolic syndrome for the retention of body fat is actually a survival mechanism built into all human beings as a mechanism to cope with starvation. The only “specialized condition” involved in these metabolic disorders is the historically unprecedented quantities of carbohydrates that have been included in our diets of almost all kinds since the early 20th Century and super-sized even further since about 1991. The percentage of the population being affected by diabetes in the U.S. Alone has been tripling, and the number of people in the U.S. who have already entered into metabolic syndrome due to overexposure to carbohydrates in their diets is now the vast majority of the entire U.S. population of more than 300 million people. The number of people who are not currently in a stage of metabolic syndrome in the U.S. is now the MINORITY of our population. If you are not in metabolic syndrome, you are part of a very fortunate minority now.

"What you seem to be missing here is the fact that you obviously 1. did not consume enough protein from eating enough bacon and other proteins and carbohydrates together for a prolonged enough period of time to induce metabolic syndrome"

Nonsense. I've eaten a gram of protein for each pound of body weight daily for the last 15 years. That's more than 90% of the population consumes. If I don't eat enough protein to trigger this then virtually nobody does.

“Nonsense. I’ve eaten a gram of protein for each pound of body weight daily for the last 15 years. That’s more than 90% of the population consumes. If I don’t eat enough protein to trigger this then virtually nobody does.”

First of all, the example that prompted my original comment contemplated all the bacon a person could dream of eating, in other words upwards of 100 percent of a person’s daily calories on permanent basis. Such a diet would cause serious health problems for a variety of nutritional reasons, particularly with respect to the micronutrients missing from the lack of carbohydrates.

Second, your level of dietary protein is not problematical so long as it does not contribute to maintaining chronic elevated blood glucose levels and chronic elevated insulin levels. Your assumption that your dietary experience is comparable to the response of the general population to the same dietary experience is s false assumption. Genetic differences in the handling of metabolic functions is responsible for large differences in the metabolic differences to the same diets. So too does differences in exposure to cortisol as a response to systemic inflammation, stress, lack of sleep, and so forth.

If you happen to be more typical in your body’s metabolic responses, we can force your body to enter a condition of persistent metabolic syndrome by overfeeding you with greater than 1000 grams of carbohydrates per day for a period of years with meals and beverages at regular 3 to 4 hour intervals around the 24 hour daily cycle for a period of years. This chronic condition will over time fatten your liver just like a goose being fed corn kernals to fatten its liver to manufacture patie de fois gras liver sausage. As your liver becomes fattened, you will develop metabolic syndrome, then pre-diabetes, and finally full blown diabetes. However, if you are one of those rare individuals with the genetics does not permit your lipase levels to retain liver in the adipose tissues, it could prove to be very difficult to fatten your liver, force you into a chronic state of metabolic syndrome, and onwards into diabetes. If so, however, you would be a rare minority of the population who would instead soon find themselves in a state where there lipase triggers would not allow them to burn fat from the adipose tissues despite low calorie diets and/or exercise.

Are you one of these people who seemingly cannot gain weight no matter how much carbohydrates and other food they eat?

"Are you one of these people who seemingly cannot gain weight no matter how much carbohydrates and other food they eat?"

Not at all. It's always been very easy for me to add or lose as much weight as I wanted within a "relatively" (compared to others) short period of time. However, I generally focus on bodyfat percentage rather than weight because I have a large percentage of muscle mass and tracking only "weight" or BMI is generally very misleading. My Holy Grail is to shred bodyfat while maintaining or increasing muscle mass. A very difficult objective.

I am familiar with Atkins, but that list of acceptable foods includes meats in virtually unlimited quantities.

Is there a list of foods that is recommended for this low carb high fat diet?

Thank you.

Setting aside the more obvious examples of people who do engage in gluttony and sloth in the way obese people are generally accused without distinction, there are even more people who become obese and diabetic without gluttony and sloth. Coming out of high school you’re so skinny people keep making suggestions about what you can do to put some flesh on your ribs so you don’t look like you are all skin and bones. Little do they know that your diet and sugary beverages have already silently and considerably fattened your liver and pancreas. Two years later you have already completed your basic and advanced military training. The military training has improved your weight and improved your muscle tone and endurance. There is just one problem. You have begun to gain a little weight in the gut and expanded your waist line by one pant size since finishing your advanced training. A few years later you have been honorably discharged from military service after struggling hard to maintain your required weight, and you have gone to work in private industry or government employment. You makeup for the lack of exercise at work by performing an average of five or more hours of of aerobic and anaerobic exercise per week before and after work. To deal with the increased waist size you also decreased your daily caloric intake of food from a lightly active maintenance level of 2,600 calories per day to only 1,800 calories per day. This means your diet should result in a deficit of about 700 calories per day or 4,900 calories per week. Since a1 pound of fat equals some 3,500 calories, you expect to see a loss of more than 1 pound of body fat per week. Instead you see that you have gained three pounds of body fat and loss one pound of muscle for a net weight gain of two pounds. Perplexed, you lower your daily calories to the minimum recommended for males at 1,500 calories per day. You’re getting hungry and cranky between meals, but you persevere and redouble your efforts to exercise more and better. You continue to gain body fat and weight as you lose muscle mass. Your waistline continues to expand. You have now gone from a 32 inch waist to a 42 inch waist. You keep lowering your daily calories to 1,200 calories per day, 1,100 calories per day, 1,000 calories per day, and 900 calories per day. your weight has gone from 175 Lbs. to 250 lbs while you eat half the food of the 100 lb girl in the family. After spending nearly a year on a diet of only 600 to 1000 calories per day you are now have trouble with having bowel movements. You simply do not have enough food intake for your bowels to move on a regular basis. Your concentration starvation diet is making you very lethargic and compromising your general health with a chronic shortage of vital micronutrients. Finally you concede defeat and go back to eating 1,400 to 1,500 calories perday, and you step up in weight by another 15 lbs. to a weight of 265 lbs. and a waistline of 48 inches. Along the way your eyesight became seriously impaired, you are diagnosed with diabetic retinopathy, and the family doctor gravely announces your blood sugars are far out of control because you now have Diabetes mellitus Type II. The doctor advises you to make your will and put your affairs in to order, because your life expectancy has now been deemed to be limited to not more than about another ten years. ou are only 46 years old. You exercise regularly, you’ve eaten a balanced diet more or less your entire adult life. You don’t smoke. You don’t drink alcohol. You limited and then stopped drinking sugary beverages more than a decade later. You ask the doctor what you can do now? The doctor replies that you must be eating too many calories and need to exercise more. You look at the doctor and think, “Say what!” A number of years later you have been on diabetic medications meant to lower your blood sugars closer to normal levels, but it becomes more and more impossible to do so as the months and years pass. Your eyes become more and more blinded with cataracts. You’re losing sensation in your feet as neuropathy very painfully and slowly destroys the nerves in your feet and legs. Your lower legs and feet begin to swell with edema caused by the diabetes and neuropathy. You can no longer wear normal shoes or walk or exercise normally. You have to be hospitalized when a leg suffers an idiopathic bacterial infection described as Cellulitis. You are hospitalized to treat the infection as your temperature rises, you feel ice cold and frozen, shiver uncontrollably, become nauseous, become dizzy, and enter into toxic shock as you reach the emergency room of the hospital. After evaluating you, they debate on whether or not they are going to have to take your leg off in an amputation procedure. The test results come back, and you get to keep your leg...maybe...for now...if your condition does not worsen despite the antibiotics being pumped into your body. You were lucky...this time. The antibiotics were effective...this time. But you still have swollen legs and feet which are partially numb and partially subject to searing shocks of burning and electric pain every time the nerves suffer another insult and die off a little more. AS quickly as you recover from your days in the hospital, you resume your exercise. but now you have to wear compression garments to help the blood flow in your limbs, because you don’t want to risk another bacterial infection, amputation, or death in the event such an infection reaches your heart. Your exercise schedule has to be planned around all of your medical appointments. The doctors are all but sure you are likely to have Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), and they have to spend an awful lot of time and money to make sure you don’t have CHF after all. Depending upon your skill in handling the doctors, you are either being further killed a pill at a time with half a dozen bottles of medications to treat the high blood sugars, the edema, your eyes, your so on and so on and so on..., or you artfully dodged all but one or two of those medications. The only problem is the question of how you are going to get your doctor to tell you how to stop this madness and find a way to stop the progression of the diabetes and perhaps even reverse it to get well again and lose all of this ever increasing weight gain. Instead, the doctors just repeat the same old suggestions as before. Take your insulin or oral medications like a could little diabetic patient and be advised there is nothing more than diet and exercise you can do to slow down the progression of the disease; unless you submit to bariatric surgery that will put a band around your stomach and shrink it, but there are no guarantees something won’t go horribly wrong. You now weight 270 lbs., and the doctor offers no way of stopping the progressive worsening of your situation. you now have a 50 inch waistline, the muscles in your arms, legs, and buttocks have all but vanished, and your weight is now 270 lbs. with no end in sight other than medical complications and a premature, yet long, and painful death.

The above scenario is what is happening to tens of millions of Americans who have NOT been pigging out or behaving like gluttons and sloths. What is so very inexplicable about this whole affair is the way in which the U.S. Government has prevailed upon the medical community to not educate new physicians about the means to stop this madness by using a proven medical treatment known for a century or longer to reverse diabetes mellitus and restore the health of millions of patients afflicted with these medical problems as a consequence of the U.S. Government promoted dietary guidelines.