I’m with ya on those real foods thing you mentioned, I love them all, and indulge. My BP just measured is 124 over 75 with a heart rate of 64. Best of both worlds, and I’m full of beer. Mother was nuts for that Weight Watchers crap, and I’d bet that stuff played a role in her early exit @ 66 YO. She also smoked...
Oh, forgot, also take Atorvastatin and 6 more scripts. We’ll see...
In fact, fat and protein are necessary for the body to trigger the satiety elements in the brain so that people aren't hungry. Too much insulin not only interferes with this, insulin actually increases hunger.
Chronically high insulin levels can eventually lead to a situation where the signals are to send the food you eat directly to fat storage, instead of to the cells to get what they need, so that the whole system is basically needing nutrition, and thinks it is starving.
It's like the income tax. You need 2000 per month to pay bills, but the government takes more, and only leaves you 1500, so then you have to get a job to do some more work to bring in the extra 500.
What amazed me, was that some fairly recent studies were done to try and demonstrate that the Atkins diet was not healthy and would increase blood lipids. So they divided people up into groups following the Atkins, Mediterranean, and Heart Healthy low fat diet.
Atkins worked better than the others, for weight loss as well as bringing the lipids to healthier levels. Atkins has been very misrepresented, as they focus totally on the first 2 weeks. They also make it seem like he recommended that people stuff themselves on fats and meats.
He in fact was treating starchy foods similar to the way that Doctors tell you to treat food allergies. Eliminate the most likely for a while, and then add them back one at a time to see how your body reacts.
Once people lost weight, they were to add back carbs 5 or 10 grams at a time to see what their body could tolerate. Many people just go back to eating exactly what they ate before the diet, and then wonder why they gained the weight back. The answer is found in the hormones: insulin, leptin, and cortisol.
Adequate protein, healthy fats, veggies, fruits are all part of healthy diets. Excessive starches are not. Between meal snacking can also pack on the pounds, as it keeps the insulin level up for an extended period, and the snacks tend to be inferior in nutrition - like Twinkies, cookies etc. I am convinced that the best way to bring down healthcare costs is for people to go back to eating a healthy whole food diet-hopefully before healthcare/entitlements bankrupt us.