Day Six: Don't Bury the Lede (Updated)

I've been reading through Protein Power (Eades and Eades) as I work through this year's self-experiment. After defining how much protein and carbs you will be allowed to consume daily, they discuss how one will slowly increase the intake of carbohydrates as one moves from the very restrictive menus early in the diet to the more relaxed maintenance portion.



At some point, you're going to discover the maximum carbohydrate level that still allows for weight loss. When this happens, they write (page 133):

Remain at that daily total carbohydrate level for two months to allow your fat cell activity to stabilize.⁷

If you're like me, someone who always reads the footnotes, you find:

⁷ The very act of weight loss causes your fat cells to want to store fat. This heightened storage activity falls back to normal after several months.

That seems a strange place to bury what is (in my opinion) one of the more important facts I've read so far in this book. I linked to a story a few days ago in the New York Times, titled The Fat Trap. It's fairly common knowledge in the dieting world that after a person loses weight and stops dieting, the pounds return. In a recent study in Australia which was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found that up to a full year after the subjects had stopped dieting, their body were still acting as if they were starving. And (as if that wasn't bad enough) the ghrelin level in their bodies (often called "the hunger hormone") was 20% higher than the level in their bodies at the start of the diet. In other words, the act of dieting had put them into a hunger state worse than had they never started dieting in the first place!

I talked about this a little in my first post in the series. At one point I weighed about 15 pounds more than I do now and I credit that I haven't gained all of that weight back in the past decade to the fact I changed my diet some. I can't eat and drink like I used to (much less pastas, sweets and beer now) or the pounds will come on quick. Obviously the authors of the NYT piece and Protein Power would agree: once you reach your weight goal (be it through lo-cal, lo-carb or lo-broccoli), you're going to have to stay restricted for some time afterwards. If not, your body will regain the weight ... whether you like it or not.

P.S. Speaking of which, first weigh-in and body-fat calculation is tomorrow. I'm not sure I look any different after this past week but I do know that I've eaten a lot of bacon. Which isn't terrible news at all.

P.P.S. UPDATE: Gary Taubes responded to "The Fat Trap" article here.