| > Such diets are still better than the SAD, but you'd get a similar bang for the buck in terms of satiety and healthfulness ... if you just stuck with whole foods at least 80% of the time. Another useful benefit of Keto is that the rules are really simple. That sticking with whole foods 80% of the time is the hard part, there is temptation everywhere, e.g. the Girlscout cookies on desks at work, free granola bars, etc etc. A decent % of our society is geared towards getting people to eat more. Keto says "you can't eat any of that junk". Just, flat out. No points, no "a little bit of ice cream", just, no. The easy calories are not an option. > Then the dreaded plateau appears, which can happen pretty fast on keto, esp due to the propaganda that calories don't matter. Plateau's happen for many reasons, and a lot of them are not yet fully understood. For years there were stories of people eating below maintenance who aren't losing weight, and just recently science has learned that gut biomes can drop (increase?) their efficiency and result in a lower BMR than normal. Of course at the end of the day, getting a 6 pack requires being hungry. There is no getting around that! (Well other than being under 24 and very physically active, but that's a very time boxes solution! ;) ) |
> "Keto says "you can't eat any of that junk". Just, flat out. No points, no "a little bit of ice cream", just, no. The easy calories are not an option."
This is also a recipe for getting an eating disorder. You can't stick with this mentality unless you end up thinking that carbs are poison, which is factually wrong and a very unhealthy mentality. And do you have the same mentality about fats? Those are "easy calories" too.
Sometimes it's OK to just have one cookie. If that doesn't work for you, fine, I've been there and I can understand wanting 100% compliance, but personally I feel much better since giving up on such a goal — because no, food is not poison, food is not alcohol, chronic overeating is the problem (aka energy poisoning) and chronic overeating can happen once you develop what they call "an unhealthy relationship with food".
I now naturally want whole foods, because I get to eat more volume and it keeps me full for longer. Once I got the taste of it, I don't need to fear food categories in order to stay on path.
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> "For years there were stories of people eating below maintenance who aren't losing weight"
There's no such thing. People that eat below maintenance and not losing weight are either:
(1) underestimating their calories intake or
(2) have overestimated their maintenance requirements
If you're not losing weight, then by definition you're not eating below maintenance. And note that it is true that some medical conditions, like hypothyroidism, lead to a lowered metabolic rate (the thyroid is responsible for raising your body temperature for example), but in all cases we aren't talking about more than 200 - 300 kcal. So in order to lose weight, even people suffering from hypothyroidism can simply eat 2-300 kcal less — it's harder but it can be done. And if you claim a bigger penalty than that, you start breaking the laws of physics.
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> "just recently science has learned that gut biomes can drop (increase?) their efficiency and result in a lower BMR than normal"
No, that did not happen. The research you're talking about was inconclusive and it was done IN MICE.
There are indications that the health of the microbiome is important, however the associations between the _human_ microbiome and obesity are weak and don't appear to be causal.
I.e. people that are obese tend to eat a less diverse diet (less whole plants). Such people also have less diversity in their microbiome. You cannot infer from that the microbiome is what caused their obesity, the huge confounder in such associations being the diet itself.