[netcraft]

I'm 31. A recent physical revealed that I have both high blood pressure and high cholesterol. They've put me on meds for the bp (which is now under control rather well) but they wanted me to try a lifestyle change before putting me on cholesterol meds. I was ~ 10 lbs overweight, nothing major - and while I wouldn't say I am fit by any means I wasn't out of shape either. But they wanted me to lose the 10 lbs and so they told me to stay under 2500mg of sodium per day, and less than 150g of carbs per day - no more than 50g per meal. And no red meat - all I can have meat wise basically is chicken, turkey and fish. Occasional lean pork.

I am two months into it - and have already lost 15 lbs, without any additional exercise. The carbs were rather easy to give up really - less sugar in my coffee, no pasta, few potatoes. Sodas were a little harder, but at 40g of sugar for a single Dr. Pepper, the choice between that or a whole sandwich is an easy one to make. The sodium is quite hard if not impossible though, unless you make every meal at home and only use fresh ingredients. If it is in a box, bag or can you can forget it. There is hardly anything at any restaurant you can get that is low sodium though. Even salads are absolutely loaded with sodium.

I will say I feel a little better, and not just from losing a couple inches around my waist. Water all day certainly helps. I don't think my cholesterol numbers are going anywhere really, I think my genetics are to blame, but I hope not.

Just a short anecdote, but if you sit behind a desk all day and have put on a few lbs, its fairly easy to give up the fast food and watch your carbs. It sure didn't seem like it at first though.

[fleitz]

It's weird how that stuff works.

I'm 32, my last physical revealed that I'm 63 lbs overweight, I smoke (pack a day), drink fairly regularly, my blood pressure is fine, my cholesterol is fine, and have a great insulin response. Lung capacity is definitely not where it should be though.

I also eat almost entirely meat and carbs, save for lettuce/salad. I can drop 5 lbs in a couple weeks just giving up soda, 10 lbs if I give up carbs entirely.

I think the low fat / no meat thing is a load of crap. At least for me all I have to do is drop the carbs, and especially sugar.

[mason55]

Have you kept going past the 5 - 10 pounds? It's doubtful that you'll continue to shed weight at that rate. What happens is that without carbs your body's glycogen stores begin to deplete when you stops eating carbs (carbs are essential to glycogen production). Your muscles will take a week or two to flush out all the fluid they were holding on to before eventually stabilizing at a new level. Most people tend to drop a lot of weight at the beginning of a diet, especially low or no carb, however once the initial glycogen depletion happens they level off with the weight loss.

Some people hit a plateau and get discouraged or think they're done and start eating carbs again and shoot right back up. Others continue on at a healthy 1 - 2 pounds/week until they reach their goal.

[fleitz]

Yup, I was down to 10-15 lbs overweight before I stopped freelancing (perhaps it should be called free-ranging) and started employment again.

Office job plus free pop and chips plus stress = massive weight gain. I think for me at the core it's a stress + easy access to unhealthy food issue.

[kyllo]

"Carb sensitivity" is also a thing, and some people get a much stronger weight gain response from eating carbs (and weight loss response from not eating them) compared to other people. You might have a relatively high sensitivity to carbs.

[gte910h]

Not everyone is salt sensitive. Talk to them about measuring your salt sensitivity (or you can do it at home, but less reliably).

If salt is hard and the rest is easy, you may find losing weight and exercise the two you worry about, and ignore salt.

[ihsw]

Salt sensitivity is also far easier to manage, and its impact is limited to putting you over the top when shit hits the fan (eg: high-sodium diet can make or break you when you stray into heart-attack territory).

[stcredzero]

There was a Finnish study where they had some people try to control salt intake and others just eat as much salt as they want. The "as much salt as they want" group actually had better health outcomes. Their conclusion was that for most people, the body's salt regulation is actually very good.

[lena]

Link? Studies about salt are notoriously difficult, because hardly anyone actually adheres to a truly low-salt diet, so you get the equivalent of a study that tries to discern whether smoking 1.5 pack of cigarettes (which takes lots of restrain) is any better than 2. Personally, it took 2 months for my blood pressure to start coming down on a high-vegetable low-sodium diet, and I notice that many people already think they are not salt-sensitive if it doesn't work in 2 days. I'm still astonished when I take my blood pressure and it is 115/70 or so. It used to be consistently 150/90.

[kaybe]

During the Mars-500 experiment they ran a low-salt-diet test.

They found that the body cycle for salt is more complicated that thought before and "It is not only worthwhile reducing the amount of salt added to food for those who are ill - even the blood pressure in healthy individuals such as the Mars500 test subjects was reduced." [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500

[1] http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/4329/lessons-from-mars-...

[glaugh]

Here's my favorite summary of the science on salt: http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/2/311.full

[netcraft]

yeah, thats kinda where I am. I don't think I'm salt sensitive, I think I just have bad genes. And the bp meds are managing it rather well. I'm still trying not to go overboard with the salt (I think cutting out fast food was the biggest part of losing weight, beyond the carbs), but I don't worry as much about it. I have also read studies that show too little salt (in the one I read, < 3000mg / day) was just as bad as too much (>8000 / day)

[lena]

Those studies are usually not very good. They often fail to recognize that people who are on a low-sodium diet are very sick, for example (just like those studies that say that a low BMI is very dangerous but fail to control for the fact that very ill people are thin). I just think it would be really strange if humans had such a high need for salt, because until a few hundred years ago people did not add salt to their diet, getting only the naturally occurring sodium from food, and people did just fine.

According to Harvard School of Public Health, salt sensitivity is a myth: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/salt-questions/#...

[netcraft]

Here is the article I was quoting: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/health/panel-finds-no-bene... and the study it was quoting: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22110105

It looks like I had my high end off, it was actually > 7000mg / day.

> Another study, published in 2011, followed 28,800 subjects with high blood pressure ages 55 and older for 4.7 years and analyzed their sodium consumption by urinalysis. The researchers reported that the risks of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and death from heart disease increased significantly for those consuming more than 7,000 milligrams of sodium a day and for those consuming fewer than 3,000 milligrams of sodium a day.

[lena]

In general, I would advice to not get your health advice from the NY Times. This is a response from Harvard's Nutritionsource: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2013/05/17/the-n... who calls it "highly misleading". Nutrition research is difficult, like I said, population studies often fail to account for the fact that in western countries practically the only people who are on a very low sodium diet are people who are already very sick.