Are High Protein, Low Carb Diets Healthy?

July 29th, 2008 | Posted in Dangers of fast weight loss

In order to understand the dangers of dis-balanced weight loss diets and the sequels they may leave in our body, we have to understand first how the human body transforms various types of foods into vital energy. Each time you choose a diet for losing several pounds or more, you need to seriously weight the benefits with the dangers and to ask yourself if you are prepared to trade your health for a temporary weight loss.

The foods we eat contain three major components:

Proteins:

Found in meat, eggs, milk, cheese, proteins contain 4 kilocalories per gram. Proteins need to be part of the daily diet, because in case the body detects a lack of protein intake, it will consume the protein from the muscle mass in order to supply vital energy, leading to muscle wasting. Various sources (like the RDA – Recommended Dietary Allowance) recommend the daily protein intake to be about 46 grams for women and 56 grams for men (aged 19-70), or between 0.8 gram and 1.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Of course, physical activity is a factor which needs to be considered, as well as the body’s need for essential amino acids and nitrogen.

Protein deficiency in nutrition may cause poor health, reduced intelligence or even mental retardation.

Protein excess is also a problem, because the body cannot store it in this form, thus converting it into fatty acids or sugars. Nitrogen is removed from the amino acids by the liver, and excreted by the kidneys as urea, in urine. In case of kidney disease, urea can be harmful, and a low protein diet may be recommended.

Proteins are amongst the most widespread allergens, thus causing a big number of food allergies.

Carbohydrates (or carbs)

Carbohydrates are biomolecules which have the role of storing and transporting the energy in the body. Their digestion requires less water than the digestion of proteins or fats. Carbs are not essential nutrients, because the human body can take all the needed energy from proteins and fats. Carbs contain 3.75 kilocalories per gram and they can be found in foods such as bread, pasta, cereals, beans, potatoes or rice.

Carbs are classified by dietitians and nutritionists in two major groups: simple and complex. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, published by USDA in 2005, gives up this simple – complex classification of carbs, instead recommending fiber-rich foods and whole grains to be consumed for the daily carb intake.

Lipids (fats)

Lipids are very important for a healthy nutrition. While some of them are essential for life, others may be harmful and may be risk factors for heart diseases (like cholesterol, in the case of hypercholesterolemia). Fatty acids are also lipids, and scientists believe that the human body needs essential fatty acids such as omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids. They are contained in fish oil, and this is why many specialists recommend fish consumption at least three times a week.

Besides the risk of obesity, a high fat intake seriously increases risk for major illnesses, such as diabetes or atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis consists of plaque building up on the inner walls of the arteries, thus generation coronary and cardiovascular diseases like heart attacks or strokes.

What Happens During Low Carb, High Protein Diets

As you’ve already seen, a low level of carbohydrates in nutrition is not a problem for the body, as carbs are not essential nutrients. However, in case you suffer from kidney diseases, you shouldn’t go for high protein diets, because your body would encounter problems in urea excretion.

A study published by the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, in 2005, shows that the anorexic effect of protein may contribute to the weight loss produced by low-carb diets:

An increase in dietary protein from 15% to 30% of energy at a constant carbohydrate intake produces a sustained decrease in ad libitum caloric intake that may be mediated by increased central nervous system leptin sensitivity and results in significant weight loss. This anorexic effect of protein may contribute to the weight loss produced by low-carbohydrate diets.

(Sopurce: PubMed – indexed for Medline)

So, it seems that high-protein diets really help people lose weight. However, there’s another study, published in 2007 in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, done by Professor A. Trichopoulou and his colleagues at Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Athens Medical School, which aimed to assess the relationship between long-term weight control with low-carb-high-protein diets and mortality. Conclusions of this study done on a sample of adult Greek population:

Prolonged consumption of diets low in carbohydrates and high in protein is associated with an increase in total mortality.

As you can see, the issue of choosing a healthy weight loss plan is more complex than it seems at first glance. This is why a specialist’s advice is priceless and why a bit of research on how our body works can help us understand how easy it is to harm ourselves even with simple wishes such as to get rid of 5-6 pounds to look better.

Keep Healthy While Losing Weight

July 26th, 2008 | Posted in Weight loss general

One of your main goals when losing weight should be to keep healthy. Nobody wants to get fit with the price of giving up health, at least this is what I like to believe.

Keeping healthy during weight loss diets is not as hard as you may be thinking. It requires only a little bit of attention to base your diet on healthy recipes, be them vegetarian or not, on healthy desserts low on sugar, and on respecting a few eating principles which are the key to a healthy nutrition and lifestyle:

1. Breakfast should be your main meal of the day. Never skip breakfast. Your body and your mind need energy to function well, and if you fail on supplying them with this energy in the morning, by 11 o click you’ll be already tired and not productive. Nothing compares with a healthy breakfast to start your day with.
2. It is better to eat five times a day in smaller quantities than eating only three bigger meals. If you eat only 3 meals, your last one would probably be around 7 o clock in the afternoon. If you like to stay up late, you’ll end up by getting to sleep in hunger or by eating at midnight. None of these is OK for a good night rest.
3. Healthy options for menus are not a difficult choice if you take into consideration that on average, a person needs between 1500 and 2500 calories to get energy for a whole day. The main three elements of all foods are carbohydrates, proteins and glucose. Proteins and glucose have about 5 calories per gram, while carbohydrates (or carbs) have on average 10 calories per gram. Keep healthy by eating a balanced menu each day.
4. Fruits should be eaten at separate meals, preferably in the first part of the day. This is because the time your stomach needs to digest fruits is different from the time needed to digest meat, for example. If you mix the two, by eating fruits at the end of a meat-based meal, those fruits would be required to stay in the stomach longer than they really need, leading to fermentation and causing you bloating and digestion troubles. Keep healthy by keeping fruits separate from other foods (half an hour pause after you eat the fruits would be OK).
5. Eat fish at least three times a week. Fish is rich in Omega 3 fatty acids, which are considered to be essential if you want to keep healthy. Fish oil stimulates blood circulation, increases the breakdown of fibrin, a compound with a major role in scar formation, and additionally has been shown to reduce blood pressure. There is strong scientific evidence that n−3 fatty acids significantly reduce blood triglyceride levels and regular intake reduces the risk of heart attack.
6. Exercise. There are many people who are very busy or just sedentary, who wish to lose weight by miracle, or by taking a pill, without any efforts. Exercising doesn’t mean that you really have to sweat every day in the gym and make your heart get tired. You need to adapt the effort level at your age and your health condition. A fitness trainer might be of good help here, if you want to keep healthy.

Weight Loss Methods Quick Overview

July 18th, 2008 | Posted in Weight loss general

Since our modern society has altered the natural lifestyle of the human race, weight became more and more an issue for lots of people. Sedentarism and unhealthy nutrition had a heavy contribution to the increase of the overweight persons number, and this effect was observed mostly in well-developed countries.

Weight is more than just some extra pounds to be carried on your back: being overweight has implications upon the proper functioning of various body organs: the heart suffers if it has to pump blood in a much bigger body than it was designed for; your knees and spine suffer, like all other bones, when being forced to carry additional weight; your liver has troubles in processing the fat foods you give it; your arteries get clogged due to the bad cholesterol that adds up in your body in case of inappropriate eating habits. Besides, you may develop skin troubles such as cellulite, and you may soon find yourself in the situation of needing to follow a good cellulite diet for looking good again.

Fad Diets

This how the idea of weight loss appeared: people realized that something is happening with their body when getting a few extra pounds (or even more than just a few) and a new medical specialty was born: nutritionists. But going to doctors is not so much of a desired activity for many of us, so we started to believe that we can get the same results by following some common sense rules of losing weight, and so the fad diets appeared. Fad diets is the generic name for all weight loss diets which don’t have a scientific basis to support they supposed way of action. We will have the chance to tackle in detail all these popular diets, but for now, we are just going to enumerate few of them here:

• The grapefruit diet
• The cabbage soup diet
• The chocolate diet
• The lemonade diet
• The chicken soup diet
• The South Beach diet
• The Atkins diet
• The Hollywood diet
• The One good meal diet
• The 3 day diet
• The 7 day “all you can eat” diet
• The Weight Watchers diet
• The metabolism diet

Weight Loss Surgery

Slaves to cravings and to the eating pleasures, some of us got so fat that no diet in the world gave results anymore. Being so much overweight, workouts became impossible for those people. Sometimes, even simple walking became impossible, and thus, they were forced to lay in bed all day long and get their friends and family help them even with the easiest things like eating or washing, or even scratching a foot. For such situations, medicine was able to help only by drastic measures, like the gastric bypass, which is a surgery procedure that leaves the patient with a very small stomach, thus making eating possible only in very small quantities. There are lots of people who were saved by this weight loss surgery procedure, but they had to change their eating habits for the whole rest of their life.

Not everybody can be a good patient for undergoing gastric bypass, so the doctors run a lot of tests before deciding if an overweight person is a good candidate or not. The surgery is life threatening, and in case of patients with lots of complimentary conditions, it may not be a viable option. Anesthesia can be dangerous if, for example, you suffer from severe heart failures, thus making any major surgery practically impossible.

Weight Loss Pills

Some of us love eating so much, that they’d rather swallow a bunch of pills every day than trying to have a balanced nutrition and an active lifestyle. Drug manufacturers took advantage of this human weakness and developed weight loss pills that work by cutting down your appetite, or by fat-binding. Literally thousands of weight loss supplements have flooded the markets, promising people beautiful bodies without giving up the eating pleasure. Some of the claims of such food supplements are quite funny: for example, Spirulin is believed to have both increasing appetite and decreasing appetite properties, depending on the moment you take it (taken before meals it cuts your appetite, while taken after the meal it would make you wish to eat more). As funny as it sounds, there are people who actually believe this kind of things, and dream to get a quick weight loss without any sacrifice at all and without getting ill due to metabolism changes.

Weight Loss Calculators

Since science discovered calories, weight loss diets and plans started to get a scientific base. It has been proven that in order to function, our body consumes calories. Even simple activities like eating or brushing our teeth need a certain number of calories to run. The digestion process is run on calories. All life sustaining, involuntary activities, need certain numbers of calories to run.

Under these circumstances, the theory says that if somebody wants to lose weight, the number of ingested calories should be smaller than the number of calories consumed during the day. In reverse, if some person is trying to gain weight, then the calories intake needs to be bigger than the calories consumption. In this weight loss zone, the doctors have a word to say, because a wealthy nutrition supposes a balanced combination of proteins, glucose and carbohydrates, and not eating only one thing until you get metabolic troubles.

Fitness Models

Fitness models have been developed when people realized the importance of physical fitness in controlling their body weight. Consequently, a wide range of fitness equipment and workout machines were developed, some of them with the sole purpose of working out a certain group of muscles, like the ones for abs and stomach.

As we are social animals, we hate to do such activities like workouts by ourselves, hidden in our homes, and this is how fitness centers appeared. Besides the social component of such fitness clubs and centers, there is also a practical side: fitness equipment can be quite expensive and many times it is rather big, so it barely can fit in a normal home. Why have a treadmill of your own and dedicate half of your living room to it, when you can go to the nearest gym and get your daily workouts done under the surveillance of a professional fitness trainer?

For those of us who like to study, well-known personal fitness trainers have written books which can offer us a deeper look into the secrets of weight loss through workout programs.

Weight Loss Motivation

Motivation is an extremely important chapter in any weight loss adventure: many times, you need to have a very strong will in order to resist temptations. For instance, alcohol is well-known to be the enemy of any diet and fitness program, but how easy is it to refrain from it when you go out with friends, or when you go to a lot of parties and celebrations and you want to have fun?

One more example: if you are the only person on a weight loss diet in your family, how easy is it to open the fridge and not to take any of the goodies which other family members put inside for their consumption, but which are absolutely forbidden in your case?

There was a study done in the US which has shown that weight loss programs have more chances to succeed if all family members follow them in the same time. In this way, they can support each other and all temptations are removed from their fridge, as there makes no sense to buy foods that you are not allowed to eat.