Over and over on lowcarb lists I've watched people come in and ask wouldn't be just a brilliant idea to combine lowfat and lowcarb? (A few even come in and proudly report that they have already decided to do it this way, you know, get the best of both worlds.)
I generally hate and skip hypothetical questions like this... What if and why, y'know? I'm (perhaps incorrectly) assuming they haven't even started lowcarb, they may never start, yet they're already trying to figure out ways to improve it? Isn't that sort of interesting?
Anyway, one of the things I don't want to spend my time doing is convincing people to do lowcarb, or selling it (that's a boundary I've developed). I only want to try to help people who are having a hard time DOING it. I think that's because before anybody has even a chance of becoming successful at this, they need to make an internal change/acknowledgement that what they've been doing is NOT working and that they really do need to change.
But in some senses, these are good, logical and understandable questions that probably should be addressed now and then...so...
I have two short observations/opinions on this. The first is to advise you to look around any public place you find yourself in and decide for yourslf how "reducing the fat" in the American diet for the last 30 years or so, has been working?
My second is a warning that...yes, lowfat and reduced calorie lowcarb will work (for WEIGHT LOSS) in some bodies for SOME time...sometimes just a few weeks, sometimes even for several years. But I call "several years" in this case a relatively short time. Either way, I've seen nothing but EVENTUAL weight GAIN *and* increased long-term (as in forever) resistance to weight loss/normalization from people following this approach.
This is what I believe the experts are talking about when they say that "diets make you fat". I am finally understanding and totally believing that. And I am believing this about lowcarb "dieting" just as much as lowfat.
Yes some people absolutely DO eventually tend to overeat on lowcarb, they eat too many calories and they need to start paying close attention to lose. But trying to fix that by cutting calories (especially FAT calories) to rates below their body's basal metabolic rate ends up boomeranging virtually every single time. The challenge facing these types of people (99% of them emotionally addicted eaters) is to stabilize their calories at a sane rate, at 200-250 calories above their metabolic rate. This, sadly, is a boring proposition to unacknowledged all-or-nothing addicted eaters.
