Skip to main content

The Results of my Fat Fest Are In

If I listened long enough to you, I'd find a way to believe it's all true. From "Reason to Believe"

At the end of January, I saw my doctor for pain in my shoulder. He examined me and assured me it wasn't injured. Since he rarely sees me, he ordered a blood workup while he had me there. This was about the time I cut out wheat; a month later, I started a low-carb diet. I've read a lot about a low-carb diet not ruining your cholesterol or your waistline, so a few weeks ago, I asked my doctor to order another workup. Here are the before and after results.

BEFORE
January 28, 2010

Typical daily menu:
banana protein shake
cup of caramel corn
one-half baked sweet potato and cottage cheese
turkey sandwich
small salad
one-half apple and low-fat cheese sticks
meatloaf and mashed potatoes
several chocolate candies

Exercise:
Daily workout of either 20-minute high-intensity aerobics or 50-minute weightlifting session (Body for Life)

Weight: 140

Triglycerides: 46
HDL: 42
Total cholesterol: 135
(LDL was calculated, not measured; therefore, I'm not including it because I don't know how accurate the figure is)
Eos (absolute): 0.2
Eos: 4

AFTER
August 20, 2010

Typical daily menu:
nut butter protein shake
chef's salad with 2 boiled eggs, a strip of bacon and full-fat dressing
low-carb protein bar
diet soda
"pizza" (pepperoni, mozzarella, garlic, a little tomato and spices--no crust)
low-carb ice cream
a few chocolate candies

Exercise:
High-intensity, 30-minute weightlifting sessions twice a week (Slow Burn)

Weight: 119

Triglycerides: 46
HDL: 57
Total cholesterol: 140
(Again, LDL was calculated, not measured; therefore, I'm not including it because I don't know how accurate the figure is)
Eos (absolute): .5
Eos: 10

Comments:
On my six-month fat fest, I ate fat and protein until I was full, cut way back on the carbs and the workouts, lost 21 pounds and raised my "good" cholesterol by 15 points. (Cutting down on the sweets had nothing to do with willpower--I'm just not as hungry as often on the low-carb plan.) I feel good, too--my original shoulder complaint is gone.

I wasn't familiar with Eos, but at August 20, they were high. Eos stands for eosinophil. According to the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, they're white blood cells "believed to function in allergic responses and in resisting some infections." My doctor remarked that the high level was probably from allergies, but if I had allergies, I didn't notice it.

Conclusion:
The old saw that eating fat makes you fat and raises cholesterol turned out to be partly true: it raised my good cholesterol (HDL). My effortless 21-pound weight loss speaks for itself.

Comments I've read on other low-carb blogs suggest that I'm not metabolically unique. So why do dieticians and most doctors and nurses keep telling us to eat a starchy, sugary diet and avoid fat? I think it's like the Rod Stewart song quoted above: they've listened to the fat-is-bad message so long they've come to believe it.
Labels:

Comments

Erica Gott, aka Erratica said…
Lori, way to go! I stopped eating grains on May 19 of this year and, while I don't know how much weight I've lost, my clothes are now falling off me and I've lost the bloated belly. The pain in my thumb joints is almost gone, and I have very little hip joint pain any more.

Some day the medical community will admit that low carb/high fat is valid. The evidence is mounting up fast; soon that hundredth monkey will present itself and LCHF will become the norm instead of the devil. I'm sure of it.
June 30, 2011
Lori Miller said…
Erica, that's great. I know how hard it is to avoid grains.

There's a term from dancing that I like to apply to the bottom-up low-carb movement: highjacking the lead.
June 30, 2011
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...
17 comments
Read more

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more