Benoit ' s other exciting discovery was that on a fat-burning regimen, subjects maintained their potassium levels, while subjects who fasted experienced major potassium losses.( Potassium depletion can cause heart arrhythmia, which, in severe cases, can be fatal.)
Still not convinced? Try this one. Charlotte Young, professor of clinical nutrition at Cornell University, compared the results of overweight young men placed on three diets, all providing 1,800 calories, but with varying degrees of carbohydrate restriction. The regimens contained 30, 60, and 104 grams of carbohydrate, and subjects followed them for nine weeks. Young and her colleagues calculated body fat through a widely accepted technique involving immersion underwater. Those on 104 grams of carbs lost slightly better than 2 pounds of fat per week, out of 2.73 pounds of total weight loss-not bad for 1,800 calories. Those on 60 grams of carbs lost nearly 2.5 pounds of fat per week, out of 3 pounds of actual weight lossbetter.
But those on 30 grams of carbs, the only situation that produced lipolysis and the secondary process of ketosis, lost 3.73 pounds of fat per week-approximately one hundred percent of their total weight loss. These results are a perfect example of the benefits the metabolic advantage provides. That ' s what has enabled most of my patients to succeed. And it will make you a success, too.
Before we leave Charlotte Young, I ' ve got good news for those of you who have been trying to lose weight on low-fat plans, most of which typically comprise sixty percent or more carbohydrate. Dr. Young ' s most liberal regimen contained only thirty-five percent carbohydrate. She discovered that the more carbs consumed, the less body fat was lost. In treating many thousands of weight loss patients, I have observed the same thing. And virtually every other scientist who has actually studied controlled carbohydrate nutrition has confirmed that the more carbohydrate consumed, the less the amount of body fat lost. And that may be one of the major reasons you are struggling with your weight and getting nowhere.
Several other studies have shown that you can consume more calories and lose more weight than on low-fat programs. For example, Ulrich Rabast and associates at the University of Wurzburg studied forty-five hospitalized patients for five weeks.' Once again the controlled carbohydrate approach to weight loss demonstrated a significant metabolic advantage: This time an extra 9.24 pounds were lost on the low-carbohydrate version of a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet in contrast to the 1,000-calorie-a-day, low-fat diet. Moreover, careful water-balance studies demonstrated that the proportion of those extra pounds that could be attributed to water loss was insignificant. This trend continued in other trials, even when calories consumed were greater than 1,000.
The Beat Goes On
The massive revival of interest in controlled carbohydrate approaches to weight management that flowered in the 1990s has provoked exciting new research. And the results have only fueled the fire. The metabolic advantage is very real.
Five studies are worth noting. The relevance of the first four of these is limited by the fact that the carbohydrate content of the " low " carbohydrate diet being studied was still a good deal higher than you would experience during the first weight loss phase of Atkins. Therefore the metabolic advantage was relatively small, though it still existed. One study done in
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