Glasgow described overweight women who after three months had lost 14.5 pounds on a thirty-five-percent carbohydrate diet of 1,200 calories and 12.3 pounds on a fifty-eightpercent carbohydrate diet of 1,200 calories. That ' s fairly slow weight loss and pretty strict caloric deprivation. The advantage went to the lower-carbohydrate diet as always, but the lesson is that stricter carbohydrate control makes for an even more successful weight loss plan.
Three other recent examples also didn ' t go low enough in carbs and thus had limited metabolic advantage, but two facts should be noted: First, in all cases, the lowercarbohydrate group did lose more weight than the higher-carbohydrate group. Studies that show the opposite are, believe me, more rare than pink elephants in the streets of Boise. Second, in two of the studies cardiovascular risk factors improved significantly-but only in the subjects who were on a lower-carbohydrate intake. The folks who got put on a highcarbohydrate diet showed no significant improvements in these health indicators.
That leaves one last study, which was really a blowout. Published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2000, it reported on a group of obese adolescents put on a controlled carbohydrate diet with no restriction on calories for three months and meticulously monitored throughout that period. By design, the regimen was based on the Atkins approach. The group was compared with a control group put on a low-fat diet.
The results? Well, naturally, the adolescents lost significantly more weight on the controlled carbohydrate diet than on the low-fat diet. The written records indicated that at the end of the trial, the adolescents in the controlled carbohydrate group had averaged 1,830 calories daily, while the adolescents in the low-fat group had consumed 1,100 calories. The controlled carbohydrate group averaged 21.7 pounds lost, compared to 9.1 pounds for the low-fat group, and a significant improvement in body mass index( BMI), compared with the low-fat dieters.
As studies like this become increasingly common, opposition to a controlled carbohydrate nutritional approach should fall away even more quickly than has already been the case in recent years.
The Metabolic Advantage in Action
Perhaps you will now understand how Harry Kronberg, the patient I mentioned in Chapter 3, was able to lose fifty pounds in three months on an eating plan containing an abundance of nutrient-dense, high-calorie foods. And he did so, even though in the previous three years on a moderately low-fat balanced diet he had gained 70. This does not contradict reason; instead, it is an outstanding example of metabolic advantage.
When you study both of Harry ' s menus, you ' ll see that when doing Atkins, he ate an average of only 200 calories less than he ate on his low-fat diet, but he has gone from gaining an average of 0.5 pound a week to shedding almost 4 pounds.
The metabolic advantage is there. It can ' t be disguised, evaded, put down to water weight or wished away.
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