Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

[Hudson]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

Taubes book is not light reading. Takes me about a night to get through one chapter and some chapters get a little repetitive.

Taubes looks at the research and concludes there is no evidence that exercise alone is a viable weight loss idea. He dosen't separate cardio from weights. Just brings up the research showing very minimal weight loss benefit from exercise.

[julirama723]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

I'm certainly starting to believe that idea!

[mitzimarie]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

I'm certainly starting to believe that idea!

It would explain a few things, wouldn't it, Julie?

I'm going to get the book for Christmas. I probably won't have time to get into it before then. But I'm looking forward to it.

[sallyseachange]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

Is there a paperback version of Taubes book out yet, or is it too soon? Or an e-book?

[Outback Jess]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

This has been a very good read. I've enjoyed the insights, will look for the book, can relate to higher levels of exercise creating a higher need for food....
I am to the point of not really needing to loose weight and with my fit body I love to pursue higher endurance levels of exercise and I absolutely love the challenge of it, and how I feel when I am done. I exercised for 30 mins day, during the first 8 months on Atkins when I lost the most weight. Now I exercise far more, and I eat a lot more foods. I don't loose weight any more and in fact have gone up a bit. Endurance sport and low carb, I am WAITING FOR THE BOOK ON THAT ONE! Triathletes and Marathoners and Extreme sports addicts NEED someone to pursue that avenue! Because there is not guidence for the endurance athlete and low carb.

[matawguro]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

A lot of the arguments regarding exercise stem from a misconception of Taubes' conclusions. He does not dispute that exercise with caloric restriction will cause you to lose weight. It will, but it's a short term solution. It doesn't work as a long term solution because:

1. The human body compensates for the caloric deficit by reducing thyroid hormone levels and lowering metabolism;
2. It addresses only the symptoms and not the metabolic and hormonal root causes of obesity;
3. Hunger mechanisms kick in which will urge the person to look for food leading to eventual failure. It's inevitable, Mr. Anderson.

As any Atkineer who's read DANDR knows, the Atkins Diet addresses the metabolic and hormonal abnormalities by limiting insulin production through carb restriction. Lower insulin combined with the satiety power of fat and protein help control hunger. In that case exercise plus carb restriction becomes a viable long term solution.



Edit to add:



Took a while to hunt down this article by Gary Taubes...

The Scientist and the Stairmaster

This is not to say that there aren’t excellent reasons to be physically active, as these reports invariably point out. We might just enjoy exercise. We may increase our overall fitness; we may live longer, perhaps by reducing our risk of heart disease or diabetes; we’ll probably feel better about ourselves. (Of course, this may be purely a cultural phenomenon. It’s hard to imagine that the French, for instance, would improve their self-esteem by spending more time at the gym.) But there’s no reason to think that we will lose any significant amount of weight, and little reason to think we will prevent ourselves from gaining it.

...

For the last 60 years, researchers studying obesity and weight regulation have insisted on treating the human body as a thermodynamic black box: Calories go in one side, they come out the other, and the difference (calories in minus calories out) ends up as either more or less fat. The fat tissue, in this thermodynamic model, has nothing to say in the matter. Thus the official recommendations to eat less and exercise more and assuredly you’ll get thinner. (Or at least not fatter.) And in the strict sense this is true—you can starve a human, or a rat, and he will indeed lose weight—but that misses the point. Humans, rats, and all living organisms are ruled by biology, not thermodynamics. When we deprive ourselves of food, we get hungry. When we push ourselves physically, we get tired.



Our bodies, like all living organisms, have evolved a fantastically complex web of feedback loops. These physiological mechanisms serve fundamentally to work against the inevitable pull of thermodynamics (which is entropy, a.k.a. death) and so make life possible. The necessary condition of life, as the great French physiologist Claude Bernard noted 140 years ago, is to keep the internal environment of an organism stable and conducive to life, regardless of what’s happening on the outside. This is what the Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon, in the thirties, called homeostasis—or the “wisdom of the body,” as he put it. “Somehow the unstable stuff of which we are composed,” Cannon wrote, “had learned the trick of maintaining stability.”


...

As for those people who insist that exercise has been the key to their weight-loss programs, the one thing we’d have to wonder is whether they changed their diets as well. Rare is the person who decides the time has come to lose weight and doesn’t also decide perhaps it’s time to eat fewer sweets, drink less beer, switch to diet soda, and maybe curtail the kind of carb-rich snacks—the potato chips and the candy bars—that might be singularly responsible for driving up their insulin and so their fat.

[montanaman]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

Just because you may "only" burn 300 calories on the treadmill for 30 minutes is a very weak reasoning for exercise not being beneficial. Most people in the health industry will tell you that a person needs both cardio and weight resistance for a healthy workout. For every extra pound of muscle you put on, your body uses around 50 extra calories a day. In a recent study, researchers found that regular weight training boosts basal metabolic rate by about 15%. This is because muscle is ‘metabolically active’ and burns more calories than other body tissue even when you’re not moving.

Training with weights just 3 times a week for around 20 minutes is enough to build muscle. Not only will you be burning more calories, you’ll look better – whatever your weight.

[NemesysXXX]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

Okay just a thought here, but ..... I have a sneaking suspiscion (sp?) that Atkins knew exercise help with endorphins (the happy hormone) during the moodiness of following a more strict WOE while assing some extra lsot calories to the mix.

in addition i felt that all exercise during any weight loss was to tone and reshape your body during the weightloss so you didnt reach your goal weight like a lean mean fighting machine covered in a strecthed skin bag. basically doing two things at once...

WOE is for Weight loss
Exercise is for Reshaping during that weightloss

just a thought

[ValidRouge]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

Here is what I took from reading the chapters. It's VERY hard to take volumes of his research and sum it up and get his entire point across.

With that said, and i'll repeat what the others have already said. Mr. Taubes does NOT say that exercise is not necessary. He just says that exercise (and I would say EXCESSIVE exercise) wouldn't necessarily speed up fat loss for most people. It just makes the body hungrier. There are mechanisms that will cause a person to become hungrier in conditions of heavy exercise and the calorie deficit created by exercise would end up being balanced because hunger would cause us to eat more to feed that hunger. Thus, the exercise wouldn't result in more fat loss. Just increased hunger.

I, personally, feel I experience this. I am training to run a marathon, and I weight lift and do yoga. I am RAVENOUS and can out eat the additional exercise I'm doing. The amount I am doing, in theory, should result in lots of weight loss. I can tell you that I am not losing lots of weight. My hunger/need for additional calories to support the amount of exercise I am doing cancels each other out--and that is what I take away from what Taubes said about exercise.

[Chicklady]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

Back to the original topic , if I may ....
I bought the 2002 version of Atkins because you all said that's what you use. I also have a version from the early 80's.
If people are reading only the version from the 80's (which is probably close to his 70's version) I can see why they might jump to the conclusion that this diet may be unhealthy, or at least not doable for a lifetime. He has done MAJOR changes, both on the food aspect of the diet, especially vegetables, and on exercise.

[IrishIrish]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

I ignore what other ill informed people think. If I had listened to the first person to tell me that this diet would kill me, I'd have died by now. But instead, my life is thriving. In my case, I'm more likely to be hit by a bus or fall off a hiking trail.

[sallyseachange]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

Here is what I took from reading the chapters. It's VERY hard to take volumes of his research and sum it up and get his entire point across.

With that said, and i'll repeat what the others have already said. Mr. Taubes does NOT say that exercise is not necessary. He just says that exercise (and I would say EXCESSIVE exercise) wouldn't necessarily speed up fat loss for most people. It just makes the body hungrier. There are mechanisms that will cause a person to become hungrier in conditions of heavy exercise and the calorie deficit created by exercise would end up being balanced because hunger would cause us to eat more to feed that hunger. Thus, the exercise wouldn't result in more fat loss. Just increased hunger.

I, personally, feel I experience this. I am training to run a marathon, and I weight lift and do yoga. I am RAVENOUS and can out eat the additional exercise I'm doing. The amount I am doing, in theory, should result in lots of weight loss. I can tell you that I am not losing lots of weight. My hunger/need for additional calories to support the amount of exercise I am doing cancels each other out--and that is what I take away from what Taubes said about exercise.

Very interesting Joy... and I can imagine that this is just how it would be.
Am wondering however (and forgive me if I've forgotten where/if someone has already addressed this in the thread) what Taubes says about the advantage of having muscle vs fat. It takes exercise to make muscle, and we burn more cals to maintain muscle than fat; so in this respect, doesn't exercise help with weight loss/maintenance? Or am I missing something with this reasoning?

[ValidRouge]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

He doesn't specify muscle vs fat or anything like that. Nor does he get specific about what types of exercise (cardio vs resistance training). And actually, what he does is take some of the studies that were used to make the theory that creating a calorie deficit though exercise will cause weight loss and shows where in the same study there is evidence that does not support the theory or actually is the opposite. Then he will point out other studies that illustrate the opposing theory.

[sallyseachange]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

He doesn't specify muscle vs fat or anything like that. Nor does he get specific about what types of exercise (cardio vs resistance training). And actually, what he does is take some of the studies that were used to make the theory that creating a calorie deficit though exercise will cause weight loss and shows where in the same study there is evidence that does not support the theory or actually is the opposite. Then he will point out other studies that illustrate the opposing theory.

Gotcha! Tks. I'm really wanting to read this book!

[sas2sap]

Re: Touchy Topic: Dr. Atkins' death

I realize that this is an older thread but I wanted to add my 2 cents worth....

My mother is a nurse practioner and has been following the Atkins WOE for about 7 years now. She is careful to make sure all her levels are good and feels very comfortable recommending Atkins to her patients. Prior to starting Atkins she was borderline diabetic and about 50 lbs overweight. Due to some back, leg, and neck injuries sustained when she was hit by a drunk driver years ago, strenuous exercise is not an option. She read everything she could find about Dr. Atkins' death and she's satisfied that this WOE did not contribute to him dying but is convinced that it did contribute to his Living. She finally convinced me to follow her lead - trust me, she would not do anything to harm one of her children.