What Do Hitler and Dieticians Have In Common? Lose a lot of fat fast without being hungry.

You’ve heard it said over and over again by well-meaning dieticians, “ a calorie is a calorie is a calorie.  To lose weight you just need to eat fewer of them.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a fat, carb or protein.”

Adolph Hitler said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”  That all calories are created equal is one of those lies.  It turns out that there really isn’t much research to support that theory.

WILL YOU STARVE SO THAT THEY WILL BE BETTER FED?

Near the end of WWII Ancel Keys started a starvation study to see how best to help the people in the decimated parts of Europe after the war was over.  For the first 12 weeks the 36 young men were really well fed – about 3,200 kcal/day, 3 huge meals per day with multiple courses, lots of protein and definitely dessert.

Things changed completely for the second 12 weeks.  At this point his volunteers were fed a diet based on what people in war ravaged Easter Europe would be eating – cabbage, bread, peas, and extremely small quantities of meat (so small that most of the participants were unaware that there was any meat at all in their diet).  This worked out to be just under 1,600 kcal/day.

The men (all participants were men) were NOT happy.  They were always hungry, had no energy, miserable, developed numerous health and psychological problems, and thought about food constantly.  (Does that sound like you on your last diet?) (1)

The Monkey Wrench

In the late 1960’s John Yudkin at the University of London was having remarkable success using low-carb diets for weight loss.  To silence his critics he decided to do a formal study of his clinic’s clients.

These are the instructions he gave them:

“The subjects were asked to take between 10 and 20 oz milk daily (about 300-600 ml), and as much meat, fish, eggs, cheese, butter, margarine, cream and leafy vegetables as they wished. The amount of carbohydrate in other food was listed in “units” with each unit consisting of 5 g carbohydrate; the subjects were told to limit these foods to not more than 10 units (or 50 g) carbohydrate daily.”

It turns out that these people VOLUNTARILY ended up eating LESS than Ancel Key’s folks in terms of calories, but had NONE of the emotional or physiological problems.  In fact they all had MORE energy, and were NEVER hungry.

Ancel Key’s people had to be held against their will in locked bunkers to comply with the 1,570 kcal/day diet.  Yudkin’s people WILLINGLY and AUTOMATICALLY ate 1,560 kcal/day and felt BETTER. (2)

What’s The Difference?

Key’s Semi-Starvation         Yudkin’s Low Carb
100g protein                         83g protein
30g fat                                105g fat
225g carb                            67g carb
1570 kcal                              1560 kcal

One was a low fat diet, and one was a low carb diet.

How many ways can I say it?  I’m not even touching on the studies where the low carb groups ate MORE – a lots more – than their low fat counter parts and dropped 75-100% more fat.

I’m about to graduate from one of the top Dietetic program in the US – UMD.  Yes, I’m 6 years “late”;-).  Every semester is exactly the same.  They repeat over and over again the dogma: “for weight loss eat as little fat as possible, and a high carb diet.  All that matters is eating fewer calories and nothing else.”

But they repeat this without EVER offering up a single reference, and never actually investigating the so-called science that supports this idea.

Lucky for me (and you) I’ve stayed busy getting my real education outside of school – at least 4 seminars per year, 50 books, and I’m always in touch with experts in the real world who are getting results that people will actually pay money for, not parroting inane theories just because that’s what everyone else thinks.

Josef Brandenburg is also the author of The Body You Want, and an award winning personal trainer in Washington DC that was nominated several times for 2009 Personal Trainer of the Year from Personal Fitness Professional Magazine.  Oh, and check out his new web-site washingtondcpersonaltrainer.com

References

1.  Tucker, Todd. The Great Starvation Experiment: Ancel Keys and the Men Who Starved for Science.  University of Minn. Press. 2008

2.  Yudkin, John.  The Low Carbohydrate Diet in the Treatment of Obesity.  Postgraduate Medical Journal. May; 51(5):151-54