I’m sorry but I just don’t agree that your reply matches either my own experience or a large body of peer reviewed research. Fat causes insulin resistance, especially male-pattern abdominal fat. It may not be the only cause, but it’s an important one. So restricting carbs treats both symptoms and cause. Eliminating carbs makes it far easier to loose fat for many people, because by eliminating the glucose surge and consequent insulin over-release It gets rid of the hungry-20min-after-eating effect. For the same reason it greatly improves the chances of keeping it off. And we need the help, after 5 years the vast majority of dieters will have regained all that they have lost. For the vast majority, willpower is just not enough to last for the rest of their lives.. We have to be realistic and recognize that ,just as the 47% are not useless benefit-fraudsters, the 90% who cannot keep the weight off are not all hopeless backsliders.

As for the symptoms, that is just as important. For people with diabetes and for the many times more who have insulin resistance every shot of glucose in the diet is more work for the Islets of Langerhans. These poor little cells have been laboring like trojans for years, pumping out more and more insulin to try and overcome the insulin resistance. If the workload doesn’t let up, eventually they die and you are on insulin injections for life. Carbohydrate is just another word for poly-sugar and a lot of that sugar is glucose, nearly 100% for potato.

Although I totally agree with you that exercise is vital, my experience is that it is not enough. I have always exercised a lot and it didn’t suffice on it’s own. It was also a heck of a lot easier to step up the exercise after loosing the weight.

(It just doesn’t do much to address the cause.)

I don’t tell people what to eat or not eat. People who are metabolically healthy don’t need to be on highly restrictive diets. People who are NOT metabolically healthy should be working with a qualified medical professional to implement any dietary restrictions that professional deems appropriate. That is the extent of my dietary recommendations.

My story is quite different to yours but just as valid I think. My wife is an athlete and there was no way that I could get away with not exercising. In spite of regularly running, up to 2hours, or mountain biking up to 7hours in a session, by my early 50′s I weighed 200lbs which is quite overweight when you are only 5ft 6in. After I was diagnosed as Type 2 diabetic, I did some research. After cutting out carbs, I ate more calories in the form of protein and fat and also upped my vegetable intake. In a matter of months I lost 30lb and it was easy! OK I also exercised even more than before but that was because it was easier and more satisfying with less weight. Without medication, my blood sugar levels are in the non-diabetic range. My triglycerides fell by a factor of 5, from totally awful to very good. Total cholesterol down by a third to fair to good, hdl/ldl the same.

As I said, we are all of us different but there is very strong medical research that says that carbs are not good at all for diabetics or pre-diabetics, which is a lot of us. When 12 academic researchers present an open letter to the Lancet begging the medical establishment to stop pushing the carb-laden food triangle at diabetics because all the actual research contradicted it, I don’t think that your confidence in the “conventional” medical view is all that valid. In fact, a startlingly high proportion of “conventional” medicine is not “evidence-based” at all, but based on the hunches of cabals of self-appointed experts. It has been rightly criticized as being “reputational-based”. The medical profession seems to be getting its act together nowadays, at last, but there is still a huge inertia, due to the number of senior medical pundits with reputations to preserve.

The fact is, unlike any other food group, carbs are not essential to health. We can easily get the calories, vitamins and minerals we need from a balanced diet of other food. Some people can tolerate carbs well, others especially those with sub-par endocrine systems are much better avoiding them.

There is no doubt that excess body fat interferes with insulin effectiveness. Carbs, especially high GI carbs, make it much harder to loose weight, because of the appetite-stimulating effect of the blood-sugar spike they cause. That is certainly my own experience. I dieted for years, sensible non-fad diets, but my weight just crept up with age, in spite of exercising way more than average for my age. Cutting the carbs just made dieting so easy, I rarely felt hungry, in spite of the weight just falling off.

Incidentally the GI research shows that the whole “complex carbohydrate” story was just simply made up by the “conventional medicine experts”. Far from being a good food, potato gives twice the glucose surge of the same weight of pure sugar! That’s real, totally repeatable research that is easily explained biochemically. How can anyone still have any confidence in dietary recommendations made by the people who came up with that schoolboy howler?

I am NOT criticizing your approach to health. It obviously works for you. However, by your sweeping dismissal of the carbs story you could very well be doing a serious disservice to those to whom it could be vital, like me.

~ Eva

Great success story. Great writer. Great humor. Great lady!