I agree on most of weight loss happening in the kitchen. I read a really interesting article last week in the Minneapolis paper about how wrong we have all been for a long time about what a healthy diet is. It was called "The Risk-Reversal Diet." It was about a fairly big study that was done on people with people with type 2 diabetes, who went on a diet that is low in carbohydrates and higher in protein and fats (the right kinds of fats) than we have been led to believe we should be eating. So not quite a keto diet, but definitely not the low-calorie, low fat diet we have been told for decades is good for us. Here's an excerpt talking about the diet and results:
As reported last year in the journal Diabetes Therapy by lead investigator Sarah J. Hallberg of Indiana University Health and the dietary coaching firm Virta Health, the physician-directed, app-delivered LCHF intervention reversed diabetes in 60 percent of patients.
That’s not a typo. At a one-year mark in the venture capital-funded study, 60 percent of 262 rural, obese, long-term diabetic patients who were coached on how to eat LCHF dropped and remained below the diagnostic threshold for diabetes. They ate as many calories as they wanted.
Thanks to dietary coaching based on digital monitoring of the ketone blood markers confirming the absence of dietary carbohydrates, they likely ate a lot of once-forbidden foods like eggs, cheese, butter, full-fat dairy and yogurt. The subjects were coached to eat only a normal amount of protein, but all the non-starchy vegetables, greens, berries and dietary fat they desired. Calorically, that breaks down to 10 percent or fewer calories from carbohydrates, 10-20 percent from protein, and 70 percent from fat. Though it may give some pause, the fats helpful in this quest include unlimited amounts of coconut and olive oil, dairy fat and the most marbled cuts of meat — every kind of fat except for that which is used to hold together carbohydrates. This allowed the participants to feel full while keeping their total daily carbohydrate intake under 30 grams a day, or roughly the amount of three slices of bread.
Because you’re wondering about this next part, they lost over 12 percent of their body weight in the process, for an average of 30 pounds, with the weight loss sustained at one year. More importantly, by following close medical guidance, they rapidly titrated downward their diabetes drugs, and by necessity at that, since an acceptable dose of glucose-lowering medications and insulin can quickly become dangerous in the absence of dietary carbohydrates.
By the end of one year, 57 percent of the study subjects had all of their prescriptions discontinued save for the drug metformin, with drug costs halved for the entire group and the use of insulin, a medication currently the subject of shortages and price gouging, either eliminated or halved.
Pretty amazing. My man friend is on a keto diet. He really gets very little exercise, but the weight is dropping. Once the weather is better here and we are able to get out hiking again, he figures it will just enhance the weight loss.