Quote:
Originally Posted by PR_Glen
As for low carb diets, i have tried a number of them over the years and I often have the same problems with them. Loading your body with nothing but complex carbs and eating heavy on the proteins just sucks the energy out of me completely... The last one i did was the slow carb diet explained in the book The 4 hour body. The first two days on it i had headaches, serious drowsiness, so much that i could barely keep my head up and by the time i got home at 5 o'clock i was so tired i hit the bed and didn't wake up until morning.
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The problem is your brain switching between glucose as a fuel source and ketones (acetoacetate and β-hydroxybutyrate ) as a primary fuel source for the brain. It takes some time to adapt for most people - usually 2 weeks. That is where the lethargy, brain fog, inability to focus, concentrate etc come from. Once you get through that and assuming you are in ketosis, you should feel very good and energy levels should be consistent and stable throughout the day. The only way they wouldn't be or what would cause that to not be true is if you were eating enough to trigger an insulin response, getting out of ketosis and continually switching back and forth. Ketogenic diets are very much an "all or nothing" deal. Too many people (not you necessarily) don't get that and end up eating crazy amounts of calories and fats but not be in ketosis, jack their cholesterol up etc.
The primary benefit of a ketogenic diet is that you can severely restrict calories, lose weight and preserve muscle while maintaining stable energy levels. Ironically THE EXACT SAME CLAIMS of HCG diets (sorry kids, HCG does nothing for weight loss) and when people are following Simeons original diet it's tricky because it is also a Ketogenic diet although not advertised as such. The problem with restricting your calories to 500 a day and "cheating" occasionally eating too many carbs is that your energy levels go nuts as you go out of ketosis, cravings start to run away, brain function is again impaired, you start catabolizing muscle for energy in the absence of adequate glycogen stores, start losing muscle etc. People tend to do the same with ketogenic diets.
At the end of the day, what "works" is highly individualistic. I mean, its about what an individual can stick with as you''ve found.
4 Hour Body? Tim Ferris in my view is a con artist. He lucked into writing a book that became popular. The book was about obvious (and oftentimes impossible) concepts for time management.. he's been nothing but a snake oil salesperson since then. His original pitch for that 4 Hour Body book was that he lost XX lbs and gained XX pounds of lean mass in like 4 weeks by "hacking his body" - the guy is a fucking moron and nothing he claimed in his original marketing is even remotely possible, not even possible assuming you have perfect genes and a good drug hookup, enough needles and a hardy liver. This guy is trying to be Kevin Trudeau and he's well on his way (to being arrested and convicted and fined)... just my opinion.
Peace
