Hypothesis: Eating fat gooses your metabolism, burning body fat.
Experiment: Eat more fat.
Some time back, I reviewed a very old book: A Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public, by William Banting. It was published in 1865, and you can get it for free from Google Books. It’s the earliest I’ve ever seen anyone publish what amounts to an experiment in losing weight. An overweight man got advice from his doctor, tried it, and lost weight. Better still, he published what he ate, and passed out the book (which is more of a pamphlet) to anyone who wanted it. Banting’s diet proved so popular that “to bant” became a Victorian term for what we now call “going low-carb.”
Fast forward to the late 1950s. A physician named Herman Taller, like Banting, got impatient with his own weight. He’d tried the fashionable remedy of his time (counting calories and avoiding fat) without any success. Then, at the encouragement of a fellow researcher, he did something remarkable: He started consuming what could have been as much as 5,000 calories a day, most of it fat. He lost weight.
Also, like Banting, he wrote a book. Calories Don’t Count was published in 1961. Again, like Banting, Taller and his book have been pretty much forgotten. Forgotten, of course, until Gary Taubes redisovered them, and described them both in his 2008 book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Taller’s book is mostly of historical interest these days. His science is now 55 years old, and we’ve learned a lot in the meantime. (There are hazards in polyunsaturated fats that we had no clue about in the 50s.) So I don’t recommend it. Taubes’ book picks up the science that Taller began with, and brings it up to the current day. I do recommend Taubes, enthusiastically, and have several times. If you want to know anything at all about human metabolism, he’s your go-to guy.
For this entry, the point I want to make is something that Taubes explained: Going low-carb is an excellent first step. But you can’t just eat protein, or you risk mal de caribou, which is liver overload due to eating almost nothing but protein. You have to eat fat as well. If you’ve reduced your carb intake, eating fat begins a remarkable process: fat mobilization. Your body runs out of convenient carbs in the bloodstream, and begins to burn stored fat for energy. Your metabolism ticks up sharply. You generate more heat. It’s a weird concept, but I did the experiment. It works.
Here’s how: I banished all carbs from my breakfast. No sugar, no grains, no juice, no fruit. What I began eating (and have eaten most days since) is an egg fried in butter, sometimes two. Coffee with cream. Some days (not always) full-fat unsweetened yogurt. An odd thing began to happen. Within twenty minutes to half an hour, I started to sweat under my arms.
I added up the calories, and it was about a wash compared to a bowl of Cheerios. But when I ate Cheerios, I didn’t sweat. I got a little sluggish, in fact, an hour later, in what was literally a Cheerios crash. The key is that I hadn’t eaten any carbs since the previous evening’s meal, and had gone all night without eating anything. By the morning, I was out of carbs. There was nothing to stoke the fires but protein and fat.
As with everything I’ve suggested in this series, it may not work this way for everyone, but the biochemistry seems legit, and it certainly worked for me. Try it. Lose your fear of fat. There’s nothing to it. When I ate more fat, I lost weight, and both my bad cholesterol and triglycerides went through the floor. By conventional measures I’m healthier than I was when I was 45. I credit that to eating more fat. (The kidney stone just pushed me in the right direction.)
Tomorrow: Wrapping up.
