Is a Low-Carb Diet Sustainable for Life?

I recently received a comment from a reader that suggested my lack of dieting success was probably due to my inability to stay with one particular low-carb diet plan long enough to reap results. The advice I received was to go on a low-carb, high-fat diet and give it six months or more to work before analyzing. 

That was similar to the advice I received from the zero-carb folks a few years ago when despite the fact that I had gained about 20 pounds in the first three weeks and was experiencing abnormally high blood glucose levels, they told me to eat only beef, drink only water, and wait six months before reviewing the results. They didn't seem to care about the resurrected neuropathy. They were just sure that their way was the only way. 

The problem with that type of advice is that it doesn't work for everyone. 

Take Responsibility for Your Own Health

Correcting metabolic issues isn't always as easy as lowering your carbohydrate level. For example, I'm juggling vertigo, celiac disease, food sensitivities, and hyperthyroidism (Graves' Disease), so my problems with sustainability are far more complex than simply going back onto a very low-carb, high-fat diet, ignoring the physical ramifications, and giving the plan six months to work -- no matter what.

For those of us with autoimmune thyroid disease, that type of advice is dangerous.

Granted, my health had started to deteriorate before I received the hyperthyroidism diagnosis, but that doesn’t mean that a low-carb diet won't be sustainable for you. For many people, low-carb diets are the best choice out there. What it means is that a very low-carb, high-fat diet is not sustainable for me. I need quite a few more carbs than 20 per day and less fat than a typical low-carb diet has to keep my thyroid purring happily.

That’s one of the main reasons why I continuously stress the importance of finding what works for you. I do not subscribe to the common low-carb community belief that everyone needs to follow a low-carb diet, even the kids. That is not what Dr. Atkins taught, nor is it what he stood for.

Don't Give Up on Low Carb Too Soon

I totally agree that diet hopping isn’t beneficial. I used to watch several people over at Low Carb Friends do that back when the Kimkins diet was popular over there. If they went a single week without losing weight, they would switch something up. That was one of the non-beneficial things that surfaced in regards to Kimkins: this mindset that weight loss needs to be consistently fast.

The body can only mobilize a certain amount of fat per day, and anything more than that is likely to be coming from muscle. The less muscle you have when you reach goal weight, the fewer carbohydrates you’ll be able to eat because your ability to store glycogen depends on how much muscle you have.

In addition, you don’t solve a lifetime weight problem by going onto a low-carb diet (or any diet for that matter) and then come back off it haphazardly. One of the things that Dr. Atkins repeatedly stressed when he was still alive was that losing the weight wasn’t the objective.

The goal is sustainability: keeping the weight off for the rest of your life.

If you can’t do that with some modified version of the diet you’re using to lose the weight, then over the long-term, you won’t be very successful.

That is what I learned from the various dieting experiments that I ran on myself. I learned what worked for me and what didn’t. I learned how my body responded to:

• different levels of carbohydrate content
• different carbohydrate restrictions
• simple calorie counting

I learned what a very low-calorie diet does to me mentally, emotionally and physically. I also learned what a very low-carb, high-fat diet does to me. These are not lessons I regret.

My Regret

Although I regret going off the self-designed low-calorie, low-carb diet I created for myself, I have also come to realize over the past few days that a low-carb diet is not sustainable for me, so it probably didn’t make any difference over the long run that I didn't ignore the low-carb peer pressure.

Steven Phinney's Viewpoint on Sustainability

I watched an interesting video yesterday. It was an interview with Steve Phinney, one of the major names within the low carb community. If I remember correctly, he was involved in writing one of the prior Atkins Diet books along with a couple of other men.

His viewpoint differed greatly from Dr. Atkins as to the sustainability of ketosis long-term. His interest falls into the category of how people adapt to a low-carb diet over time. He believes you should stay in ketosis at maintenance rather than returning to a more moderate-carb diet like Dr. Atkins advised. The basis for that belief is the experiments he has conducted on himself over the past few years.

He moved in and out of several low-carb diets and eventually settled on the one he discovered he could live with for the rest of his life.

Dr. Phinney did not just pick a plan and stick with it. He experimented on himself the same way I did. He discovered that his body runs great on a low-carb, high-fat diet. He eats about 15 percent of his calories from protein, 5 percent from carbs, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 percent fat.

That is what works best for him.

He also believes that sustainability is more complex than simply restricting carbohydrates. 

How to Determine Low-Carb Sustainability for Yourself

As for basic sustainability, there are many people who receive a surge of energy from restricting carbohydrates. Their:

• hunger goes down
• sense of well-being goes up
• metabolic markers improve
• health issues reverse themselves or at least get better

These people typically have insulin resistance or metabolic syndrome and not too much excess body weight that their metabolism adjusts to their low-carb, high-fat diet before they reach goal weight.

For them, a low-carb diet works beautifully. It’s corrective and sustainable, especially if you enjoy the food choices and don’t have too many food intolerances that interfere with what you can eat.

On the other hand, if you are insulin sensitive you might find that a low-carb diet makes you feel terrible. There’s:

• no energy surge
• you’re hungry and tired all of the time
• your body consistently tries to sabotage your diet

I’m not talking about mind tricks or emotional eating for comfort. I’m talking about:

• hormonal crashes that occur fairly quickly
• uncontrollable gluconeogenesis
• an inability to control your blood glucose level
• your thyroid crashing
• your metabolism slowing down to a crawl
• blood cholesterol getting worse

and other physical problems that might affect the quality of you life and your sense of well-being.

Low Carb Not Sustainable for Everyone

The cold, hard fact is that a low-carb diet is not sustainable for everyone. For many individuals, a low-calorie diet works better. Sustainability depends on your individual metabolic issues and what you need to personally eat to keep your body functioning at its best. 

That's one of the reasons why Atkins Nutritionals has now divided the Atkins Diet into two different plans: Atkins 20 and Atkins 40. It's also why they now have strict regulations that must be followed in order to remain at 20-net carbs for an extensive length of time. A very-low carb diet is not safe for everyone.