Will a Low Carb Diet Ruin My Metabolism?
There is a lot of confusion these days about metabolism. It seems to be a scapegoat that people like to blame when weight loss doesn’t happen easily. If they’re following a low carb diet and struggling to succeed, then they believe that all of those years of eating carbohydrates must have destroyed their metabolism and made them fat. On the other side of the argument are those who oppose low carb dieting. These people claim that carbohydrate restriction will permanently alter your metabolism, but what’s the truth? Will eating carbohydrates or following a low carb diet ruin your metabolism – or not?
What is Metabolism?
Low carb dieters generally do not like to hear about the energy equation. Dr. Atkins told us that we no longer need to worry about calories, so most people believe the energy equation isn’t applicable to them. Calories don’t matter, they say. Dr. Eades has tried to set the record straight, but far too many people still do not want to go outside and drag the equation back in from the trash. They’d rather leave it out of sight, pretend it doesn’t exist and let the myths about starvation mode and damaged metabolisms reign in their lives instead.
The energy-out portion of the equation is your metabolic rate. Although the body handles each macronutrient differently, that doesn’t make the energy-out side of the equation false. What you eat must be broken down, processed, utilized, and burned for fuel or stored. You can’t get around that. Over the long-term, if energy in does not balance energy out, you’ll get fat. If energy in is less than what’s needed to fuel your body processes, you’ll lean out. Metabolism isn’t simple. It’s fairly complex and divided into three parts:
- basal metabolic rate (BMR)
- thermic effect of food (TEF)
- thermic effect of activity (TEA)
How Metabolism Functions
When people talk about damaged metabolisms, they’re generally referring to their BMR. However, the thermic effect of food and activity play greater roles in the success of your diet.
Basal Metabolic Rate: BMR is influenced by a variety of factors. Some of those conditions are the amount of lean body mass you have, your body fat level, whether you’ve dieted yourself down to your current weight, your hormonal homeostasis, heredity tendency and other adaptive issues. While a low carb diet will ultimately affect your BMR, that affect is no different from any other diet. It is the hormonal outcome and body composition of weight loss that affects your resulting metabolic rate after dieting, not the type of diet you followed to get there.
Thermic Effect of Food: This energy breaks down the macronutrients you eat and processes them. Protein uses the highest amount of energy. About 20 to 30 percent of the calories in meat, eggs and dairy foods are needed to break them down into amino acids. This is one reason why a low carb diet appears to improve metabolism, but that improvement comes with any diet where you ate the same amount of protein. When processing carbohydrates, the body uses about 5 to 6 percent of its calories to turn them into glucose and store them as glycogen. If glycogen stores are full, it takes up to 23 percent of the calories to convert carbohydrates into triglycerides and store them in fat cells. That’s similar to protein. Fats don’t need much converting, so it only takes 2 to 3 percent of its calories.
Thermic Effect of Activity: This portion of your metabolism is extremely variable. It includes all movement that isn’t a basic body function. Sedentary individuals might burn calories of 10 to 30 percent over their BMR, while more active individuals will burn more. Fitness level really comes into play here, but overdoing exercise in comparison to the number of calories consumed can cause your metabolic rate to fall quicker than anything else. In addition to exercise and daily movement, there are other things that burn calories. Weather cold enough to cause shivering, coming down with a cold or the flu and repairing injuries are just a few.
How Low Carb Dieting Affects Your Metabolism
A low carb diet works extremely well for those with insulin resistance because it quickly lowers basal insulin levels and blood glucose in those with metabolic syndrome. It also requires less first- and second-stage insulin release, which allows the body’s metabolism to function more normally. Many individuals with insulin resistance have a TEF defect that corrects itself when you lose weight and become more sensitive to insulin. Insulin can also trigger hunger, so reducing insulin levels can correct overeating problems.
Not everyone who follows a low carb diet is insulin resistant. For those with only a few pounds to lose, it’s more likely you are insulin sensitive or only slightly resistant. Turning to a low carb diet early puts you ahead of the game because your metabolism isn’t as likely to get depressed from dieting as those with more pounds to lose. You should not have a TEF defect that needs healing. After losing 40 pounds in 1975, I easily maintained that weight for many years eating anything I wanted. It was only after my food sensitivities began to surface and my blood glucose levels started to degrade due to an abnormal amount of stress and trauma in my life that I put on weight.
Whether you have a little to lose or a lot, handling pre-maintenance and maintenance wisely is the key to keeping your metabolism healthy. When you restrict calories, metabolism slows because it senses that fuel is in short supply. The body functions with only one goal in mind: survival. Low carb dieters often refer to this reduction in metabolic rate as starvation mode, but that isn’t accurate. The definition of starvation is less than 50 percent of the calories you need for your BMR. That’s why the famous Minnesota Semi-Starvation Study done on Viet Nam War objectors was called semi-starvation even though they were fed only 50 percent of the calories they needed for maintenance.
Keeping Your Metabolism Healthy
Most people who claim to be following the Atkins Diet are not doing Atkins. They are following an extremely low carbohydrate plan they designed themselves, and they are doing it for extended lengths of time. That’s fine, but keeping your metabolism healthy requires certain precautions. Very low carb diets affect many body functions. Metabolism slows because insulin, blood glucose, thyroid, catecholamines and especially leptin levels drop. Dr. Atkins’ original built-in defense against the slowdown was to raise carbohydrate intake slowly and steadily until you reached a level slightly less than homeostasis.
For many individuals, losing only a pound of week – even if it comes off easily – is far too slow to maintain dietary focus. For that reason, Dr. Atkins allowed many patients to stay at Induction levels a little longer, and he raised their carbohydrate intake slower. In fact, in one interview, he mentioned that for those with 100 pounds to lose, his course of action would be to keep them at 25 net carbs for the major part of the weight loss phase to get the fat off more quickly. To compensate, he administered thyroid hormone to his patients to get them through the rest of the weight loss phase.
Many of us do not have that luxury, so we have to do things a little differently if we want to succeed. That’s why I always recommend Dr. Atkins’ original diet when asked which Atkins version is best, and I fully advocate returning carbohydrates to your diet to keep your thyroid healthy. It is extremely important when you reach lower body fat levels to eat adequate protein and carbohydrates because the thinner you are, the more likely it is that you will sacrifice lean body mass rather than body fat. The ’72 version allows you the freedom to fine-tune your diet to your own metabolic issues and food sensitivities as well as discover your own personal carbohydrate and fat tolerance levels.
If you’ve been dieting for quite some time, you also run the risk of your Leptin levels crashing. If that happens, weight loss will come to a halt, and you’ll be unable to stick to your diet. Your hunger will increase dramatically, you won’t be able to get your thoughts off food, and you’ll begin displaying many of the symptoms associated with the starvation response. That doesn’t mean a low carb diet is bad. It means that your body needs a break. For me, I always move to maintenance to give my body time to adjust back to a normal metabolism because the alternative is what most dieters fear the most: returning to your old way of eating and gaining everything back plus more.
Pre-Maintenance and Maintenance
No matter how much weight you have to lose, no diet will allow you to return to your old way of eating. That old way is what caused you to become overweight. Return to that, and the weight will come back. That much is true. What isn’t true is the type of foods you have to limit. There are many ideas floating around the low carb community that are personal choices projected onto everyone else. For example, Dr. Atkins’ early books didn’t outlaw white potatoes. In fact, in the 1992 version, he showed you how to eat them and continue losing weight. He called it: Real Life.
Unknown to many low carbers, Dr. Atkins also did not put all of his patients on a low carb diet. He did not believe that carbohydrate restriction was necessary for everyone. A low carb diet is for those with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. It worked well for his patients who had inflammatory bowel disease. Sometimes, he used it for those who were allergic to wheat, but he did not put everyone who came to him on it.
I know that tidbit of information would shock a lot of low carbers who believe everyone should forever follow the rules of carbohydrate restriction for good health, but in 1981, Dr. Atkins wrote a book called “Dr. Atkins’ Nutrition Breakthrough: How to Treat Your Medical Condition Without Drugs.” In that book, he provided a diet he called, “The Meat and Millet Diet,”that he fine-tuned to fit the patient’s individual metabolism:
“This diet is the best blood-sugar-controlling diet I have been able to devise for the patient who cannot afford to be on a weight-losing regime. It maintains most of the advantages of the Atkins Diet, except the advantages of being in ketosis. But it affords the many clinical advantages of a high ratio of complex (starch) to simple (sugar) carbohydrates. And it provides the added benefit of a high fiber intake.”
The bottom line is that Dr. Atkins was into health, not strictly low carb. His pre-maintenance diet was designed to gently take you out of ketosis, but most low carbers do not want to go there. As a result, their metabolisms stay depressed, so they have to eat a low number of calories to maintain their weight. Their thyroid often becomes trashed, so they end up on thyroid medication for the rest of their lives. They are afraid of refilling their glycogen stores because on the average that represents a 5 to 10 pound regain, so they stay in ketosis even though we don’t know how safe that is for everyone who doesn’t need to be there.
The easy alternative to the glycogen problem is to simply diet yourself down to 10 pounds lower than you want to be, so that when your glycogen refills, you’ll weigh exactly what you want to. Glycogen and the water that attends it are not fat. They are nothing to be afraid of. It’s all that water and glycogen you lost the first two weeks of your diet. That needs to be replaced so your body doesn’t think it’s still starving. The key to a healthy metabolism is to find out the carbohydrate level you feel best at, one that will allow you to maintain your goal weight easily. That doesn’t necessarily mean you give up potatoes, but it does mean you have to stay within your maintenance level of calories.
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