Nutrient Partitioning and the Inability To Lose Fat

 Following onto yesterday's post, I get a weekly missive (I think they call these newsletters) from Dr. Michael Eades, one of two authors of The Protein Power Life Plan which advocates for a low carbohydrate lifestyle. Eades himself has said that the plan is really a high fat diet, but that the publishers felt this wouldn't sell because of the way fats have been demonized.

Featured in this week's Arrow is a piece by Adam Kosloff on nutrient partitioning entitled The Rats Who Starved to Death While Obese. The article is both disturbing and interesting. It is disturbing not because of the starvation of the rats, as disturbing as that is, but what it has to say about human obesity. It is also disturbing because it points to the blindness of doctors and dieticians to the suffering of their patients.  I encourage gentle readers to read Kosloff's article.  In many cases, these nutritionists are as cold as liquid nitrogen to our sufferings.

Using a low carbohydrate, ketogenic diet, I have gotten my weight down to 225 from a high of 307. Yet I have been unable to get any lower for at least 6 months. This despite starting a jogging program and keeping my calorie consumption around 1500-1800 calories per day. There is something else going on. At those low-calorie consumption levels, if the Calories In/Calories Out (CICO) formula worked I would be losing a pound every week and a half conservatively. But the Carb-insulin-hypothesis (CIH) doesn't explain the problem fully either. It gets closer but doesn't quite close the gap in understanding.

I have noted that I can gain weight, meaning fat, by just smelling a piece of pie. That may or may not be true, but it illustrates the problem. I have gained weight while fasting for a couple of days. Holiday eating consists of one meal, yet it takes weeks to get back into ketosis, and even then, the weight doesn't fall right off. As I stated above, I seem to have a lower limit to my weight that my body simply refuses to let go. I know of other people who have the same issues. There clearly is more to it than mere CICO.

(As a way to determine if I need to take in calories, if I am hungry, I eat protein.  If I don't have energy, I eat fats.  But I always have energy, so I am only concerned about protein intake which usually includes enough fats as well.)

Kosloff sums up his essay with three questions researchers should be asking:

The core questions should be along the lines of:

Why does the body partition fat the way it does?

Is that partitioning normal?

If not, what can be done about it?

These are the questions that actually matter.

And once we start asking these questions, perhaps we can stop blaming people for biology—and start figuring out how to fix it. Maybe then—just maybe—the torture of our mammalian cousins won’t have been entirely in vain.