Low carb diets seem like a 20th century craze, but actually, they go back even further than that.
A man named William Banting may be one of the first people to propose a diet that eschewed bread, beer, sugar, pastries, and all other carbohydrates, and relied heavily on meat. He published a small pamphlet about it in 1869 and quickly became a sensation in diet circles.
In the 20th century of course this was followed by diet fads like The Scarsdale Diet and the Atkins Diet.
The question is, if low carb diets are so great and they work so well, why are we all still struggling to lose weight? (Approximately 64.5 percent of Americans are either overweight or obese, according to the United States Department of Health and Human Services. )
And the answer is: low carb diets, like all diets, do work well in the short term. In the long term, they fail, and can actually harm your health.
When you first go on a low carbohydrate diet, your body is forced to raid its fat stores, which makes it burn glycogen, a type of carbohydrate. Water binds onto glycogen, and when the body starts burning glycogen, the water is released.
In the early stages of a low carb diet, you will be urinating frequently and losing a lot of water weight.
This makes it appear as if your diet is a success, and has a lot to do with the popularity of high protein low carb diets. These diets start off with a bang, that’s for sure.
And this allows people in the diet industry to continue to promote low carb diets as the only real road to weight loss success. After all, the sale of millions of dollars of low carb diet books, recipe books, frozen meals, and prepackaged foods depends on the belief that low carb is the only way to go.
But here’s the problem: it is very hard to stay on a low carbohydrate diet for any length of time, because they have a number of unpleasant side effects like bad breath, constant cravings for sweets, low energy, irritability, and constipation.
The minute you start eating normally again, the water weight comes back on. And most people blame themselves, rather than realizing that this particular type of diet is set up in a way that is doomed to failure.
Worse than that, a number of independent medical studies have shown that a low carb, high protein diet can be dangerous to your health and even life threatening, and the danger increases over time.
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