I lost 10kgs twice in my life; the first time with a high carb, low fat diet and the second one with a no carb, high fat diet. Roughly same weight interval 84kg->70kg and roughly the same timeline (I was aiming at -1kg per week).
The high carb diet was tough: I was hungry all the time and I had to count calories precisely. Mentally I felt roughly like I did before the diet. Mostly tired. I didn't do much adjusting to my diet, I just had less food than before in order to create a caloric deficit.
The no carb diet was easy: I was never hungry, I had mental clarity for the first time in my life. After the occasional sleep deprivation I was feeling much better than before. I started eating twice a day with no snacks, then migrated to one meal per day with no hunger. Adjusting to the new diet came with some mistakes (eg. balancing elecrolytes to get the optimal level of energy) but after fixing them I was much better than before.
I can confirm that for this N=1, both clean vegetarian and carnivore diets are a large improvement over the standard American diet health wise, but the later has been much more sustainable.
I think this is why there is so many arguments about one or other, people get fired up over veg v carnivore.
Because they are both better than the Standard American Diet.
It is really important for people to note their starting position. If they were from Standard diet, almost anything is improvement.
Just like someone can be a vegan but is eating vegan oreo's, then that is not healthy. Or carnivore and just downing ribs all day.
Seems like just less processed is the best.
That pattern has been very successful for me. Beef short ribs are my favorite food now, and I have them for my main meal of the day (breakfast) on most days. I'm eating a plate of them as I type this. On that diet I've gone from morbidly obese to merely overweight, my diabetes is in remission, and my IBS has become manageable. The duration of the satiety from this meal is very high, so I'm not at all tempted to try to down them all day. I was a binge eater on carbs.
I wonder why you consider ribs to be carnivore junk food? Is it the fat? On any low carb program you're practically obliged to replace carbs with fat for energy. If it's the saturation of the fat, carnivores like me tend to disagree that it's unhealthy. Of course that doesn't work very well if they're covered in sugary BBQ sauce, but my breakfast has just three ingredients: ribs, salt and butter.
But you are correct. If it is just salt and butter, then ribs is a low processed food and probably not even as bad fat wise as other cuts. Probably also not the most fatty either.
Maybe a better carnivore 'junk' food example is like someone making a 'lasagna' with just layers of hamburger and a layers of cheese. So it is just all hamburger and cheese slop.
I've done both keto and vegan. And lost weight with both.
At the moment, I'm not sure I can define which one is better.
When I finally tried the low residue approach of carnivore it relieved my symptoms by the next morning. As a result I've become skeptical that either fiber or carbs are health foods for me. I'm also much more skeptical of the epistemic capacity of nutrition research.
After sorting that out I added some psyllium fibre tablets and I'm mostly sorted.
I agree, taking extra fiber supplements can be bad, or overwhelm the gut. But you can eat vegetables, and get fiber, but at a lower volume of fiber before you get constipated.
I'm just on side that vegetables are important. And the carnivore diet people don't seem to get enough vegetables generally, and all the other nutrients in vegetables. Even thought, you can do Keto with low carb vegetables. It can be done. Thought difficult.
Also. Gluten. When I cut out Gluten, that also cut out a ton of carbs (no breads). If you just eat vegetables without grains, it is pretty low carb.
Maybe, by the time you eat just meat, or just whole plants, or even a combination of whole foods (meat and vegetables, minus grain), your are being much more healthy in general than the Standard American Diet.
really, just eating a whole baked potato can be considered low carb compared to someone downing oreo's.
Why don’t you think it’s unhealthy? Would you argue the reverse - that saturated fats are healthy?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18615352/
For a good popular treatments I recommend
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all...
and
See how you made assumptions (not downing ribs) and watered down the analogy (oh it’s just not-SAD) in order to reach a different conclusion.
The “seems like” is a totally unrelated conclusion to the N=1 that GP was talking about.
I am a month in right now on tracking every calorie I eat as close as possible in a spreadsheet.
It astounds me what I thought I could eat and think I am still in a calorie deficit. I would even say I had become completely delusional from diet misinformation.
All these gimmicks to cause yourself to restrict calories is so suboptimal to simply counting.
I think counting calories is unpopular though exactly because not counting calories allows for a level of self delusional. You can then mentally be in this super position of at the same time believing to be on a diet without actually restricting calories. Of course you don't lose any weight but you are on a "diet".
This has been known for quite some time. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19820013/
Though those labels were always suspicious to begin with, especially since the carb in the “low carb” meme seems to only cash out into refined grains, not beans or broccoli.
I have no study to back me up but I think all anecdotes and studies about weight-loss without self-denial is bound to get more push-back than normal. Weight-loss and fitness above a certain level is “supposed to” (we think) involve hard work and sacrifice. No doubt colored by the hard workers who pushed through and have now have built a minor identity around how their strong character compared to their former selves.
Control groups are not "whataboutism". If adding that kind of control showed keto was specifically helping these people, then that'd be great; but since the study doesn't seem to have done that, it's hard to be confident in the conclusion.
Instead, they gave the participants cookbooks, and assigned them a personal coach to help them plan and cook their meals and follow through with the diet change. Giving that kind of personal support to change habits and make more considered choices to someone with mental health challenges is bound to make them feel better, no?