KC Lemson

By KC Lemson [MS]


My feelings on the anti-carb craze...

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Can be best summed up by this:

(More brilliance can be found here)

What's really annoying me these days are the magazine articles saying that “Really, what it is is calories - if you burn less than you take in every day, you'll gain weight. If you burn more, you'll lose weight.“ These are the same magazines that a year ago were telling us all about atkins and south beach, 5 years ago about the zone, 10 years ago about low-fat, 15 years ago about oat bran.

If I hear one more study about two groups of people trying to lose weight, one on a “low fat“ diet and one on a “low calorie” diet and - hold on to your hats now - the low calorie diet group lost more weight, well then gee gosh dandy, I might have to go get me one of them low calorie diets myself.

I lost a bunch of weight two years ago. I didn't exercise. I just ate less. Everyone wanted to know “my secret“... stop eating so dang much. It's not easy, but it works. Oh, also - Balance Bars. They're like candy bars but they're good for you (after all, they use the 40-30-30 rule so they can't be bad!). I'd have 3-4 during the day, and then eat a normal dinner.

  • Good job on the weight loss.

    I stopped drinking soda pop, the pounds just started coming off.

  • I liked this little TIME article recently: it's what the experts actually *agree* upon, which at this point I think can be taken as gospel:


  • I recently presented at a .NET user group. I prefaced my code demo with a comment about the code being low-carb.

    It's a little frightening to me how fanatical we are as a country. What's even funnier is that the whole low-carb thing was almost over by the time the marketing craze kicked in.

    Scary stuff.

    I will NEVER give up my bread!

  • A few years back I did the Body For Life plan which worked wonders for me in the end but the real funny thing was that just by changing my diet I lost 10 pounds in the first week. Congrats on your success.

  • Ben: I've long been jealous of people who normally drank regular soda, since they could so easily cut out calories by switching to diet. Unfortunately I grew up on diet pop and abhor the regular stuff (I swear I can *feel* the sugar settling on my teeth), so that wasn't an easy out for me.

  • That's true. I had a cousin and an ex-collegue who lose weight just by eating less, without paying attention to any diet. But only 3-4 balance bars during the day ? How much did you lose over how long ?

  • Over a span of 11 months I lost a total of 40 pounds, but my rate was variable. I lost 13 pounds in the first 8 weeks. I lost another 8 pounds over the next 3 months, and another 15 over the 5 months after that.

  • That's a tough diet. My cousin's version was going to Chinese restaurants as usual, but eat until you're 90% full instead of 110% full. But then he didn't lose 40 pounds.