On today’s episode of the Ask Prof Noakes Podcast we look at a different aspect of weight loss on the Low Carb Healthy Fat or Banting Diet, losing too much weight. prof. Tim Noakes shows us how to help ourselves overcome this problem.
Eating more fat won’t solve this problem
Today we look at a different aspect of weight loss on the Low Carb Healthy Fat or Banting Diet, losing too much weight. Alex Strick got in touch and shared a bit of background.
Alex is 1.91 meters tall and weighs approximately 74kg’s. He started on the LCHF or Banting diet mainly for running, but he has been losing quite a bit of weight.
He is already down from 76/ 77kg’s. He is worried that he will lose too much weight on the Banting or LCHF diet. How can he prevent that, would eating more fat help?
The simple solution to stop yourself from losing too much weight on the Banting Diet
Prof Tim Noakes: Not at all. He has to eat more carbs. That is the paradox, Alex, that you are very very lean. Even lean people lose weight on the Banting diet. One of my great friends Karim Khan, who is the editor of the British Journal of Sports and Medicine – he laughed at me over the years.
He was always lean and I was just getting fatter. There he was, eating all the cereals and grains. Eventually he decided to cut out the cereals and grains and he also lost 7kg’s. He started at probably 80kg’s, and he is also tall like Alex.
He said it was amazing, he feels so much better now. He doesn’t have to run to maintain his weight. When he was eating the cereals and grains he had to run to maintain his weight. But now he says it is completely easy.
I think, Alex, the problem is if you cut your carbs too low, you will lose a lot of weight. What you could do is think of taking like 100 – 120 grams of carbohydrate a day. Because if you are insulin sensitive, 200g’s a day is fine – it is not going to harm your health.
That is the sort of upper limit, and you probably won’t lose as much weight. But if you cut to 50g’s of carbohydrate and you are really concerned, just take it up a bit more to 100, 120g’s. You won’t continue to lose weight, you will stabilise maybe at 70 or 72.
That might be more acceptable. I will just add that the weight that you are losing is fat. You don’t really need that fat on your body anyway, so don’t be too concerned about the weight loss.