The Three Week Challenge

If you read the posts and pages here, and on other sites promoting a low carb approach to weight management, and find it interesting, but also confusing because it is the reverse of what you have heard all your life, how do you get started? And is it safe to do so? These are the very questions I had to field recently with a very close friend.

He listened to me preach the good news of radically cutting carbs to achieve rapid weight loss, and could see the result sitting in the chair across from him, and decided he wanted to try the same thing. He said the next day "you know, I am taking this on faith", which is absolutely true. In spite of seeing me nearly 100 lbs smaller than the last time I saw him, it still requires convincing. So I told him to just commit to three weeks. There are some good reasons for this.

1) Look around the internet - you will find that behavioural psychologists recommend that it takes 21 days to break a habit - and our eating patterns are perhaps the most ingrained habit we have.

2) The reality is you could survive on any diet that is not made of poison for three weeks, so you are not going to hurt yourself

3) Biologically, after three weeks of consuming absolutely no carbohydrates, the body actually stops producing the enzymes required for carbohydrate digestion. They body converts entirely to the use of Ketones as fuel, and the effects of carbohydrate overloading have finally been minimized in the body.

I know from my personal experience that it was at precisely three weeks that I called my Doctor (who knew what I was doing even though he did not like it) and told him that my blood pressure which had been somewhat poorly controlled by medication was now falling incredibly low, and he began weaning me off of the meds. Next to go was the cursed Metoprolol that I had been taking for nearly six years for my heart. At this point I still weighed 240 lbs, yet my BP had crashed down to normal without medication.

The reason for this is that without carbohydrates, my body had finally stopped overproducing insulin. In those three weeks, the insulin had been consumed even though I have severe insulin resistance, and I was riding my exercise bike to assist this for 40 minutes per day. Once my insulin level dropped, my glucagon level began rising, and my body began to release the stored fat.

It seems obvious to me that the elevated blood pressure was not being caused by body fat; it was a result of my very high level of insulin in my blood. When my insulin level fell, my BP dropped. My weight began to drop. The amount of water in my body dropped, which of course is why the blood pressure dropped as well.

So as I said to my friend - commit yourself to radical carbohydrate restriction for three weeks. Just three weeks. At the end of those three weeks you can assess yourself. How do you feel? What happened to your weight? Is your pulse lower? Your blood pressure? How are you sleeping? Are you hungry? Do you feel generally hot, or cold?

With these answers, you can decide on the next step. Do you continue with radical carbohydrate restriction, or do you begin to increase your carb intake?

For those who have been around this barbeque a while, you know what I am recommending is something very similar to the Atkins diet's two week Induction stage. I have said elsewhere that in my estimation, the Atkins diet is PERFECT. It did not however prove perfect for me, only because it was not stringent enough. I had to cut out ALL carbs to achieve the health improvement and weight loss that I required at the rate that I required. Three weeks, not two, allows the body to get to the state where the effects of carbohydrate consumption have been truly minimized.

Oh yeah - I didn't dream this up. Please see "The Ketogenic Diet" by Lyle McDonald, 1998.

ISBN: 0-9671456-0-0