This seems to be widely-accepted, but I couldn’t tell you for sure.
It’s not a huge point, but I think it’s important because part of the hype of low carb dieting comes from the promise of rapid weight loss at least at the beginning.
It’s a psychological effect. People start the diet, immediately lose 5lbs over a week, and think “OH MY GOD, this is working, I can stick to this!” They establish the habits and systems of losing weight. Then when weight loss slows down to the more reasonable 1-2lbs per week, they aren’t bummed out because they know it’s working.
When they cheat, their weight immediately shoots up—and then when they stick to it, it immediately goes back down. This helped me a lot with getting back on track when I used a low carb diet to lose weight.
It’s true. It’s said that for every gram of glycogen, you need three grams of water to store it. The average person has about 500g of glycogen, so you’d have around 2kg weight loss just in glycogen and water from starting a low carb diet.
I basically agree, I’m just wondering if there is expert consensus on this chain of reasoning, i.e.
Low carb-dieting tends to produce stunning weight loss results in the first few weeks with far less actual fat loss.
As a result, many people tend to feel falsely that they have found the silver bullet for weight loss in low-carb dieting, i.e. a way to circumvent the calories in/calories out paradigm.
I personally am pretty convinced of the above two points, but I am wondering if there is expert consensus.
It’s not a huge point, but I think it’s important because part of the hype of low carb dieting comes from the promise of rapid weight loss at least at the beginning.
It’s true. It’s said that for every gram of glycogen, you need three grams of water to store it. The average person has about 500g of glycogen, so you’d have around 2kg weight loss just in glycogen and water from starting a low carb diet.
It’s a psychological effect. People start the diet, immediately lose 5lbs over a week, and think “OH MY GOD, this is working, I can stick to this!” They establish the habits and systems of losing weight. Then when weight loss slows down to the more reasonable 1-2lbs per week, they aren’t bummed out because they know it’s working.
When they cheat, their weight immediately shoots up—and then when they stick to it, it immediately goes back down. This helped me a lot with getting back on track when I used a low carb diet to lose weight.
I basically agree, I’m just wondering if there is expert consensus on this chain of reasoning, i.e.
Low carb-dieting tends to produce stunning weight loss results in the first few weeks with far less actual fat loss.
As a result, many people tend to feel falsely that they have found the silver bullet for weight loss in low-carb dieting, i.e. a way to circumvent the calories in/calories out paradigm.
I personally am pretty convinced of the above two points, but I am wondering if there is expert consensus.