There have been incidental and unexpected benefits for me in adopting a low carb diet with moderate exercise to lose weight. The obvious gains have been a higher level of general fitness and a sense of wellbeing I haven’t experienced quite so much for many years. I feel much more relaxed and tolerant to stress, including heat stress from the recent hot weather. I no longer get out of breath just going upstairs. A significant drop in blood pressure is a little more surprising, as is a general improvement in skin condition. The latter may be due to more sunshine, improved circulation, more nutrients from a wider range of vegetables or a combination of factors. One possibility that occurred to me is that my new diet has meant excluding grains such as wheat, corn and rice because this is the easiest way to reduce starchy carbs. The possibility of a mild wheat intolerance led me to explore this a little further.
There is a trendy modern diet called the Paleo diet, because it’s based on the foods our hunter gatherer ancestors ate. The rationale behind it makes sense. As a species we’ve been around for a couple of million years, plenty of time to evolve an adaptation to the kind of diet that modern forensic archaeology tells us was eaten back then. It’s only about 12000 years since grains were cultivated and stored in a systematic way. The historical impact of this ready source of carbohydrate energy was of course immense. The ties to the land brought in agriculture, cities and civilization as we know it. There was a downside, however. 12000 years is a relatively short period in evolutionary terms. Some claim that the average height of humans was shortened by several inches and only caught up in the 20th century. Is it possible our bodies haven’t yet adapted to a diet high in grains?
The industrial revolution, and its agricultural counterpart brought about a further major change in diet. It’s been said that industry was fuelled not just by coal but by the mass production of sugar, once a luxury enjoyed only by an elite few. Sugar in our diet is more sugar in the blood, to add to that rapidly produced by the digestion of starchy carbs. It isn’t too surprising that we now have a global epidemic of diabetes and associated maladies, and it isn’t just in wealthy western countries. Medical opinion about this is changing, with fat no longer being blamed as the cause of obesity. A reduction in starchy carbs and sugar has shown that type 2 diabetes can be reversed, along with rapid reductions in weight.
I won’t be adopting the impractical extremes of a Paleo diet, but I may well continue the benefits of a low carb, low sugar diet after I’ve reached my targeted weight reduction.
I wrote the above on 6 August 2018. Since then my weight has remained stable, even through lockdown, although I’ve reintroduced some carbs in the form of potatoes.
Chronicles 