Why You Should Consider Switching to a Low-Carb High-Fat Diet in 2016

As a foodie who has spent more than five decades on this planet, I have followed almost every diet known to humans shy of eating monk fish and bananas exclusively (no, that is not an actual diet, but it could be one day). From a health, weight control and compliance perspective, my favorite diet so far has been low-carb high-fat. I could follow this eating plan for the rest of my life without feeling the least bit deprived.

The most amusing and telling RD response
to why Dietary Guidelines don't work
is that people don't follow them.

And though we all have our own metabolic idiosyncrasies and unique microbiomes, I suspect many people who love food as much as I do should also part ways with such failed diet concepts as "moderation" and high-carb low-fat recommended by both the USDA, Coca Cola and Big Food.

If you are one of the rare people who can subsist on donuts, Marlboros and Mountain Dew and still live to 100, please ignore what follows. Most people, however, need to make conscious food choices to look and feel good, choices which can be hard to make when the government-healthcare-media complex continues to push yesterday's discredited dietary advice as if it were handed down by God on stone tablets.

The historic rationale behind our dietary misguidelines is very complex, but you can find a most entertaining detailed recap here. The Readers Digest version is we have rabbits, lazy researchers and failed presidential candidate George McGovern to blame.

I happened upon low-carb high-fat eating by accident, basically after following the Medifast Take Shape for Life program and dropping 35 pounds with minimal effort. I no longer eat any Medifast foods; nor do I endorse its low-fat manufactured food approach; but what that diet did teach me was I did not need to eat pasta, potatoes and bread to feel satisfied.

In fact, by eliminating what I like to call "the whites," I could eat more of the foods I liked better, like avocados, steak, bacon, nuts, seeds, butter, and whole-fat cheese (along with vegetables and low-sugar fruits like blueberries) -- and not feel hungry between meals.

Satiety is the key to being compliant on any diet since if you don't feel satisfied you will be jonesing to eat foods that are not on plan. That is why people cheat on their diets and then binge on more forbidden foods because they feel guilty or bad about themselves.

Since following a low-carb high-fat way of eating, I don't ride that merry-go-round any more.

What's funny is that even with all the publicity in recent years suggesting studies on saturated fat were bogus and carbohydrates are the real culprits behind our nation's chronic diseases, such as Type 2 Diabetes (no longer called Adult Onset Diabetes because children are now being diagnosed with it), many people have not yet gotten the memo. This, despite the documented success doctors like Sarah Hallberg, Andreas Eenfeldt, Rangan Chatterjee, Tim Noakes and others have had with patients following high-fat low-carb diets.

Not to mention myth shattering books like Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories and Nina Teicholz's The Big Fat Surprise.

Sometime this month, the federal government is going to issue another set of U.S.D.A. Dietary Guidelines that will likely continue to make Americans fatter and sicker. Fortunately, there are many books and articles now available that refute the faulty research on which the guidelines are based and demonstrate how and why low-carb high-fat diets are healthier for most people.

So before drinking that Diet Coke and driving to the gym to work off the egg white omelet you had for breakfast, resolve on this first day of 2016 to do your own research to determine which diet is healthiest for you.

You may never have to subject yourself to a sad low-fat dinner of poached chicken breast, quinoa and steamed broccoli again.