[airspirit]

This is for Tuff, who doesn't understand nutrition despite his claims:

The body will not store fat unless there is fat to store. Fat is most commonly gained by excess glucose being snagged by insulin and stored away as fat. If you don't have excess glucose levels, your insulin levels won't spike and you will not be storing fat away (my blood glucose levels are almost perfectly steady between 70-75 at all times now, IIRC from the test). If your body has grown accustomed to burning fat as its main power source, then it will first digest the fat that you eat preventing it from being stored, and then will burn the fat on your body for the energy balance needed.

The only way that you'll gain fat on this diet is if you were to eat over 3-4000 calories of FAT per day. That is like eating multiple tubs of butter. How likely do you think that is?

There is a reason that as you progress and lose fat that you are supposed to add more carbs and such to your diet ... this allows your body to remain in ketosis, but allows your body to find an equilibrium where you aren't losing any more body fat (which gets dangerous after a point) but you aren't gaining it either. The carbs are what create the fat ... not the fat itself.

I, for one, have been finding it difficult to eat more than around 1200-1300 calories per day, because meats and such fill you up so much quicker than the empty calories from carbohydrates that everyone else takes in (the average american eats 800 calories of sugar per day!). I don't think I'm ever going to go hungry ... but I don't think I'll ever have weight problems again ... and I definitely don't have to ever worry about diabetes!

As far as muscle loss, which you are wildly off about, there is an article in one of your muscle mags (the names all sound the same to me) about how they now RECOMMEND this diet because it is the only one in which you don't lose muscle mass, where the low cal/low fat diets usually result in 50% fat/50% muscle loss. They also recommend it for extra endurance in the gym ... go figure.