Banting and Weightloss
Banting was first prescribed in 1861 by a Harley Street surgeon Mr William Harvey with great success to a corpulent London undertaker, Mr William Banting. In time the term to “bant” was introduced into the English language. to Bant is to use of this low carbohydrate diet for weightloss. Banting widely used and was the standard for weight loss in all the major European and North American medical schools for nearly 100 years until it suddenly went out of fashion after 1959 when it was written out of all the major medical and nutritional textbooks, to be replaced with its polar opposite, the currently popular low fat, high carbohydrate, “heart healthy” diet.
The low Carb diet is finaly coming back into common public aproval, it has been making a strong comeback since the Atkins diet in 2002 which met with some strong critisism.
Why is a low carbohydrate diet effective?
A low carbohydrate diet is not like most other diets. Most diets concentrate on cutting fat from meals. On the face of it, the approach makes sense.
Hoever why does cutting the fat in a diet so rarely work?
The key problem most people don’t address is that you should be reducing the total amount of energy consumed, carbohydrates which are the corner stone of a traditional diet are primarily energy. As is Fat. If you consume excess energy your body will store this excess as fat.
So by consuming less carbohydrates and eating more protiens and vegetables you will be sunsuming less energy and so will start turning your fat stores in to energy.
Carbohydrate should be looked on as a fuel, are you an endurance athlete who is at your ideal weight? if so by all means you need more fuel.
However if you are not an endurance athlete or you are but you are over weight then stop eating pure fuel. There is plenty more you can eat.
Its not for everyone
This diet particularly suits people who are carbohydrate resistant. However those who can metabolise carbohydrates efficiently and who have always been lean despite eating a high carbohydrate diet may not benefit in any way from this eating plan. I would not advise any athlete who is lean and quite happy with his or her weight and performances to change to this eating plan since it might not make a difference and might even be detrimental.
Further reading on bunting
I highly reccomend reading Tim Noakes article on this:
http://www.health24.com/Diet-and-nutrition/Nutrition-basics/Tim-Noakes-on-carbohydrates-20120721
Also for more information on the atkins diet check this out:
http://www.atkins.com/Program/Overview/How-and-Why-Atkins-Work.aspx
More info on william Banting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Banting
I personaly am very lucky with my metabilism and I am naturaly lean, I still follow the Paleo diet but include lots of potatoes as I do a lot of exercise and need the extra fuel.
Duncan Boltt