There’s a reason people are lured in by low carbohydrate diets. If you follow them correctly, you can lose weight pretty darn quickly. And, in a small study from UT Southwestern Medical center, scientists found that people on low carb diets use more fat in the liver for energy than those on low calorie diets. Why does this matter? Fat stored in your liver is quite awful and related to insulin resistance (i.e. your body has issues metabolizing sugar), high triglycerides and the production of more fat.
In this small study published in the journal Hepatology, Dr. Jeffrey Browning and colleagues put one group of subjects on a low carbohydrate diet (less than 20 grams/day), another group on a low calorie diet (800 calories/day) and they monitored a third group who didn’t alter their diet. The low carb dieters lost 9.5 lbs and the low calorie dieters lost 5 lbs after two weeks. But the biggest difference was that the low carb dieters dipped into the fat reserves in their liver and used less stored carbohydrate for energy.
This study may have future implications for those with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. And, low carb diets (diets like this that are very low in carbs should be monitored by a physician) can be a tool, when used appropriately, to reverse some disease risk factors pretty darn quickly.
For those people who just want to lose a few lbs, I don’t recommend cutting your carb intake nearly this low. Especially if you are exercising (in which case you’ll need the carbs for energy). Another point to remember: low carbohydrate diets are tough to stay on. And, for this very reason I prescribe all diet advice with caution. If I had a dollar for every person who told me they were doing “insert fad or strict diet here” and then fell off the bandwagon, I would be sitting on Adirondack chair outside my newly purchased house in Rosemary Beach right now. In fact, that might be my next venture, give me a dollar and if you fall off your self-prescribed diet, I keep it and if you succeed, I’ll give back your dollar tenfold. In the meantime, I’m going to start searching for real estate.