Eat Fat and Grow Slim - Published 1958 - Anyone Read It? page 2

[lexie]

Same here. My mother, who was a Registered Physical Therapist, taught me to lose weight, cut starches (carbs). This was common knowledge in the '60s before the big fat scare.

I have a book written in the 1930s about charm, etiquette, and personal presentation geared toward young ladies. In its diet section, it also recommends cutting starches. Basic meal? Meat and two veg. If you wanted a dessert, a milkshake was acceptable, but cake was "too heavy." Funny how things changed.

[Paleobird]

My Grandma always said to cut out the "white" foods like bread, potatoes, rice, etc. to lose weight. And no snacking. Grandma knew a thing or two.

[Omni]

I just really liked the story in the first chapter of the Fat Undertaker in 1862 who was morbidly obese and finally found a physician who said don't eat starch, eat fat to get slim, and he did and it worked.

Even if it hasn't got all the fine tuning of science with today's Paleo/Primal, it would be a far sight healthier than current SAD state of affairs.

I think it is a real gem, and they just went on what worked and didn't need to do an ancestral analysis or a multi million dollar study, so SAD, so SAD that we lost this knowledge for so long.

[otzi]

This is awesome. I'm working my way through it...it reminds me of those Jack Lalanne videos that were posted a few weeks ago--if we knew all this in the 50's and prior why are we still re-inventing this stupid wheel???

I was caught off-guard by something. In the height-weight charts it says a 5'10 man (in shoes and clothes) would be Small at144-155; Medium build at 153-164; and Large build at 161-175.

Then it gives this description of a 5'5, 210 pound man, "He was a prosperous, intelligent man, but terribly fat. In August, 1862, he was 66 years old and weighed 202 lb. He stood only 5 feet 5 inches in his socks. No pictures of him are available to-day, but he must have been nearly spherical.

He was so over-weight that he had to walk downstairs backwards to avoid jarring his knees and he was quite unable to do up his own shoe-laces. His obesity made him acutely miserable."

5'5/210lbs? That's big, but hardly spherical. Same for the h/w charts. I'm 5'10, 175 in clothes, and I would be considered large. Maybe they were less muscular back then.

[tfarny]

Well, all standards are skewed to much thinner than is currently common, and if you lift heavy weights, just forget about all of it - at 6'1" the BMI cutoff for overweight is 185 lb, if I weighed that right now I'd have an 8 pack.

[gopintos]

Then it gives this description of a 5'5, 210 pound man, "He was a prosperous, intelligent man, but terribly fat. In August, 1862, he was 66 years old and weighed 202 lb. He stood only 5 feet 5 inches in his socks. No pictures of him are available to-day, but he must have been nearly spherical.

I read that also, and I thought hmmmm. I have been reading more of it also and enjoying it.

[ATTAACK]

Thanks for posting this. I've read a little and saving the rest for later. Very interesting stuff!

[otzi]

This series explores two people referred to as 'Mr. Constant-Weight' and 'Mr. Fatten-Easily'. I'm thinking in today's terms, they'd be 'Mr. Insulin-Resistant' and 'Mr. Insulin Sensitive'. Surely those terms existed in the '50's. Maybe more correctly they'd be 'Mr.s Leptin Res/Leptin Sensitive'. What do you guys think about 'Mr. Constant-Weight' and 'Mr. Fatten-Easily'? Are there only two types of people?

Explained: "He took people whose weights had been constant for many years and persuaded them to eat double or treble their normal amount of food. They did not put on weight.

He showed that this was not due to a failure to digest or assimilate the extra food and suggested that they responded to over-eating by increasing their metabolic rate (rate of food using) and thus burned up the extra calories.

He then over-fed people whose weights had not remained constant in the past and found that they showed no increase in metabolism but became fat.

So two people of the same size, doing the same work and eating the same food will react quite differently when they overeat. One will stay the same weight and the other will gain."

[Omni]

The Wiki page on William Banting, the "Fat Undertaker",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Banting

Apparantly the diet caught on for a while, long enough to coin a phrase "Do you Bant?", as in do you diet?
He lived to 81, so not a centarian, but a good wicket nevertheless.

[Omni]

This series explores two people referred to as 'Mr. Constant-Weight' and 'Mr. Fatten-Easily'. I'm thinking in today's terms, they'd be 'Mr. Insulin-Resistant' and 'Mr. Insulin Sensitive'. Surely those terms existed in the '50's. Maybe more correctly they'd be 'Mr.s Leptin Res/Leptin Sensitive'. What do you guys think about 'Mr. Constant-Weight' and 'Mr. Fatten-Easily'? Are there only two types of people?

Explained: "He took people whose weights had been constant for many years and persuaded them to eat double or treble their normal amount of food. They did not put on weight.

He showed that this was not due to a failure to digest or assimilate the extra food and suggested that they responded to over-eating by increasing their metabolic rate (rate of food using) and thus burned up the extra calories.

He then over-fed people whose weights had not remained constant in the past and found that they showed no increase in metabolism but became fat.

So two people of the same size, doing the same work and eating the same food will react quite differently when they overeat. One will stay the same weight and the other will gain."

Agreed, but as for the exact mechanisms, Insulin/Leptin etc., I still think we have a lot of learning to do.
Only just read a bit more and quite fascinated that in 1856 they had already made the connection between carbohydrates, Obesity & Diabetes, but when Banting went public, even though the diet was a great success, because he was just a layman, the medical profession (Allopathic), felt it was their duty to bury it and CICO was born, because it was not their idea, or was it because they would be out of a job?
Not too different to what we seem to see happening today.