David Ludwig > Quotes

“fat cells much more than passive storage sites for excess calories. Fat cells take in or release calories only when instructed to do so by external signals—and the master control is insulin. Too much insulin causes weight gain, whereas too little causes weight loss. So if we think about obesity as a disorder involving fat cells, then a radically different view emerges: Overeating doesn’t make us fat. The process of becoming fat makes us overeat.”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“Here’s the basic strategy: 1.  Turn off the starvation response by eating whenever you’re hungry and until fully satisfied. 2.  Tame your fat cells with a diet that lowers insulin levels, reduces inflammation (insulin’s troublemaker twin), and redirects calories to the rest of your body. 3.  Follow a simple lifestyle prescription focused on enjoyable physical activities, sleep, and stress relief to improve metabolism and support permanent behavior change.”
― David Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently

“People who regularly consume artificial sweeteners may find naturally sweet foods (like fruit) unappealing, and unsweet foods (like vegetables) intolerable. Artificial sweeteners may also cause insulin secretion, driving calories into fat cells and stimulating hunger.62 In addition, fat cells have been reported to contain sweet taste receptors—similar to those on the tongue. Artificial sweeteners may promote fat cell growth by stimulating these receptors or in other ways.”
― David Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently

“Insulin’s effects on calorie storage are so potent that we can consider it the ultimate fat cell fertilizer. For example, rats given insulin infusions developed low blood glucose (hypoglycemia), ate more, and gained weight. Even when their food was restricted to that of the control animals, they still became fatter.9 Conversely, mice genetically engineered to produce less insulin had healthier fat cells, burned off more calories, and resisted weight gain, even when given a diet that makes normal mice fat.10”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“the ideas presented in this book culminate a century of research questioning the calorie balance model of obesity, and represent a fundamentally different way to understand why we gain weight and what we can do about it.7”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“Forget calories. Focus on quality. Let your body do the rest.”
― David Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently

“Foods with similar nutrients can affect hormones and metabolism in profoundly different ways, determining whether we store or burn calories, build fat or muscle, feel hungry or satisfied, struggle with weight or maintain a healthy weight effortlessly, and suffer from or avoid chronic inflammation.”
― David Ludwig

“fundamental principle of the body’s weight-control systems: Impose a change in behavior (for example, by restricting food), and biology fights back (with increased hunger). Change biology, however, and behavior adapts naturally—suggesting a more effective approach to long-term weight management.”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“Just as calories differ according to how they affect the body, so too do carbohydrates. All carbohydrates break down into sugar, but the rate at which this occurs in the digestive tract varies tremendously from food to food. This difference forms the basis for the glycemic index (GI).
The GI ranks carbohydrate-containing foods according to how they affect blood glucose, from 0 (no affect at all) to 100 (equal to glucose). Gram for gram, most starchy foods raise blood glucose to very high levels and therefore have high GI values. In fact, highly processed grain products – like white bread, white rice, and prepared breakfast cereals – and the modern white potato digest so quickly that their GI ratings are even greater than table sugar (sucrose). So for breakfast, you could have a bowl of cornflakes with no added sugar, or a bowl of sugar with no added cornflakes. They would taste different but, below the neck, act more or less the same.
A related concept is the glycemic load (GL), which accounts for the different carbohydrate content of foods typically consumed. Watermelon has a high GI, but relatively little carbohydrate in a standard serving, producing a moderate GL. In contrast, white potato has a high GI and lots of carbohydrate in a serving, producing a high GL. If this sounds a bit complicated, think of GI as describing how foods rank in a laboratory setting, whereas GL as applying more directly to a real-life setting. Research has shown that the GL reliably predicts, to within about 90 percent, how blood glucose will change after an actual meal – much better than simply counting carbohydrates as people with diabetes have been taught to do.”
― David Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently

“This situation is similar to edema, a condition in which fluid leaks out of the blood vessels and accumulates elsewhere in the body (for example, in the legs), causing swelling. Despite having too much water in the body, people with edema may experience unquenchable thirst, because there’s not enough water in the blood, where it’s needed. Telling people with edema to drink less is no more effective than food restriction for weight loss, because it ignores the underlying cause. Insulin (and other influences, as we’ll discuss later) has programmed fat cells into calorie-storage overdrive. People chronically overeat because they’re trying to keep enough calories in the blood to feed the brain, compensating for those being siphoned off by overstimulated fat cells.”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“And remember, the fleeting moments of pleasure from eating poor-quality food pale in comparison to the enduring rewards of feeling good.”
― David Ludwig

“The one nutrient we don’t need at all is carbohydrate.”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“The saturated fats in dairy appear to be healthier than those in red meat.34 Shorter chain saturated fatty acids, such as the kind found in coconut, are metabolized quickly and don’t stick around long enough to cause much trouble. And to make matters even more complicated, the amount and type of carbohydrate in the diet influences how dietary fat affects blood lipids, with saturated fat and processed carbohydrate being an especially dangerous combination.35 So without bread, butter may be relatively benign.”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“we seem to have a choice—bypass the gastrointestinal tract or bypass the highly processed diet.”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“In a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,79 we followed 276 middle-aged adults in Quebec for six years, dividing them into categories based on diet. Overall, the participants gained about 6 pounds (quite typical for this age group), but with huge individual variation—ranging from a 20-pound weight loss to a 30-pound weight gain. For those consuming a high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet, Insulin-30 strongly predicted this variation. That is, people with low insulin secretion gained on average virtually no weight, whereas those with high insulin secretion gained on average more than 10 pounds. In contrast, Insulin-30 had no relationship to weight gain among those consuming a low-carbohydrate/high-fat diet.”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“Highly processed carbohydrates are among the lowest-quality components of the food supply, accounting for the majority of diet-related disease in the United States today— they’re highly concentrated in calories but devoid of real nutrition.”
― David Ludwig

“as I see it, the similarities among all concentrated sugars and refined starch outweigh their metabolic differences.”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“In full disclosure, this diet—like all other diets—hasn’t been fully proven. The pilot project didn’t include a control group and wasn’t intended as scientific research. We can’t be sure how these outcomes would apply to the general public. But the ideas presented in this book culminate a century of research questioning the calorie balance model of obesity, and represent a fundamentally different way to understand why we gain weight and what we can do about it.7 For those of you with a scientific bent, I’ve included hundreds of supporting studies from many research teams among the references.”
― David Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently

“Curiously, the stimulant drugs used to treat ADD have broadly similar biological actions to the stress hormone adrenaline. Could it be that these drugs help counteract the swings in blood sugar that occur on the highly processed diets children consume today?”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“The goal of Look Ahead was to reduce heart disease, a common complication of diabetes. The study, conducted in sixteen clinical centers in the United States, assigned about five thousand adults with type 2 diabetes to either a low-fat diet with intensive lifestyle modification or to usual care. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013,33 was terminated prematurely for “futility.” Analysis by independent statisticians found no reduction of heart disease among participants assigned to the intensive low-fat diet, and no prospect of ever seeing such a benefit emerge.”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“Such research has sometimes been misinterpreted to mean that “all diets are alike,” or “sticking to a diet, any diet, is the only thing that matters.” But these conclusions are simply wrong. This sort of faulty reasoning wouldn’t withstand scrutiny in other areas of clinical research. Should we abandon a promising new cancer drug, simply because participants in the experimental group didn’t take most of the medicine?”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“Cutting back on calories will cause weight loss for a while, which gives the illusion that we have conscious control of our weight over the long term. However, many bodily functions are within our temporary, but not permanent control. For example, many people can lower the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood for several minutes by breathing fast, but few can do so for much longer.”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“With such limited support, most participants in diet studies don’t change their behavior very much, and the comparison groups (for example, people assigned to a low-fat versus a low-carbohydrate diet) don’t wind up eating much differently from each other. Not surprisingly, these studies produce very little weight loss in any group.”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“People with major metabolic problems, like severe insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes, may benefit from long-term carbohydrate restriction— to 25 percent of daily calories as in Phase 1 or sometimes even lower. Preliminary studies report that some individuals experience remarkable improvements in health by eliminating virtually all carbohydrates on a ketogenic diet.4”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“Ironically, the standard treatment for diabetes since the 1970s has been a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet—the same diet that contributed to the problem in the first place! We wouldn’t give the milk sugar lactose to someone with lactose intolerance. What’s the sense in giving so much carbohydrate to someone who, by definition, has carbohydrate intolerance?”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“THE APPROACHING TSUNAMI OF OBESITY-RELATED DISEASE Stories about obesity appear regularly in the media, but what gets lost in all the attention is just how quickly this epidemic has emerged. Fifty years ago, 13 percent of adults in the United States had a BMI in the obese range.22 Today, that figure is 35 percent. An additional 34 percent are overweight, leaving fewer than one in three adults in the normal weight range.23 The epidemic has spared no segment of society or region of the country, although people in lower-income communities and belonging to some racial-ethnic groups have suffered most severely.”
― David Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently

“researchers from the University of Wales in the United Kingdom gave seventy-one female undergraduate students slow- or fast-digesting carbohydrate-based breakfasts and then tested their cognitive functioning. They found that memory, especially for hard words, was impaired throughout the morning after the fast-digesting breakfast.”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“There’s also some indication that replacing carbohydrate with plant rather than animal foods has special health benefits. Among approximately eighty thousand women in the Nurses’ Health Study consuming lower-carbohydrate diets, high consumption of vegetable protein and fat was associated with a 30 percent lower risk for heart disease over twenty years, whereas high consumption of animal protein and fat appear to provide no such protection.

One explanation for this finding is that the relative amounts of amino acids in animal protein stimulate more insulin and less glucagon release than those in plant protein – a hormone combination that has detrimental effects on serum cholesterol and fat-cell metabolism. Other possible downsides of a modern, animal-based diet include a less healthful profile of dietary fats, excessive iron absorption (especially for men), and chronic exposure to hormones, preservatives, and environmental pollutants.”
― David Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently

“But are we really to believe that a cup of Coke would be as healthy as a large apple (both with about 100 calories), if we drank it with a serving of Metamucil and a multivitamin pill?”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently

“In possibly the only clinical trial of its kind, seventeen South African adults were instructed to follow diets consisting primarily of fruit for a minimum of twelve weeks, with small amounts of nuts to satisfy nutritional requirements. The participants consumed on average twenty servings a day or more, likely containing at least 200 grams fructose. At the end of the study, the investigators observed virtually no adverse effects. To the contrary, body weight and other heart disease risk factors tended to improve despite this massive dose of fructose.57”
― David S. Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells and lose weight permanently