The New Low Carb Way of Life: A Lifetime Program to Lose Weight and Radically Lower Cholesterol While Still Eating the Foods You Love, Including Chocolate [Hardcover]

Rob Thompson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 11, 2004

This book serves as a guide for the next generation of dieters who will be delighted to know that only certian carbohydrates are responsible for adding on the pounds and clogging up the arteries--and sugar is not one of them.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Rob Thompson MD is a graduate of the Washington School of Medicine. He did post-graduate work at the University of Illinois in Chicago and is board certified in internal medicine and cardiology. For the past 26 years, he has practiced medicine in Seattle, Washington state.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: M.Evans & Company (June 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590770315
• ISBN-13: 978-1590770313
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #91,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The New Low-Carb Way of Life, October 26, 2004

By 

Happy Mama! "Dianne" (Wells, Maine, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The New Low Carb Way of Life: A Lifetime Program to Lose Weight and Radically Lower Cholesterol While Still Eating the Foods You Love, Including Chocolate (Hardcover)

It isn't a diet, it is a way of life that makes sense and works! My Italian pasta/bagle loving husband and I, a chocoholic,and mother of five, were worried about midlife pounds, lack of energy and family genetics of diabetes. Dr. Thompson's book made so much sense that we tried it. We have each lost 30 pounds(he looks yummy again!), have more energy, have gotten back to our walking regiment and are still enjoying eating. We have fun discovering better ways to order from menus, are amazed the "punch" a few cherries or pistachio nuts can have and I can still eat chocolate! This book gave us back control of our bodies and our lives!

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Full of errors, no depth of research, potentially very damaging to your health., January 27, 2011

By 

Anthony Stratton "Both decorative and functio... (Chaska, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The New Low Carb Way of Life: A Lifetime Program to Lose Weight and Radically Lower Cholesterol While Still Eating the Foods You Love, Including Chocolate (Hardcover)

I've read a handful of low carbohydrate books. This one is the LEAST informative and the MOST stuck in old dogma. It was written by a medical doctor, which explains the old school, keep-pushing-the-drugs dogma.

Good Stuff: At least Rob has figured out that low carbohydrate diets are very beneficial. He's also in favor of aerobic exercise. But other low carbohydrate books are much more cutting edge and helpful. I'll list the ones I know at the end of this missive. He's also in favor of statin drugs, which could seriously damage your health. Read on!

Background Intel: When I chat with regular people, I quickly out pace them because they don't have any solid body of knowledge to compare against all the nutritional misinformation that's currently circulating. And with most people, they've learned five or six wrong ideas about cholesterol or exercise and they just recite those wrong ideas like they're mantras. Even when I give them helpful information that could definitely improve their health, with studies and books to back it up, they still cling to the old ideas. They argue to be sick and ignorant. It's very rare that I meet an adult over the age of 20 who is willing to learn anything new, particularly when it's something to do with nutrition.

Your average doctor knows NOTHING about nutrition, diabetes, osteoporosis or heart disease. Medical students sit through 3,000 hours of lectures. Out of those 3,000 hours, most of them receive exactly zero hours of training in nutrition. They can take elective classes in nutrition, but those classes just cover the same old, wrong misinformation that has been proven wrong by the studies and books I've read. What they do learn is anatomy and how to identify symptoms and prescribe various drugs to treat those symptoms. They do not learn how to stay healthy or to treat illnesses with methods that don't involve drugs.

My friend Dana once asked ten medical students why they wanted to become doctors. All ten of them replied, "To get rich." No one said - To help people.

For more on this, check out: What Your Doctor Doesn't Know About Nutritional Medicine May Be Killing You by Doctor Raymond Strand.

And this article by Doctor Joseph Mercola: Doctors Are The Third Leading Cause Of Death In The US, Killing 225,000 People Every Year

In which he lists:

All these are deaths per year:
* 12,000 -- unnecessary surgeries
* 7,000 -- medication errors in hospitals
* 20,000 -- other errors in hospitals
* 80,000 -- infections in hospitals
* 106,000 -- non-error, negative effects of drugs

These total to 225,000 deaths per year from iatrogenic causes!!
What does the word iatrogenic mean? This term is defined as induced in a patient by a physician's activity, manner, or therapy. Used especially of a complication of treatment.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Stuff Doctor Thompson Got Wrong:

He thinks you need a custom diet:

There are people with food allergies and it's even more important for people with diabetes or hypoglycemia to avoid sugar than the rest of the crowd. But you don't need a special diet based on your blood type or your DNA.

The field of genetics has morphed into the new field of epigenetics. Epigenes are switches that turn genes on and off. Your epigenes play a role in how your body handles your diet, but your genes are one of many factors.

You can't eat lots of pasta, doughnuts, bread, pizza, cover your salad with salad dressing that's loaded with corn syrup, wash it all down with a 32 ounce soft drink and then blame your hefty weight and diabetes on your genes. People in families with many overweight members are mainly overweight because they eat the same sugary, starchy junk food. And they all sit on the couch, watching television and playing video games. There certainly is a genetic factor, but your diet is the main thing. What are you eating three times a day? On a beautiful, summer evening, are you going for a walk or watching television?

He thinks saturated fats make one gain weight:

This is another old bit of dogma. First of all, eating fats does not make you fat.

The journalist Henry Louis Mencken wrote, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." The idea that eating fat makes you fat is clear, simple and wrong.

Here's a telling example which appears in the article - On The First Law Of Thermodynamics, written by Barry Groves, PhD:

Actually, excess fats aren't stored in the body. Any unused fat calories are excreted in urine and feces. (Endocrinology 1962; 70: 579. Experientia 1963; 19: 319. Metabolism 1964; 13: 87-97. Proc Soc Exp Biol Med 1964; 115:424. Nature 1964; 201: 924)

You can eat all the natural animal fats you want. The idea that eating fat makes you fat is, quite literally, crap. You're body just excretes any excess fats that it doesn't need. It's sugar, corn syrup and starches that make you fat, not meat.

You're better off eating grass fed beef from cows that eat their natural diet, grass, and spend their time in the sunshine. In factory farms cows eat an unnatural diet of grains, plus their injected with hormones and antibiotics. The grains cause ulcers to grow in the cows' stomachs. Eventually, the ulcers would kill the cows, but they don't live long enough for that to happen. That's another huge topic.

There are two ways to lose weight:

1 - Starve yourself. This is also called a low fat diet. It's not healthy and it's no fun at all.
2 - Restrict insulin. Insulin is the gatekeeper. As long as insulin is high, it prevents triglycerides from being used for fuel. When insulin is low, a process called lipolysis-ketosis begins. Triglycerides are taken from the adipose cells (the fat cells) and burned for fuel.

This is usually called ketosis for short and it's completely natural. Unfortunately, the name is similar to diabetic ketoacidosis, which is a dangerous condition for diabetics, resulting from a shortage of insulin. So many people, including many doctors, confuse the two and will tell you that ketosis is dangerous.

On the contrary, you're in ketosis every night while you sleep. If it were not for ketosis, you would use up all your glycogen, your short term energy storage, and die in your sleep. Since you can't eat while you're sleeping, your body converts some triglycerides (body fat) to glucose while you sleep to keep your body and brain running.

Fruit:
He says you can eat all the fruit you want. He doesn't understand that fruit is loaded with fructose. It's not as harmful as mainlining sugar, but you don't want to go overboard with fruit. And if you're trying to lose weight, eating more than a little fruit will sabotage your weight loss efforts.

His glucose shock rating:
Where did that come from? He has a chart with the glucose shock ratings of various foods. It's the first time I've seen this. Everyone else uses the glycemic index. (It's a young field, so the values for various foods are still being sorted out. That's how it goes with young fields.)

Exercise:
His advice about exercise is incredibly vague!

He did write that exercise helps reduce triglycerides before they are stored as fat. Well done there. But then he wrote that, "High triglyceride levels wash away HDL, the good cholesterol." He added no explanation for that statement.

He suffers from the HDL is good cholesterol and LDL is bad cholesterol myth:

HDL is high density lipoprotein and LDL is low density lipoprotein. These are special molecules, from a class of molecules called lipoproteins, that move things around in your body, including cholesterol. HDL and LDL are not cholesterol; they are the vehicles that move cholesterol around. Calling HDL good cholesterol is like looking at a school bus and saying, "You're a 3rd grade student."

It's right there in the name, high density lipoprotein. The word cholesterol does not appear anywhere. It's amazing how so many people can miss something so obvious.

LDL takes cholesterol to the cells. HDL takes it away from the cells, back to the liver. The thinking was that taking cholesterol away from the cells must be good and taking it to the cells must be bad. Another bit of wrong thinking.

On top of that, only 20 percent to 33 percent of the cholesterol in your body comes from the food you eat. Your liver makes the rest. If you eat fewer foods with cholesterol, your livers makes more. If you eat lots of foods with cholesterol, your liver makes less. The amount of cholesterol you eat has only a negligible effect or no effect on the amount of cholesterol in your blood.

He thinks cholesterol clogs your arteries:

Here's an idea is from Doctor Ron Rosedale:
Your liver is not going to make a molecule that's harmful, then make another class of molecules to move it around, then transport that molecule into your arteries and smear it all over your artery walls to give you a heart attack. Nature does not work that way.

The idea that cholesterol clogs your arteries and leads to heart disease is a complete myth. It was created by Professor Ancel Keys, at the University of Minnesota, in the 1950s. He could have blamed heart disease on sugar or animal fats. He picked animal fats. He was wrong. He was supposed to do a regression analysis to check his hypothesis. Any researcher worth eight bits knows how to do a regression analysis. (I changed that expression for the computer age.) He never did that.

Tribal people who still eat a high fat diet, such as the Masai in... Read more ›

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It works!!!, April 20, 2005

By 

Arthur Steuer - See all my reviews

This review is from: The New Low Carb Way of Life: A Lifetime Program to Lose Weight and Radically Lower Cholesterol While Still Eating the Foods You Love, Including Chocolate (Hardcover)

The New Low-Carb Way of Life is a very satisfying eating program that has enabled me to lose a lot of weight and to reduce my blood pressure and cholesterol to ideal levels! I don't feel hungry or deprived - in fact, I feel great! The book is enjoyable to read, and Dr. Thompson's advice is very easy to follow. I highly recommend it!