The Banting diet propagated by Professor Time Noakes is all the rage right now in South Africa to the degree that many restaurants even serve special Banting dishes.

But the banting benefits maybe short-lived. At the core this high fat/medium protein diet is setting you up for massive failure.

This can easily be verified by the magnitude of people who stopped with the Banting diet and who is now massively overweight due to this very serious problem.

Let’s look into what this problem is…

Click here to view the video “The Banting Diet dangers”

 

The insulin problem

By cutting out or minimizing carbs from your diet, you make your body’s insulin response more and more ineffective and “desensitize” it to such a degree that when you start eating carbs in the future again your body will be completely unable to deal with the carbs. This will result in you adding fat weight in a very fast fashion with the smallest amount of carbs eaten. The result is that a few months after you stopping with the banting diet, you will be massive in size, MUCH bigger than you were before you started with this diet.

The human body needs carbs to work effectively – full stop. The moment you cut it out from your diet is the moment you set yourself up for complete failure in the future.

You cannot indefinitely cut out carbs from your diet, it is NOT a practical approach, not from any angle…

Long term cutting out of carbs can actually lead to insulin resistance and metabolic damage!

Due to the ineffective insulin response on the banting diet a bodybuilder would find it near impossible to get a cut or ripped look. To get the body fat down to single digits carbs is essential. The carbs keep the insulin response healthy and this means you have a very high degree of control over fatloss. The banting diet is a serious no-no for any one interested in the fitness lifestyle.

 

What benefits does the Banting Diet have?

Extract from sabreakingnews.co.za:

South African celebrity professor, Tim Noakes’ controversial low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet is not healthier or better for losing weight than following a balanced weight-loss diet, according to a University of Stellenbosch study published in the Plos One journal on Wednesday.

About 3 200 participants took part in 19 international scientific trials reviewed by the university. These participants were placed on either Noakes’ banting diet or a balanced weight-loss diet for a period of between three months and two years.

“This study shows that when the amount of energy consumed by people following the low carbohydrate and balanced diets was similar, there was no difference in weight loss,” said the study’s lead researcher, Celeste Naude.

This means Noakes’ diet, which drastically reduces the intake of carbohydrates in favour of fats, resulted in weight loss by limiting the amount of calories (kilojoules) the body took in. In effect, a person lost weight because they reduced their caloric intake rather than restricting the amount of carbohydrates.

“Decades of research have shown the balanced diet to be safe and healthy in the long term, and along with a healthy lifestyle, is associated with a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and certain cancers,” the Heart and Stroke Foundation South Africa CEO, Vash Munghal-Singh, told Health-e News.

“We do not have similar proof that a low-carbohydrate diet is safe and healthy in the long term, and some studies already point towards an increased risk of heart disease and death with low carbohydrate diets.”

“Based on the current evidence we cannot recommend a low-carbohydrate diet to the public,” she added.

Noakes has defended his diet, and argued a high fat and protein diet has been known for reducing hunger, in turn leading to consuming less food and thus less calorie intake. He told Health-e News his diet was the easiest to follow.

“Unless the diet takes away hunger it will not produce the change in lifestyle necessary to sustain weight-loss. Low carb [diets] take away hunger in a way that no other diet does, that’s why it is the easiest diet to follow and the most effective.

The above University Stellenbosch study (June 2014) clearly indicated that for weight-loss, there is NO advantage in following the Banting Diet versus a traditional calorie controlled diet. The fact that Tim Noakes suggest that the higher fat content stops hunger pain is not completely unfounded. But even in this regard a healthy lifestyle diet should ALWAYS include frequent meals and not traditional 3 meals or less a day. Our bodies was never designed to act optimally with 3 meals or less. Five to 7 small balanced meals per day is what provides the nutrients in the correct fashion and this control the hunger pains of a calorie restricted diet near perfectly.

Tim Noakes is an expert in his field but the controversy surrounding his Banting Diet has pretty much alienated him from the rest of the medical community.

The Banting diet could be a short-term solution for certain people who is insulin resistant. But it can never be a permanent solution and the potential harm by far outweighs the benefit factor.

 

A Permanent Solution

Carbs, Good Fats and Protein are crucial for a healthy insulin response, hormonal system and effective muscle growth – ALL of them. There is no getting away from this fact. A classic, balanced diet style must be applied which can be executed for an indefinite period. It must become a balanced lifestyle that you adopt. This is THE ONLY approach that will bear permanent fruit.

For the bodybuilder to reach very low body fat levels, a very specific monitoring approach must be applied whereby every two weeks the body fat % is checked via fat calipers and weight is measured on a scale. Should this show a decrease in weight but no drop in body fat levels (this indicates the body is in starvation mode which means muscle mass will be utilised first and last the fat storage), the calories must be increased across the board by a 10% factor. Continue with this approach until you hit a “sweet spot” (this is the point where the body realize it is NOT in a starvation diet mode anymore) were you will suddenly stop loosing muscle mass but your body will start utilising your fat reserves for weight loss. This is the perfect approach for most aesthetic benefits.

The following video explains this process (male version):

 

Here is such a balanced carb/good fat/protein diet which can be adopted indefinitely:

Cutting Diet Challenges

Also check out the following video covering some very sound diet lifestyle principles: