It is very difficult to be a LCHF vegetarian since the vegetarian diet will still be high in carbohydrate and low in protein and fat. In order to Bant you’ll need to eat more of the fatty foods we prescribe – nuts, avocado, coconut oil, eggs, cheese, and other dairy. It would also be helpful if you could eat fish, as this will ensure that you have an excellent diet. My advice is therefore to increase your fat intake and try to get in more animal protein from fish and eggs – you will be in great shape!

Here are a couple of possible explanations. First, you may have lost fat and replaced it with some muscle. Has your waist measurement decreased? If not, then this explanation does not work. Second, to lose weight you need to reduce your calorie intake. This usually happens spontaneously in those who respond well to this diet. If you are not losing weight, you are still eating more calories than your body requires. Even though you’re eating relatively little, it may be that your body has adapted to require very few calories to sustain it. If this is the case, you actively have to reduce your calorie consumption in order to lose more weight. In other words, you need to learn to restrict your portions.

I have reduced my calorie consumption by up to 40%, largely because I’ve lost my appetite on the high-fat moderate-protein LCHF diet and I only eat highly nutritious, energy-dense foods. But I also think that there is an element of conscious control in that I consciously aim to eat less now than I would have in the past. My advice is to eat a very big breakfast and learn not to eat lunch, then only snack in the afternoon and eat a light dinner. In other words, you don’t need to eat three meals a day and, in my view, you want to rather eat large meals infrequently. I think you’ll find that that will accelerate your weight loss.

Finally, some women find that if they cut dairy from their eating and drinking, they do better. Perhaps give that a go. Some women have found that intermittent fasting helps, either a meal a day, or a day a week. This is certainly something to explore on an individual basis and has been utilized by Dr Jason Fung quite successfully amongst his patients.

The evidence is that the average response of the blood (LDL or total) cholesterol concentration to an increased fat intake (in the absence of a high carbohydrate diet), measured in thousands of patients, is no change. Yet we know that values do go up in some subjects. So, in an equal number of patients, the value must go down, which most people would consider to be good. So how can an “unhealthy” diet produce changes that are either very unhealthy or very healthy? It does not make immediate sense, so we need to dig a bit deeper.

There are 2 models for how heart disease develops – the cholesterol theory and the insulin theory. The cholesterol theory holds that cholesterol in the blood rises when one eats a high fat diet and this clogs the arteries causing heart attack. The treatment is therefore simple – remove all fat from the diet.

According to this theory, the only factors in your blood which you need to worry about are either your total or your LDL-cholesterol concentrations – anything that makes either one go up is bad, and anything that causes either to go down is good. Statin drugs reduce both and are therefore good, as is a low fat diet. The only trouble is that even the most religiously followed low fat diet will drop the total cholesterol by a homeopathic amount (about 0,2 mmol/L), which would be too little to make any difference even if cholesterol was the true cause of arterial “clogging”.

The insulin theory holds the opposite – that it is the consistently elevated blood insulin levels, caused by carbohydrate in the diet, that produce the series of conditions we recognise as Metabolic Syndrome (MS), which in turn causes heart disease. Individuals with insulin resistance (IR) are at an especially high risk, and are likely to develop MS when following a high carbohydrate diet.

The cholesterol theory of heart disease has never been proven. The best evidence that the science behind this theory is “junk” can be found in Nina Teicholtz’s new book, The Big Fat Surprise. It seems that we have been seriously misled by bad scientists, industry, and politics to accept a theory for which there is no good evidence. Then there is an entire $40 million per year industry – the cholesterol lowering (statin) industry – that seeks to ensure that we continue to accept this unproven theory without question.