The Harcombe Diet vs. LCHF
Having spoken at two LCHF conferences – Oslo November 2014 and South Africa February 2015 – I thought it may be useful to do a special article on LCHF vs. The Harcombe Diet, just in case any of you thought I had suddenly replaced my beloved 85% chocolate with coconut oil! Andy and I have worked on this together as a Q&A. Comments are open at the end, so please feel free to ask any questions that we may have missed...
Q) Is The Harcombe Diet LCHF?
A) No. Depending on what you may have done before you came across The Harcombe Diet you will likely find it lower in carb and higher in fat (if you were a calorie counter) and you’ll probably find it higher in carb and maybe lower in fat if you were doing Atkins.
The important thing to remember about The Harcombe Diet is how it came about. There’s
a full article on this here and it’s also shared in the 2013 version of Why do you overeat? And the Hodder 3-step plan book, as it’s so important to remember.
The Harcombe Diet came about trying to understand food cravings and why we overeat, when all we want is to be slim. Following extensive reading, research and piecing evidence together, I came across three physical conditions that cause insatiable food cravings and Phase 1 was then designed to be the perfect diet to overcome these. Phase 1 had no macronutrient end in mind (the three macronutrients are what we know as carbs, fat and protein) – it simply allowed foods that were allowed by the doctors working in the fields of each of the three conditions and it didn’t allow the problem foods for each condition.
Phase 2 then built on Phase 1 i) making sure that problem foods would continue to be avoided ii) ensuring that the real food principle would remain first and foremost and iii) Phase 2 added something that I had observed about how the body uses food for energy so that we would NOT give the body a perfect fat storing environment – quite the opposite. The fat meal vs. carb meal principle ensures that the body uses carbs for fuel or fat for fuel after each meal, minimising the chance of using carbs and storing fat on the body.
