At the risk of being shouted down, I want to stick up for Jimmy and note that much of this page goes beyond discussing his interview and its just ad hom Jimmy bashing. Try to argue the topic, not the person. If you disagree with someone, try to stay off their Facebook page looking for something to criticize!

Go to iTunes, look up Jimmy's new Ask the Low Carb Experts, and see if you think he's doing a bad job.

Sure, Jimmy was big, found low carb, got excited and wrote a book, did his news thing, and still struggles. Now his news thing is his business, and his struggle is part of it. Plenty of people in his situation identify with this and follow along, as Jimmy asks anyone who knows something about every topic he can find. Is that so bad? Paleo has answers and ideas. Paleo should be proud that others see common ground.

Most bloggers and writers come at you with what they figured out. Jimmy is still looking and some folks just follow along for the ride too. I'm on his forum, which is real slow, but there are still ideas there.

It's not harming anyone here or holding anyone back. Jimmy is bringing Paleo to low carb more than he's just trying to cling to low carb and it's single input theory. A lot of his readers/listeners are still those low carbers that think dieting means finding low carb bake mix. Don't expect too much. His business is trying to help people like that.

I'm so sick of these paleo dogmas:

1) Anything more than 5 minutes if getting your heart rate elevated is "chronic cardio". When Sisson talks about chronic cardio he's talking about running marathons, not 30-60 minutes on the treadmill.

2) Fat/Sugar burner nonsense. Metabolic ward studies have shown with regard to weight loss calories matter, and macro-nutrient composition is largely irrelevant for weight loss. I'm fine with eating a high fat diet, but if your goal is weight loss, you still need to maintain a caloric deficit. However, satiety may be affected by macro-nutrient ratios, and that's why low fat diets fail (people feel hungry all the time).

3) Paleo is low carb. All evidence points to the ancestral diet was around 50% carbohydrate.(See Paleolithic Nutrition 25 years later by Boyd Eaton). Low carb fundamentalists are latching on to paleo as their movement dies out.

4)Damaged metabolisms. Show me evidence of your "damaged metabolism".Thyroid panel?. If you're not refering to thyroid levels, what the hell are you talking about?

Jimmy needs to take his own advice "If you're diet is not woking, find the one that's right for you". Low carb isn't working for him, but since he's built a life around being a "low carb guru", he can't ditch it (lest the low carb pasta and quest bar sponsors will flee).

I totally agree with Kurt Harris about Jimmy "As far as Jimmy goes, he simply can’t reassess low carb, even though he has already had countless guests explain to him that the CIH is wrong and why. Jimmy is basically boxed in at this point.

I used to think he was just a friendly, neutral “journalist”. He is not. He is a creationist agenda pusher who earns his living based on people buying low carb dogma and he will avoid admitting he is addicted to food as medication until it does him in."

It's so annoying because he's disarmingly nice, but under the surface you can tell he's just attached himself to us because he's seen that interest in plain old low carb has declined. In the process I would say he's significantly derailed the movement. His latest post on the "carb debate" was totally unacceptable. Dr. Rosedale has nothing to do with paleo, Nora has no credentials or citations that qualify her to comment, and there is an assortment of other comments from people who couldn't give a crap about evolutionary biology. I see a pattern though. Jimmy will do a carb debate to generate hits that consists of one or two reasonable people to make it seem a little more legit and some copy and paste from some low carb MDs. I wish Sean had asked Jimmy if he even believes in evolution.

My advice for Jimmy: keep doing great podcasts, but your blog posts about paleo and the "safe starch" debate are a circle you-know-what at best and extremely misdirecting and inaccurate. Evolutionary biology and paleoanth are NOT your strong points and you also seem unable to pick people for those debates that know anything about those subjects.

Edit: There is an anti-Jimmy Moore person EatLessMoveMoore, who keeps posting "answers" here that are not discussions of the PaleoFX talk in question. "No more irrelevant than 99% of the answers here. I suspect Melissa would rather Kurt's provocative comment not gain traction/get exposure. That, or it's just censorship as one might expect over at LLVLC."

Wtf. I was the one who first publicized Dr. Harris' comments. The idea that I am censoring things critical of Jimmy is hilarious and absurd.

People are harshing on Jimmy. He's not perfect; who is?

1. He may be a Creationist, but his interview with Mark Sisson a few years ago introduced me to Paleo, and he's an avid enthusiast of Paleo. Also, he doesn't hide his religion, without telling me to believe what to believe. Full disclosure is good. This atheist and evolution enthusiast owes his discovery of evolutionary-based eating to that Creationist.

2. His weight is up. We know this because he tells us. Again he's up front about his struggles.

3. He's not a scientist. He doesn't hide it. So what? Those of us who want to listen to Robb Wolf do.

4. He's probably not trying everything he could do to lose weight. Is low carb useful for some people because if food reward? Because it's helpful in restricting calories? Because there's a metabolic advantage? We'll debate that and science will clarify it. A sensible approach for Jimmy might be calorie counting, which he is inclined not to do, but calorie counting with high quality food might work for him. He obviously has larger struggles than some of us, and while most paleo people don't need to count calories, he may need to. He may be stuck in a dogma that doesn't allow him to "believe in" calorie counting. Maybe he does need to add in a bit of carb. I don't think we know. I do thing he's stuck in a paradigm that isn't quite working for him, and it'd be scary to backtrack a but and try a few other paths. That doesn't make him foolish or evil or anything. It makes him probably a bit like the rest of us.

I have to admit that I'm at a point now where it's hard for me to listen to Jimmy, so obviously I was "a bit biased". Being a regular reader of Evelyn's carbsane blog, to me, Jimmy just confirmed what Evelyn (and Dr. Harris too) writes about all the time. He's completely caught in his "low-carb is the only way for me" dogma, despite being quite obese. He has convinced himself that he is super healthy and now tells everybody that weightloss is not his primary goal anymore.

I also have a problem that he constantly displays himself as THE LC success story, he is still fat and regained quite a bit.

More over, at one point he said at his biggest weight he ate whatever he wanted, and afterwards he blamed conventional wisdom dietary recommendations. I don't think downing massive amounts of soda and junk food is following the original low fat/high grain food pyramid.

I don't like that he tries to tie low carb to paleo just because paleo is for most lowER carb than SAD (I don't think most folks will unknowingly be VLC unless they make a conscious effort, couple of pieces of fruit, carrots, some nuts and you're easily over 50g)

Finally, I'm not a fan of his pseudo paleo food creations ala "it's paleo aka LC, I can eat how much I want and still be super healthy"

I just don't buy his nice and open minded guy thingy anymore ;)

ChenZhen is very right : he's a low carb freak. Like so many others, he's blinded by his success, and will not change his ideas easily. On the other hand, is the fact that he's low-carb really the issue here? If I'm not mistaking he tried eating potatoes but it didn't work out.

I think he's a great guy. He doesn't really know the science, but he obviously doesn't care much about it, and I don't blame him for that. Different people, different interests.

I don't like the attitude of people recently : yeah, the guy is still not lean, but he's far from what he used to be, his mood is obviously great and he looks good apart from being a bit fat. Like he said,

You know, this is one of the things that discourages me the most in the community of health, "You don't look the way we think you should look (...) so something you are doing must be wrong". Well not necessarily, there's so much to being fat.

He's an adorable guy, and will always be. Sometimes I just wonder to myself : is the guy really eating as nutritious as he thinks he is? I mean, eating grass-fed steak and a bit of salad each day is great, but even when I eat more than 2 pounds of leafy greens per day with grass-fed meat, I still don't get enough of certain minerals. I doubt he's eating any liver. He probably eats copious amounts of butter too. He may eat bone broth, I don't know. But I know one thing for sure : if I eat liver, I'm not hungry for 24 hours, if I eat ghee, I'm very hungry and could easily eat 1lbs of it. Still, like Sean says :

I love how you're an open book, you're not afraid to share personal things, ...

And his podcast is awesome.

Alright, so I've read people's answers here. And I agree that he has a number of things I question. But he makes a key point that a lot of people I think have overlooked:

We live in an instant-gratification culture. Part of being healthy is taking back the time we spend, and putting it to other things.

I think he's right on that. It's a lot easier to keep on the bandwagon when I get off my ass to cook.

I also think that strength training is a good point. I'm still trying to figure out my exercise balance. Personally, I think I need to have more strength training, at least to feel like I'm making progress visibly.

I think there is a difference between someone who has been morbidly obese and someone who has only needed to lose 20-30 pounds. If you've been very overweight, especially for a long time, it's going to take a long time to fix it, and maybe you will never get you back to "normal".

I think there is room in the Paleo movement for Inuits and Kitavans. There is no one-size-fits-all for diet and health.

If I were morbidly obese, and if I had never heard of Jimmy Moore, hearing today's presentation would give me some much-needed hope and perhaps some willingness to give "low carb paleo" a try.

Of course, I HAVE heard of him because PH and Carb Sane Asylum are my 2 most-visited sites with Melissa right behind. :-))

Since I've been sensitized by Evelyn, Melissa and Dr Harris in particular one statement echoed throughout my empty head this morning while everything else faded away--"stick with (that one plan) for the rest of your life."

That's a sad quote because, as Dr Harris indicated this week, Jimmy is indeed clinging to that one low-carb concept for dear life.

I started out at the lower edge of what we'd call morbidly obese and I'm currently just about to move officially from obese to overweight (scoff if you will but that's a big deal for me.) I even started out on LC for about 3 weeks, but since then my mix of foods has changed significantly about every 3-4 weeks. If I am to endorse Jimmy's quote above, then I have to say my "one plan" is to rotate my foods significantly and use varying degrees of fasting. :-))

Right now, what was starting to feel like a plateau (not to mention excessive external stress) has been shattered by a WIDE range of cycles. Three days of the week are 0-300 calories, 4 days are moderate carb (would be VLC for SAD) and about every 2 weeks I relish a high-calorie feast. I'm fascinated to report that while I've been losing fat steadily, the most noticeable improvement in my skin, gums and gut appeared after the FEAST. I'm not qualified to pose a hypothesis but my ignorant guess is that the fasting set the stage for some very healthy responses to the nutrients in my feast. And I am pretty sure none of these improvements in my status would have occurred from following any of these strategies alone--it took cycles of all 3.

I have no personal dislike of Jimmy. If he coaxes some morbidly obese people to try either low-carb or paleo as strategies to begin a road toward weight loss and/or improved health he will have done very worthwhile and important work. Those who get past losing the first large amount of fat, though, will be those who instinctively reject his "stick exactly to that plan" paradigm. I don't think you can make it all the way to normal weight/metabolism with such a narrow focus.

That's about 19 minutes of my life I'll never get back ;-) But I took one for the team.

I'm surprised Jimmy is so up on resistance training. After all, it was back in late 2007 that all of his problems with regain began as he gained 35 lbs in like 6 weeks or something like that.

These days Jimmy serves as an example of what not to do. Low carb is clearly not working for him anymore. Indeed if he hadn't embarked on his various crash diets along the way, he'd be in the mid-300's by now at least.

In light of Chris Kresser's presentation, it's also about time these "healthy" low carbers stop crowing over their stellar lipid profiles. Here's his most recent shared results: http://www.livinlowcarbdiscussion.com/printthread.php?tid=3952 (FWIW,, I'm Low Carb Cheater on that thread)

Total Cholesterol 351 LDL-C 278 HDL-C 57 Triglycerides 79 LDL Particle Number 2130 Small LDL-P 535 LDL Part. Size 22.0 Large HDL-P 10.9 Large VLDL-P 0.4

That's LDL/HDL ratio of almost 5. And this was 2009 when Jimmy dipped back into the 230's and was likely in the 260's at the time of the test.

That Dr. Westman has no problem with this makes me thankful I don't have a low carb doctor. I'd rather deal with the docs I've had over the years who have expressed concern over my slightly high (always in normal range) cholesterol than someone who dismisses it entirely.

Cortisol. Stop worrying about everyone else and do what works for you and if YOU feel someone is WRONG, remember they probably think the same of you. There is no one right way to eat your food. It's ok to disagree (and yes, I disagree as well with said person of interest) but its all good. Some people probably need VLC to maintain health, but even if it's "wrong" it's probably better than the SAD diet they've been following. Just my humble opinion.

Paleo IS Low Carb, but it is alway fest and famine. I eat less in the winter than the summer. The body has one main objective, it is not to be lean or fat, it is to survive, to keep on keeping on. If you feed it Low Carbs it will set the Low carb as the high point. I fine for me and I tell people to see if it works with them to never let your body figure out your hunt and gather menu. Im not a fan of Jimmy Moore but he does the Low Carb community a world of good with his blog, but he needs to get off of all the package food and snack bars, he needs to have some productive cheat days followed by famine at some point. He may even then need to go hard core for a year so he can re-introduce some better carbs into his diet and he needs to be very serious about strength training- its a great place for carbs to gather. He needs to get off the scale and away from test numbers and use the mirror as his guide. Paleo IS Low Carb because we eat nature whole food with lots of fat and protein that replace a lot of carbs I'm not keen on Jimmy Moore but I listen to his podcasts and enjoy them but if I was his friend- I'd tell him the above.

and to all those folks who suddenly see paelo as NOT low carb, one day you will look in the mirror and say, shhheeet, I guess I overdid the tubers and such. Carbs increases your carba'tite with little warning.