Steve: My exact diet is a combination of Primal and The Anabolic Diet. With my goals being lose about 2% body fat and gain muscle, I'm pretty close to as small as I would like to be (173.6 today - which is getting close to my all time smallest). I did feel a reduction in energy for the first week or 10 days, but then it bounced back. Here's the thing though - you can't go "kind of" low carb. Or you'll most likely feel like crap.
It takes about 2-5 days (everyone's different) to switch from burning glycogen (carbs) for fuel to burning fat (both dietary and body fat) for fuel. During this time, your energy will dip because your body is still looking for new glycogen reserves to burn. During that depletion time, it's normal to be tired and have workouts suffer, but after you make that fundamental switch, your energy will bounce back better than ever. Why better?
We only carry a very small amount of glycogen at any time. When you eat a huge carb meal, your body replaces what glycogen you need, then stores the rest as fat... that's no good. Then when you run out of glycogen, you will get tired, and need to replenish it with more carbs. This is why so many people really have to eat every 3 hours - to replace the small amount of glycogen that we can store in the body. Also, this is why you often get tired after eating a huge carb meal (in addition to a minor gluten intolerance that many people have).
When you're fully converted to living off fat, you won't run out of energy to burn. Ever! We have so so so much fat to use for energy that you can go all day. My endurance is better than ever, even for long runs, or multiple training sessions. You don't run out of fat, not only because you have basically unlimited, but also because 1g of fat contains 9 calories (energy) where 1g of carbs = only 4. You get a lot more bang for you buck (or pound for you I suppose!)
Some people who go primal never quite get here though because their carb intake is still too high for the initial cross over. For the first 2 weeks, the Anabolic Diet recommends going almost no carb. I still ate a big amount of spinach to help my bathroom situation be more regular, but kept it to under 30g for the first 12 days. Then I do a weekly carb up. This is strictly for muscle building.
When you're on a ketogenic (extremely low carb) diet, you primarily lose fat, but there is a small muscle loss as well. Since I don't want this, I do a weekly carb up, in order to fill my muscles with a big glycogen stores for 2 big weight training sessions Mon-Tue (I carb up on Sunday usually). I can lift and build huge muscle, then by Wednesday, I'm back in ketosis, leading to fat loss again, but the glycogen left over in my muscles is the first to go out, rather than my newly made muscle size.
I have yet to find anything that proves that eating low carb for the long haul shows any risk at all. There are study after study that fail to show eating high fat diets as raising LDL, hardening arteries, increased risk of heart disease and in fact, many of them show a decreased risk of cancer. Even saturated fat (which you eat a lot of on Primal and Anabolic Diet) is not shown to increase risk of heart disease. The U.S. government recommendations to eat low saturated fat (and low fat in general) is actually based on..... get ready for this - only 2 studies. 1 showed a very slight advantage to eating low fat and the other showed that eating low fat, high carb actually INCREASES your chances to die from heart disease. The American Heart Association threw out the findings of the second study (actually done in England).
I would recommend, first, reading the book The Primal Blueprint (or researching it on the web - most of the information is there) and then deciding to go all in or not. Marginally primal will leave you drained and still looking for carbs/glycogen - I won't lie, the first week is tough - but if you make it through, it gets so easy!
Speaking of that, I'm going to hit the treadmill for some weighted walking before my training session.
Have fun,
Steve
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