The Data - Health Markers
Weight and Body Fat
Weight is probably considered by most people to be the primary indicator of health, when in reality it really isn't, but let's get that measure out of the way first. My weight before starting low carb eating was around 221 lbs. With my height of 6'0", that put me at a BMI of 30, technically just barely obese. (BMI is a rating that's not really that much use since an extremely heathy, athlete might be rated as overweight or obese simply because they had a lot of weight for their height. The rating simply doesn't take the body composition into consideration.)
My body composition wasn't much better. Based on my body composition scale (not terribly accurate but good for monitoring change at least) I had 29% body fat, or a total of about 64 pounds of body fat.
Today, I'm at about 176 pounds with a 14% body fat. That means my BMI is now about 24 which puts me solidly in the "normal" range. The 14% body fat means I'm now carrying only about 25 pounds of fat. You can see in the graphs below that the weight loss was steady and quick. The key thing here is that I didn't really intentionally exercise during this rapid weight loss period. The changes were due only to the change in diet. I also didn't consciously try to eat less, I ate when I was hungry. The key was I just made sure my consumption of carbohydrates was greatly limited - targeting less than 50 grams per day (not counting fiber.) Generally I averaged around 25 grams per day.
A better, and simpler, measure of metabolic health is waste measurement. Unfortunately as I made my changes, I didn't think to get accurate before and after measurements of my waist. I can say I was wearing pants that had a 38" waist and they didn't fit great and probably didn't fit at my waist. I would guess my actual waist measurement was more like 40" or more. (>37" is sometimes considered one of the markers for metabolic syndrome.)