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Low carb diet
Jaded
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I am two weeks into my 100 pushups program and am desperately also trying to shred some (fat) pounds off.
I have really wanted to explore a low carb diet but really wouldn't even know how to begin going about this.
Would anyone happen to have a decent low carb meal plan that works for them?
I'm Canadian and would have to rely on more or less regular supermarket food.
Not a big fan of stuff to spicy but am open to trying new things.
Currently weighing in at 5'9" and about 235.
I've read stuff about diets and cutting carbs to the point where you go into Keotis (god I am sure I butchered that one)?
I have really wanted to explore a low carb diet but really wouldn't even know how to begin going about this.
Would anyone happen to have a decent low carb meal plan that works for them?
I'm Canadian and would have to rely on more or less regular supermarket food.
Not a big fan of stuff to spicy but am open to trying new things.
Currently weighing in at 5'9" and about 235.
I've read stuff about diets and cutting carbs to the point where you go into Keotis (god I am sure I butchered that one)?
I can't think of anything clever.
Jaded on
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"Ketosis" is what you were looking for.
You can lose plenty of weight, even get bodybuilder level ripped without dropping carbs almost completely to get into ketosis. Of course dropping particular carbs will help a lot. Sugar and wheat primarily. I'd suggest just slowly changing your diet rather than going from a high carb diet to low carb in a day. You'll crave a lot less that way. Start by doing a few simple things like cutting out soda and fruit juice, start having eggs for breakfast instead of toast and eating more smaller meals than fewer massive ones.
My meals look something like this:
meal 1 - porridge & protein shake
meal 2 - 4 scrambled eggs
meal 3 - meat and 5 veg (usually lamb, chicken or beef but turkey is great as well, also I don't count potato as a vegetable)
meal 4 - unsalted nuts, 2 pieces of fruit, can of tuna/salmon/sardines
meal 5 - meat and 5 veg (different meat to lunch) + rice (if I'm going to the gym)
meal 6 - post gym protein shake with oats, yoghurt, blueberries/raspberries/banana(depending on season), milk,
meal 7 - casein (slow release) protein, unsalted nuts, maybe a small amount of cheese
Obviously your meals have to work with your work schedule. I'd definitely suggest cooking up large batches of meat and veges at a time so you've got plenty to eat throughout the week. I cook up a large meal on sunday night (a couple of butterflied chickens and enough veges for 5-6 meals was this week). I then microwave this at work during lunch time. I cook the eggs in the microwave at work as well during my morning 15min tea break then eat meal 4 at my desk while working.
You need to maintain a balanced diet and simply make sure you're burning more calories than you're taking in.
In fact, if you add more cardio (Running, biking, swimming, etc.) you'll want to adjust your diet to have MORE carbs, whereas if you add more weightlifting type exercises, you want more proteins.
Generally, cutting out fats is the best option (You still need some), but if you find a diet with no fats that doesn't make you want to kill yourself, you're amazing.
If you can, eat more protein and in smaller meals. Not load up on protein shakes, but eat meals heavier in proteins, as they make you feel 'full' longer. Tuna, chicken, turkey, etc. are awesome. Look into the lunch-to-go tuna packages if you're a lazy bum like me.
Simply put; Eat healthier, stop drinking soda, stop eating 'snack' foods. Those are ridiculous calorie carriers. A tuna or chicken salad package ~ 250 calores. 2 Pop-tarts is ~400. Keep exercising.
Cereal
Oatmeal
Fruit juice
Bagels
Sandwich bread
Potato anything
Corn
As for ones that people often recognize, there's basically any dessert and any bread.
So, to adopt a low-carb diet, you identify the carbohydrates in your current diet and eliminate them. If you find yourself hungry, you replace those things with proteins or fibers. If you have a bowl of oatmeal in the morning, instead you're now having some eggs. That's not so bad. If you have a bread with dinner, now you're having some more vegetables.
It's a balance, though, and you shouldn't look to add foods that you don't like to your diet, because you won't stick with them.
It's a bit crunchy, so it's not exactly the same as noodles, but it does a good job.
DO NOT DRINK CALORIES. If you are lifting heavy, your exceptions are milk and protein drinks. Tea and black coffee have next to no calories.
Nothing with added sugar. If the sugar occurs naturally in the product (veggies, milk, whatever) it's okay. Anything glazed is right out.
Avoid bread. It's better than sugar, but not by much. I would still eat wraps, and maybe a sandwich if I had to, but sides of bread are right out.
Ignore the rules once a week (In moderation). If you're gung-ho on the exercise, take a day. Less so, take a meal. Maybe some ice-cream.
I think the favorite food I discovered out of this was sauteed onions and peppers. I also would add a bit of peanut butter (natural peanut butter good - hydrogenated stuff bad) to a vanilla protein drink, freeze it, and tell myself it was a milkshake. Not quite a Blizzard, but still tasty.
The best exercise I found for fat loss was interval training - mix sprints with walks for about 10 minutes or so, or alternate between multiple lifts targeting separate muscle groups, so that intensity goes very high for a short time. The theory behind it is that this causes the body to burn more calories at rest for the next 48 hours or so, eventually outworking the body that just goes low intensity for a long period of time. Worked for me at least.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/primal-blueprint-101/
also
check this
http://nomnompaleo.com/
also this http://robbwolf.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/thePaleoSolution_QuickStart.pdf
Avoid wheat and sugar, not "carbs." Vegetables are carbohydrates, but they aren't bad. Bread and sugar is bad.
What you want to do is alter your portion sizes to better favor fruits and vegetables, and lessen amounts of breads and sugars.
This isn't because wheat is bad for you, it's because our diet consists of a lot more of it than we actually need. We are very "meat and bread" in the way we portion things, and you only really want to eat like that if you're facing a long winter where you won't have access to another harvest and you need insulation.
Well, vegetables are largely cellulose, not carbohydrate. Potatoes are actually bad. A quick search led to this page, which is a good way to think about the vegetables that you eat. Note that these do change somewhat if you eat them raw, like carrots, since we can't process much of anything out of cellulose. Note how carrots tend to taste sweeter once they're cooked, for example.
http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/whattoeat/a/whatveg.htm
I switched to eggs for breakfast over the last couple days. Had a Sausage and Bacon omlette yesterday and a Sausage, Bacon and Cheese one this morning. My snack just now was a G2 and Banana. Lunch will be leftover stirfry with (don't kill me) white rice and then I have some Source french vanilla yogurt with granola for an afternoon snack. I also have my old slurpee mug (1.3L) that I keep here for water through the day.
Not sure about supper yet, that's a whole new challenge.
What the hell is a G2?
Yeah, because his diet is so hardcore low-carb, what with the rice and granola.
Fruit is full of good stuff, and unless you are really going for low-carb it's not going to screw up your diet because it's low calorie. Fibre: it's good for you.
Good work! You also have to accept that this isn't a short-term thing. Well, to lose weight, there are short-term things you'll have to do, but there are long-term changes that you should accept.
For example, do you like drinking your coffee black? For me, it's a sacrifice I make that I add non-dairy creamer and real sugar to my coffee, because I love the taste and otherwise I wouldn't enjoy coffee. So, I only have two cups a day. For dinner, I *really* like having rice with stir fry meals and other similar dishes, like you, so I make sure to only cook a small portion of rice and then split that up. It's like pasta -- most people cook up a ton of pasta without actually reading the package and measuring it out. If you measure it a couple times, you realize that what you thought was a portion was actually two portions.
It's true for a lot of carbs. Carbohydrates are sneaky in the sense that they don't fill you up quickly, and they don't keep you full. I tell the story that the size of french fries you order at a fast food place doesn't matter, because when you eat the last one you think "Hmm, I could stand to eat a couple more french fries." Same with the Lay's Potato Chip ad -- they say you can't eat just one, and most people just eat and eat because they taste good and they don't really get full from eating them. So what you have to do is exercise portion control, to teach yourself -- and your stomach -- what a proper portion of carbohydrates consists of. That's more powerful than a scorched-earth diet where you drop everything and hate what you eat. So, your approach is good -- take steps to control your portions and your diet, reduce needless carbs, and make sure you're at least enjoying what you eat.
And remember that weight loss isn't instantaneous. Dropping soda last week will be worthwhile, but weight loss happens over a long period of time. When I lost 20 lbs, it took me 4 months to do it because I'm a relatively thin guy who was getting a little soft. That's only 5lb a month, even though I was eating much less food. So, don't be discouraged and go crazy eliminating things from your diet because the scale says the same today as yesterday. Plot out your weight on a monthly scale, to see actual trends.
Skip the multi-vitamin. The only supplement a young person needs is vitamin D, and maybe iron for women.
Honestly, I think you'd be better exploring the mediterranean diet- it's the only one that really has solid empirical evidence behind it. Take a look at it, anyway. Just remember that whatever you end up doing, it has to be a lifestyle change. You can't diet down to 180 and then start eating and sitting around like you are used to; you'll just gain all the weight back.
E: When I think about it, the mediterranean diet IS pretty low carb. See http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/mediterranean-diet/CL00011 for a good overview.
"eat less, do more' isn't that simple. Here's some video to chew on:
Wheat is bad, period. Sugar is bad, period. This also includes fruits, sorta - they have plenty of "good things" (vitamins) but they aren't things you can't easily get from other sources. You don't need sugar, or any carbohydrates, ever... technically.
I ate less than 5 carbs a day for 6 months and lost well over 100 pounds, my cholesterol stats went from pretty bad to basically perfect, my blood pressure went from pretty high to well below the "acceptable normal" range, inflammation dropped dramatically... This isn't to say that this is the only way to be healthier or lose weight or whatever, but I've never met a person who hasn't had it work perfectly for them if they actually did it for more than three days before crying about the lack of carbs making them irritable (tip: this doesn't mean carbs are good, it's just like quitting smoking - you're coming off of something you're addicted to, yes it will suck for a week or so. It doesn't mean cigarettes are great too.)
I'm sure people will chime in about how some "studies" (of very questionable origins and methods) have "shown" that low carb diets will somehow make you die because it kills your liver or something but I've never heard of a real legitimate study finding any issues with a low carb diet except in people with other medical issues. There is probably a reason diabetics are basically prescribed a low carb diet to fix themselves. The mediterranean diet is decent but people need to get off this belief that grains are good in any way.
No. Whole grains provide absolutely nothing you need. I'd love to hear of something they provide that can't be found via eating a much healthier and less toxic food.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/why-grains-are-unhealthy/
Enjoyment, flavour, ease, not requiring a massive lifestyle shift immediately. Get off your high horse. Grains aren't going to kill anyone and it is completely impractical to tell someone that their first step should be cutting them out completely when there is no harm in them.
Any diet that claims the key to health is to cut out an entire food group is stupid. Even if it were true (and it isn't) almost no one would do it so it is useless.
So your brain doesn't require carbs to function? I'm pretty sure it does. If your working out your going to need carbs to perform.
All food debate aside, perhaps the most troubling thing that's come out of obesity research is that fat cells never really go away. Once you gain weight and keep it on for a long time, your body adapts to this high weight pretty much permanently. If you lose a substantial amount of weight, you'll actually have to work harder to keep it off than people already at that weight that never got chronically fat. If you get to 160lbs, you'll be hungrier, will have to eat less, and will have to exercise more than fellow 160lbers because your body has already settled in the long term of 235.
So whatever your eating schedule is now, you can never eat that way again. There are a lot of diets that get results, so don't pick the diet that get results the fastest - pick the one you'll be able to stand and enjoy for the rest of your life, or however long you want to be thin. As long as you don't deprive yourself of essential vitamins, minerals, and nutrients, you really can't go wrong with whatever diet helps you lose weight unless your body tells you otherwise by making you feel crappy and sick.
It's almost exactly like weightlifting. The first few weeks suck, then you get into a steady stream of progress, then you go maintenance at your desired bulk. You can never stop weightlifting, and you're better off finding alternatives to key recommended exercises that make you feel terrible personally. You've got to do your research and crunch numbers to make sure you aren't wasting your time, because your body is special. It will take a lot of effort, and it's dangerous if not done correctly. Recidivism is and always will be your enemy until the end of time.
Good luck.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
This is completely wrong on both fronts. I'm not even sure if it's worth arguing anymore if people seriously believe stuff like this.
I will say that carbohydrates (healthyish ones, ie sweet potatoes, white rice) will be very useful to anyone that is attempting to gain mass. You don't need carbs to "perform" at all - in fact working out completely fasted is probably the best way to go - but you'll have issues getting bigger without a good carb refeed post-workout. leangains.com <--
And I find it a bit ridiculous that people think it's setting up someone to fail to suggest they eat a primal/paleo diet. A LOT of people eat that way now, and it's only getting more popular. How does someone fail eating steaks, salmon, crab, lobster, chicken, big salads, fruit, nuts, seeds, etc? What are you really lacking there? A person needs junk food to ... not fail? What?
Try getting off the gluten/sugar addiction and then give those old meals a whirl, that awful feeling they'll give you will convince you that you don't need to eat garbage anymore.
wrong forum
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
True. I've already PM'd him in regards to his questions about meals so I guess that's that. Good luck with it, if you stick to it (as a permanent lifestyle change) your life will definitely improve.
So first no carbs, now he is to eat fruit (which contain carbs). We get the fact you don't suggest sugar etc, however no carbs what so ever is plain wrong.
Even the website you used as a source before recommends 100 grams a day.