Safe Low Carb Dieting for Weight Loss

I've gotten some mail from a few people who are very concerned about a scammy, dangerous diet that is being promoted in the media right now as being "low carb." Without further publicizing the lying weasel profiting from that particular diet, I thought I'd share a few thoughts about how to construct a healthy low carb diet that you can eat, healthily, for years. I learned this stuff through participating for six years in online low carb discussion boards.

1. A low carb diet should not be a high protein diet.
Your liver has the ability to transform protein into carbohydrate. Key to losing weight on a low carb diet is that you want to lower the amount of insulin circulating in your body. Eating too much protein may not raise your blood sugar--unless you are a Type 1 or a Type 2 whose beta cells are mostly gone--but it may raise the amount of circulating insulin in your body. Insulin is the hormone that tells your body to store fat, so to lose weight you don't want to eat a high protein diet. You want to eat a diet that contains the right amount of protein.

How much protein do you need? Well, you will need protein to repair damage to your muscles. In addition, if you are eating under 100 grams of carb a day you will probably need some protein to furnish the glucose needed to run your brain. Your liver can turn about 60% of the protein you eat into glucose, so you will eat a bit more protein to provide the glucose for your brain.

Beyond the small amount of protein needed for these two functions, any excess protein you eat can stall your weight loss, and even worse, too much protein in the diet causes the infamous "diet breath" that many people incorrectly label "ketobreath". It isn't ketones you are smelling when people are doing very low carb diets incorrectly. It's byproducts of protein digestion.

How much protein will be right for you depends on how many grams of carbohydrate you are eating and your size. I have put together a web page that tells you How To Calculate Your True Protein Need.

2. A Low Carb Diet Should Be a High Fat Diet.
Most of the calories in your low carb diet should be coming from fat. Fat, unlike protein, does NOT raise blood sugar or provoke any insulin response. And now that Gary Taubes has thoroughly debunked the badly conducted, politically motivated research that was used to argue that fat caused heart disease, we can all relax and enjoy the fat we eat.

The exception to the goodness of fats is trans fat. And despite all the labels that claim "no trans fat", any food that lists "hydrogenated" fats of any type on the label does contain trans fat. There are lots of them and you should avoid eating them.

When I was in the active weight loss phase of my year long low carb diet--the one whose 30 lb weight loss I maintained for four years--fat made up about 70% of all the calories I consumed. I'm not a big meat lover, so much of my fat and protein intake came in the form of nuts, eggs, and high quality cheeses.

3. Supplement B Vitamins if You Cut Out Grains
Most of us get our B vitamins, including Folic acid, from grains. So if you stop eating all grains you will have to use a supplement to replace the missing B vitamins. A simple drug store multi-vitamin is all you need. B vitamins are the only vitamins you won't be getting from meat, dairy, and lots of low carb greens, nuts, and berries.

4. Use Morton's Salt Substitute to Replace Potassium
A low carb diet especially in its early phases flushes a lot of fluid out of your body. You can read why this is HERE. The diuretic effect can cause you to lose potassium and if that happens you may get leg cramps.

Sprinkling a bit of Morton's Salt Substitute on your food is all you need to do to correct any potassium imbalance--UNLESS you are taking a potassium sparing blood pressure medicine. In that case, do NOT supplement with potassium. If you aren't sure if your blood pressure medicine is potassium sparing or not, ask a pharmacist. If you are taking a potassium sparing drug you don't have to worry about losing potassium.

If you are low in potassium, the usual symptom is leg cramping which resolves as soon as you consume a sprinkle of the salt substitute which is pure potassium. You can buy it in most supermarkets in the section where the salt is sold.

5. Eat LOTS of Greens and Berries.
If you only eat meat and cheese on your "low carb" diet you are going to end up missing valuable nutrients. If you eat meat and greens and packaged "low carb" foods full of chemicals and hidden carbs, you are also going to miss out on those nutrients--and you are going to end up gaining weight, as many packaged foods include ingredients that are forms of MSG (like hydrolyzed vegetable protein) that make you hungry.

In the old days, people in the low carb community used to tell each other "When you visit the supermarket, Shop the edges" . That's because, typically, fruit, veggies, meat, nuts, eggs and dairy are arranged around the outside edge of the market and all the prepared foods are in the aisles. The more you eat from the edges, the healthier you will be. Frozen veggies are fine, too.

6. Use Whey Protein Powder
Many low carb recipes tell you to use soy flour. Don't. It tastes nasty to many of us, and soy can have negative effects on your thyroid and can disturb your sex hormone balance. Whey protein powder tastes better than soy and has no hormonal effects. I use it in quite a few of my recipes. Vanilla or plain are best for cooking.

If you find yourself feeling depressive after a few weeks of your low carb diet, cut out any of the soy foods you may have added, including tortillas, "low carb" breads, or cereals. You may be amazed at how much cheerier you feel. I sure was.

7. It is Normal to Feel Edgy The First Week or Two
As your body switches over to running on ketones you may feel edgy and have trouble sleeping. This is completely normal and it goes away pretty quickly.

7. Take Advantage of Low Carb Beginner's Luck
The first time you eat a very low carb diet, your body has no clue what is going on and may drop surprising amounts of real weight in the month or two before it figures out what the heck is happening.

This is a one time thing. Once your body gets used to living on a low carb ketogenic diet, you will never again experience this burst of dramatic weight loss. You CAN lose weight the second time you go on a low carb diet--I've done it--but it takes a lot longer and requires a lot more discipline.

Because of this "beginner's luck" phenomenon, if you are low carbing for weight loss for the very first time, stick to your diet very carefully for the first three months. Avoid all commercially prepared "low carb" products. Most of them are full of hidden carbs that will sabotage your attempts to lose weight.

Stick with salad, low carb veg, meat, cheese, and small amounts of nuts. Do the diet straight without taking days off as long as you can because by doing that you will get the best weight loss. After a few months when your body gets used to the diet and weight loss drops to a modest amounts you can be a bit more flexible and experiment with different "low carb" products and the occasional higher carb day. But, at first, give yourself a while to let the diet do its magic!

8. Cholesterol Rises Early in Most Effective Diets
If you have a cholesterol test in the first three months of your diet when you are losing weight at a rapid pace expect to see your cholesterol be higher than it was before. This is normal. The fat in your blood stream is on its way OUT of your body. Many doctors don't know this--fortunately, mine did and explained it to me.

By the sixth month of your low carb diet you should start seeing dramatic improvements in your cholesterol, especially your HDL and triglycerides which are the fractions of cholesterol most closely associated with health.

That should be enough to get you started. . .