Considering a Low Carb Diet? What Not to Do

I think there are some new readers of this blog who may be considering a low carb diet, so I wanted to post a caution about following the diet.

First off, you really need to be committed to it.  About the worst thing you could do is add a lot of fat to an already high carb diet. It won't work if you don't also cut carbs.  According to the Weight Loss Sweet Spot, you need to be consuming 100 or fewer carbs per day to lose weight, and really, to get into the fat-burning ketosis, you need to be below 50 carbs per day.  I would recommend fewer than 30 carbs, at least for a month or two, to see some dramatic results. If you consume 150 or fewer carbs per day, you can enjoy almost effortless weight maintenance.

Second, cheating is immediately punished in a rather shocking way.  If you cut out the carbs, you lose water weight quickly at first, perhaps 6 to 12 pounds in a week.  But if you cheat for a day and binge on carbs, it can all come back quickly, too.  But it is just water. Remember that if you binge on carbs one day and gain 10 pounds the next day. Your initial weight loss is water (the fat will come off later) and if you cheat, your weight gain is all just water, too. Get up, dust yourself off, and get back into the saddle and try again.

Third, do NOT try a low-fat, high protein version of the low carb diet (like the old Weight Watchers Core program). If you truly cut out your carbs, but eat a lot of lean protein (like skinless chicken breasts) and very little fat, you may actually get sick. If you are going to try a low carb diet, you must get over your lipophobia (fear of fat) and eat animal fats. They will not clog your arteries and they won't cause a heart attack. For a very detailed explanation of this, read Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. Warning: this is a dense book, but it outlines the history of the saturated-fats-cause-heart-disease hypothesis, including a very thorough debunking of this hypothesis. Or just watch this video instead, which essentially says the same thing Taubes said, but without dozens of pages of scientific citations.

Fourth, realize this is a lifestyle, not a diet you can step off once you get to your weight loss goal and then resume eating like you used to eat. If you do that, you will just gain back all the weight you lost.

Finally, if you do a low carb diet, and cut out most of the carbs you have been eating, you will experience carb withdrawals to one degree or another. But this is temporary, and the healthy aspects of the low carb lifestyle will quickly outweigh the withdrawal symptoms. Michael R. Eades, M.D. has a two part series on starting (or restarting) a low carb diet, including tips for getting over carb withdrawal.  Part I is here, part II is forthcoming.

Now for the good news: you will not be hungry, you will lose weight safely, you will have more energy, your lipid profile will improve, and you will be very healthy. Here are some very useful suggestions for following a low carb diet.

Carb Cravings

Wow, yesterday I suffered through some pretty serious carb cravings.  I did not succumb, but I did drink a diet A&W root beer.  My wife has been telling me I drink too much diet soda, and I agree, so I haven't had one in a week, since March 4.  I've been drinking water instead.  However, the diet root beer helped a lot.  She also bought some raspberries, which are good and high fiber/low carb, so I made some whipping cream and sweetened it with sucralose (0 carbs) and had raspberries and cream.  I also made sure to eat two salads as well (one for lunch and one for dinner).  That satisfied the cravings and I still consumed fewer than 20 grams of carbs today.

Long term, I feel like I need to break my cravings for carbs, especially for sweets.  They tell me it can happen.  But I am taking baby steps in this process and right now I needed the crutch afforded by the diet A&W.

Carb Withdrawals

If any of you are contemplating a low carb diet, I would strongly encourage it, for all the reasons laid out in Gary Taubes' book, Why We Get Fat (And What to Do About It).  However, be warned that for the first two to three weeks, you will go through carb withdrawals that can cause some side effects.  Taubes describes it this way (p. 214):

"When you replace the carbohydrates you eat with fat, you're creating a radical shift in the fuel that your cells will burn for energy.  They go from running primarily on carbohydrates (glucose) to running on fat--both your body fat and the fat in your diet.  This shift, though, can come with side effects.  These can include weakness, fatigue, nausea, dehydration, diarrhea, constipation, a condition known as postural, or orthostatic, hypotension--if you stand up too quickly, your blood pressure drops precipitously, and you can get dizzy and even pass out--and the exacerbation of preexisting gout."  (For a more technical explanation of this process, known as ketosis, read this article by Michael R. Eades, M.D.).

Taubes warns us not to "confuse the short-term effects of what can be thought of as carbohydrate withdrawal with the long-term benefits of overcoming that withdrawal and living a longer, leaner, and healthier life."  The symptoms can be lessened with adequate sodium intake and Taubes cites physicians who recommend adding one half to one teaspoon of salt a day to the diet (or by drinking one to two cups of chicken or beef broth daily; p. 216)

The first two weeks can be somewhat miserable, even while you are losing weight.  The first day or two, I suffered diarrhea and for about two weeks I could tell I was a bit dehydrated and tired, and I had headaches.  But  after about two weeks, I started feeling a lot better.  I have increased energy, I am sleeping better, I am not nearly as tired as I was, and my wife tells me she hasn't heard me snoring.  Oh, and my blood pressure dropped to normal and my blood glucose levels have fallen dramatically, almost to "normal."

One more thing: you will have carb cravings.  At first, I slaked those cravings by drinking diet soda (because the diet soda is sweet), but they seem to have diminished quite a bit now and I am not feeling quite the need for sweetness that I did at the start.