How to Turn Your Low Carb Diet into a Lifestyle

How to Turn Your Low Carb Diet into a Lifestyle

Low Carb Styles

Make Low-Carb Lifestyle Changes One at a Time

Low carb isn’t a diet – it’s a lifestyle. We hear that all the time. In fact, even the latest Weight Watchers commercials are saying exactly the same thing: this isn’t a diet; it’s a lifestyle. We love the idea of not dieting. We love the idea of being able to eat to satisfaction. Plus, going into carb restriction with the perception that it’s for life helps to eliminate the dieting mindset that so many low-carb dieters fall into.

We truly believe we can eat this way for the rest of our lives with no problems. Who couldn’t? You get to eat fatty meats such as pork ribs and bacon, real butter and sour cream, put heavy whipping cream in your coffee or tea, and munch on mixed nuts, assorted cheeses, olives and deviled eggs – all without having to count the calories. There’s cheesecake for dessert, low-carb pancakes and muffins, jalapeno hot poppers and dozens of ways to enjoy chicken wings.

But then your birthday or anniversary rolls around or your best friend wants to go out to lunch at your favorite Italian restaurant or pizza joint, and before you know it, you’re missing many of the foods you had to give up in order to create your latest lifestyle. Social engagements, holidays, and parties don’t feel as fun as they used to, so you start feeling deprived, restricted, and left out.

If you have food allergies and sensitivities that make many standard low-carb foods off limits, it can be worse because you’ll lose the enthusiasm that helped you get over the initial hump of adaption even more quickly. With no comfort foods to fall back on, you suddenly find yourself falling head-first into a plate of homemade Christmas cookies, sneak a thick slice of pizza when no one’s looking, make excuses for why you need to eat that extra-large piece of chocolate cake for your birthday, or even give up totally.

So what happened? Where did all of that enthusiasm and motivation for your low-carb diet go? You know it works, so why is it so easy to go off plan? If you really want to lose weight and keep it off, why do we make up so many diet excuses for not doing it? Is there any way to prevent that from happening?

Enter the Small-Steps Low-Carb Diet Plan

In a previous post, I talked about using a back door approach to a low-carb diet if you’re having problems pairing your menus down to an Induction level of carbohydrates. Following a standard Atkins Diet, it can take weeks to find your Critical Carbohydrate Level for losing, and many people don’t have enough patience to do that. Although a back door approach that gently slips you into Ketosis takes even more time to discover your level of carbohydrate sensitivity, it’s far less restrictive than a typical low-carb diet plan, so many dieters find that way easier.

A Small-Steps Low-Carb Diet Plan is similar, but you make the changes from the vantage point of a carbohydrate-reduced eating plan. You don’t start backwards. You simply take a step back from what you’re currently doing and experiencing to examine exactly where you are, and then take the necessary steps to implement one single change that will help you convert your diet into a lifestyle you can live with.

For example, over this past weekend, I finally got around to experimenting with a recipe for low-carb crackers made with almond flour. Although I wasn’t happy enough with the results to take a picture of them and post the recipe yet, they were a hit with my husband. We travel up north quite a bit because many of the things we need, we can’t get here. So, I decided that my first change would be finding something that contained fewer carbs than potato salad and fruit that I could put with our baked chicken I always make to take with us. For me, finding comfort foods and making better low-carb choices is essential to getting myself back on track.

Take it Slow

If you have no food allergies, sensitivities or autoimmune problems, you might struggle with different problems and low-carb lifestyle issues than I have. Some people have problems drinking enough water. Others might use too many sugar substitutes, drink litres of diet soda every day, find themselves addicted to homemade, low-carb baked goods, or have no motivation to begin an exercise program. Some might have problems sticking to their plan because they don’t prepare ahead for emergencies, don’t have a well-stocked low-carb kitchen or refrigerator, or don’t know how to handle food temptations when they strike.

No matter what your particular issues are, take the time to examine your behavior and mindset. Self-examination is what will allow you to find the problems that are preventing your personal success with whatever low-carb or low-calorie program you’re following. But, those problems can also work against you if you try to make too many changes all at once. Switching from a typical, processed-foods American diet to a whole food, low-carb lifestyle can be overwhelming in the beginning. Even the basic rules for Atkins Induction might be far too drastic to implement all at once.

The body fights change, and so does the mind – especially when those changes aren’t comfortable, feel restrictive, or are perceived as being temporary. Be kind to yourself, and take it slow. Pick one single thing about your current behavior or lifestyle that is interfering with your weight-loss goals. Maybe it’s something you know you should do, or something you shouldn’t. Whichever issue you choose, focus on only making that one, single change because even when changes improve our outlook, health or energy levels, there is always a mental adjustment attached to that change.

Give yourself adequate time to make that adjustment. If low carb is a lifestyle, rather than a diet, there should be no pressure to rush the process.  

Changes Need to Be Permanent

Lasting change is the goal. Temporary change does very little for us except allow us to enjoy a little temporary success. I really learned that lesson when I did my single round of hHCG a year-and-a-half ago and ended up regaining everything I’d lost during that period over the past year. The changes I made then were not permanent. I saw that restriction as temporary. That diet mindset was accented by the fact that I don’t enjoy eating chicken breast, raw cucumbers and cabbage.

But I also failed to maintain those losses because I didn’t have anything solid to move into next. The parameters of the program simply tell you to do a sugar-free low-carb diet for 3 weeks, and then return foods to your diet slowly in order to keep on top of your maintenance. However, the cravings control center in our brain doesn’t always allow that type of return to a normal diet. As a result, when I returned to my typical way of doing maintenance, it didn’t work.

I couldn’t sustain the weight loss that time because to stay at that lower weight of 152 pounds (once my glycogen storage refilled itself) required my diet to be too restrictive for comfort. I realize that now. I couldn’t eat the high fat, moderate protein, low-carb diet required for three weeks after stopping the hHCG drops due to my fat malabsorption issues. I also didn’t think about my dietary restrictions before starting the diet. That’s the bottom line for me. For someone else, that bottom line might be different.

I have only come to this realization lately, after beginning to re-read Dr. Atkins original diet book. For low-carb to be sustainable, it has to be satisfying, eliminate hunger, and fit within your metabolic issues and health restrictions. Making changes in steps can help you to accomplish that. While even small steps can’t heal fat malaborption or reverse my celiac disease and corn intolerance, incorporating real-life changes a little at a time can certainly work to make your life better.

By incorporating changes slowly, you can move towards converting your current low-carb diet into a permanent lifestyle.

How Much Protein Do I Need?

How Much Protein Do I Need?

Questions??

How Much Protein Do I Need?

The current rage beginning within the low-carb community is blood ketone meters that measure the amount of ketones in your blood, rather than your urine. The sticks are somewhat expensive, but for those who have purchased and used them, they have received a very eye-opening revelation about their low-carb diet plan.

What people are discovering is not new. Both Stargazey and I have been saying this ever since we investigated and tried a no-carb diet several years ago. Stargazey has a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and her blog is LowCarb4U if you’re interested. The series starts with a post on protein intake and blood glucose levels and runs for about half a dozen more posts, or so. Make sure you read all of the comments for each post as well.

Today, there are low-carb experts who say the same thing, so low carbers are beginning to sit up and take notice – especially since Ketone Blood Meters are making the problem more real. Regardless of what you want to believe, you most certainly can be eating more protein than your metabolism can handle adequately. According to Dr. Atkins, “A total of 58 percent of dietary protein is converted by the body into sugar.” When you’re young, this doesn’t seem to be as large a problem as it is for those over 50, but that depends on your degree of Insulin Resistance and how many healthy Beta Cells you have.

Is a Low-Carb Diet a High-Protein Diet?

Nutritional ketosis is a new term that describes the situation that occurs when you enter the state of ketosis due to carbohydrate restriction. Dr. Atkins used to call it dietary ketosis. It is defined as a blood ketone level of .5 to 3.0 mg/dl. You may, or may not, have ketones in your urine. Those ketones are irrelevant. What’s important is that your body makes the switch from predominantly burning glucose for fuel to burning fatty acids and ketones.

But...many low-carb dieters have never made the switch.

On a typical, low-calorie diet, protein intake is kept low. That results in as much as 50 percent of your weight loss actually coming from muscle tissue rather than body fat. So eating adequate amounts of protein is essential, but how much is that? Is a low-carb diet supposed to be a high-protein diet?

Protein supplies your body with the amino acids it needs to create hormones and repair or build muscle, organs and other body tissues. To do that, you need to eat about .6 grams of protein for every pound of lean body mass you have. That’s just for repair and basic body functions. It doesn’t take into account any extra for gluconeogenesis or the extra you need if you have an active lifestyle or lift weights.

For those with about 100 pounds of lean body mass, you need a minimum of 60 grams of protein per day. If you have 120 pounds of lean body mass, that comes to 72 grams. If you have a sedentary lifestyle by choice or due to health restrictions, you need a little less.

Either way, that doesn’t make a high-protein diet. That’s quite low when you consider that an ounce of meat or an egg contains about 6 to 7 grams of protein. Lean meats have higher protein counts than fatty meats. Depending on your meat, cheese and egg choices, that comes to about 10 to 12 eggs or ounces of meat and cheese per day. That’s far less than most people realize, especially when you take into account that you can easily consume 12 to 16 ounces in a single steak! And quite a few Atkins followers go out of their way to consume the 4 ounces of cheese they're allowed per day.

Is Nutritional Ketosis Necessary For Weight Loss?

So how necessary is Nutritional Ketosis? If most low-carb dieters are not in ketosis but are losing weight just fine, does it matter? The answer to that would depend on what your blood glucose levels are doing. When I first decided to start monitoring my blood glucose levels, I was shocked to discover they were so high. I was on a strict low-carb diet, never cheated, yet my numbers were above the margin for safety.

Some of the reason for that turned out to be gluten, dairy and corn intolerance, but those food sensitivities didn’t answer what happened when I moved to a completely no-carb diet in the summer of 2009. I was eating only beef and drinking only water, yet my blood glucose levels rose sharply after only a few days and continued to rise into diabetic levels. In addition, since that experience, doing a simple Atkins Induction also caused my blood glucose to go out of whack!

Interestingly enough, my 12-week hHCG diet round or all of those weeks I spent doing my interpretation of the Kimkins Diet didn’t. So what made the difference?

The only difference I can see is the amount of protein I was eating. On hHCG and Kimkins, my protein was carefully monitored to stay within 60 to 72 grams per day. On Atkins and other versions of low carb, I didn’t monitor anything. I just ate when I was hungry. That’s how many low-carb dieters do it: eat to appetite, because that’s what we’ve been taught to do. Yet, that’s how the body gets the glucose it needs to keep burning glucose for fuel, rather than fatty acids and ketones. We are so used to grabbing a protein snack. We are used to filling our plates with cheese, eggs and meats, so we can shun the carbs.

For those who still have a decent insulin response to protein and are running on a calorie deficit, nutritional ketosis might not make any difference. As long as insulin levels quickly return to normal, it doesn’t matter how high they initially spike. It only matters how many hours of the day they remain normal or low. For those who have stalled in their weight loss effects, or the weight is coming off much slower than anticipated, the problem can very well be a lack of ketosis. That’s because getting into ketosis requires you to keep your protein, carbohydrates and dietary fats in balance.

The Eye-Opener for Me

I hate monitoring my food intake. I simply hate it! That’s why my maintenance break has started to get away from me lately. I have tried to return to lower carbs several times, but have only succeeded in making it through a day or two before my body goes into a crazy, unrealistic hunger fit. Whether I’m doing Induction, the Old Weight Watcher’s Exchange Program, or simply counting calories and making lower carbohydrate choices, the result is the same.

At first, I thought my body was fighting further attempts at weight loss. I thought it was tired and didn’t want to give up any more of my body fat stores. In fact, every time I’m exposed to one of my food sensitivities, I put on a couple of pounds. However, reading about the experiences of several low-carb dieters who have purchased one of these new ketone blood meters and measured their state of ketosis, I’ve realized that whether I’m falling face down into a pile of my husband’s chocolate chip cookies or cooking up an extra chicken breast – the result is the same: I’m feeding my hunger glucose!

That was a severe eye-opener for me. We think we are doing the right thing by turning to meats and other no-carb choices, but maybe we’re hurting ourselves more than we realize. Instead of grabbing those left-over baked chicken legs for a snack because they're easy and convenient, maybe we should be reaching for the left-over salad instead.

Photo By: Catherine Ford

Role of Insulin in Weight Loss

Role of Insulin in Weight Loss

Sugar..!!

Mozzarella Cheese 

If you’ve read Dr. Eades’ or Dr. Atkins’ books, you might have developed a serious dislike for insulin. For those with metabolic issues, insulin often sits at the heart of the dysfunction. What most low carb dieters believe is that insulin causes the carbohydrates you eat to be stored as body fat. Lower your insulin levels and your body will burn your fat stores instead. Unfortunately, that isn’t how the role of insulin in weight loss works.

How Insulin Works

Insulin is a hormone that is secreted by the pancreas for a variety of reasons. The need to get glucose into your body cells and return your blood sugar levels back to normal is only one of them. Many low carbers refer to insulin as a nutrient-storage hormone because it encourages the body to use any toxic levels of alcohol or glucose first and store the fats and/or proteins you eat for use later on.

If you eat a high carbohydrate meal, the glucose the body doesn’t immediately need is turned into glycogen and stored in your liver and muscles. How large your storage capacity is depends on how much lean body mass you have, how full your glycogen stores already are and your body structure. On the average, glycogen storage capacity is about 300 to 400 grams of carbohydrates.

When you eat, blood sugar rises in accordance with the amount of glucose produced by those foods as they’re broken down into useable forms in the stomach and absorbed through the walls of the upper small intestine. If your blood glucose level rises above 100 mg/dl, the pancreas releases the insulin it has stored to handle the rise. This is known as first stage insulin release. The storage is determined by the amount of insulin it took to deal with your previous meal, not your current one.

Receptors are proteins that live on the surface of your cells. When insulin is secreted, it binds or attaches itself to these receptors. That attachment turns the receptor cells on and alerts your muscles and liver that glucose is available for use or storage. When you’re insulin sensitive, it only takes a small amount of insulin to get the glucose into your body cells. That keeps your glucose level from rising very high. In most people, their blood sugar level after eating remains below 100 mg/dl most of the time, and it never rises above 120 ever. When you’re insulin resistant, however, it takes a much larger dose to activate the insulin receptors.

Once the glucose passes into the body’s cells, insulin levels return to normal. If the glucose doesn’t move quickly enough, the body will release additional insulin to help. This occurs between 15 and 30 minutes after eating and is called second phase insulin release. In a normal metabolism, this process works smoothly and efficiently. Even those who have slight metabolic irregularities, hereditary defects or mild insulin resistance continue to make enough insulin to do the job within an hour after eating. The body simply adapts to the amount of insulin needed to keep your blood glucose levels normal.

Role of Basal Insulin

Beta-cells are the cells inside the pancreas that make and secrete insulin. Throughout the day, these beta-cells release a tiny burst of insulin to keep the body primed to handle glucose when it arrives. This is known as basal insulin. This constant steady stream also helps the liver determine when the glucose level in the blood has dropped too low. When basal insulin levels dip, the liver converts glycogen into glucose and releases it into the blood to keep blood sugar levels steady. When there are no glycogen stores available, which is typical on a low carb diet, the liver will convert dietary amino acids or protein stored as muscle into glucose instead.

How Insulin Affects Weight Loss

When insulin response is sluggish or not effective, it can take two to four hours or more for the body to produce enough insulin to get the glucose levels in the blood back to normal. While insulin is elevated, body fat stores cannot be mobilized for fuel because glucose is always utilized first. In addition, when the body doesn’t recognize circulating insulin, the liver can interpret that as low blood sugar and dump even more glucose into the blood that the pancreas has to deal with.

As long as your blood glucose stays above 100 ml/dl, insulin secretion continues until it can correct the situation. For many insulin-resistant or pre-diabetic individuals, blood glucose and insulin levels never return to normal until the middle of the night. While those who go on low carb diets understand that carbohydrate restriction lowers insulin levels, most dieters focus on the state of Ketosis rather than insulin.

Carbohydrates are broken down into glucose during digestion. That raises your blood sugar and requires insulin to be secreted. The amount of insulin you need in addition to your basal insulin levels depends on the amount of carbohydrates you eat. When you eat fewer carbohydrates, less glucose is produced during digestion, so less insulin is required to process it. The more normal your insulin response is, the more body fat you can mobilize and use for fuel.

Low Carb Diets, Ketosis and Insulin

When you have insulin resistance and consistently consume a high level of carbohydrates almost every day, your basal insulin level will increase. The higher your basal insulin level, the more difficult it is to lose weight. The Atkins Diet starts you off at 20 net carbohydrates per day. Dr. Eades’ Protein Power LifePlan uses 30. Both of these carbohydrate levels will cause your basal insulin levels to fall quickly. They will also generally eliminate blood sugar spikes provided you are not eating too much protein.

With Atkins, you add back carbohydrates gradually until you find your carbohydrate tolerance level that will allow you to lose weight at the rate you want. At your critical carbohydrate level for losing, you stay just below the threshold where your insulin level ceases to function adequately. This is very different from the state of Ketosis.

Originally, Dr. Atkins defined Ketosis as the presence of ketones in the breath and urine. He believed that when the urine testing strips turn purple, that meant his patients were burning their body fat stores for fuel. What the test strips actually show is that you are not ketone adapted. Ketones are being lost, but they are not the type of ketones the brain, heart and kidneys prefer and can use efficiently. For that reason, most low-carb dieters begin to spill fewer ketones into their urine as the diet continues. At which time, many dieters also stall.

So what does that mean?

How Important is Ketosis?

How Important is Ketosis?

Questions??

How important is Ketosis to a Low Carb Diet?

There is an awakening that’s beginning within the low-carb community. It’s an awakening to the realities of Ketosis, it’s importance in weight-loss success, and the rude awakening that we might have somehow deceived ourselves as to what Ketosis actually is and does. While the state of Ketosis is not necessary to achieve a healthy weight, it’s interplay with insulin resistance and fat metabolism is not always understood.

When Dr. Atkins was young, he was one of those kids who could eat anything he wanted and not gain weight. In the early 1960s, however, he found himself with three chins looking 15 years older than he was. That was a critical turning point in his life. He had to face what he’d become: a fat man. Although he knew he needed to do something about his condition, like most of us, he was afraid of being hungry. He didn’t want to reduce his portion sizes and go on a low-calorie diet. He wanted magic.

As a doctor, he knew that hunger was at the foundation for most diet failures. As a cardiologist, his medical training wasn’t in nutrition and metabolism. That allowed him to be more open to the new possibilities he was seeing in the medical literature of that time. In his search for a diet that wouldn’t make him hungry, Atkins ran across a study that suggested a metabolic defect in the way the body handled carbohydrates was the cause for most overweight. This type of diet was called a ketogenic diet.

In the 60s, a few people discovered by accident that carbohydrate restriction worked. Even though cutting back on bread, potatoes and dessert was a popular low-calorie notion at that time, counting carbohydrate grams was relatively new. I can remember the before-and-after-pictures, the convincing advertisements coaxing you to buy the dieter’s secret homemade diet booklet printed off in the garage. They promised you their book was the last diet book you would ever buy. Spiral bound, they were sold through back-of-the-magazine advertisements. I know because I bought one.

What intrigued Atkins in the 60s, however, wasn’t these 60-gram carbohydrate-restricted diets that closely resembled what William Banting did a hundred years prior. What caught Dr. Atkins’ attention was Ketosis. It might surprise you to learn that Dr. Atkins did not actually create his metabolic diet. In fact, one of the scientific papers he looked at during the 60s was a study Dr. Alfred W. Pennington had done for the DuPont company on several of their employees. It was Pennington who came up with the idea that a carbohydrate metabolic defect sat at the heart of overweight and obesity – not Dr. Atkins.

Dr. Walter Lyons Bloom was also doing work during that time that centered on the metabolic changes a carbohydrate-free diet produces. When Dr. Atkins read that the disappearance of hunger that happens a few days into a fast also occurs on a no-carb diet, he was hooked. It was exactly what he was looking for: bacon and eggs for breakfast with plenty of meat and salad for lunch and dinner. So, in 1963, Dr. Atkins tried Dr. Bloom’s no-carb diet, which included checking for ketones in the urine.

At that time, Dr. Atkins did experiment with returning a small amount of carbohydrates to his diet after the zero-carb start. That widened his food choices and made the diet more tolerable. He believed that as long as the urine test strips were turning purple, he was burning his body’s fat stores. Through trial-and-error, he learned that he could eat about 35 to 40 grams of carbohydrates per day and still turn the test strips purple if he added them back gradually enough. That also included an occasional Scotch and water before dinner.

Because of his fear of hunger, he ate several small meals throughout the day. At the end of six weeks, he had lost 28 pounds! That caused some mixed emotions. He felt excited and satisfied with the weight loss, but he also felt resentment towards what he believed was deception by the medical community. What he had discovered was that focusing on calories was not the only way to lose weight, but the idea was a bit obscured because of the effects that Ketosis has on the body.

To him, it felt like he was eating all day long. He ate as much as he wanted to eat and he ate often, so the low-calorie theory had to be wrong. But is it?

Dr. Atkins was not ketone adapted. His body had never used the alternative metabolic pathway before, so it was dumping extremely large amounts of Acetoacetate ketones into his urine. These ketones are not the type of ketones that the brain, kidneys and heart use very well, so the body gets rid of them. Eventually, after adaption, the muscles will convert Acetoacetate ketones into a more usable form and fewer Acetoacetate ketones will be cast off, but initially that doesn’t happen, so weight loss can be rather dramatic.

This early diet that Dr. Atkins presented to the world was a ketogenic diet. It placed the body in a state of Ketosis and kept it producing ketones in the urine as a sign that the body was continuing to mobilize its fat stores. Unlike the 60-gram carbohydrate diets popular during that time, Dr. Atkins’ diet focused on those who were more insulin resistant than those who could lose weight easily at higher carbohydrate intakes. That’s what made his diet different. He cut the carbohydrate sources low enough and added some of them back gradually enough that everyone who tried his diet at that time succeeded.

He believed that the urine test strips coincided with Ketosis. If the diet wasn’t working, you were doing something wrong. He based his opinions on his personal experience, the experience of his co-workers and the experience of his patients at that time. Ketone adaption changes the playing field a little bit, but it doesn’t rule out Dr. Atkins’ belief that we need to stay in Ketosis for the length of the weight-loss period. Since his original diet was ketogenic, it was designed to remain ketogenic. That makes Ketosis extremely important to the diet’s outcome. But why?

Bloom’s diet was only a three-day diet. It wasn’t created to treat insulin resistance. It was a study that was designed to observe the metabolic effects that occur when you cut carbohydrates completely out of your diet. It included bacon and eggs, meat, salad with an oil-and-vinegar dressing, and nothing else. Dr. Atkins took that study diet and added additional no-carb or very low-carb foods in a specific way. The design was perfect. It taught the dieter exactly how many carbohydrates would continue to ensure weight loss. What wasn’t perfect was implementation outside of Dr. Atkins’ office.

Hence, we have a multitude of low-carb dieters today who struggle, stall or give up part way to their goal. That’s the reality without the magic. It also begs the question, “What happened?” There’s more than simple ketone adaption standing in our way. If the Atkins Diet worked in the 70s, why doesn’t it still work today? If Ketosis is essential to success as Dr. Atkins believed, are we even in Ketosis today? Maybe we aren’t. Maybe we just think we are. Maybe we’ve been deceived into thinking that a low-carb diet is always a ketogenic diet.

Granted, you don’t have to be in Ketosis to lose weight. You just have to be in a calorie deficit. But if Ketosis worked for Dr. Atkins and his patients, why is it not working for us?

What Can I Eat on a Low-Carb Diet?

What Can I Eat on a Low-Carb Diet?

Questions??

Low Carb Chocolate 
Cream Cheese Pie

One of the main goals of switching to a low-carb diet is to learn how to make healthier food choices.

But let’s be honest. 

Most of us were raised on peanut butter and jelly spread on a couple of slices of fluffy white bread, a glass of kool-aid, and a Ding Dong. At least, that’s what lunch was like for me as a kid. 

When I first became converted to low-carb diets at the age of 19, it was with a Big Mac in one hand and a large, sugary, Dr. Pepper in the other.

When you’re 19 and overweight, the Atkins Diet works miraculously.

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