Low Carb Diets
I have been a big fan of low carb diets ever since I first tried the Atkins Diet probably around the year 2000. I was considerably overweight, though fit. I attended up to 4 classes of step aerobics each week and completed them no problem. So the term fat but fit or fit but fat could have been applied to me.
I was wary of starting a diet at that time because I had memories of feeling ravenously hungry in previous years and feeling that diets didn’t work for me. In addition, I had always thought that you couldn’t just remove carbohydrates from your diet, you would get ill or very unhealthy. How wrong could I have been?
A work colleague persuaded me to find out more about the Atkins Diet, so I bought the book and started to read. It totally blew my mind. I didn’t need carbohydrates, at least not all of the amounts I had been consuming? I might be allergic to carbohydrates? I could be healthy eating mainly protein and fat? It was a revelation. And that book was written by a heart doctor who had tried this diet out on his patients who ended up a lot healthier than previously!
I lost 4 dress sizes and 28 pounds on that diet and felt really healthy but eventually I slipped away from low carb into the temptations of sugar and put weight on again.
Older and Not As Easy
I am nearly 20 years older now and losing weight is not as easy these days, however, I have gone back onto a low carb diet because quite honestly I feel better eating that way. I don’t crave sweet stuff, I can leave it totally alone, not even tempted to lick a bit round the edges! I am looking at low carb cooking, though it is hard to persuade my husband to move away from the (healthy) way of eating he has enjoyed for decades. But then his weight stays the same healthy level from year to year – lucky so and so. So although I feel better on low carb, I would like to lose some weight as well, so I have decided to move onto low calorie eating, however, I am likely to keep to the low carb type of food anyway, simply because I enjoy it more and feel better on it.
Low Calorie
A calorie is the measure of the amount of energy in your food. The theory is that food containing a lot of energy (calories) requires you either to work it off or else it gets stored as fat. A low calorie diet doesn’t prescribe what kind of food you eat, just that it mustn’t contain too many calories. So you could eat a very small piece of cake or some cookies or a LOT of lettuce and celery. Each might contain the same amount of calories, so you would be on a low cal diet but one might leave you feeling ravenously hungry a short time later (the cake or cookies, if you didn’t know), while the other would take longer to digest and leave you feeling fuller for longer. If you choose your food wisely, you can eat a low calorie, healthy diet and lose weight, while not feeling like you could eat an elephant, or a gallon tub of ice cream! Some low calorie diets are used for a short time only, to get weight loss kicked off. One of these diets is the 8 week 800 calorie blood sugar diet, developed by a University and tested on diabetic patients. You can read more about that here. If you want to read the book and check up all about it you can get it here.
Which Will You Try?
Have you tried a low carb or low calorie diet? Which did you prefer?