Living Low Carb (69 page)

You can try a lot of things. You could up your carbs if the amount you’ve been eating is very low, or you could try lowering them (see the list of reasons for plateaus in previous question). Try cutting out treats and going back exclusively to unprocessed meat and dark green vegetables for a few days. Cut out the low-carb bars. Drink a lot more water. Or try one of the following techniques, which have been known to knock people off plateaus.

Try a vegetable-and-fruit fast.
Eat nothing but vegetables and some fruit for about three days. This is very alkalinizing, in addition to being low in calories and very high in nutrients. Eat all you want, and feel free to add some good fat like flaxseed oil (for women), olive oil, or butter.

Try a vegetable-juice fast.
This is a favorite of Dr. Allan Spreen, the “Nutrition Physician,” and it’s one of my favorites as well. Go a day or two on nothing but freshly squeezed vegetable juices. I’m not talking V8 here; I’m talking the kind you make at home with a juicer. You can also drink hot water with lemon juice and, of course, all the fresh water you like.

Try raw foods for a few days.
Be aware that not all people can tolerate this, and if your digestion isn’t great, this may not be the best intervention for you.

Add digestive enzymes.
Dr. John Hernandez, medical director of the Center for Health and Integrative Medicine in San Antonio, Texas, has found this to be one of the most useful weapons he has in his weight-loss arsenal (see also
chapter 9
).

Try the all-meat diet for a few days (no more than three).
Eat nothing but meat and drink plenty of water. (The Lindora program uses a variation on this technique once a week, only with more choices for protein.) Another variation on this technique is to use the Stillman diet, which I consider to be absolutely ridiculous as an eating program but perhaps useful for a couple of days to get things going again. On the Stillman version of the meat fast, you eat only lean meats, chicken, turkey, all lean fish, eggs, and cottage, farmer, or pot cheese made with skim milk. No extra fat, zero carbohydrates, and nothing but water to drink.

Do the Fat Fast.
This is an Atkins technique, but it should be reserved for
only
the most metabolically resistant people who have been absolutely unable to move the scale any other way. It’s based on the Kekwick and Pawan study in which researchers placed patients on a 1,000-calorie diet that was 90% fat and got better fat loss than on any other plan.
³⁹
In the Atkins version, you eat only 1,000 calories, with 75% to 90% of it coming from fat. Atkins recommends five small meals of about 200 calories each. Sample 200-calorie choices include 1 ounce of macadamia nuts, 2 ounces of cream cheese or Brie, or 2 deviled eggs with 2 teaspoons of mayo. (For more choices and a full explanation, see
Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution,
pages 272–274.) Atkins emphasizes that this is actually
dangerous
for anyone who is not metabolically resistant—the rate of weight loss is too rapid to be safe. Atkins used it only with people who could not lose weight any other way, to encourage them and to show them that weight loss was possible—but even then, he used it for only four or five days.

Exercise

What about Exercise?

Exercise is probably the most important predictor of whether or not you will keep weight off. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really account for a great deal of the weight you will lose (maybe a few pounds a month), but if you don’t do it, the odds of keeping the weight off tumble. Some lucky people are able to lose weight just by adding a lot of exercise to their daily routine without changing their diets much, but these are very rare people who usually don’t have an awful lot of weight to lose.

That being said, there are many, many excellent reasons to begin an exercise program if you are not exercising already. The health benefits alone are legion, and exercise is one of the things that helps change your biochemistry to that of a leaner person. Exercise has an insulin-like effect on lowering blood sugar, it increases serotonin, and—except when very high-intensity—it decreases stress hormones.

Low-carb exercise gurus Graeme and Kate Street recommend full-body circuit training for beginners (plus cardio interval training for all levels) as the ideal programs for low-carbers. I agree. These programs will maintain or even build a little muscle; yet they are not so overwhelmingly intense that you won’t have the energy for them. You can supplement with cardio as you see fit: probably the more, the better. And don’t worry about the fat-burning zone (see the following question). Just go as long and as hard as you can without exhausting yourself; or mix short, intense workouts with longer, slower ones.

Whatever you do, do
not
neglect weight training. Walking by itself is just not going to cut it as an exercise program for weight loss. Without using and challenging your muscles, you will lose them, slowly but surely, and that will slow down your metabolism. Weight training is the best way to boost a sluggish metabolism. The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn.

Do I Need to Exercise in the Fat-Burning Zone?

The need to exercise in the so-called fat-burning zone is a complete myth. You should exercise for as hard and as long as you safely and reasonably can, and go for the maximum amount of calories you can burn. It makes no real difference whether those calories come from fat or from sugar, any more than it matters if you pay for something with a check or with cash.

The average person uses about 70% fat and 30% sugar as “fuel” while they’re sitting, sleeping, or relaxing. As they become more active, the percentages shift—the harder they exercise, the lower the proportion of fuel from fat and the higher the proportion of fuel from sugar. This is where the misunderstanding comes from. While the
percentages
of fuel do indeed change, so does the amount of calories burned. So, sure, at low levels of exercise, I’m burning about 70% of my calories from fat, but I’m burning only a couple of calories a minute! When I exercise harder, I may be burning only 40% fat, but I’m burning a lot more calories. Would you rather have 90% of all of
my
money, or 10% of Donald Trump’s?

I Have No Stamina for Exercise When I’m on a Low-Carb Diet. What Gives?

Lyle McDonald, one of the foremost experts on the ketogenic diet and author of a textbook in the field, works with many athletes, particularly bodybuilders. He believes that with very high-intensity exercise, the ketogenic diet can present a problem as far as energy goes. He therefore recommends that on exercise days you consume more carbohydrates than usual, then go back to your usual amount at the next meal. It’s important to realize that he’s talking only about super-high-intensity exercise. For more “regular” folks, a ketogenic—or any reduced-carb—diet will supply more than enough energy for circuit training, conventional weight training, and/or moderate aerobics.

If it doesn’t, it may be that you’re not eating enough fat. If, however, you still find that getting through your workouts is nearly impossible, try eating a small amount (5 to 25 grams) of carbohydrate about thirty minutes before your workout and see if that helps. If it does, you’ll know that you are one of those people who need more carbs to work out effectively.

I’ve recently started both lowimpact circuit training and a low-carb diet, and I haven’t had any problems. As long as I don’t overdo my workout, I have more energy than ever before.

—Janice K.

I’m a Runner and I Like to Run Races at My Local Runner’s Club. I Thought “Carb-Loading” Was a Must for Athletes. Can a Low-Carb Diet Work for Me?

Remember that the fuel you most want to use during endurance exercise is fat, not sugar. “Carb-loading” simply ensures that your glycogen stores are full, which translates into using sugar for fuel. The better you are at fatburning, the longer you’ll be able to go. For what it’s worth, Stu Mittleman, an exercise physiologist, nutritionist, ultra-marathoner, and one of the greatest endurance athletes of all time, generally eats a diet of about 40% carbs, 30% protein, and 30% fat, but when he is in training for an event, he ups the
fat
to about 50%—not the carbs.

CHAPTER 11

Tricks of the Trade:
The Top 50+ Tips for
Making Low-Carb
Work for You

I
’ve put together more than fifty of the most useful tips for making low-carb eating a part of your life. The tips are organized into three categories: food and drink, motivation, and general. Occasionally, a tip in the “general” category may seem like it has nothing to do with low-carb eating; but believe me, if it’s there, it has
everything
to do with making lowcarb weight loss a success. Remember that no program that results in changing your body
and
your life can be based
just
around what foods to eat or not eat. We also need to know how to deal with the kinds of issues—boredom, anxiety, disappointment, failure, perseverance, and so on—that inevitably come up when we’re talking about changing lifelong habits. By the way, before we get started, let me tell you the first and most important tip of all….

Don’t Try to Do All the Tips

In low-carb dieting, as with many other things in life, you can easily and quickly get intellectually fatigued from information overload, a pitfall that causes many people to just throw up their hands and give up. Don’t do this. Use the tips that make sense to you and that you can incorporate easily into your life. Don’t worry about the rest. You can always go back and revisit them.

Now, let’s get started!

Food and Drink

Drink Water

No kidding. This tip has been all over this book in various forms, including in the FAQ chapter, but it’s so important that I’m going to stick it everywhere you might possibly see it.
Water can—and does—affect fat loss
. If you’re on a ketogenic diet (Atkins induction phase, Protein Power phase one, etc.), it’s essential to flush out the ketones and waste products from the fat you’re losing. Even if you’re not on a ketogenic diet, it’s essential to prevent constipation and to optimize kidney and liver function (remember that the liver is the main fat-processing factory in the body, and if it’s not working properly, neither is fat metabolism). Eight glasses a day is the
minimum
and is not enough for most overweight people. For more specific recommendations on how much water to drink, see page 325.

P.S.: If you need more motivation, water is number one in the anti-aging arsenal of Dr. Nicholas Perricone, formerly of Yale University and the chairman of the International Conference on Aging and Aging Skin. Perricone says, “If I could teach my patients and students three things that would keep them forever young, they would be: one, drink water; two, drink water; and three, drink more water.”

Watch Out for Protein Bars

You gotta be careful with these. I definitely don’t recommend them during the first two weeks, when you’re adjusting to this new way of eating. For one thing, the market has been saturated with this new class of candy—I mean, snack food—and predictably, the bars vary in quality from complete junk to not so bad. Some of the best are PaleoBar, (available on my Web site,
http://www.jonnybowden.com
), Sears Labs’ Omega-3 Zone (don’t confuse them with the Zone bars found in every grocery store), and the Atkins bars, available everywhere.

All protein bars are not created equal, and the term
energy bar
is a complete marketing scam. “Energy,” in the parlance of nutrition, simply means “calories,” but manufacturers want you to think that eating one of their bars will make you feel like running a marathon. Not so. In fact, most “energy” bars are loaded with carbs. Almost all have hydrogenated fats (trans-fats). Protein bars specifically have more protein and often fewer carbs, but you still have to read labels. Some are as high as 330 calories, not exactly snack food. In addition, they have sweeteners like sorbitol or mannitol, which are sugar alcohols that still need to be counted if you’re counting carbs. Mannitol, especially, may give you gas. And even dear Dr. Atkins doesn’t count the glycerine (also known as glycerol) when he tells you there’s only 2 or 3 grams of effective carbs in his bars. That’s controversial: glycerol—an odorless, colorless, sweet-tasting liquid—is used as a sweetener and is classified as a carbohydrate, but Atkins claims that because it does not impact blood sugar in the same way sugar does, it shouldn’t be counted as part of the net (effective) carb content in his bars. Maybe; maybe not. Many low-carbers do find that it slows down their weight loss; others don’t. In any case, stick with real food and hold off on the bars for a few weeks until you get your bearings in this new way of eating.

Consider Salmon for Breakfast… or Lunch or Dinner

I told you that not all tips would be applicable to all readers, but if you can make this one work, you’ll reap a lot of results. Unfortunately, farmed salmon—which is what you’ll get most often in restaurants—has all the problems other farm animals have. The fish are raised in pens, fed grain, and given antibiotics. As a result of the grain diet and the lack of exercise, their omega-3 fat content is not nearly as good as that of their wild brethren. However, with wild fish there is always the slight risk of mercury. So what to do? There are such huge benefits to eating salmon that I recommend it anyway. If you can get Alaskan wild salmon, that’s great. Consider, however, some amazingly healthful varieties of canned salmon, which also taste delicious. The red sockeye kind is the best. You can get my absolute favorite, the hard-to-find gourmet Vital Choice salmon (which is also the choice of many other well-known nutrition and health gurus), through a link on my Web site,
http://www.jonnybowden.com
. They even have a special “Dr. Jonny Introductory Package” of salmon fillets, the best canned tuna on the planet, and three different kinds of organic berries.