Living Low Carb (74 page)

Principle #1: Begin with a 2-Week “Boot Camp” Period

Many of the diets discussed in this book make use of an initial restricted eating period of at least 2 weeks—what Atkins called the
induction phase.
This idea is common to many of the plans, and I recommend it highly and use it with my own clients all the time. During this time you:

•  Eat as much meat, poultry, and fish as you like.

•  Eat unlimited vegetables.

•  Eat as much of the healthful fats—butter, avocados, olive oil, coconut oil, fish oil—as you like.

•  Eliminate all
potatoes, rice, pasta, breads, cereals, and other starches.

•  Eliminate grains.

•  Eliminate sugar.

•  Eliminate dairy.

•  Eliminate alcohol.

Optional:
the strictest version of this 2-week program also temporarily eliminates fruit. (On an “induction-lite” program, I
allow
my clients one or two small daily portions of berries.)

You can have a cup or two of coffee, preferably organic; and, if you like, you can sweeten your coffee with xylitol, stevia, or erythritol and lighten it with 2 tablespoons of cream. You need to drink
at least
8 glasses of water a day, plus an additional 8 ounces for every 25 pounds of extra weight you are carrying. Hot water with lemon juice is fine, as are teas (green, black, and oolong). I personally do not object to caffeinated teas, though you are welcome to use herbals.

If you prefer more specific guidelines for amounts, keep your protein portions to 3 to 4 ounces per meal and oils and butter to 4 tablespoons a day. Vegetables are essentially unlimited. You can eat 2 eggs a day with no problem, and you should use the whole egg, preferably from free-range chickens.

I always wondered why I felt tired after eating pasta and wide awake after eating meat. Now I know.

—Bill W.

Principle #2: In the Beginning, Don’t Be Concerned with Calories

First you want to make sure you’re eating the right foods. There’s plenty of time later to start fiddling with portion sizes. At this point in the game, I’m not concerned with calories; centering the diet around protein, fat, and fiber will generally cause you to be full before you’ve overeaten anyway. For some lucky people, that’s all that’s necessary—calories will self-regulate. For most people, it will be necessary to deal with calories
if
weight doesn’t come off (see principle #9).

Principle #3: Find Your Own Personal Level of Carb Restriction

Though to the nutritional establishment low-carb is low-carb, the truth is that low-carbing exists on a
continuum
. As you have seen, that can mean anything from the restrictive induction phase of Atkins (20 grams or less of carbs a day) to the much more lenient Zone (in the neighborhood of 150 grams a day for a man on a reduced-calorie program). That’s a big range. Where you will fall on this continuum at any given time depends on a number of things:

The whole concept of mindful eating—not doing 20 things while I was stuffing things into my face unconsciously—was really helpful to me. It just meant learning to put some time aside to actually enjoy and experience my food.

—Melissa McN.

•  how metabolically resistant you are

•  how much weight you have to lose

•  how you feel, physically and mentally, at various levels of carb restriction

•  whether your current strategy is working for you

I suggest you
begin
at about 50 grams of carbohydrate a day for the first week; use that as a baseline from which to determine whether the amount needs to be lower (or if you can tolerate more). If you’re not into counting grams, simply eliminate all of the “forbidden foods” on the induction list (pastas, grains, starches, dairy, sugars, and fruits), and you will easily be where you should be to get good results without counting carbs.

Principle #4: After the First 2 Weeks, Begin Adding Carbs Back Little by Little

After the initial “whoosh” of loss during the 2-week induction phase, your weight loss should stabilize, and you will probably wind up losing around 2 pounds a week. Some people find that they need to stay on an inductionphase eating plan to accomplish this, but most others can begin adding back
small
portions of foods on the “forbidden” list at this time. Virtually all of the plans agree on this principle and differ only on which foods should be added back and in what amounts. This is the place where you customize and individualize. I suggest that you constantly monitor how you feel, how you look, and what you weigh and, based on these factors, determine what can go back into your diet, as well as how much and how soon.

Principle #5: Add Back Foods According to the “Ladder of Desirability”

My suggestion is that you begin with low-glycemic fruits like berries. Some people will be able to add small amounts of cheese. Many will be able to add small amounts of nuts. (Remember that nuts and cheese, while perfectly okay for low-carb eating plans, are very dense in calories and very easy to overeat. When you get “stuck” at a plateau, it is often these foods that need to go first.) Grains should be the last on your “regular” diet to be added back in, if at all, and then only truly whole grains. The sprouted variety is best. Processed grains you can say good-bye to forever. Recreational foods include the ones we all know are not great for us but without which life would be just too boring—I include pizza, ice cream, and cheesecake on my list; you may have your own favorites. Obviously, they should be eaten infrequently!

Find the level of carbohydrate intake that suits you and allows you to keep losing consistently at a moderate rate (1 to 2 pounds a week, 3 at the most if you’re very overweight), and stay at that level. Remember to expect plateaus and stalls (see page 338).

Principle #6: When You Add Back Foods, Add Them One at a Time and Watch for Reactions

One of the delightful unexpected “side effects” experienced by many lowcarb dieters is that symptoms they’ve had for years—symptoms that are unrelated to weight—begin to clear up: notably headaches, allergic symptoms, inflammation, and assorted aches and pains. This is often because the low-carb diet, by its nature, eliminates many of the foods that are triggers for unrecognized food sensitivities as well as those that contribute to inflammation and pain (namely, grains and many of the omega-6 refined vegetable oils). When you begin to add back your carbs, don’t do it haphazardly. Watch what you’re adding, do it one food group at a time, and monitor yourself for any reactions. If you start to feel worse, the food you added back is not right for you. Dump it.

Principle #7: The Hard Work Begins with Maintenance

Difficult as it may seem, getting to a goal weight is not the really hard part.
Staying
there is. And, believe it or not, developing a strategy for maintenance can actually begin while you are still in the losing phase.

When I work with someone on a weight-loss program, she inevitably asks me if she will have to “eat this way forever.” The dieter who asks this question is invariably gritting her teeth and simply toughing it out, waiting to get to the goal so that she can relax and eat what she wants. This is almost always a prescription for a disastrous result. You need to look at the weightloss period as a kind of driver’s ed for weight maintenance. The strategy you adopt for
losing
is like the strategy of an athlete training for an event; it’s tougher and more rigorous than the “off-season” (maintenance). But every athlete also knows that getting to the top is only the first part of the journey;
staying there
is where the real action is.

So the answer to the question “Will I have to eat this way
forever
?” is “No.”

But you
will
have to eat differently. To think that you can go back to eating the way you did when you got fat and get a completely different result is one definition of insanity. You will probably not have to be as restrictive and structured and disciplined as you have to be during the weight-loss phase, but you
will
have to be forever vigilant about preventing regain, which leads to principle #8.

Principle #8: Use the 4-Pound Rule

There will be times in life when recreational eating has an irresistible pull—weddings, birthdays, holidays, and just the plain old urge to get a couple of pizzas and beers once in a while. These situations do not have to be the end of the world; in fact, to never allow yourself these little pleasures would be a big mistake. The trick is to not allow these occasional “planned lapses” to generate a slide into chaos that culminates in a complete departure from the eating plan that allows you to keep your weight where you want it and maintain optimal health. So check in with the scale frequently. Choose a set number of pounds—let’s use 4 as an example. If and when you see your weight climb 4 pounds above goal, immediately go back to your 2-week induction phase, and use that restrictive plan until you get back down to goal or even a couple of pounds under. Then you can go back to maintenance eating.

Principle #9: Don’t Ignore Calories

Because some of the best-known low-carb plans do not make a big deal about calories (Atkins, Protein Power, Schwarzbein, Zone, Fat Flush), many people wrongly interpret this to mean that calories are irrelevant. No responsible low-carb author has ever said this. The lack of emphasis on calories per se has been because most of us believe that the regulation of hormones (namely insulin and glucagon) takes precedence over calorie-counting, which is an inefficient and unproductive (not to mention old-fashioned) way to lose weight.

The prejudice against fat people in the country is unbelievable. People always assume I have no self-control and they look at me like I’m somehow morally bankrupt.

—Emma T.

This does
not
mean that calories don’t count at all—they do. But the way calories behave in the human body is far more complicated than originally thought and way more individual than any formula could convey. (An interesting side note: when Dr. Jack Goldberg and Dr. Karen O’Mara first did a clinical test of the GO-Diet in a Chicago hospital, the person who lost the most weight on the diet consumed only 1,200 calories a day—but the runnerup consumed 2,600!) Just as your level of carbohydrate restriction has to be determined by trial and error, so does your calorie intake.

Many low-carbers have been stalled because, although they are eating all the right foods, they are just eating too darn many of them! This is where monitoring calories can come in handy. Though the point cannot be made strongly enough that each individual has to determine the appropriate number for his or her body,
in general
women will lose on 1,200 to 1,300 calories per day and men on 1,500 to 1,600.

There will probably come a point at which it will be productive for you to know how many calories you are actually consuming so you can make adjustments if necessary.

Principle #10: Low-Carb Doesn’t Mean No-Carb

There is not a single low-carb diet writer who ever recommended a
no-carb
diet. You wouldn’t know it from all the people who chatter on about their “all-protein” diet, but such a diet does not exist anywhere in the responsible literature. Low-carb diets restrict carbohydrates, sometimes to very low amounts (especially in induction phases), but
never
to zero, and even the induction phases are not meant to last indefinitely. You can always have vegetables. You
should
always have vegetables. And even at the strictest induction levels, you can eat a fair amount of them for your 20 to 30 grams of effective carb content (much, much more when you move up to ongoing weight loss and finally to maintenance phases).

It was almost like a religious experience for me when I finally gave up all the “white stuff”—potatoes, rice, pasta, bread. For the first time in 20 years I didn’t feel bloated all the time.

—Brian C.

Make Low-Carb Part of a System of Self-Care

If you think of low-carbing as nothing more than a way to get skinny, you are missing out on one of the great benefits of this lifestyle. Low-carbing does not have to be merely a weight-loss strategy. It can, and should, be the cornerstone of an entire system of self-care that enhances your health and your life in dozens of ways. Keeping carbs low is only the first step, and not even the most important. You can use the tools in this book to change your entire relationship to food and, by extension, to the whole notion of how you care for yourself. Some of the terrific benefits noted by low-carbers have to do with other changes in their diet and lifestyle that have accompanied their switch to low-carbohydrate foods.