Looking for advice for Starting a Low Carb Diet in the New Year? This post might help.
Starting a Low Carb Diet – Advice and Tips
Getting healthy can be a goal any time of the year, but many people make a commitment to get fit and lose weight as a New Year’s resolution. If you have plans to start a diet soon, then one of the best ones to start is a low carb plan.
This is a diet that lowers the amount of carbohydrates you consume in your meals and snacks. You’ll still be eating normal foods, but in a way that takes off the excess weight. You can still eat many of your favorite foods, including steak, chicken, guacamole, and more – but you’ll prepare your meals so that the carb count is lowered in a way that helps you shed pounds more easily.
How to Start a Low Carb Diet
Dieting always starts with knowledge, no matter which plan you intend to follow. If you don’t know what you’re doing when trying to lose weight, then you will make mistakes that keep the pounds on.
Having the knowledge that you need can mean the difference between success and failure with your weight loss goals. To begin, you need to choose the type of low carb diet that you want to follow.
There are several – and they’re all good as long as they focus on eating healthy foods and don’t require you to eat in a manner that would negatively impact your health. Some low carb diets focus on limiting the carbs, and boosting the amount of protein that’s eaten.
The focus of these diets is on eliminating the unhealthy foods, and when faced with a choice of food items, you would choose the one that had the most nutritional value, but the lowest number of carbs.
Other low carb diets emphasize limiting the carbs, but not the fat. You can eat foods that are high in fat as long as it’s the good kind of fat, such as an avocado or olive oil. Some of what these diets call for followers to consume are foods like meat, vegetables and even dairy.
Foods that aren’t in a natural state should be avoided. That means you avoid or strictly limit any foods that were processed and ideally try to choose fresh foods over those in a can, or quick foods like TV dinners that can be cooked in the microwave.
The number of carbs you should get on any of these diets can range in number. It depends on which one you’re following. On Keto, you’re looking at a total of 20 net carbs or less, while some low carb plans call for anything under 100 grams daily.
Many of the lower carb diets are already well known, such as the Mediterranean Diet or Keto Diet. One of the easier plans focuses on the way that people in the Mediterranean eat because the diet is known to be beneficial to the body. This diet is low in carbs but has an emphasis on fish.
It also focuses more on oils like olive oil – the extra virgin variety. With this type of olive oil, it means that it hasn’t undergone any heat treatment and it hasn’t been treated with chemicals, either.
On this diet, followers can eat fruits and vegetables, and of course, the fish or seafood that the diet focuses on. If it’s a refined food, then it shouldn’t be eaten on this low carb diet.
That means, you wouldn’t eat things like refined grains. No matter what the refined grain is in, you wouldn’t eat it. Some pastas contain refined grains, so you would have to study labels and ingredients to be able to avoid this.
You would also need to avoid processed foods, especially meats and any food where sugar was added to it. Your food choices would be more along the line of the ones that are found in nature, which don’t contain any additives.
Things You Need for a Low Carb Diet
You can start a low carb diet without buying anything other than the foods that you need to eat on the diet. However, there are certain steps you can take and things that you can buy that can make it more helpful to you.
These things can increase your chances of success on the diet. If you’re someone whose pantry is filled with processed foods and you have a store of sugary snacks, you really do need to clean out your pantry and your refrigerator.
If you eat sugar or salt, it can set off more cravings for those foods. After you’ve been eating healthy on a low carb diet for a bit of time, your cravings will subside. You’ll feel better and your cravings will start to be for those healthy foods once your body is used to eating sugar-free and low sodium.
Most people mess up when trying to eat low carb by forgetting that they may need a new way of cooking. Their meal plans may have consisted heavily of high carb comfort foods, like breaded and fried chicken.
Any food can be made low carb. But you’ll need to know how to do that. That’s why you should get cookbooks or invest in some meal planning software that can help you plan meals that are better for your body.
You need structure when dieting. That means you should have a plan. If you try to just wing it, you’ll more than likely fall right back into your old eating habits. Look around your kitchen and identify the gadgets that might sabotage your diet.
It might be an electric fryer that you put a lot of oil in to cook chicken nuggets or fries. Having it in your kitchen could tempt you. So either pack it away in your attic or get rid of it.
Invest in appliances that will help you eat low carb. You may want to buy an instant pot and a blender. These tools can prepare a meal or a vegetables and berries drink quickly.
Another item you may want to get should be a spiralizer. This gadget can be used to create low carb vegetable noodles, which you can use in your diet in the place of high carb pasta.
This way, you don’t have to give up eating pasta dishes. Finally, use a meal planner to plan out all your meals and your snacks. It can help you to not only know what you’re going to eat, but to create your shopping list and snack ideas in advance so you have something to grab to eat when you feel too hungry to wait for a meal.
Understanding the Number of Carbs You’re Consuming
When it comes to low carb dieting, you might have heard the term macros before. This comes from the word macronutrient. All it means is the types of nutrients you consume on a low carb diet.
Macros focuses on your carbs, proteins and the fats that you eat. Any low carb diet that says you need to be aware of the number of macros you’re getting just means you need to know how many grams you’re getting in each of those three main categories.
The number of macros involved in your carbs is going to depend on the number of carbs you’re aiming for in whatever low carb diet you’re following. Not all of the low carb diets are going to have the same number of carbs suggested.
There are some low carb diets that call for a higher amount of grams because they take into consideration external factors that may call for more grams. For example, if you’re involved in a heavy exercise routine, you may need to have a higher carb count than someone who’s only exercising moderately or not at all.
So, it would still be considered low carb even though you were eating more. You might be someone who doesn’t like the idea of taking the weight off quickly, which is what can happen with a low carb diet.
So you might aim to have 100 grams a day. This would lead to weight loss from healthy eating and can also be coupled with heavy exercise. If you want to choose to follow a low carb diet that only calls for 50 grams, then you can still lose weight in a steady manner.
However, many people want to take the weight off faster than that. They lower their carbs to where it’s around or under the 20-50 gram mark. You can do that and still eat healthy.
Your focus would be more on meat, along with berry fruits and vegetables as well as healthy fats. You can still have high fat dairy on a 50 gram low carb diet. Just keep in mind that if you are more physically active, the lower amount of grams may not be suitable for you.
You’ll have to pay attention to how your body reacts. Anyone who’s eating low carb should study the glycemic index. This index can quickly show you how many carbs are in the foods that you plan to eat.
Paying attention to this is an easy way to be able to track your grams to keep you from going over or under. In addition to that, knowing the glycemic index of a food can determine how that food will impact your glucose level.
You’ll want to know this if you have a medical condition such as diabetes, but you’ll also want to know it because it can help you determine if you need to watch for a crash after exercising if you plan your meals around your physical activity.
Some low carb diets consist of eating less than 50 grams consistently for the purpose of entering ketosis. There are test strips you may want to purchase to determine whether or not your body has entered ketosis.
Following the Ketogenic Low Carb Diet
The main gist of eating the keto way is to get your body to the point that it enters ketosis. When you go into ketosis, it means that your glucose levels are lowered. But it also means that your body stops using carbs for the fuel that it needs.
Instead, it’s using ketones to be able to function. Ketones occur in reaction to the fatty acids your body gives in response to the lowered number of carbs you take in. One of the reasons that many people choose to follow the keto diet is because it’s a quick way to shed pounds.
But it also helps the body drop fat. People who are on the diet see a lot of health benefits associated with the weight loss. These are things like lowered blood pressure, lowered cholesterol levels and lower glucose levels.
Normally, your meals will consist of a lot of protein and a lot of healthy fat. You can have fish and other seafood, too. You can also have dairy products like cheese. You can have vegetables and certain fruits that are low in carbs (mainly from the berry family).
You have to watch this, because some vegetables and fruits are higher in carbs. For example, sweet potatoes and corn are both higher than other vegetables in carbs. So are some fruits, such as bananas.
You’ll want to pay close attention because the number of carbs that you would want to take in should be as little as 20 or under for each day. There are some well know eating plans, like the Atkins 20, that you can follow to guide you so that you stick to that amount.
The keto low carb diet does focus on healthy eating by avoiding foods that are unhealthy and lead to weight gain. Remember that not all keto diets are the same. Some keto diets don’t focus on total carbs, but are instead based on net carbs.
This means it’s the carb tally of whatever you’re eating, but you subtract however many grams of fiber and sugar alcohol that is in the food. The reason for this is because fiber doesn’t cause your body to react with the same food response that a true carb does, since you don’t digest it.
Because you’re eating such a low amount of carbs, you will lose weight following the keto under 20 plan, even if you’re not taking part in any type of exercise. Because of the lowered amount of carbs, what many dieters do to maintain success is they break their eating up so that every couple of hours, they’re eating something.
If the thought of tracking your carbs, net carbs and macros seems like a lot of work, there are numerous fitness apps you can download that can help you easily keep up with everything.
Dealing with Sugar Cravings
Everyone has or will deal with a sugar craving. When you start following a diet, those cravings can sometimes seem to intensify. There’s a good reason why that happens.
When you consume sugar, the body releases some feel good hormones.
They make you happy and calm and this endorphin rush can be addicting. It’s no wonder why people struggle to break the sugar habit. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no hope for dealing with sugar cravings.
You can successfully overcome them so that they don’t make you miserable or wreck your diet goals. A sugar craving can hit when you’re bored, but you may not necessarily have a true hunger for it.
You just want that taste because your body has been conditioned to have it. So what you can do instead is when the craving hits, chew a piece of sugar free gum. You’ll still get that sweet taste even though there’s no actual sugar in the ingredients.
This will fool your body and satisfy the craving. Sometimes, though, not even chewing a piece of gum can quiet the craving. That’s when you need to give in. But that doesn’t mean you necessarily give your body the kind of sugar that not only fuels the craving but can lead to weight gain as well.
Instead, you give it something natural. Have some fruit instead. The natural sugar that’s found in low carb fruits like berries can help end the sugar craving and break a sugar habit as well.
Plus, you’ll get more nutritional value and health benefits from eating the fruit. Not all the fruit that you eat has to be fresh either. Having some fresh fruit might be more difficult if you’re on the go.
If that’s the case, you can have something like a low carb Greek yogurt drink that you make at home. You’ll get the sweet taste without the high carb content and it’ll be enough to end the sugar craving.
It might surprise you, but on a low carb diet, even one like keto, you can have dark chocolate. If the chocolate is 90% cocoa, it’s usually lower in carbs than chocolate such as milk chocolate.
You can find many dark chocolate bars that have just a few net carbs. You can also eat a snack bar. There are several varieties of snack bars that are low carb, low sugar and keto friendly that can help deal with any sugar cravings.
Sometimes having a sugar free mint can help to end any cravings that you might have.
There are times, though when no matter what you do, that sugar craving may feel like it’s relentless.
If that’s the case, then what you need to do is get busy doing something else. When you engage your mind or body in an activity, this helps you to stop focusing on the craving. You can do something like take your dog out for a walk, go to the gym or work on a project that makes you use both hands.
There are also many wonderful keto fat bombs you can make to satisfy your cravings. Some of them resemble delicious chocolate mousse or peanut butter cups, and you can’t tell much of a difference when it’s made from sugar substitutes.
Getting on a low carb diet may make you feel a bit lethargic in the very beginning. But a few days later, the energy returns and you feel better than ever and capable of committing to this way of life for the long haul.
You’ll be pleased knowing you can eat most of your favorite foods, and continue dropping pounds quickly and easily. You can adjust your carb count whenever you see the scale stall to help you shake off a plateau.
