Best Low Carb Diet

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Author:
Vince Lewis

Low carbohydrate diets have been made popular by weight loss schemes such as the Atkins diet and South Beach diet. They are appealing due to the fact that the foods you can eat are essentially the opposite of most other diets. That is, you eat a lot of protein and fats and very restricted carbohydrates.

The basis of this diet is that you require carbohydrates to produce insulin, and it's this that makes you metabolise the fats in your food. Without the carbohydrates, you put yourself in the position that the food you eat goes essentially undigested. Your body reacts by using up it's stored carbohydrates (in the form of glycogen) very quickly and you then go into a state of ketosis. This results in a very rapid initial weight loss since a lot of water is also stored with the glycogen.

Depending on the particular diet, the carbohydrate restriction can be very severe - for example on the Atkins diet, in the initial phases you may eat no more than 15-20 grams of carbohydrate a day. Also, the type of carbohydrate becomes important too. It becomes permissible to eat restricted amounts of fruit, but the real issue is refined carbohydrates, as these cause spikes in insulin production.

So, the foods which are a no-no are things which contain milled white flour and white sugar (and other sources of refined carbohydrates). These include

* Sugar
* Bread
* Cakes
* Sweets (candy to our American friends)
* Alcoholic drinks
* Rice
* Pasta
* any non-diet drinks
* almost all ready-meals

and also, in the initial strict part of the regime,

* Potatoes
* Rice
* Fruit
* Vegetables (apart from a small quantity of leafy green vegetables)

The things which you may eat are

* Any unprocessed fresh meat
* Unprocessed fish
* Eggs
* Cream
* Oils
* Cheese
* Nuts

A typical day on this kind of weight loss regime might consist of a cheese omellete for breakfast, perhaps some chicken and salad for lunch followed by steak and salad for dinner. So this type of diet is good if you are a meat eater, but near impossible if you are a vegetarian. It also seems to be more popular than some other regimes with men.

Some variations on this type of weight loss scheme allow you to eat fruit, but at least 30 minutes before any meal and at least 4 hours after any meal. This is so that the natural sugars in the fruit do not mix with the protein and fats in your main meal.

Still other variations also restrict your calorific intake to further hasten your weight loss.

However, do bear in mind that like all diet programmes, it relies on denial. In this case, denial of items like bread, sugar, alcohol, coffee, most desserts, many sauces, and almost all pre-packaged foods. It's also relatively expensive since it's all meat, fish and cheese.

Vince Lewis is webmaster for the site Free-Diet-Tracker.com which provides free tools for those trying to lose weight. Note that the site is run by dieters for dieters and so the site is totally free, not a free trial.

A Quick Note From The Publisher... If you like the article above, you may be interested in the following article which is also related to Popular Diet... Low Carb Diet - Weight Loss Benefits A low carb diet, as the name implies, is a diet that is low in carbohydrates (bread, rice, sugar, especially the refined variety) and high (or rather adequate) in fats and proteins (meat, eggs, cheese, butter, nuts, etc.). A number of variations of the diet exist (most well known, Dr. Atkins Diet), but the one thing that is common to all is the drastic cutback on the intake of carbohydrates in the diet plan. Most of these plans substitute the outgoing carbohydrates with fats and proteins. Although different types of these diets may vary in the recommended intake of carbohydrates, fats and proteins, as a general rule a low carb diet is tantamount to a high-fat and moderate protein diet. In a low carb diet at least 60–70% of the daily calorie intake must come from fats, contrary to a normal diet where a major portion of the calories comes from carbohydrates. The carbohydrate calories should not constitute more than 5–10% of the daily calorie intake. The remaining 20–30% calories can come from proteins. Why a low carb diet? How often have you come across overweight people feeling frustrated at not being able to lose an inch of the stubborn abdominal fat in spite of exercising and in spite of being on the traditionally recommended low fat, high carb diet for months? Too often to even remember! The reason, obviously, has to lie in the wrong approach to attack the problem underlying excess weight and excess inches. Scientific research has shown that dietary fat is not necessarily converted into body fat, whereas carbohydrates readily convert into fat by the action of insulin – a hormone produced by pancreas in response to elevated sugar levels in the blood (as caused by carbohydrates) to allow blood sugar to be used by cells. However, insulin also aids in fat...