Low-carb diets have this habit of completely excluding staples like pasta, bread, rice, and sugar. If it’s difficult for people to stick to diets that restrict them to low-carb foods, it’s because that such a diet almost always excludes pretty much everything that they know how to eat to stay alive.
How do you stay on a diet of low-carb foods when you are never told what it is that you actually can eat. The truth is, that a low-carb dietdoes not have to be so difficult to follow. You don’t even need ketosis to begin to reap the benefits of a low carb diet.
Why is it that these diets try to keep you down to starvation levels of carbohydrate intake? The principle all of these diets work on is that carbohydrates push your internal buttons to get your pancreas to begin production of insulin. And that is a hormone that increases body’s abilities in fat storage.
Restrict everything you eat to low-carb foods and they believe that you will no longer produce much insulin and you won’t have it packing fat into your abdomen either. And when there is less insulin in your blood, you’ll also begin to start burning your body fat for energy. It is supposed to work both ways.
The process by which the body burns its fat instead of its carbohydrates is something they call ketosis. There are some low-carb diets that actually aim to make the body perform its ketosis magic as early on as possible. They will almost completely cut off your allowance of carbohydrates to try to jumpstart the ketosis process.
How low does the carbohydrate content in your food help you get the process started? Usually, anything lower than 50 g a day for a couple of days gets it going. Most low-carb diets that try to get you to take advantage of this function make you do this for the first couple of weeks in the belief that it will help you take the most advantage possible.
Unfortunately, science isn’t on the side of the ketogenic low-carb diet. They actually tried this; in research tests published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition a few years ago. They took on a couple of dozen people who were overweight, put half of them on a diet that allowed them no carbohydrates, and put the other half on a normal, carbohydrates-filled diet. They found that each group did as well as the other. There was just no difference.
A much healthier and more sensible way of going about picking the cards out of your food would be to allow yourself about 50 g of carbohydrates at each meal. That will allow you to work great deal more variety into your meal. And your chances of sticking to your diet would be far greater.