What comes to mind when you think of a low carb diet? Meat, veggies, and no pasta or bread? That's pretty much it. It doesn't have to be complicated.
6 years ago, my husband and I changed our diet, under orders from his doctor. I wasn't thrilled about giving up bread, but I am living proof that it can be done!
My purpose here is to give you a basic summary of the Atkins Diet that we used, and what the results were, so you can decide whether this is a good option for you. Even if you don't use this diet, you may still want to reduce your carb intake for other reasons - like supporting healthy blood sugar levels.
The premise of low carb diets is that our bodies burn the carbs we eat in order to fuel our daily activities. However, we consume so many carbs that we have extra, so our bodies store it as fat.
If we want to lose weight, we need to drastically reduce the amount of carbs we eat so that our body will run out of fuel. When that happens, it switches to using our fat to fuel our daily activities instead!
The trick here is that in order to get your body to start burning fat, you have to seriously deprive it of daily carbs - like only eating 20 - 25 carbs a day! 10-12 of those carbs need to be from veggies (corn, carrots, and potatoes don't count
). You need to do that for 3-4 weeks, to really get your body working right.
The good thing is that we saw results pretty quickly by the second week. Depending on how quickly you want to lose weight, you can start adding an extra 5 carbs a day, one week at a time, starting after about a month. If you keep losing weight that week, then you can add another 5 carbs the next week, until your weight loss evens out. Most people can find their maintaining limit to be between 40 - 80 carbs a day. So, if you can survive the first month, it gets much easier to maintain as you slowly add back some carbs.
I lost 45# in 6 months – that was 6 years ago, and I've been maintaining ever since. I eat about 40 carbs a day, with occasional splurges (once or twice a month). If I want to lose more, I just need to drop my daily carbs back down to 20 – 25 a day.
Drop your questions down below and I'll do my best to answer them. If you'd like to hear more about the types of food we eat, specialty ingredients that really help, and other low carb tips, join my Facebook group and look up low carb in the topics. Yes, I'd like to learn more!
