Caitlin Weeks grew up eating southern comfort food and battling the bulge. After college she lost 90 lbs on a low fat diet with excessive cardio exercise. There are benefits and risks to a low-carb diet like the ketogenic diet or Atkins diet. How low is too low, and what are those benefits of a low-carb diet? Alzheimer's disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. This fatal and progressive condition destroys brain cells, resulting in memory.
Best Tips for Getting Back to the Low Carb Keto Diet. We all falter sometimes. If you want to get back on track with your healthy low carb or keto diet, keep reading. The best tips from the low carb experts! Okay, so you fell off the wagon with a resounding thud. Maybe it was a one- time indiscretion and you just cheated a little, or maybe you’ve been off the wagon for days or weeks.
But you’ve picked yourself up and you want to clamber back on as soon as possible. You’re covered in dust from your fall, you ache all over, but that wagon is sitting there waiting for you, ready to welcome you back with open arms. All you have to do is put one foot in front of the other. Sounds easy but sometimes it can seem absolutely monumental.
I am writing this because I had a little fall of my own recently. It was only a meal’s worth of cheating but it made me feel absolutely awful the next day. Shaky, bloated, exhausted, tummy issues, the works. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, I knew I had to get back on track right away. My health is too important to me to let things go any further. But I know I will fall again and so I thought it might be helpful to talk about those little tips and tricks that help you get back to your healthy diet a little more easily.
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Whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up! If you read nothing else but this one tip, that’s fine. But please take this advice to heart, because it is far and away the most important tip I am going to share.
I am part of a lot of forums for low carb and Keto diets and there is always someone flagellating themselves for cheating, for failing, for not having the willpower to stick it out. We ALL fail at this sometimes.
If you’ve ever been on a low carb diet, you know there’s a period of time after you begin the diet, when you basically feel like crap. But if you’re able to get. Low carb diet tips for a busy lifestyle. Easy low carb recipes and snacks. Low carb restaurant choices & tips for eating low carb on the go. A definitive guide to which alcohol is permitted on a low carb and keto diet. You can find the answers to all of your alcohol questions here!
Low to high method Start from a low level of net carbs to ensure you quickly enter ketosis (~ 20 grams of net carbs per day). When you detect ketosis after about 2-3.
Let’s face it, we live in a sugar and gluten- filled world. Unless we are hermits that don’t ever leave the house, we are faced with temptation daily – at work, at social functions, on television, on the internet.
It’s all around us and the wonder of it is that we don’t give in more often! I find it heartbreaking sometimes, the way people who slip beat themselves up. Just think about it for a second. You wouldn’t talk to a friend or a loved one that way when they’d slipped, would you? Then why on earth do you talk to yourself that way? And let’s be honest, some of that self- loathing might be part of what brought you here in the first place.
So take a deep breath and repeat after me. I had a moment of failure. And I will probably fail again.
What’s important is that I keep on trying”. In the immortal words of Taylor Swift, shake it off! Don’t excuse your behaviour. So I said we all fail sometimes, and we do. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hold yourself accountable. It isn’t someone else’s fault that you scarfed down that pizza or dove head first into a plate of Oreos. Be an adult and recognize that you did this to yourself and the consequences suck.
And then ask yourself why. Did you forget to eat before you went to the party and arrived so hungry you monopolized the buffet? Were you running errands all day, taking kids to soccer and not stashing a low carb high fat snack for yourself? Or was emotional eating? Or boredom eating (which I am very prone to!)? Or did you do the old “oh one bite won’t hurt.
Okay maybe three or four bites won’t hurt. Take notes or keep a journal. You feel pretty bad, don’t you? Beyond the guilt and anger at yourself, you probably don’t feel very well physically either. Going off the rails and eating carbs and sugar with abandon might seem pretty fun at the time, but most of us experience some serious discomfort the next day. Tummy aches, head aches, inflammation if we have dietary sensitivities.
It isn’t pretty, but it can also be good motivation for getting back on track. Sadly, however, it’s quite easy to forget how awful certain foods make us feel once we are feeling better. Writing it down can help a great deal. Remember how you used to re- copy your notes in high school, in order to better remember them for a test? The simple act of putting it in writing makes it all the more real and vivid. But be sure to write down how much better you feel when you stick to the plan too. A great comparison for future reference!
Eat Salad for Breakfast. Or don’t eat any breakfast at all. For me, eating a whole plate of low carb vegetables is like hitting the reset button. It feels clean, it tastes clean, and I swear it cleans out my head a little too. A large part of that may be mental, like feeling as if I am eating the antidote to a poison I consumed the day before, but it hardly matters. If it helps reset my palate, it’s a good thing. But it’s okay to skip breakfast too, as long as you don’t see it as a punishment for the prior day’s indiscretions.
Intermittent fasting is widely recognized as a healthy practice, and it’s also a great way to hit the reset button. And just giving your body a chance to work through all the junk you ate before you eat anything else is helpful.
Wait until you truly feel hunger again before sitting down to another meal is crucial. Then be sure to your next meal is solidly low carb or keto. Be sure to savour it and enjoy it, to remind yourself of why this way of eating is worth sticking to. My husband taught me that the best cure for a hangover is a 5k run. No, I am not kidding, it works.
And it works for food hangovers too. You aren’t going to feel great when you get out there.
In fact, you will probably feel a little like dog poo. Or a lot like dog poo. It won’t be your best athletic performance ever. It may even hurt a little at the beginning and you will wonder why the heck you are doing it. But afterwards, you will feel so much better and you will be that much further along to ridding your body of the junk you ate. It doesn’t have to be a run or anything super high intensity.
But you do want to raise your heart rate a little and it helps to break a sweat. It helps your body digest a little better, it clears your head, and it helps your cells uptake the extra insulin and glucose that might be floating around in your blood stream. And, if I can be frank, it helps get your bowels moving too. Which we all know makes us feel better after a binge! Sip water and other clear, low carb liquids.
A bit cliche, perhaps, but I find this to be crucial in flushing out my system. Don’t go overboard and drink gallons upon gallons or you will dilute the critical salts your body requires. But simply sipping at a cool, clear liquid can make you feel a little more on track. If you’re sick of the taste of water, herbal teas (hot or cold, with or without sweetener) can help. And if you’re prone to boredom eating, as I am, sipping something with a little flavour can help ease the urge to stuff your mouth.
Need something a little more satisfying and comforting? Try sipping warm bone broth to fill you up without carbs. Also try adding a little turmeric to your bone broth for both flavour and the anti- inflammatory properties. All the carbs and sugars and such you’ve been eating can aggravate inflammation so anything you can do to mitigate it will make you feel a lot better. I’m a girl who likes her nightly glass of wine and I am not afraid to admit it. But after succumbing to temptation, I find I am better to skip the wine for a day or two.
I am working on flushing the toxins out of my system and there’s no question that alcohol is a toxin. And given its propensity to lower our inhibitions, wine makes me less likely to stick to the plan of getting back on track. So a few days of tee- totalling make me feel more clear- headed and healthy.
Find a buddy or a support group. The benefits here are twofold: support and accountability. Sometimes we really suck at making promises to ourselves. They’re only in our head after all, so it’s pretty easy to pretend we never made them in the first place.
But when you say it out loud to a friend or a support group, you feel it’s that much harder to break. And in this day and age, there’s simply no excuse for not having someone to make promises to. Even if you don’t have any in- person friends that support this low carb lifestyle, there are numerous groups and forums.
And most of the time, people are incredibly supportive and helpful, with amazing ideas to help you stay the course. Don’t deprive or punish yourself. Whatever you do, don’t go nuts and exercise like a fiend while subsisting on salad for days on end. That’s never the way to do it. If you feel deprived, you will almost inevitably succumb to the next round of temptation. I’m the rebellious type myself. When I feel restricted or limited, I tend to lash out in frustration and thumb my nose at the limitations, going overboard in the opposite direction.
And a proper low carb diet should be the antithesis of deprivation anyway. So fill up on those good healthy fats to keep your appetite and cravings under control. Search out some new fun recipes. Get excited about cooking and eating this way again! I’ve got a whole blog filled with hundreds of low carb recipes for your eating pleasure.
And there are a number of other wonderful blogs creating amazing recipes to satisfy your hunger. Getting into the kitchen and cooking up some of your favourites, or a few new ones that catch your eye, is the best way to get back on plan. The food is beyond delicious and if you remind yourself of that, you may wonder why you ever fell off the wagon in the first place! Words of Wisdom from fellow low carb experts!
Maria Emmerich of Keto Adapted: Remember how you feel when you cheat. Maybe journal about how your body and mind feels; but however you record that moment just remember that a moment of that indulgence created a whole day or more of feeling awful. Get your cooking inspiration on and start tomorrow as day one. Plan plan plan equals success!
Lisa Marc. Aurele of Low Carb Yum: After indulging in off limit foods, it’s important to think about the reasons why you made the change to a low carb lifestyle whether it be weight management or better health.
Carb controversy: Why low- carb diets have got it all wrong. Ask almost anyone what they need to do to lose a few pounds, and they’ll probably say: “Cut back on the carbs.” As a nutrition coach, I’ve heard it hundreds of times.
While the low carb movement has waxed and waned in popularity since the Atkins revival of the late 9. Health- conscious diners order bunless hamburgers, skip the baked potato side dish, and send the bread basket back to the kitchen. Which is the problem. These simplistic statements about “good foods” and “bad foods” ignore biological complexity and the bigger picture. Let’s look closer. Do carbs increase insulin levels? Yes, they do. Does increased insulin after meals lead to fat gain?
No.(Insulin’s actually a satiety hormone — in other words, it makes you feel full — so the idea that on its own it leads to fat gain doesn’t make sense.)Are carbs really inflammatory? That depends. Are we talking about processed corn syrup? Probably. But if we’re talking about whole grains, not really.
Are carbs less important than protein, fat, and the many micronutrients that contribute to our health? Well, if you’re talking about processed carbs, the answer is a resounding yes. But if you’re talking about whole, minimally processed carbs, that’s a different story. Can a low- carb diet work to help people lose weight? Of course it can. Is it because it is low in carbs? Maybe. Maybe not.
Can eating an appropriate amount of carbs actually help you look, feel and perform your best? You bet it can. The problem with not eating carbs. As a weight loss strategy, cutting carbs (while reducing the total number of calories) clearly works pretty well for some people. If it didn’t, then Atkins would have never been popular in the first place. Here’s the thing, though: Carb reduction costs us. You see, most of us require some level of carbohydrates to function at our best over the long term. Sure, we can cut carbs temporarily if we need to lose weight quickly.
But for most of us, keeping carbs too low for too long can have disastrous consequences. This is especially true for those of us who work out. If you’re sedentary, your carb needs are lower. So you might be able to get away with more restriction.
But if you like to exercise regularly and enthusiastically, restricting your carb intake too drastically can lead to: decreased thyroid outputincreased cortisol outputdecreased testosteroneimpaired mood and cognitive functionmuscle catabolismsuppressed immune function. In other words: Your metabolism might slow, your stress hormones go up and your muscle- building hormones go down. You feel lousy, spaced- out, sluggish, cranky.
If you just want to know what to do, skip to the end. Decreased thyroid. In order to function properly and to maintain an appropriate metabolism, our body produces an important hormone called T3. T3 is the most active thyroid hormone and is incredibly important for blood glucose management and proper metabolic function. Low T3 levels can lead to a condition called euthyroid sick syndrome, in which people are constantly cold and sluggish. When calories and carbs are too low, your T3 levels drop.
In addition, the Vermont Study found that another hormone, reverse T3 (r. T3), is also sensitive to calorie and carbohydrate intake. Reverse T3, as the name implies, inhibits T3. Getting enough carbs can lower reverse T3.
Not eating enough carbs will increase it, thus blocking the important work of T3. The Vermont Study is far from alone. Other research confirms that ketogenic (ultra- low carb) diets reduce T3 levels as rapidly as starvation. Additional studies show that when calories are held constant (in this case at 2.
T3 levels (from 9. L respectively). Finally, French researchers examined four calorically equal diets (2.
Two of these diets contained 2. The low- carb diet included 7. T3 levels were equal on the normal and high carb diets (ranging from 1. L). However, on the low carb diet they fell to 1. L on average. And of course, r. T3 correspondingly rose on the low carb diet, but not on the standard or high carb diets. Thyroid hormones are important for more than just weight loss; they also have profound effects on our overall health and energy levels.
Thus, when you don’t eat enough, and/or eat enough carbs while training: T3 goes down. Reverse T3 goes up, further blocking T3. You feel like crap, and eventually your training sucks.
If you’re active, you need adequate energy and carb intakes for a healthy thyroid. Cortisol up; testosterone down. Research consistently shows that people who exercise regularly need to eat enough carbs or their testosterone will fall while their cortisol levels rise. This is a sure- fire recipe for losing muscle and gaining fat.
Incidentally, it’s also a marker for excessive training stress. In a study in Life Sciences, men who ate a high carbohydrate versus a low carbohydrate diet for 1. A few years later, another study took this research a step further. This time the subjects included men and women who exercised regularly.
And in addition to considering the effect of their diet on hormones, researchers put them through some performance tests. Once again, when the subjects ate a low carb diet, their testosterone (and other anabolic hormones) went down, while their cortisol went up. And, after following a low carb diet for just three days, only two of the six participants were able to complete the cycling test! Meanwhile, when following the higher carb diet for three days, all six participants were able to complete the test.
In 2. 01. 0, researchers reconsidered the same question — this time in relation to intense exercise. In this particular study, subjects eating the low carb diet (where 3. Meanwhile, the control group (who got 6. Thus: inadequate carbohydrate intake can decrease testosterone (which no one wants); andincrease cortisol (which no one wants); whilenegatively affecting performance (which no one wants). Carbohydrates and women’s hormones. We now know that eating too low- carb for too long can cause significant disruptions to many hormones.
This seems especially true for women, whose bodies may be more sensitive than men’s to low energy or carbohydrate availability (perhaps because of the evolutionary importance of having enough body fat and nutrients to sustain a pregnancy). While organs like our gonads or thyroid make hormones, Mission Control of our hormone production system is the central nervous system (CNS), i. This partnership is often known as the hypothalamic- pituitary- adrenal, or HPA, axis.
Thus, when women don’t eat enough calories or carbohydrate — or even when women eat enough calories but not enough carbohydrate — they face hypothalamic amenorrhea. This means disrupted hormones and stopped — or irregular — periods because of the HPA’s response to perceived starvation and stress.
In hypothalamic amenorrhea, hormone levels plummet, and the cascade is felt throughout the system. You end up with low levels of luteinizing hormone (LH), follicle- stimulating hormone (FSH), estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. In addition, we’ve already seen that not eating enough carbohydrate tends to increase cortisol levels. When cortisol rises, it signals your HPA axis to further decrease pituitary activity. Not good. Your HPA axis regulates functions such as stress response, mood, digestion, immune system, libido, metabolism and energy levels.
And your pituitary in particular is responsible for synthesizing and secreting growth hormone, thyroid stimulating hormone, prolactin, LH, FSH and other incredibly important hormones. With all this said, here’s the takeaway message: Many women try to eat low- carb, wanting to be healthier. Yet because low- carb diets can significantly disrupt hormone production, women with too- low carb intakes — especially active women — can face: a stopped or irregular menstrual cycle; lowered fertility; hypoglycemia and blood sugar swings; more body fat (especially around the middle); loss of bone density; anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues; chronic inflammation and worse chronic pain; chronic fatigue and disrupted sleep; anda host of other chronic problems. But research shows that lowering carb intake can affect your muscle mass even if protein remained constant. In other words, even if you’re guzzling protein shakes or eating steak 5 times a day, you could be losing muscle if you aren’t getting enough carbs.
A recent study from the Netherlands compared three diets: a high carb diet (8. All diets had the same total calories and the same amount of protein — 1. For starters, pretty consistent with other research. T3 levels and reverse T3 levels stayed the same with high and moderate carbohydrate intake.
T3 levels and reverse T3 went down on the low- carb diet. But here’s the interesting wrinkle. In this study, the researchers also measured urinary nitrogen excretion to see how the diets affected protein breakdown. In this case, the low carb diet increased muscle breakdown, because severely low carbs lowered insulin levels. Again, you’d assume that protein intake would determine muscle breakdown. And you might assume — based on what you’ve heard — that having higher insulin is always “bad”.
In fact, insulin is crucial for building muscle. When you get enough carbs to meet your needs, you replenish muscle glycogen and create an anabolic (building- up) hormonal environment. You get strong and buff. That’s good. Conversely, when you don’t eat enough carbohydrate, muscle glycogen is depleted and a catabolic (breaking- down) hormonal environment is created, which means more protein breakdown and less protein synthesis. This means slower muscle growth — or even muscle loss.
Putting it all together. The bottom line? Not eating enough carbohydrates can lower T3 levels, disrupt cortisol to testosterone ratios, interfere with a woman’s delicate hormone balance, contribute to muscle loss, and prevent muscle gains. Definitely not what most of us want! But wait a minute.