What the Low Carb Diet is All About ?

We're assuming here that you're new to the low carb diet.  Doubtless you have loads of questions about how low carb diet plans work, and you are seeing lots of different - but similar - low carb diet plans online and in books.  You are wondering what the advantages and pitfalls might be, and precisely - if you can't eat bread, potatoes, rice, grains, etc - what exactly you can eat on a day to day, hour to hour basis?

You may be of the belief that low carbing, popularized by Dr Atkins in the late 20th Century, is a faddy, short-term thing.  This is propaganda meant to put you off low carb diets, which are quite the reverse.  Before man was able to mass-produce carbohydrate-stuffed foods such as bread and pasta, man had evolved to eat meat, berries, nuts and a few seeds.  In evolutionary terms, the excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates such as white flour and sugar is definitely the new kid on the block.

Most diets claim to be lifestyle changes, and recommend that you should stick to a semi-starvation ration for the rest of your life.  Cynically, the originators of these diets know that is not possible and you will "fall off the wagon" sooner or later, and go back to eating cake and sweets and pizza.  Thing is with low carb, it really is a diet for life.  But that doesn't mean misery and deprivation - once you have kicked your addiction to high-carb foods and learned to enjoy healthy fats and proteins, you will not have to count calories, starve yourself, or live on tasteless, low-fat fare ever again.

For yes - a low carb diet should be a relatively high-fat one, and fat causes us to feel full and satisfied and puts the taste back into foods.  The low-fat dieting lobby has convinced us for years to live on this dry, tasteless fodder, yet once pure fats like butter, extra virgin olive oil, virgin coconut oil, meat fats and cream are reintroduced to our diet, we enter a whole new world of flavor and satisfaction from food.

We have been told, at school and beyond, that carbohydrates are for energy, and erroneously we believe that we will have no energy if we cut the carbs.  In fact, on a low carb diet, we burn fat for energy, and this is like stoking a furnace.  By consuming dietary fat in the absence of excessive carbs, we turn off the insulin response which caused us to store body fat.  We turn our metabolisms around to burning fat instead of glycogen for energy, so our bodies turn to body fat as well as the fat we have eaten, burning it away for fuel instead of storing it and locking it into fat cells.

It is only dietary carbohydrate, sugar and especially starch, which provokes insulin to be produced by the pancreas.  It is only insulin which enables sugars and starches to be converted to body fat and stored by the body.  Therefore on low carb diet plans it is not possible to store any more body fat, and over time body fat should be burnt for energy.  This is the basic premise upon which the low carb diet is built.

Defend Your Low Carb Diet Plan

If you are about to embark upon a low carb diet plan, you need to really read up on it and educate yourself, not only so that you know what to eat and not to eat, that's the obvious stuff (once you know it).  Also you need to bone up because you will encounter so much prejudice from other people, including many members of the medical profession, that you are best forewarned and forearmed for this.  It is quite a radical step to go on a low carb diet plan, especially as lobbies from the mass food producers have tried to discredit this way of eating as dangerous and faddy.

The contentious part is that low carb should mean relatively high fat, and fat, particularly saturated fat, has been given such a bad press in the last forty years that it is anathema to most people to eat it.  However, on a low carb diet plan, your body needs to burn something for energy in the absence of carbs.  And this is fat.  If you eat a reasonable amount of fat, you will burn this for energy - along with taking fat from your own fat cells as well and burning that.  This is how the low carb diet plan works to create low carb weight loss - you become a fat-burning machine.  This has to go on for life though, recidivism means that you would re-introduce carbs, replenish your fat stores, and put the weight back on again like all low-fat semi-starvation dieters do.

So, if you are going to share your low carb diet plan with others, be prepared for some opposition.  You need to learn about the insulin response, so that you can explain this to your detractors.  The hormone insulin is produced by the pancreas in response to starch and sugar consumption.  It deals with the rush in blood glucose caused by eating these foods, by converting some to glycogen to be used as a relatively instant source of energy by the cells of the body.  It then takes the rest of the blood sugar and stores it away - in fact, locks it away, in your fat cells, particularly around the belly area.  Beer bellies are caused not by alcohol but by sugars and starches. 

If you don't eat many carbs, as on a low carb diet plan, you will not store body fat, because without carbs there is no surge in blood glucose so insulin need not be produced.  It is only insulin which can store fat.

Of course when you explain this to many of your friends and family, you will find that their eyes glaze over:  it's so much easier to believe the janet and john version of metabolism which is so simplistic it's ridiculous: eat fat, get fat.  The human body is much more complicated than that, metabolism is a complex subject, but you may not be too surprised how many people just don't want to hear it.  It's too difficult for them, they have been so indoctrinated by the fat bad, carbs good lobby they can't turn around their thinking and drop the scales from their eyes.  Remember that is their loss not yours: your loss will be fat, not muscle wastage or water, and if you stick to that low carb diet plan you will stay slim and healthy for longer.