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.
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.
