Category: Low Carb

Staying Hydrated

raspberry in sparkling water

Drink Your Water

Not Drinking Enough Water?

Sometimes it feels like hard work to take in enough water to keep your body hydrated, especially if you are on a diet and trying to stay off soda and other sweet drinks. Even diet drinks are not suitable for those on a diet, because the sweeteners they contain can also cause an insulin spike, just like sugar, making you feel hungry.

Water is just too … Plain!

We all know water is best. And if you are very thirsty, it is no problem to drink cool, sweet water straight down. But other times, it may seem too boring a drink, even if you KNOW you need it to avoid constipation and to bulk out the fiber so it doesn’t clog up your intestines. Milk can be constipating for some people, who may find it best to stick to water. So here are some possible suggestions for drinking down that water in ways that are anything but boring:

Flavored Water

As with anything you put in your body, check what it says on the label first. If you are tempted to buy flavored water, look to see if it contains any artificial sweeteners, if so, avoid it: those sweeteners can produce an insulin spike, just like sugar that will make you feel hungry. Make your own flavored low calorie water:

  1. Get those little herbal tea bags and pour boiling water on, wait 5 minutes and drink;
  2. Make chilled herbal tea by adding less boiling water, waiting the 5 minutes, then adding ice cubes for a cool drink;
  3. Add the teabag to cold water and leave in the fridge overnight;
  4. Add some frozen fruit from your freezer to plain cold water and leave to sit in the fridge or carry it with you in a flask to work. Raspberries work well and you can eat them afterwards for extra fiber;
  5. Squeeze half a lemon and put the peel into a large mug or jug and pour on a pint of boiling water. Leave to cool, then add the juice from the squeezer;
  6. Add a couple of slices of fresh ginger root when pouring in the boiling water to the lemon drink in number 4;
  7. Add a stock cube to boiling water and allow to cool for a savory hot drink (not for those on low salt);
  8. Use low sodium bouillon cubes in hot water for a savory drink;
  9. black tea or black coffee.

Juices

If you are not on a diet and don’t need the fiber, then try drinking juices or smoothies. There are many tasty flavors available or you can easily make your own using a juicing machine. The problem with juices when on a diet is (a) the amount of sugar they contain, especially if you make them with fruit and (b) juicing can remove the fiber in some cases, so you either need to add the removed fiber back into your drink or add extra to your drink. Adding fiber to a juice is a good way of taking extra fiber. You can make green smoothies using vegetables if you want a healthy, low carb drink.

 

Motivate Yourself To Drink Water

  1. Make up your daily water allowance in bottles and stack them on the counter. Seeing the number of empty bottles mount is motivating.
  2. If you have one large container, put a sticky flag on the side each time you drink from it, to show how the level is dropping.
  3. Award yourself a dollar every day you drink your full water allowance. Put it in a jar to watch the coins mount up.
  4. Drink little and often. Don’t force yourself to chug down large gulps infrequently.

From Low Carb To Low Cal Diet

Low Carb Diets

I have been a big fan of low carb diets ever since I first tried the Atkins Diet probably around the year 2000. I was considerably overweight, though fit. I attended up to 4 classes of step aerobics each week and completed them no problem. So the term fat but fit or fit but fat could have been applied to me.

I was wary of starting a diet at that time because I had memories of feeling ravenously hungry in previous years and feeling that diets didn’t work for me. In addition, I had always thought that you couldn’t just remove carbohydrates from your diet, you would get ill or very unhealthy. How wrong could I have been?

A work colleague persuaded me to find out more about the Atkins Diet, so I bought the book and started to read. It totally blew my mind. I didn’t need carbohydrates, at least not all of the amounts I had been consuming? I might be allergic to carbohydrates? I could be healthy eating mainly protein and fat? It was a revelation. And that book was written by a heart doctor who had tried this diet out on his patients who ended up a lot healthier than previously!

I lost 4 dress sizes and 28 pounds on that diet and felt really healthy but eventually I slipped away from low carb into the temptations of sugar and put weight on again.

Older and Not As Easy

I am nearly 20 years older now and losing weight is not as easy these days, however, I have gone back onto a low carb diet because quite honestly I feel better eating that way. I don’t crave sweet stuff, I can leave it totally alone, not even tempted to lick a bit round the edges! I am looking at low carb cooking, though it is hard to persuade my husband to move away from the (healthy) way of eating he has enjoyed for decades. But then his weight stays the same healthy level from year to year – lucky so and so. So although I feel better on low carb, I would like to lose some weight as well, so I have decided to move onto low calorie eating, however, I am likely to keep to the low carb type of food anyway, simply because I enjoy it more and feel better on it.

Low Calorie

A calorie is the measure of the amount of energy in your food. The theory is that food containing a lot of energy (calories) requires you either to work it off or else it gets stored as fat. A low calorie diet doesn’t prescribe what kind of food you eat, just that it mustn’t contain too many calories. So you could eat a very small piece of cake or some cookies or a LOT of lettuce and celery. Each might contain the same amount of calories, so you would be on a low cal diet but one might leave you feeling ravenously hungry a short time later (the cake or cookies, if you didn’t know), while the other would take longer to digest and leave you feeling fuller for longer. If you choose your food wisely, you can eat a low calorie, healthy diet and lose weight, while not feeling like you could eat an elephant, or a gallon tub of ice cream! Some low calorie diets are used for a short time only, to get weight loss kicked off. One of these diets is the 8 week 800 calorie blood sugar diet, developed by a University and tested on diabetic patients. You can read more about that here. If you want to read the book and check up all about it you can get it here.

Which Will You Try?

Have you tried a low carb or low calorie diet? Which did you prefer?

Blood Sugar Diet 800

Measuring waist

Low Carb Lifestyle

I have tried a number of diets, all of the low carb type recently but haven’t lost anything. I had great success with a low carb diet – the Atkins diet – back 16 years ago but I am a lot older now, possibly not as active and would be considered on “older” woman, these days. I like the low carb lifestyle, which is also known as the ketogenic diet and feel it is healthy for me, as I lose the craving for sugar and sweet things, however, I have also developed a very pronounced taste for Almond butter! This is really good stuff and very healthy but the amount of carbs I need for losing weight is very low, less than 20 grams a day and with the amount of almond butter I eat, it is not possible to keep to that low level. Almond butter contains a lot of protein and good fats but also a fair amount of carbohydrate, so I can’t blame the diet but my liking for Almond butter!

I also tried the low carb high fat diet (LCHF) which is also healthy and which I enjoyed but didn’t lose anything on that either, again, I think, because of the Almond butter. But I certainly enjoyed coffee with cream in it and a number of the other recipes. While I didn’t lose weight on that diet, I didn’t put it on either.

Low Calorie Diet

The most success I had recently was with the 5:2 diet, which I tried for a month and lost 3 Kgs on – which is 6.5 pounds, fairly respectable for one month. That is an intermittent fasting diet, because you eat a very low level of calories (partial fast) on two days of the week and eat normally the other 5 days. It is also a low calorie diet because research shows that you do not tend to eat too much extra on the 5 days of the week when you eat normally to make up for the 2 days on which you partially fasted. It seemed to me that I needed to go back to a low calorie diet even though I had resisted them for over 30 years, believing they did not work for me or that I would be ravenously hungry (in total denial!).

I also heard of a book that I downloaded to my Kindle, called the 8 week blood sugar diet by Dr Michael Mosley. It sounded interesting and I read it from start to finish very quickly as it was also  very readable and interesting, with lots of personal stories from different people, which I always thinks makes a book more enjoyable. I had previously heard of research at a University in the United Kingdom that used very low calorie diets to reverse diabetes. It had put diabetics on an 800 calorie diet for 8 weeks and many of them were no longer diabetic at the end of it. At the time, I had thought “that’s interesting” but I wasn’t diabetic and was not likely to take part in any medical experiments like that. BUT Dr Mosley’s book is based on this work in Newcastle University and he shows how anyone can use this diet to lose weight quickly, whether they are diabetic or not.

Up until now, I had believed the current wisdom that losing weight quickly was not good for you and you would put it all back on quickly and more once you stopped dieting. Dr Mosley’s book showed that this was not so. He also said that millions of people in the western world are probably pre-diabetic and do not know it. I have a sister who has type II diabetes and our grandmother was also diabetic, so this is something that concerns me, however, the book is also for those would would like to lose weight quickly. I had found the 5:2 diet a little hard to stick to, remembering to fast on certain days, but I had never felt totally ravenous, so I thought I might be able to try to 800 calorie diet for a couple of days and see how I liked it, maybe even run it as a 5:2.

Dr Mosley had mentioned that the original participants in the 800 calorie 8 week trial had been placed on a liquid diet, using shakes, so that their diet could be fully monitored but that some others had tried it with their normal diet, reduced to 800 calories and found great success. This was a no-brainer for me because I keep a bag of protein shake in the house! I happen to like it and so does my son and also my daughter and we all like it mixed with almond butter as a quick dessert too. One scoop of protein powder in 500 ml of water provides 100 calories (it uses sweeteners, not sugar). That meant I could have two protein shakes during the day and eat a small meal, with no potatoes at night and probably keep within 800 calories. That was something I was willing to try for a day or even two days. I started on 5 December, with two protein shakes during the day and an evening meal of 4 ounces of meat and green beans. I don’t eat first thing in the morning anyway, because I go for a walk with my husband most days and my internal system wouldn’t let me make it right round if I ate or drank anything, so my normal breakfast time is 11.00am or so. At 11.00am on 6 December, I wasn’t ravenous, so I decided to see whether I could do it another day, taking 2 protein shakes, one at 11 and one at about 2pm, then a main meal at 5pm. And the same happened the next day, I have been able to keep on this diet.

I have done this faithfully every day now for over 1 week. I didn’t measure my weight at the start because I just wanted to get going on it and I don’t have scales in the house. I am assuming I weighed 75 Kg because that was the best weight I have been able to achieve at any time in the past couple of years and I had not dipped below that at any time I weighed my self in the past year. Last night, I weighed 72.6 Kgs! That’s 2.4 Kgs in one week. What I have been measuring is my abdomen size (around the belly button). That has not moved during the week. I am assuming that the diet is removing the internal fat in my liver first. This is the dangerous stuff.

How do I feel after a week on 800 calories or less each day?

I feel a little cold (losing my insulation) but not too tired. I had expected to feel weak but I don’t. I am still able (in my late 60s) to walk a 3.5 mile course that climbs a hill to 180 feet with no noticeable slowing down. I also have found that when in bed, I am now more comfortable lying on my side. Previously, I had found that my chest cavity seemed to be being compressed and I was uncomfortable. That suggests I may have lost some internal fat. 🙂 I also feel that my thighs have more room inside my trousers!

How Did I Manage When Dinner Was Not Suitable?

Only on one day did I feel I could not eat any of the dinner (fish fingers and chips), so I had 3 hard boiled eggs and a spoonful of mayonnaise. That filled me up. Most days I take a bigger portion of a green vegetable, rather than a starchy vegetable.

How Do I Look To Others?

Others have commented that I have lost weight around my face. I notice that myself. I am happy with that. 🙂

Am I getting All My Nutrients?

I believe so. I don’t eat processed food. Our main meal is cooked from scratch each day and I eat vegetables, together with a protein source. I occasionally take vitamins.