I've been on a Low Carb diet for awhile, but I've faltered and eaten too many carbs or had lots of cheese / diet soda. Last Tuesday (6 days ago), I quit eating cheese and diet soda. I've doubled down on not having carbs. In the past 6 days, I have lost 4 pounds. I'm sure some of that is water weight, but it's still a nice amount to lose. My clothes are fitting looser, so I have to assume I've lost more than 4 pounds of fat and actually gained some muscle.

Another change I've noticed is that I can't stay up much past 11:00 PM (I have had a very hard time going to sleep on time in the past) and I'm up and full of energy around 7:30 - 8:00 AM.

For breakfast, I usually have sausage or bacon and fried eggs. Sometimes I will mix things up and have green beans or okra with my breakfast meat. Other days, I'll eat less meat and eggs and throw in a half an avocado.

Tonight, I'm going to start doing resistance training, using the "Slow Burn" method of exercise.

I'll probably update this thread every week or so with my progress.

Lowering carbs works for me too, but be careful with the diet stuff. It's usually worse for you than just having a sugar laden soda once in awhile. And you may want to add some vitamins into your routine as well since your low carb diet may be deficient in some important ones...Vitamin C and B-complex in particular, but also Chromium Picolinate and Fish, Flax and Borage oil capsules may be helpful as well.

The other thing that may help which goes against logical thinking is that the more often you eat, the more weight you will lose! It's much better to have about 5 small meals a day than to eat 2-3 large ones. This keeps your metabolism running at a high rate throughout the day.

Our bodies need fats along with the proteins and some carbs, but the secret is to have a balance of them. We burn simple carbs for energy first. If we don't introduce many of them into our diet, we start burning fat, therefore any fat we take in gets discarded not stored.

Exercise will definitely help too as the pounds will fall off even faster. I too am trying to lighten the load on the scale these days so I took up jogging yesterday.

Good luck in your endeavor!

Oh, absolutely about the "diet" foods. I quit losing weight last year and lost heart, so I started gaining weight back. I was down by 52 pounds, but packed back on 18 pounds. Now I'm back down to 40 pounds lost and the weight is just dropping off. I now realize that my weight loss stalled due to cheese and diet soda (which can spike your blood sugar!).

I take a multivitamin, Krill Oil, Magnesium Malate and BCAA daily. I also take Betaine HCL and Acidophilius pearls to assist with digestion. I occasionally add in COQ10 and R-ALA just to mix things up and keep my body guessing.

One thing I've recently learned is that the actual calories burned from aerobic exercise is so miniscule, it's not worth it. It's better to simply do resistance training, so that you build muscles and increase your BMR, which amounts to around 60% of your calorie useable for a day. So I got rid of my exercise bike and bought some weights.

Sounds like you found what works for you. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK.

Thanks.

I don't believe the "the diet that works for one person won't work for another" line of reasoning. We have have basically the same genes and same evolutionary history. Low Carb, properly and consistently applied, will work for anyone.

Just watch your fat and oil consumption too. Some low carb diets
put so much of that garbage in your bloodstream it is like a
coronary (without the bun).

The best bet may still be a balanced low carb, low cal, low fat diet.
I've found over the years that I tend to go more vegetarian with
complex carbs and low calories and need less food. I still enjoy some
meat, cheese, eggs etc. but in smaller quantities and less frequently
and I am almost at competition weight.

Nah, natural fats are good for you. I don't eat oils other than coconut and olive oil. If you can't squeeze the source and get oil out of it, I don't eat it. Like corn oil and canola oil and all the vegetable oils, they are made in laboratory using natural and unnatural parts. That's why they are called "franken fats".

I don't limit my calories or fat and I only had a problem losing weight when I started drinking diet soda. When you limit your calories, you risk your body going into starvation mode. When you don't eat enough fat, you raise your blood sugar and you run the risk of your liver making the heart attack linked pattern B LDL.

I eat until I'm full and I don't get hungry for 5-6 hours. I ate breakfast at 9:30 AM and I'm still not hungry at 2:17 PM.

Well I'm not saying to starve and I'm not saying that one can't
eat until full. But what I am saying is that Atkins and South
Beach diets which advocate eat as much fat and protein as you like
are not healthy diets for the long term for a variety of reasons
so if one goes on one of these types of diets it is a good idea
to make some effort to get the right vitamins and not to over do
it in the fat/cholesterol dept.

See:

http://www.livestrong.com/article/365561-is-the-atkins-diet-unhealthy/

and references.

Oh what a load of junk science. Nothing against you, it's just amazing to me that doctors are still for whole grains and against saturated fats, despite all of the evidence being that whole grains are bad for you and saturated fats are good.

I'm not doing Atkins or South Beach, I'm doing a paleo diet, which is similar to what our ancestors ate. It's how our bodies are designed to eat. The very idea that we started farming grain a couple thousand years ago and so we should get most of our calories from grains is ridiculous. The same people will tell you that humans have existed, largely unchanged for 250k years will tell you we should all eat a diet that has been around for 9k years. We aren't adapted to that diet and it's not healthy.

As for the cancer stuff, oh my God they are out of touch! There are mountains of evidence that low carb diets kill cancer. The reason is that cancer can only live off of glucose and most of our body can live off of ketones. So being on a ketogenic (low carb) diet, starves cancer.

OK - Well I was just pointing out what the "conventional medical
community" is saying.

I've been taking the Mayo ClinicDASH type of approach to staying healthy and it has been working for me.



http://health.usnews.com/best-diet/mayo-clinic-diet

A couple years ago before I fell entirely off the wagon in terms of caring for my health and weight...

After initial fast results, I was having moderate success with low carb and then saw a nutritionist. She made me add in more carbs...a measured serving at each meal (NO WHITE STUFF) and my metabolism jump started, I slept better, and my workout & overall energy was much improved. Fat burns in a fire of carbohydrate, but it's not the junk or starch that most people equate with carbs. It can even be fruit, although that nutritionist recommended fruit as my mid morning/afternoon snack WITH A PROTEIN and not at meals. My current trainer also says to never have a carb without a protein.

The real trick is to find a lifestyle choice you can live with for LIFE. I'm sad to have backslid, but I'm not dead yet and can recover and hopefully be wiser now.

Total weight loss: 44 pounds.

No starvation. No salads. No "diet" food. I'll have a late breakfast of sausage and fried eggs and the last of the pot roast for lunch. Dinner is still up in the air.

If you are doing a low carb diet, it's important to keep your electrolytes up. To do this, I eat lots of Morton's Lite Salt. It's half sodium and half potassium and iodized. I also drink about a gallon of water a day from my Brita pitcher. There are chemicals in tap water (to purify or fortify it) that can attach to the iodine receptors in the thyroid, preventing your thyroid from behaving correctly. You can speed up your weight loss a bit by just making sure you drink enough clean water and eat enough iodized salt. It's interesting that people are told to cut back on their salt when they diet, as table salt is the best source of iodine in the average American's diet. If you up your water intake and lower your salt intake, you are going to have headaches, leg pains and generally feel unwell.

Now I've stopped losing weight, but my body fat percentage continues to drop, which means I'm developing muscle and losing fat at the same rate.

One of those little hand held fat percentage Doohickeys helps out a lot to keep you motivated.

Every morning I wake up and weigh myself and I'm the same weight. Then I check my handy dandy body fat monitor and see that a few more 10ths of a percent of my body fat has been turned into muscle. I'm in the weight loss stage called "Reconfiguration", when my body is burning fat and gaining muscle at almost the same rate, so the scale tells me the same weight every morning. Without a body fat monitor, I would be at risk of losing heart and giving up.

A body fat monitor is a excellent idea on ce you're reached that stage. Keep Jorge good work Sipder

How can it be at the same rate when fat and muscle don't weigh the same?....Oh excuse the question...you said ALMOST the same rate

And congrats to you! ....Reconfiguration is tuff, but sooooo worth the effort...Metabolic rate is a major contributing factor for weight control.....

Fat cannot literally be turned into muscle. When you are fat, your muscles are marbled like good beef. You have fat tissue inside the muscle itself. During the reconfiguration process, your body starts replacing some of that fat inside your muscles with more muscle tissue. Because the muscle building process is slower than the fat burning process, your overall weight will stay the same or decrease during reconfiguration, but very rarely will it go up.

Horribly untrue. Low fat is bad. Your body needs fat. Dietary fat and body fat are not the same thing. Stick to healthy fats which are unsaturated. Lowcarb diets are OK in the short run but ultimately don't work as people can't stick to them. Spider what is your workout routine like? I only watch what I eat on weekdays. I eat what I want on weekends. I eat carbs all the time. I lost 6 pounds in 4 weeks with minimal cardio. I do martial arts 2 times a week but missed all but 2 days last month. I lift 3 times a week. If you don't have a good lifting routine you will lose muscle.

They do weigh the same. 1 pound is 1 pound whether it's feathers or lead. Muscle just takes up less space as it is more dense.