[Esofia]

You should be aware that the fashion for low-carb eating is still very controversial, and is often taken to very unhealthy extremes. There is oodles of research out there on the health benefits of whole grains, including for weight control, and conflating processed sugars with whole grains is not wise at all. Carbohydrates are an essential part of the human diet. As with all parts of a healthy diet, there is an upper limit as to what is healthy, and you may find this page useful in that respect. Remember that quality is not the same as quantity, and there are similar good fats and bad fats, as well as variation in the quality of proteins (though the latter tends to be more about how you combine proteins than needing to avoid any particular type).

Bribarian, the level of mood swings and energy problems you describe sound like, well, a problem for you. Calorie suggestions aren't much use without knowing your height, weight, and approximate activity levels. Could you tell us those, please? And give us some idea of what you eat on a typical day? It sounds to me like you could be getting wildly fluctuating blood sugar, although that's just a guess.

[carter]

Originally Posted by Bribarian

But I have a lot of mood swings. I go from energetic to lethargic quite fast.

Were you like this before your diet too? Eating healthier for a couple of weeks, unfortunately, is not a magic fix for having mood swings.

If you weren't like this before, it may just be that you are a little hungry as your body gets used to eating less food. Give it some time to adjust. Try eating more vegetables too (I don't know what your diet looks like) so you can eat larger quantities of food for the same calories.

Is that normal? I would have thought I would have more energy cause that's what some say, maybe I was misinformed.

In my opinion, it's one of the common myths of dieting. My own experience is that it took a long, long, LONG time for me to actually start to feel different. I had to lose 40 or 50 pounds - that took me almost a year - before I really felt more energetic at all during the day. At that point, I don't believe it was because of a magic nutrient formula - it was because I was hauling around 40 or 50 fewer pounds!

One more thing about being energized - people say exercise is supposed to energize you, and I didn't quite find that either. When I first started exercising in earnest, it tired me the **** out! Even later when I adjusted to it, it might have given me more energy during the day (though again, that might have just been being less fat) - but it made me more tired in the evening. This was good, as it helped to regularize my sleep pattern, but it does just highlight that these common pablums of "diet and exercise give you more energy!" are a little overly simplistic and tend to set up unrealistic expectations.