General Diet Plans and Questions General diet questions, support for various diet plans other than those listed below.

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Old 12-05-2012, 03:06 PM   #1  
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Default Low Carb = Low Fiber???

So I've been experimenting with lowering my carb intake, but the problem has been that I'm not meeting my goal of getting 25g of fiber or more a day... So it would be much appreciated if people would be willing to share how they're meeting fiber recommendations while only consuming non-starchy and green leafy veggies, and maybe lower carb fruits such as berries... And say, staying in the 50g of carbs a day range... I just don't see how it's possible without fiber supplementing...

So if anyone would be willing to share what their day looks like... What veggies and fruits that you are eating and the fiber totals, as well carb amounts for your day that would be great...

I really want to see if I can make Lower Carb = High Fiber... without having to resort to fiber supplements...
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Old 12-05-2012, 03:47 PM   #2  
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I do low carb in the sense that I don't do a lot of breads. No sandwich buns, slices, biscuits, english muffins, muffins..I will do a low carb flat out wrap, pitas and foldits.

But mostly I just do apples, pears, dried apricots and raisins. I found the actual paleo/low carb diet made me constipated and..icky.
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Old 12-05-2012, 05:34 PM   #3  
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I do low carb in the sense that I don't do a lot of breads. No sandwich buns, slices, biscuits, english muffins, muffins..I will do a low carb flat out wrap, pitas and foldits.

But mostly I just do apples, pears, dried apricots and raisins. I found the actual paleo/low carb diet made me constipated and..icky.
Just curious... do you ever try and track how much fiber you are getting with your plan?
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Old 12-05-2012, 05:38 PM   #4  
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I do! It's usually 180, which is a little shy of the 210 a week that's recommended, but any more than that and I start to feel bloated.
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Old 12-05-2012, 05:57 PM   #5  
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I do! It's usually 180, which is a little shy of the 210 a week that's recommended, but any more than that and I start to feel bloated.
Wow... so that averages out to over 25g's a day... That's great... If you don't mind me asking do you know approximately how many carb g's a day you are taking in and hitting that number? That's where I've been having a problem...
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Old 12-05-2012, 06:09 PM   #6  
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it's around 20-30, sometimes less, sometimes a bit more depending on the size of the fruit, but usually around 20, and because of the variances, I usually average out at 180.
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Old 12-05-2012, 06:29 PM   #7  
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Paleo and low-carb diets do not have to be low-fiber, in fact they shouldn't be.

Nutritional anthropologists conservatively estimate paleo fiber intake to have been around 100g of carbohydrate for paleo humans (some argue slightly lower, and some argue much higher, around 200g of carbs, which is the average intake of wild chimpanzees, which share the most DNA and physiology with humans).

It is hard to get this much fiber in a modern diet, because humans have been selectively breeding our fruits and vegetables to be much higher in digestible carbohydrates and much lower in indigestible carbohydrates (that is fiber).

We've bred sugar into our fruits and vegetables, and bred fiber out of them. A quote from one researcher in one of the books I read was very memorable: "Modern humans hate to chew their food." And when you think about how processed foods are different from their whole food counterparts, it's true but funny. However, when you take it a step further and compare even the modern "whole food" to the natural, paleolithic version of that food - it's not just funny-true, it's also very scary-true.

Our modern fruits and vegetables are "junk food" in comparison to their paleolithic counterparts. The paleo fruits and vegetables were all very fibrous and much more sour than sweet. As an example, even 150 years ago, most apples were small, tart, and not-very sweet. If you don't like Granny Smith apples, you would have hated paleo-apples.

Choosing only fruits and vegetables that are most like their pre-agricultural counterparts would be one solution, but not always practical. For one thing, we're not used to eating the volume of food paleo people did (and modern hunger-gatherers still do).

Fiber supplementation is one strategy. Another is choosing more of the freggies that provide the most bang (fiber) for the buck (calorie), and fewer of those that are mostly sugar and very little fiber.

It takes a while to learn which are the best, moste paleo-like choices. Also, those foods take the most "getting used to," because they are so alien to the modern diet. We often don't like foods that are very tough to chew, so our natural tendency isn't to reach for those highly fibrous, tough, not-very-sweet, almost-no-calorie foods that made up a large part of our ancestors' diets.

Even in the last 150 years, modern freggie varieties have drastically increased in sugar and decreased in fiber, so it's getting harder and harder to even find truly "natural" foods. You can still forage in the wild, but even some of the wild plants found today, aren't really "wild" so much as feral (cultivated plants that are reproducing in the wild).

I supplement with a psyllium fiber, and I try to eat lower sugar, higher fiber choices, but it is a struggle. It requires a frame-of-mind change more than anything else, because the highest fiber foods aren't (to my modern palate) the most palatable ones. So I do the best I can, and supplement to make up (part) of the difference.

I'm not getting nearlly 100g in (it makes me think paleo humans must have spent a large part of their day pooping), but I'm having success at gradually increasing the amount of fiber through supplementation and choices.

If you're going to increase your fiber intake, it's also important to do it gradually and with a proportional increase in water intake. If you have IBS, you know why - and if you don't you might learn (gas, diarrhea, constipation, and abdominal pain like you wouldn't believe).
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Old 12-05-2012, 07:31 PM   #8  
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Thanks kaplods... I think my problem with this is that I'm finding it difficult to make this number of carbs that I've chosen (50g a day) translate into getting 25g's of fiber a day... So I have been supplementing... Time for me to do a little more research and see what veggies add up to 200 calories and deliver 25 grams of fiber... I really hope I can make the math work on this one
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Old 12-05-2012, 07:34 PM   #9  
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it's around 20-30, sometimes less, sometimes a bit more depending on the size of the fruit, but usually around 20, and because of the variances, I usually average out at 180.
What fruits are you eating for 20-30g's of carbs that are getting you to 25g of fiber a day?
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Old 12-05-2012, 10:15 PM   #10  
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Thanks kaplods... I think my problem with this is that I'm finding it difficult to make this number of carbs that I've chosen (50g a day) translate into getting 25g's of fiber a day... So I have been supplementing... Time for me to do a little more research and see what veggies add up to 200 calories and deliver 25 grams of fiber... I really hope I can make the math work on this one
One thing when doing the math to consider, is that many (if not most) calorie counting resources include fiber calories in the calorie count. To me, this is absolutely ridiculous, because human beings cannot digest dietary fiber. For humans, it has no calories at all. However, it does technically "have" calories, because calories are essentially a measure of "burnability." If you're a cow or a horse, hay has calories, but to a human none of those calories will be absorbed.

The fact is, we don't know how many calories of a food are absorbed by the human body, so the calorie counting resources often count them all (which in the case of fiber is stupid, because NO HUMAN can digest any of them).

Even when it comes to non-fiber calories, not all calories are burned equally. Sugar alcohols and "resistant starch" are also carbohydrates that aren't completely digested (apparently some folks can digest them more completely than others). That means the same potato might provide one person with more calories than it would another person. How many could depend on how cold the potato is (cold potatoes contain more resistant starch than hot) or it could depend on the person's genetics or digestive system (some folks have a harder time digesting some fruit sugars than other people so the same apple could provide more calories to one person than to another).


It's because of these calorie-absorption discrepancies that many people believe that calorie-counting (at least without considering these factors) is outmoded.

You can double check the calorie-counting resources' math by seeing if the calorie counts add up correctly. If you multiply the fat grams by 9, the grams by 4 and the protein grams by 4 and add them all together you will get the total calories (including those from fiber.

What you'll find (I spent months doing the math) is that the math often doesn't add up correctly. Often the fiber calories will not be subtracted (making high fiber foods seem higher in calorie than they really are. Also, sometimes even with foods with no fiber, the math is still wrong. Sometimes the calorie count will be rounded up or down. Sometimes it won't even come close (I've seen this with oatmeal. It makes me wonder if it's "legal" to use a default calorie amount for given foods, because it seems that many oatmeal brands use the "default" calorie count of 130-140 whether or not the macros add up to that or not. For one brand, I calculated that the oatmeal contained fewer than 100 calories, but listed 140 on the label. Even subtracting the fiber calories wasn't enough to make the math work.

Last edited by kaplods; 12-08-2012 at 08:50 PM.
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Old 12-08-2012, 07:57 PM   #11  
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What fruits are you eating for 20-30g's of carbs that are getting you to 25g of fiber a day?
She may mean "net carbs" which is total carbs - fiber.

Just for another point of view (I don't eat low-carb, but I do eat lowER carb - I'm eating around 45% calories from carbs right now): I average 40g of fiber per day within roughly 200g total carbs. Breakfast includes high-fiber cereal (14g fiber) and lunch usually includes a high-fiber energy/protein bar (another 14g).
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Old 12-19-2012, 07:21 PM   #12  
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Just a quick update... I did resort to supplementing with fiber... I've been using a protein powder that contains 20g of protein and 10g of fiber with 8g of carbs... I'm also doing plenty of green leafy and non starchy veggies as well for fiber...

I'm hoping that once I figure out what carb level works best for me... The fiber thing will fall into place and I can reduce or even eliminate my need for fiber supplementation...

It's still a work in progress... But then again what diet isn't?
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Old 12-20-2012, 11:29 AM   #13  
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50 grams of carbohydrate is only 200 calories

25 grams of fiber is 100 calories

If you keep your carbohydrates to vegetable with a small amount of fruit you can probably keep your carbohydrate count down but it might be hard to reach your fiber count. The good thing about consuming vegetables is they can be low calorie but extremely high in nutrients. So you can snack on them without feeling guilty.

1 cup raw Broccoli
5.8g carb, 2.3 g fiber

1 Avocado
14.9 g carb, 11.8 g fiber

1 cup Carrots
12.3 g carb, 3.6 g fiber

1/2 Blueberry
10.5 g carb, 1.75 g fiber

1 cup raw Kale
6.7 g carb, 1.3 g fiber

If these foods were the only carbohydrate containing foods you consumed in a day you would reach your goal of 50.2 grams of carbohydrates. However your fiber consumption would only reach 20.75.
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Old 03-25-2013, 08:14 PM   #14  
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Default Low Carb = Low Fiber???

I'm on the f-factor diet, which is lowish carb and high fiber. I am eating about 30-35 g fiber a day and about 35-50 net carbs. Right now I am eating A LOT of vegetables, eggplant hummus (from TJ, it is 4 g carb 2 g fiber per serving), and flackers, a gluten free flaxseed cracker that I find online (they have 8 g carb and 7 g fiber per serving).

You might want to google f-factor, and you'll find info on foods that are low carb and high fiber. Good luck!
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