First foray into low carb from a cal counter
 

So I lost 50 pounds on pure calorie counting, but have since crept back up 10, and am looking to lose 15 from where I am now. I've been working with the calories, but I think my body is just DONE. I'd like to try a foray into the low carb world, see if I can get my body back to where it should be. From what I've read, I should shoot for 20 carbs/day for the first few weeks, then around 50 should be fine? Any surprise carb sources I should watch out for? Fruits I noticed already, ate a banana this morning and now I can't eat anything else for the day! Crazy. Has anyone had success shocking their body into restarting loss? Is it reasonable to lose through low carb and then maintain with calorie counting?

First, you should probably read a little about low carb dieting. I wouldn't recommend this as a "trick" to lose a few pounds with a plan to then return to another way of eating. You will more than likely regain all the weight you lost with low carbing. If you decide to low carb, you need to approach this as a way of life. If I am doing my calculations right, you are very close to a healthy body weight. You may want to check your lean body mass, %BF and see if losing more is even reasonable. Maybe your body is done because you are where you need to be.

I will make one suggestion to you. It is a plan that is both low calorie and low carb but it is not the easiest to follow. It's called Fat Flush. There aren't many Fat Flushers on this board so if you want to talk to others on this program you may have to look elsewhere but it may be what you are looking for.

Welcome! And congratulations on your fantastic weightloss success!

As to your questions - well, I'm DEFINITELY no expert, but I think that if you find low carbing successful, then you'll probably want to stick with carb-counting for your maintenance. It's really not all that tricky, actually, and since it's tied in with shifting the way your metabolism works I would suspect that going back over to calorie counting would probably not make maintenance all that easy. (And if you read Dr Atkins' book you'll be pleasantly surprised by the wide range of foods that one can cheerfully eat in the Maintenance Phase.)

Regarding the banana - yeah, fruit is surprisingly unhelpful - but that definitely doesn't mean you can't eat anything else for the rest of the day just because you've eaten something with a higher carb count than you planned! In fact, that's the very REVERSE of what you should be doing! You should eat as much as you need to feel satiated - just be sure that you're picking from stuff on the 'eat all you want' list. (Meat, fish, chicken, leafy veggies, even cheeses and butter are all guilt-free.)

Unlike with calorie counting, denying yourself food is NOT helpful. It's going to seem counterintuitive initially - you honestly don't get any extra brownie points for starving yourself - in fact, it can actually stall the weightloss.

With calorie-counting, you can lose the weight from both your stored body fat and your lean muscle mass. With carb-counting you're teaching your body to shift its fuel-of-choice so that it burns the stored fat rather than the carbs you're putting into your mouth, but you're NOT sacrificing muscle. To make this work, you need to be sure you've eaten enough dietary fat, so that your body stays in the fat-burning mode.

It's a very different approach to nutrition, and if I were you I'd do a bit of reading first to re-educate yourself. Ideally Dr Atkins' New Diet Revolution (or maybe the South Beach Diet book?), and I have to say that Gary Taubes' book Good Calories, Bad Calories is pretty mind-blowing reading.

If you haven't time/inclination to do all that, though, here's a pretty good summary of how and why this stuff actually works:

http://www.youmeworks.com/whylowcarb.html

And here's a fantastic resource for Low Carb recipes:
http://genaw.com/lowcarb/

I'm in my 13th week of Low Carbing, and I have to say that I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I don't miss bread, rice or pasta at all, and although I miss potatoes a little, I'm surprised by how easy it was to adjust to having yummy veggies instead of starchy padding like potatoes and noodles.

Check out some of the other threads, especially JerseyGyrl's stuff, and you'll hopefully get some useful insight into what it's like over on the Low Carb side of the street.

And once again - welcome! ;)

Ooops, thats not what I meant - I will CERTAINLY be eating for the rest of the day, I just meant no more carbs - if I had that kind of self control I wouldn't be where I am now, anyway. I love pasta and potatoes, I don't think it'll be possible to keep up super long term for me, but its worth a try. Thanks for responding!

Okay, cool!

Aha! See, here's the thing - it's entirely possible that actually, YOU DON'T!

Because if you'd asked me back in December, I'd have said that I'd miss my starchy foods like **** - bread, potatoes, rice, pasta and all that were definitely my favourite things, more so than veggies or meat or cheese or sweets, even. I bloody LOVED wheat-based stuff - bread, cake, pastry, etc etc.

...or I thought I did.

Turns out that it was actually more a case of me not being able to metabolise them properly - eating carbs just made me crave more carbs, and I'd always assumed that this was because, you know, I liked 'em. But after a week of cutting them out entirely, I genuinely didn't miss them!

I don't think I can adequately express what a total revelation this was for me. Because I'd always assumed that there were parts of my relationship with food that were psychological or down to tastebuds or whatever - and actually, it was more like having a particularly perverse food allergy, where you crave the thing that's messing you up. (So maybe more like a drug addiction - but, man, SO much easier to kick than cigarettes!)

Here's what work well for me in breaking one of my recents 4+ week stalls:

It's called "Carb Cycling". I am a low-carber (non-specific) and I read a book called Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. It spoke about this Carb Cycling thingy. Here's how it goes: 3 days low carb (70 & under) followed by 1 day high carb (130+) and back again. It tricks the body (on a low-calorie diet) and keeps it from going into starvation mode. *EDIT* Keep in mind that ALL of your CARBS should come from CLEAN sources if you try this. Yams, legumes, nuts, brown rice, oatmeal, etc.

Both Broadabroad & Petra also make some very good points to low-carbing. There are many ways this can be done. You can go low-carb without doing some of the extreme low-carb diets out there. There are many to chose from (Southbeach, Protein Power, The Zone, Atkins, etc.) I, personally, started with Atkins but right from the beginning I ate fruit regularly. I lost 20 lbs since 1/5/08. I guess whether the fruit will hurt you or not will depend on the timing in which you eat it. I normally have my protein shake with banana and fresh strawberry right after my cardio workout. This way the extra sugars and burned quickly and don't linger around in my system. I also treat myself to an orange or raspberries before bed. The natural sugars in fruit don't effect me at all (although making my carb level higher than some). However, my carbs are around 70-80/day and I'm losing lots of fat!

One thing to remember though...slow and steady! No quick fixes! You want to lose FAT not just WEIGHT. If you go too fast, you'll be losing muscle as well as water! You must FEED YOUR MUSCLES so frequent meals (5-6 times/day) is recommended. You must BURN THE FAT, so regular exercise (cardio and lifting) is also recommended. Hope this helps you...good luck in whatever program you try! Joyce

I transitioned from calorie counting/low fat to low-carb over the last 8 weeks or so. I decreased my carbs from 150+ per day to right around 40. It has certainly restarted my weight loss. My reason for changing? Constantly hungry on calorie counting and I because of some other issues I was exploring/experiencing, I had a hunch I was insulin resistant.

I don't miss the bread/pasta/potato/sugars either. It's amazing how the cravings have simply vanished.

I'm really a believer that any change that I make needs to be something I can sustain for life. Having said that though, there are so many low-carb options available (especially in the USA) that you may not actually have to give anything up long term.

Speaking of pasta. I eat dreamfields pasta and find that it doesn't cause me much problem. Other low carbers find it causes them to retain water. YMMV. It tastes great. I actually can't tell the difference. Obviously, eating pasta isn't a GOAL of low carbing so I see this as a "treat" and try to keep it to once a month or so. Also several decent choices in low carb bread. I buy Nature's own double fiber wheat. I think it comes out to 5 grams of carb per slice. Again, not something I eat every day but it's an option.

I think I want to try the Dreamfields. An occasional treat like that can keep DH going for a month.

SC