Congrats on your weight loss so far!

Stick with the basics and don't get too hung up from all the "bro-advice" at the gym.

Personally, I would try to limit it to two servings of fruit (don't worry about tomatoes though!), and eat plenty of veggies with your protein as they'll keep you feeling full, are packed full of nutrients and also keep your blood alkaline when eating protein.

But again, make small changes and keep adjusting until you find what's working for you!

Hi Carter, thanks for your reply. My remarks about being told different things wasn't about yourself, you gave me some really good advice it was the stupid people at the gym.

Thanks for all of your advice. Well today is a new day and I'm going to give it a go to limit my carbs (rice or potato) to dinner time only. Im going to cut out the toast and focus more on getting more protein. If I get hungry I will snack on something with more protein and if I want some peanut butter I will have that with an apple instead of a piece of toast. I guess you are all right, I will just try and have to tweak it.

Carbs dont leave me bloated and only leave me tired if I eat alot ( like i did before i was doing the healthy eating)

Im going food shopping today so I will get tweaking and thanks everyone for all your great advice

what works FOR ME is to limit wheat and sugar....i have a bad tendency to go off the binge end when i tell myself i can NEVER have sugar, NEVER have wheat, or grains, or carbs...again...way too restrictive...i count calories, i work out hard, and i limit myself to one, maybe two, small servings of wheat daily and a VERY small serving of sugar if the opportunity arises...for example, i dont go out searching for sugar to eat but if i'm around something like the birthday cake last week, i know that i can allow myself a tiny serving

i eat fruits and vegetables...usually 1-2 pieces of fruit per day and my lunch is almost entirely vegetables with a little meat and sauce of choice...i make sure i get enough protein by eating moderate servings of meat and also making my own protein shakes....i try very hard to keep a routine to my days because that helps me with my eating habits as well

eating like that for ME helps keep cravings down, energy stable, no blood sugar crashes etc...

Carbs have their time and place. Too much sugar makes most people feel funny and eventually crash.

I wouldn't say fruit is inherently healthier than chicken or the other way around. But both fruit and chicken are probably "healthier" than bread. HOWEVER if you like bread and function well, lose weight and have energy to live your life while eating bread, eat the damn bread.

I find it helpful to eat my carbs, if I do eat any, in the morning. This way I have the whole day to burn them off. It is hard not to eat carbs in the evening though. Thats when the restaurants bring out bread baskets and cheeseburgers look delicious. But eating low carb seems to be the only thing that works really well for me.

Perhaps, though I can't say it's ever happened to me or anyone in my immediate circle. As an FYI, I just interviewed an endocrinologist today (I'm writing an article about a new class of diabetes meds), and he said that if you have a healthy pancreas and are not overweight, carbs -- even a lot of them -- are not bad for you. According to him, the pancreas was designed to handle carbs, just as the lungs were designed to transfer oxygen to the bloodstream and the heart to transport that oxygen throughout the body. If healthy, these organs don't need a rest.

F.

Not to mention that all of this bro science is GEARED TOWARD MEN. In fact a lot of these diet plans are designed for men and people assume: "well we're human, so it must be the same for women." Nope. We have different needs and a lot of diet plans and nutritional advice ignore that completely. I find it very annoying that this happens. I'm trying to add muscle weight right now and resources for women are few and far between. Most of the time I find stuff geared toward men with a sentence tacked on that says: "Oh do the same if you're a chick!" ARGH

I've been doing a bit of research and while I'm not going to jump into the paleo diet, the Paleo for Women site has an interesting take on the low carb craze and how it may not be good for women: http://www.paleoforwomen.com/carbohy...ty-and-health/

It's obviously not going to be true for everyone, but I find that I function best in that 100-200g range that the above site mentions. I don't actively track my carbs, but whenever I do I end up around 100-150 a day. I'm getting closer to 200 now just because I'm eating more calories in general.

Lifting advice? Sure, I'll take it from a dude with lots of muscles—he obviously knows how to do that. I'll completely ignore him on nutrition though because he isn't a chick.

lol! best advice i've ever seen. wish someone woulda told me that when i started out. sheesh <3

Hmmm? I'll admit I've very curious here. Aside from iron and perhaps protein I'm really not sure where men and women have different nutritional needs?

Bro-logic and Bro-science are about as bad as the oft-repeated, trite advice in women's magazines regarding diet and fitness - except with more testosterone. And usually about as correct.

There is very specific and solid science that supports dietary forms dedicated to keeping baseline insulin normal and deviations of insulin levels as tight as possible. This isn't fiction and it isn't conventional wisdom diet advice, but the plain metabolic facts regarding the function of insulin in fat storage aren't contested by anyone with even a basic understanding of hormones and physiology. A diet that focuses on minimizing insulin spikes (usually a slow digesting diet/low glycemic load/high fat/moderate to low carb/moderate to low protein) is very beneficial for folks showing insulin resistance (that's most of us who get morbidly obese, to where we re not only maxing out our current fat storage capacity, we have actually grown an excess of new lipocytes to store MORE). This is where some of the low carb zealotry comes in - it is magnificently effective at shortcircuiting our fat storage issues and then circumventing issues of hormonally dictated cravings/hunger through the mechanism of ketosis. For most obese and formerly obese dieters, to slim down beyond a certain point requires a real awareness of how different foods impact our bodies and monitoring or restricting the quantity of those that are not neutral or beneficial to our metabolisms as they stand.

One of the reasons that bro-science has co-opted generally low or moderate carb eating is that for those looking to reduce their body fat to fitness-model levels while sparing as much lean mass as possible, careful manipulation of energy intake (quantities, types, timing) can indeed affect their body composition in noticeable ways. An excellent site that speaks about this at length, in a studious and well-referenced manner, is Suppversity: http://suppversity.blogspot.com/

Not every dieter, especially those not fighting their biology regarding nutrient utilization and fat storage, needs to be careful of exacerbating their cortisol and insulin responses. They can eat a dietary composition that is broad and full of red and yellow light allergenic foods, if they desire, and suffer no obvious ill effect. But while the ideal human diet is a misnomer - too much variation across our species to make anything more than broad generalizations - there are basic nutritional and medical realities that may factor in to how much we eat and what types of food we indulge in. What works for one person may not work for another, but a mostly unrefined diet of low glycemic foods is about as solid of a method to work from and adjust as there is, you really can't beat it for nutritional bang for the buck while causing minimal problems for the biggest swaths of population. Your personal best may vary, but it is as good a place to start as any. For this, I cannot recommend The Perfect Health Diet enough. It explains in great detail the thresholds of benefit vs. detriment for various nutrients and gives a ton of information to work off of for thoughtfully tweaking your own diet to match your needs: http://perfecthealthdiet.com/the-diet/

This is a round about way of saying that the bro's aren't necessarily wrong and there IS a great deal of research to back up the health benefits of a diet low in glycemically reactive foods (low carb is one easy method for doing this, but many more fall into this category and their specifics vary). If you're one of those people who can reach your goal weight, have no cravings, and experience no months-long stalls in your diet while eating nutritionally-weak or inflammatory foods, that's really awesome! But many of us cannot, and therefore have to start monkeying around with our intake and carefully noting the effects. About the best diet advice I can give is to start from a sound dietary platform FIRST and then add back in foods you enjoy that might be less healthy for you and see how/if you react. It works much better than the other way around

I've always thought that men in general needed more calories to maintain weight then women. Maybe it's just that most men are larger than women and therefore need more calories. Maybe I'm just flat out wrong!

I would also think that pregnant women definitely have different nutritional needs than men

I'd actually be curious to know if the calorie thing is really true.

I also read that intermittent fasting can affect men and women differently as it can be more stressful to the female body. (See this post and this post).

Honestly though it probably does come back to your personal body and paying attention to your body cues. If your body isn't responding well to something after the intial shock has worn off (e.g. feeling depressed, no periods, lethargy), then change it. My elder sister tried to go very low carbs and found herself depressed even after 2 weeks so added some back in while I've had no problem with depression with cutting carbs except for once a week.

I'm not trying to open up a can of worms here. I just want to point out that women have different needs than men.

It's not a huge difference, but women do have different needs than men.

Caloric needs, of course, are different between men and women (sometimes just in terms of size, sometimes not) but because of our hormones and how they regulate our bodies, a low carb diet or diet high in soy can mess with that. This is individual of course, but it can mean the temporary loss of fertility for a woman. IF can also effect women differently than men (in that a woman might stop getting her period depending on how she fasts)

There are a number of women who go Paleo or Primal and find that they stop having their periods. They are confused because sometimes they feel the best they ever have, but are not getting their periods. Even if they're not planning on having children, it's a pretty big problem. While we complain out the wazoo about our cycles, they're pretty important for our health. It could be a combination of different things (too low carb, too little fat, too much soy, etc.), but it's something I rarely see addressed outside of women-specific sites.

We hear CARBS ARE BAD all the time, when in reality some women might need them.

Also, if a woman was overweight when she began menstruating, it's entirely possible she'll have to choose a higher weight than another woman. She can still lose weight, but her body may require a bit more extra fat than a woman who was never overweight. She may have to stay at around 24% body fat rather than trying to shoot for a low enough body fat to get a six pack, for example. This is certainly something men don't have to worry about

For women, most advise us to lose weight by cutting calories and doing lots of cardio (I certainly know you're not one of them! yay weights!). We see low carb diets or other diets without discussion on how they can change around our hormones, etc. Women's bodies are very complicated and a slight change can really cause havoc and impact our health.

Most of this comes from me getting annoyed about not finding much information on women-specific weight training and muscle building advice. Even my favorite sites write articles that are clearly written with men in mind and then try to appeal to women as well by adding two sentences at the end. I don't mind if a whole article is written for a man, but don't make a poor attempt to cater to women by tacking us on as an afterthought The principle is the same of course (eat at a surplus to gain muscle, etc.) but I'm sure if a woman tries to gain a couple pounds of muscle a month that it's just not going to work the way it would for a man.

Oh yes, nursing and pregnant woman definitely have different needs.

The calorie thing is certainly true, sometimes because of size and sometimes not. Men just have more muscle mass than we do and build it much easier than we do.

I'm really referring to low carb diets. I've been exploring how they specifically affect women ever since failing epically at going below 50g per day for an extended period of time—not because I couldn't stick to it, but because my body was reacting terribly to it.

We also have different needs, in general, because our bodies are set up to have children. We hate our periods but they are pretty important to our health.

Oh yes, it's entirely individual. Some women will do fine cutting carbs and others will do fine with IF. I think it's worth it to explore how these diets affect women though, because for a lot of women it can be upsetting when something doesn't "work" that seemingly works for everyone else. It would be comforting for them to know that certain diets may not be ideal for women and they should try something else.

We're told to be a certain "ideal" and when we have trouble meeting that ideal it can be very upsetting for a woman. So not only are the nutritional needs of women different, the mental needs are as well.

The hormones that affect our cycles can cause issues with how we process carbs. Some women have problems like PCOS that cause insulin resistance. Our bodies have to prepare for blood loss and require extra energy in general during those times. Look at pregnancy and gestational diabetes, women become diabetic just b/c of the added hormones which can be increased at least 30x more than average. It's very odd being a woman, all month is it 3 little hormones fluctuating, affecting everything. All of this is if you aren't currently trying to prevent pregnancy with hormonal birth control which can also play into insulin resistance or even in my case, occasionally hypoglycemia.

If you're a guy, thank the heavens!

Oh we can absolutely recover. I'm talking about rather extreme situations like eating a whole pint of ice cream in one sitting, where you get a "sugar high."