How to Count Carbs on the Atkins Diet

by | Apr 4, 2013 | Carbs, Fat Loss, Low carb | 0 comments

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Managing carbohydrate intake is the heart of the Atkins diet plan. In addition to computing your daily carbohydrate intake, you will gradually reintroduce carbohydrates back into your diet in a specific sequence called the carbohydrate ladder.

Steps

Compute Net Carbs
The Atkins diet focuses on net carbs, which is the quantity of carbohydrate in a food less the amount of dietary fiber and sugar alcohols.

  1. Find the number of total carbohydrates in a food on the food’s nutrition label. Total carbohydrates are found in the top section of the label after the product’s sodium content.
  2. Find the quantity of dietary fiber in the food. Dietary fiber is usually located as a subheading beneath the total carbohydrate count.
  3. Subtract the amount of dietary fiber from the amount of total carbohydrates. If the product contains 20 grams of total carbohydrates and 3 grams of dietary fiber, then the product contains 17 net carbs.
  4. Look for sugar alcohols. Because sugar alcohols are not easily absorbed by the body, they do not count against your net carb total. If the food label contains a listing for sugar alcohol quantity, then you can subtract sugar alcohol content from your total carbohydrate count in addition to subtracting dietary fiber.
  5. Use a carbohydrate-counting guide. Many guides for foods that contain both their carbohydrate and dietary fiber counts are available in bookstores or online. These are especially helpful for foods that do not come with nutrition labels.

Count Carbohydrates During the Induction Phase
In the Induction phase, you should consume no more than 20 net carbs per day. In subsequent phases, you can consume more as long as they don’t interfere with your weight loss.

  1. Start by consuming 12 to 15 grams of net carbs through eating foundation vegetables. Foundation vegetables include leafy greens, broccoli, cauliflower and asparagus.
  2. Eat high-fat, low-carb dairy products during Induction for your remaining carbs. Examples include hard cheeses, cream and sour cream.

Count Carbohydrates During the Ongoing Weight Loss (OWL) Phase
Increase your carb intake gradually during OWL (Ongoing Weight Loss). Every week, add 5 grams of net carbs to your diet. As long as you continue to lose weight, you can continue gradually adding more carbohydrates to your diet. If weight loss stalls, you can gradually cut back on your carbohydrates until you start to lose weight again.

  1. Start eating nuts and seeds again. Avoid chestnuts, which contain too many net carbs.
  2. Add in some fruit the next week. You can eat berries, cherries and melon. Avoid watermelon, however, because it will raise your blood sugar rapidly.
  3. Vary your dairy. After you incorporate fruit, you can add in whole milk yogurt and fresh cheeses, including ricotta and cottage cheese.
  4. Add legumes next. These include chickpeas, lentils, peanuts and beans.
  5. Drink some tomato or vegetable juice cocktails after you add in legumes. Continue to avoid fruit juices with the exception of lemon and lime juice.

Count Carbohydrates During Pre-Maintenance and Maintenance
Add 10 grams of net carbs each week during Pre-Maintenance and Maintenance. Your weight loss should slow to a crawl during this period because you are working to find your Atkins Carbohydrate Equilibrium, or ACE. Your ACE is the number of net carbs you can consume each day without gaining weight.

  1. Eat a greater variety of fruit. Enjoy apples, citrus fruits and other fruits that are lower in sugar but high in fiber. Be wary of fruits high in sugar such as banana, pineapple and watermelon.
  2. Start eating high-carb vegetables again. You can add winter squash, peas and carrots back to your diet. Avoid regular potatoes.
  3. Add whole grains after you add high-carb vegetables. Focus on whole grains and continue to avoid high-carb refined grains such as white bread and white rice.

Tips

  • In addition to watching your weight, pay attention to your cravings. If you start to crave more carbohydrate after adding additional net carbs to your diet, then you are probably eating too many carbs.
  • Throughout each phase of Atkins, make sure to consume 12 to 15 grams of carbohydrates each day by eating foundation vegetables.

Warnings

  • Don’t allow yourself to gain more than 5 pounds without addressing your carbohydrate intake. Lower your daily carb intake by 10 to 20 grams until your excess weight retreats.

Things You’ll Need

  • Carbohydrate counting guide

 

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Count Carbs on the Atkins Diet. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Carbs are key

by | Apr 2, 2013 | Carbs, Diabetes, Diet, Low carb, Sugars | 0 comments

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The world needs more people like Peggy Newman. She’s a Family Nurse practitioner at Southeastern Medical Clinic in White Lake and she takes the time and trouble to teach people about exactly what carbohydrates are.

Her main audience is people who have diabetes but obviously that would also apply to people who are wanting to follow a low carbohydrate diet in order to deal with the diabetes and other health problems such as being overweight.

 It’s a matter of fact little story this but frankly it’s quite touching but someone would give up their time and take the trouble to help show other people how to live better and healthier lives.

Three cheers for Peggy! Maybe this story will touch your heart as well…. The link is below.

Link to the full article

Early Consumption of Carbs Heightens Obesity Risk

by | Mar 29, 2013 | Carbs, Diabetes, Metabolism, Obesity, Sugars, Weight gain | 0 comments

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Something that many people aren’t aware of is that many modern baby foods and juices have a high carbohydrate content; many of those carbs are just simple sugars. It would seem that maxim that breast is best, holds true particularly according to a study by Mulchand Patel out of the University of Buffalo.

More than 20 years, Dr. Patel and his University of Buffalo colleagues have looked at the effect of increased intake of carbohydrate-enriched calories to young and newborn children and how an early introduction to these carbohydrate-enriched foods can almost program infants to continue to overeat as they grow up.

Most of his clinical studies have been based using rats most of the time. There is a clear correlation between the studies done in the lab and the findings out in the real world. Nonetheless it does seem to give credence to the understanding that children who get fat as babies and infants very rarely get thin in adult life.

Link to the article

Gut Bacteria & Obesity – A Hidden Connection?

by | Jan 23, 2013 | Carbs, Obesity | 0 comments

Here is another of my comments on a post at Jimmy Moore’s about gut bacteria

 

Jimmy Moore’s post:

Gut Bacteria & Obesity – A Hidden Connection?: You’ve gotta read this outstanding column from a registered dietitian I’d never heard of before named Peter Curcio who says “the universal fear of dietary fat” is very likely “what’s behind the current obesity epidemic.” He notes our high-carb diet has caused our healthy gut flora to become “imbalanced” and that we should be looking at these “gut buddies” (as Dr. Steven Gundry describes them) as “an organ” in our bodies with specific functions. Cut the grains, flour, sugar and omega-6-rich vegetable oils from your diet to reduce inflammation and “keep our bacteria microflora happy and thriving.” It’s the way our bodies were meant to run optimally for controlling weight and health and it has nothing at all to do with calories.

 

My comment:

In part I would agree with Peter Curcio, the average carbohydrate rich diet surely has caused not just our stomach bacteria to become imbalanced but also the enzymes that our digestive system uses to further break down food. If it were just an imbalance between good bacteria that probably wouldn’t be that bad but unfortunately the high carbohydrate diet that most people consume in the west actually promotes the growth of harmful bacteria whose presence and toxins that they generate go on to poison the body in a whole host of ways giving rise to numerous symptoms that are unfortunately blamed on other things so the cause of the problem is never really tackled.

Another big problem that is very much a hangover from the high carbohydrate camp is the assumption that we must have lots of fiber in our diet in order for our digestive system to work properly. Various scientific writings have gradually trickling through that showed that we don’t actually need as much fiber as has been previously though and in fact the high consumption of fiber which I should add passes through the body and digested actually acts as a nice medium for those same bad bacteria to grow in and multiply as they pass through our digestive system. You can find more about this by visiting doctor-natasha.com.

All in all it’s not difficult to see that there is a definite connection between the quality of the bacteria we have in our digestive tract and not just obesity but many other health problems that beset a population whose diet is just far to high in carbohydrates and not rich enough in good quality proteins, fat, vitamins and minerals that can be easily obtained though a sensible low carbohydrate diet.

Cheers,

Mark

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Link to the article

 

ME and low carb, high fat

by | Jan 15, 2013 | Carbs, Fat Loss, How Your Body Works, Low carb diet | 0 comments

Here is a copy of the  post I have commented on over at forums.about.com about chronic fatigue syndrome

 

Olive24 Posted:

Hello, I have been on the low carb high fat diet for two months now. I have ME and was hoping the diet would help the condition. I read that you are supposed to have more energy . My symptoms have improved alot but i still have the fatigue.

Does anyone have any experience with having ME and going low carb? I would be grateful to hear your experiences, if you recovered or about any improvements in health, thankyou.

 

My Comment:

Hi Olive24,

ME can also be called CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) but it’s also known as CFIDS or Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome that showed quite a wide spread problem.  There are upwards of about a million people in North America who suffer from it, but probably more that that one now. There is quite a lot of research gone on for this which may be of interest to you. One of the conclusions that many of these researches have come to is that there is quite a connection to diet as a cause, or a certainly an aggravator of CFS. One of those is a yeast sensitivity that can also be a linked to wheat sensitivity as well as sensitivity to milk. There are a number of things you can do to help with CFS. You’ve already discovered one of the biggest things and that’s “start eating a proper diet” but it doesn’t actually end there as far as diet goes. There were some excellent studies done back in 2007 and again in 2010 which you can get the abstract for on PubMed. Basically they showed there is definitely a link between acute infection of the gastrointestinal tract that can lead to a manifestation at the time or even years later of chronic fatigue syndrome.

From my own experience  of having a number of, I used the term digestive problems, I found that one of the things that totally alleviated a lot of the problems I had and as a side effect gave me more energy, was sorting out, firstly, my stomach bacteria, which I did through the use of probiotics. Then also sorting out my intestinal enzymes which I did very simply by using enzyme supplements. The advantage of doing that, of course, is that it more or less resets your digestive tract and helps it to work at full efficiency, firstly by building up the level of good bacteria in your stomach and the level of enzymes in the rest of your digestive tract. At the same time, because of the good bacteria will then outnumber the bad bacteria; the bad bacterial will get pushed out.

Going back to the reports I mentioned earlier, as I have said, they are quite worthy and technical; fortunately, Dr. Mercola has produced a much more readable article.

So if you are looking for ways to improve not just your energy levels but your health in general, firstly, do consider, neatly taking probiotics and again I would encourage you to use good quality ones not just the generic types you can find in the drugstore and enzymes, again, quality is the name of the game there. They are a little bit expensive but think of the benefits you’re going to get from them and do please, take time to read those articles from Dr. Mercola and the reports on PubMed.

Hope that helps,

Mark

Ladies and Gentlemen over 60 Continued

by | Jan 9, 2013 | Carbs, Fat Loss, Food Choices | 0 comments

This is a post from Pam, a 62-year-old lady, about carbs which I have replied to over at forum.lowcarber.org

Pam’s post:

I will soon be 62 and still find my weight struggles continue. I have done LC over and over for the past 20 years. I am successful when I limit my carbs to 30 or less/day, but I find it difficult not to give in to the carbs when I’m stressed or happy or when the wind is blowing…I need some support and encouagement as I’m sure many of us do. The older I get the easier it is to resign myself to being overweight. But I know for the sake of my health it is more important than ever.

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My advice:

Hi Pam!

Yes, I know exactly how you feel. I find it hard to keep away from the carbs as well and have done, really, ever since I started low carbing myself, but after a while, I realized this was as much down to habits as anything else so I started to have a look at what these habits of mine were and how I could break them.

 I believe the answer is actually quite simple, if I didn’t have carbs in the house then I couldn’t eat them. So what I did was in effect, was change the way I shopped. I no longer bought any items that had high carb to them thinking “I can resist, and anyway other people in the household would like to eat them”; instead I left them in the shop which is exactly where they should be rather than in my cupboard only later to be in my stomach.

So my advice would simply be “if you don’t buy it then you won’t have it at home to eat it”.

Hope that helps,

Mark