Chapter 1

Mapping Out a Low-Carb Diet

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding low-carb dieting

Choosing the best carbs for your body

Maintaining a low-carb lifestyle

Although eating in the United States has been changing since the beginning of the 20th century, it has dramatically changed in the last 50 years. Americans eat out more frequently, eat larger portions of food, and eat more foods with little resemblance to their form in nature. Everywhere Americans turn, they’re inundated with refined and processed foods such as snack foods, chips, candies, cereals, cookies, and all other sorts of junk food. In addition, Americans are bombarded with best-selling diet books that just repackage fad diets to make them seem new and exciting. So, the old adage, “Eat less and exercise more” just seems dull and boring. As a result, more Americans than ever are overweight or obese and struggling to find a plan that helps them lose the extra pounds.

Americans unfortunately are exporting this dilemma around the world. Kuwait has more fast-food restaurants per capita than any other country in the world. And, yes, the incidence of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity are on the rise in Kuwait. So, does this mean fast foods are the culprit? Not exactly. Most people are overwhelmed with the availability of cheap, tasty foods and junk foods whose advertising barrages them in every media at every twist and turn.

My goal is to help you discover a better way of eating that is easy, healthy, and reasonable. In this chapter, I map out a low-carb eating plan that is healthy and satisfying. I show you how to remove refined carbohydrates (carbohydrates with lots of sugar and very little fiber) from your diet, to make your diet healthier. By improving the quality of the carbohydrates you eat, and by controlling your daily intake of starchy carbs (like breads, pasta, and starchy vegetables), you’ll lose weight and experience many other healthy benefits including increased energy, improved mood, and better sleeping.

How Low Is Low Carb? That’s the Question

If you’ve looked into low-carb diets, you’ve probably found more than a few that require you to banish carbs from your diet entirely. And if you like carbs the way most people do, you’ve probably thrown down those books with a mixture of fear and frustration. Low-carb diets include a variety of carbohydrate levels, and not one specific level is accepted by all. The end result is confusion and a barrier in communicating the real risks and benefits of low-carb eating.

Americans are eating more food than ever, and carbs have replaced much of the fat. That increased food intake means an increased carbohydrate intake, which is largely sugars, sweeteners, and processed flour. That increase has had a direct impact on the health (and waistlines) of Americans. In working with patients at Texas Tech Medical Center, I found the low-carb eating plan approach referred to as the Whole Foods Weight Loss Eating Plan as more effective than a low-fat diet approach. Patients watching their fat intake were eating a lot of fat-free food products that weren’t any healthier than the fat they had been eating.

This Whole Foods Weight Loss Eating Plan doesn’t reduce carbohydrate so much that it induces ketosis (a process that happens when you don’t have enough carbs to burn for energy so you burn fat, which makes ketones to use for fuel). The Whole Foods Weight Loss Eating Plan not only reduces your intake of processed carbs, but it also shows you how to control your intake of those foods for a more permanent weight loss.

The following sections delve deeper into the world of low-carb diets and explain what a low-carb diet is and isn’t.

Defining a low-carb diet: Not as easy as you’d think

Although the term “low carb” is bandied around freely in general conversation and most everyone using the term assumes that they’re using the term in the same way, unfortunately no clear definition of the term exists.

In an attempt to overcome this barrier to communication, researchers have suggested four definitions:

• Very-low carbohydrate ketogenic diet (VLCKD): Carbohydrates are limited to 20 to 50 grams per day or less than 10 percent of a 2,000 kcal/day diet, whether or not ketosis occurs. It’s derived from levels of carbohydrate required to induce ketosis in most people. VLCKD is the recommended early phase (induction) of popular diets such as Atkins Diet or Protein Power and is the basis for the Keto Diet.
• Low-carbohydrate diet: This diet limits carbohydrates to less than 130 grams per day or less than 26 percent of total energy. The Dietary Reference Intake (DRI) defines 130 grams per day as its recommended minimum. The Whole Foods Weight Loss Eating Plan promoted in this book adheres to this carbohydrate level. See Appendix C for more on the DRIs.
• Moderate-carbohydrate diet: This diet sets carbohydrate limits at 130 to 225 grams per day or 26 to 45 percent of your total calorie intake. This was the prevailing upper limit of carbohydrate intake in the western diet before the obesity epidemic (43 percent) began.
• High-carbohydrate diet: Carbohydrate intake is more than 225 grams per day or greater than 45 percent of total calorie intake on this diet. More recent surveys estimate that the current American diet is 53 percent refined and processed carbohydrate.

The Whole Foods Weight Loss Eating Plan that I describe in this book provides 130 grams of carbohydrate and fits the definition of a low-carbohydrate diet. But don’t worry — the guidelines I give don’t ask you to remove carbs from your diet completely. Instead, I want to get you thinking about the quality of the foods you consume, rather than the number of carb grams those foods contain. For more details about this, turn to Chapter 2.

Clarifying what this low-carb diet is about

The Whole Foods Weight Loss Eating Plan isn’t an eat-all-the-fat-and-protein-you-can-possibly-consume diet. It’s really focused on enjoying whole or unprocessed foods and enjoying the healthy side effects, including having more energy, stabilizing your blood-sugar levels, losing weight, and improving your self-confidence. Whole foods are fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, nuts, and seeds that haven’t been processed to remove vitamins, minerals, fiber, and so on. They’re foods that are sold to consumers as close to the same state that nature provided them.

Most foods contain some carbohydrates. Even an 8-ounce glass of skim milk contains 12 grams of carbs. A cup of broccoli contains 8 carb grams. And yet, both milk and broccoli are packed full of other nutritional benefits, including vitamins, nutrients, fiber, and phytochemicals. If you strictly limit the number of carb grams in your diet without considering the quality of the carbs you eat, you’ll be missing out on some key foods that will enhance your overall good health.

These sections clarify which carbs you can eat as much as you want on the Whole Foods Weight Loss Eating Plan and with which carbs you need to be more selective.

Identifying free foods — eat all you want

Even though you’re limited to five carbohydrate servings a day on the Whole Foods Weight Loss Eating Plan, many foods that contain carbohydrates are absolutely free (which means you can have as many of them as you want, without counting them toward your daily carb allowance).

Here are some quick tips on which foods to focus your attention on and which to pass by (Chapter 5 has more details about free foods):

• Don’t be afraid of fruit. Fruit does contain carbohydrates, but the carbs in fruit give it a delicious natural sweetness, which is partnered with a ton of vitamins, fiber, and relatively few calories. Increasing your fruit intake is a great way to help you wean yourself off refined sugars. (Refined sugars are sugars like table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup that are added to processed foods.) Fruits make a great dessert option and, because they come pre-portioned in their own natural package, they’re a great choice for grab-and-go snacks. On this diet plan, almost all fruits are free The recipes in Chapter 16 offer a wide array of healthy, fruit-filled desserts.
• Look at leafy green and non-starchy vegetables. Leafy greens, like spinach, watercress, cabbage, and romaine lettuce, and non-starchy vegetables, like green beans, broccoli, carrots, and tomatoes, come in an almost limitless variety. You can further vary your diet by trying new preparations of old favorites and partnering them with new choices. Check out some great recipes for salads and other greens in Chapter 12.
• Remove refined sugars from your life. Refined sugars provide calories, but lack vitamins, minerals, and fiber. They’re also high on the glycemic index table. See Chapter 3 and Appendix A for more on the glycemic index. The amount of refined sugar in the American diet is a disastrous, but fairly recent, development. Watch out for hidden sugars in breads, lunch meat, and salad dressings. Pay attention to the not-hidden sugars in non-diet sodas, cookies, and candy. For more on reducing the amount of sugar in your diet, see Chapter 6.

Eyeing what five carb servings...