I have been going to slimming world for just over a year and had lost over 2 1/2 stone. However lately I have been struggling and put on a few lbs and I am also finding as I get older certain foods seem to upset me.
I have decided to completely change the foods I eat, I have avoided sugars and rarely eat processed food, I also do not like pastry, batter or many cakes and biscuits and only like very dark chocolate. However I was shocked to discover how much hidden sugar there is in things like potato.
Although I eat meat, in the last few months I have been eating more vegetarian meals and now only eat meat 2 or 3 times a week.
I tend not to eat breakfast or just have some fruit and eat lunch at work Tues-Fri. I usually have a salad with egg or tuna and sometimes a little cheese, occasionally I have a jacket potato, but will not be having that any more.
Evening meals will be the biggest change for me as I will be replacing potatoes and pasta with extra vegetables.
I have a few questions that I would be grateful for answers to.
Is sweet potato a better alternative to ordinary potato?
Is it better to cut out all rice and pasta or is it ok to have brown versions of these?
The same with bread, I only have bread at weekends, when I usually have bacon, eggs etc. Is it ok to have wholemeal or seeded bread or maybe rye or spelt, or would it be better to cut it out entirely?
Thank you
Written by
Loraine518
1st 7lbs
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I don’t really follow LCHF too strictly and like you, I do like bread now and again, if I give it up completely I start to crave it. The same with fruit, I feel I need the fibre and vitamins.
With regards to your question, I’m no expert but i think sweet potato is slightly better than normal, but I’m tagging TheAwfulToad as he knows much more than me. One thing I do recommend, is eating enough fat, mayo, oil, nuts etc or you’ll get hungry. Also, the LowCarb HighFat forum is handy.
A primary reason for cravings is that people "sit on the fence" with carbs, thinking that if they cut down slowly it'll be painless and they'll be more likely to stick with it. In fact this is usually a good recipe for failure, because if you've spent a lifetime eating mostly carbs, your body's fat-burning machinery will be sluggish: it will rebel against the carb limitation, and may not be able to deal with the fat efficiently (this is the thread of truth in the largely-false idea that fat is bad for you). This approach can end up in a weird in-between position which has all of the downsides of high-carb and none of the benefits of LCHF.
Some people do make it work, but you'll get a guaranteed positive result if you just go cold turkey for a couple of weeks, substituting fat for your entire energy requirement. Counterintuitive, but it is what it is.
Although it's pretty boring - you'll have had enough of it after two weeks - you'll find that you completely lose interest in bread, pasta etc.
After this induction period, you can re-introduce relatively carby foods (eg., pumpkin, tomatoes, onions) and trust your appetite not to go off the rails.
Having said all that, if you find it's working out for you so far, and if you need some time to get your head around the idea of fat being good for you, then keep doing what you're doing. Just bear in mind that, if you start struggling, there's another way to do it.
To answer your specific questions:
>> Is sweet potato a better alternative to ordinary potato?
No. You may have read that the carbs in sweet potato are mostly in the form of resistant starch, but this just isn't true - the glycemic index of sweet potato and ordinary potato are in the same ballpark. Funnily enough the method of cooking makes a big difference: baking a sweet potato hydrolyses the starch, and you end up with something that has the same GI as sugar (in fact roasted sweet potato is treated as a dessert in my part of the world).
Is it better to cut out all rice and pasta or is it ok to have brown versions of these?
Brown, white, it's about the same. It's a myth that brown rice is digested more slowly that white rice - the difference is trivial. In the case of pasta, there's no difference at all. Supermarket "wholemeal bread" is a highly-processed product carefully engineered to look like wholemeal bread. Drop all these things. You can reintroduce bread later as an occasional treat as long as you bake your own, or source it from an actual bakery.
Apparently yes, although this an area of research that's very much in its infancy, I think.
Carb terminology is really confusing - "resistant starch" and "fibre" are used almost interchangeably to mean starches that humans can't digest directly, but which might, depending on the exact makeup of your gut flora, be converted into useful things (like short-chain fatty acids).
This is one of the main reasons that carby foods shouldn't be dismissed as "evil" ... although funnily enough it's the single reason that most dieticians aren't aware of.
Thanks for setting me straight, it is really confusing when you have believed something for most of our life and then find out you have not been told the truth.
Most of what I have read about LCHF does make sense and I feel like I need to do something as not only has my weight loss stopped, but I feel tired and bloated a lot of the time.
I just want to make sure I get it right and that it is sustainable for me, so this has really helped.
LCHF is inherently sustainable when you get it right because it very quickly becomes second nature. You have to learn a list of 'carby' foods to avoid, to begin with, but within a couple of months you'll find that your appetite is making most of the choices for you, and there's no need to consciously avoid anything. It's actually quite an odd feeling when you realise that your body is working properly again, after decades of malfunction!
If you find you're struggling, it's a sure sign you're off-base somewhere
Just noticed your comment about feeding the family their normal meals. This situation crops up quite regularly, and it can be a big problem - even if they're not actively ridiculing your diet (yes, it happens, a lot) they might inadvertently sabotage it by saying "oh, go on, a bit of potato won't hurt". In fact, after you're fat-adapted, it won't hurt - if your regular diet is LCHF, you can handle the occasional dose of carbs without problems - but during the first few weeks, it's imperative that you stick to it religiously.
You might also try to get the family on board - especially if you're nominally responsible for doing the grocery and the cooking. If your regular diet has made you overweight, it'll do the same thing to them, eventually. If you have kids, this would be a good chance to get them into healthy-eating habits.
As for not being told the truth ... it drives me mad that dieticians are given a free pass to spread ignorant nonsense that they just made up (instead of, say, reading some books about physiology and biochemistry). We expect that sort of thing from politicians, but these people style themselves as professionals. It's just not good enough. But I'd better not go off on a rant about that!
I have told my family that I am changing my diet and the reasons, my husband asked me why and my daughter just thinks I am mad. She is 23 and pregnant though so very fussy at the moment and has the choice of either eating what we have or making her own, lol.
My husband will eat most of what I eat but will insist on potatoes and pasta, although he will have cauliflower rice and sometimes might have a different vegetable mash.
I am hoping that when he sees the benefits he might come on board, but I'm not entirely convinced.
He does cook a lot at weekends though and is happy to prep and cook my meals the way I ask him to, he will just add his carbs as well.
I had that same reaction — "Hmmm. LCHF just seems to make sense."
What The Awful Toad says make sense too but the path I took was a little different. I cut out all the main sources of carbs (potatoes, pasta, rice, desserts, sweets etc) but I still eat fruit and non-starchy vegetables and drink beer every day. It's working for me and I'm maintaining at my target weight after losing 30 pounds.
The best thing about LCHF for me is that I never have that late-evening craving where I want to stuff my face with whatever's in the house.
Ain't that the truth Loraine518 !! A couple of months on from starting LCHF, I still catch myself thinking I should be cutting the fat off meat and not cutting so much cheese and not putting so much butter/full fat milk in scrambled eggs.
As regards feeling tired and bloated, I found that once I stopped eating bread, pasta, rice etc., I stopped feeling bloated. The blubber I have lost, has been from around the middle which is where I needed to really lose it from so that's been brilliant. I also don't feel lethargic. In a word, I'm finding this diet 'liberating'!! Good luck x
Hi I hope you don’t mind me chipping in here, I’m on day two of LCHF and I thought I had done well but I ate tomatoes, onion and red pepper as some posts say to make sure you eat veg ( I know tomato is a fruit). My question is should I be eating zero veg in the first two weeks and only eat protein and fat? I’m confused. And worried now. Thank you.
As noted, it's an old post, but I'll reply here anyway: the short answer is that you should be eating lots of veg, because if you don't you'll get mightily sick of nothing but fatty meat. You only need to avoid starchy veg (broadly speaking, that means you focus on above-ground veg). Check out dietdoctor.com for a visual guide to what's OK and what isn't.
The craving thing. ‘If I give something up completely I will crave it’. I actually think this is a slimming world & weight watchers myth. It’s reason behind Syns & Points, which just builds sugar & low release GI into our diets & we never break free. And suppose we crave something or feel deprived, the sky will fall in! It’s good to have a strategy for those early weeks of cravings, and not nonsense like listening to music or drinking herbal tea, you need a food substitute & I found strong cheese a good one. If someone is giving up smoking, they don’t build in a few cigarettes a week in case they crave them. Yes for the first few weeks we miss bread etc, but after a couple of months, we build new habits a new tastes.
I moved to brown rice, quinoa & spelt bread before low carb. It was a huge mental shift to find that these carbs were not the superfoods I had believed. Or rather they were doing nothing for getting my metabolic hormones & therefore my appetite under control.
A lot of these diet clubs seem to be committed to keeping people fat. How else would they make money? If their diets actually worked they'd be out of business.
I was reading an Australian publication (Diabetes Living Magazine) which repeats all the usual tropes: carbs aren't bad for you, your body needs glucose to function, low-carb diets make you feel bad and cause nutrient deficiency ... etc., thus ensuring that their readers can never be cured. Oh, and buy our magazine every month, lol thx.
in reply to
PS more on the cravings thing. We go through life desiring things but not having them, but we don’t give in because it’s destructive. Why is it only food where cravings are irresistible? I crave’ a lie in, but I get up so my son gets to school & I don’t lose my job. I ‘crave’ some fancy new shoes, but I don’t buy them because I’ll go overdrawn. I desperately desperately crave a holiday in the Caribbean right this second, but I don’t have the spare £5k & don’t want the bore of explaining to the local authority why I took my son out of school. I also ‘crave’ telling my mother in law she’s an interfering indiscreet old bag, but I don’t because....
I think that's evolution. If food cravings were resistable, our ancestors would have starve to death at the first sign of shortages. The problem is we are having those cravings for food that we don't need, that is bad for us.
Ah. I think there’s a difference between cravings and hunger. If we are hungry we should eat. It does not have to be a bun or chocolate. People repeatedly say they cannot go low carb or they will crave bread. Ok so they crave bread, but could eat a piece of cheese instead, and get on with their day. But no, food ‘cravings‘ must be obeyed...
The foods I will mainly miss will be bread and potatoes, but I only eat bread at the weekend anyway and I love cheese which I have had to limit a lot on SW, so being able to eat that will be a real treat.
I just need to learn the carby foods to avoid as TheAwfulToad says, I have started making lists and trying to get my head around it.
Today is my start day as I plan and prep all my meals for the week on a Monday as its my day off work.
I would make good use of today's daily dairy. Put in a few dishes and ask for honest feedback as to carbs.
You will develop a good instinct soon enough. The only time recently a dish had unexpected carbs was when it included mussels. Those yummy blighters are 18% carbs.
I occasionally fancy bread mainly as a vehicle for eating butter and I found a really easy recipe for keto 'bread'. You make it in the microwave and from starting to make it to eating it, takes a couple of minutes. I haven't made it for over a week now and can't remember the quantities, but I'll look for it tomorrow and post it
Well, being pedantic, at least the intention was for your mother to give up both ultimately. Not to keep going with both cigarettes and nicotine as a permanent thing... and the little treats thing is a permanent approach for Slimming World. In terms of the analogy with weight loss, it can perhaps be easiest to go low carb in stages. Give up sugar initially, then the rest of carbs. Or go low carb one meal at a time.
Reading your rep'y and tried to find lowcarbhighfat forum but it comes up with one post from seven years ago. Could you tell me how to find it please. Ellie
now, 8 months before my 70, I do 6 days a week, within 115 minutes, the followings:
A. 440 movements (on 15 different exercises, most not for arms or composed) with 7 kg dumbbells each. that's about 50-55 minutes
B. ascend and descend 12 times the 5 levels of the building with 20 push ups on the wall from 80 cm between each series of ascending + descending and every 3 series each 10 folds on each leg. that takes me the rest of 50-60 minutes.
I noticed today, I tried to climb with a pack of mineral water (9 kg), but after the first 3 stories I thought it was over with me. so don't hold on yet.
but this time I eliminated practically the carbohydrates (1 apple remained and what is left in spinach, tomatoes, brocolli, radish, cucambers, beans, avocados and other vegetables). I eat fish, seefood, sheep / turkey pastrami, sheep meat, beef and poultry, sheep / goat cheese, greek yogurt. it seems something like keto.
drink at least 1 liter of genmaicha per day and at least 1 liter of carbonated water. I drink up to 5 glasses of wine a week, some brandy (sure it's not made with sugar) and some whiskey, but not single malt or blended, I don't like it.
I have been doing this for about 4-5 months and I have slowly dropped from 106 to 98 (in fact last week I saw that I managed to go below 98 for the first time). this time I do not stop, I do not know if at this level but I would like (meaning my dream is!) to stay at 90 kg.
04 March 2020
--------------
I reached just over 93 kg from 106 (was it 112 ?). I had 2 levelings, from 99 to 97 and from 95 to 93.
officially measured blood glucose (at the laboratory) evolved from 139 to 90.74 and HbA1c from 6.7 to 5.9.
officially measured tension (blood pressure) from 140 to 130. inside my eyes from 21 to 18.
my serum uric acid increased from 7.30 to 9.99, I start taking milurit and cut the sheep fat.
I got that 6 times a week to exercise 115 minutes: 13 times climbed + descended 5 floors, 440 strength exercises with 7 kg piece dumbbells, 260 push ups at the wall from 80 cm. everything mixed.
I eat practically no explicit carbohydrates (there are still carbs in apples or other fruits, in vegetables, etc.). anyway I eat with my mouth not my eyes.
I'm 8 months shy of 70.
on Saturday-Sunday I may drink 2-3 brandy shots and 3-4 wine glasses.
desire: about 83 in May-June. and then maintenance.
In 1996 I decided to quit smoking after 30 years. No doctor asked me to do this. The family supported me. We decided to quit on the last day of the year. When the clock started the 10 seconds countdown I lighted my last cigarette, got one deep smoke and I threw the cigarette. Since then I never thought about it. all the patches, medicines, teas, counselling, etc are just ways to waist money.
You have certainly been keeping yourself fit! It sounds as if you could be following a Low Carb High Fat approach?
In order to get the most out of the Weight Loss Forum ,I'd recommend you look at this link which takes you to our Pinned Posts section . Here you'll find a Welcome message and guide to our site plus links to other groups on here Fit is Fun Club, Green Gym, Recipes, Drink-Less, Happiness Celebration and Book Club to name but a few!)
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Yes, it is a kind of keto. but not very much animal fat, avocado is free to eat. I gave up anything with starch, i.e. all the explicit carbohydrates are out, except the ones embedded in fruits, vegetables, etc. but NO bread, NO pastry, NO kind of potatoes, etc. no very sweet fruits too. I still do not say no to noodles or SOME and SOMETIMES rice/couscous. Maybe 1 apple a day but the small, rural ones.
I wanted to emphasize that your will is the most important weapon you have.
Yes I understand that though it has to be well focused and well informed doesn't it? We can be full of determination but if we eat the wrong things ,we won't achieve what we seek.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I agree and disagree! I strongly agree that a clear decision is very powerful. I decided on 2 January to go low carb. I am not ‘trying not to eat cake’ and it’s not that I ‘mustn’t’ eat cake. I just don’t. On the other hand, I think calorie controlled high carb diets are very difficult, even impossible, because they rely on willpower over hunger. I don’t think we can master hunger for long - which is why as LCHF is so effective because it gets our hunger under control. This is not just because fat is filling, but because the reduction in insulin production increases our hunger management hormone, leptin.
All of these things have to be down to personal choice really Loraine518 and what you feel you are able to maintain for the long term.
Wholegrain bread/rice/pasta are generally better for you and for your digestive system as they have more fibre.
Trying to follow the principles of LCHF I rarely eat rice and pasta (perhaps once a week?) and the same for bread. I tend to have just one slice of sourdough bread at weekends and will sometimes have a folded flatbread in the week, but that is about it.
I replace potatoes, pasta and rice with my meals with:
- stir-fried cabbage and leek (stir-fry long and low, using butter and olive oil)
Thank you Pineapple27, I do want to find something that works for me long term.
Stir fried cabbage and leek sounds lovely and I love carrot and swede mash and butternut squash and I do have cauliflower rice a lot, so probably won't find it too hard to substitute these for potatoes, I will just have to do potatoes for the rest of the family.
My big problem eating carbs is wind! Nobody mentions that. Have altered my diet slightly to help lower my cholesterol which means less meat and eating a slice or two of rye bread per day. Last night I also indulged in sweet potato chips done with trout in the oven. Back comes the wind. Never had this problem with keto but unfortunately that caused constipation. I'm trying to balance things and need to lose more weight. The exercise is still ongoing. Gym and swimming three times a week. ps. no problem with bread bought in France where it has to be eaten that same day - otherwise it ends up hard as a baseball bat.
Loraine518 i realise TheAwfulToad tagged me to give husband management advice & I never did. My husband decided for himself that he wanted to adopt my diet as he saw me drop a dress size in a month, and wanted some of that. Now we eat all the same things for supper but apparently he can’t eat berries and cream for breakfast though he can eat them as a pudding... he is happy for me to tell him what he can eat - I find it amazing read irritating he can’t work it out for himself... husband sometimes implies I am making him eat low carb but he does like losing weight & that he gets to eat lots of meat...
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