Obese people get a hard time really. It’s too easy to blame obesity on people’s gluttony or lack of will power. These are definitely two contributing elements, but it’s far too simplistic. Hopefully from my previous posts, it’s clear that hormones play a role in weight regulation, and our diet can seriously impact how our weight regulation hormones behave. Unfortunately, much “conventional wisdom” in this space seems to be making things worse not better. And it certainly doesn’t help that processed carbohydrates have to my mind addictive properties.

What prompted me to start writing was to share my own experiences of what worked for me and what didn’t. It may not be for everyone. Those people who are generally quite athletic and haven’t typically had a problem with their weight may well be ok with eating lots of carbs. 20 months since I started on low carb living, I know watching how many carbs I consume is key to staying at a weight I’m happy with. I definitely carb count rather than calorie count.

I want to say a few things on the most famous low carb diet of all, Aktins. I’m actually not an Aktins fan. I tried Atkins about 10 years ago. I thought it would be a doddle for me – I mean here was a diet which allowed me to eat loads of meat! Wonderful. It’s just I lasted just over a week. Why? Because it’s just too extreme I think for most people. Basically for the first few weeks you are told to consume a maximum of 20 grams of carbohydrates per day. A slice of thick white bread has going on for 20 grams of carbs. An apple has about 20 grams. The official recommended amount of daily carbs is between 200-250 grams.  So going from 200g+ to 20g will require a monumental effort on most people’s part. It basically means for the first few weeks you eat no fruit, have no sugar, no bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, hardly any veg, no pulses, no cereal and eat basically meat, nuts, eggs and cheese. I couldn’t cope with that – it was too big a change in one go. After a week I’d lost 4-5 pounds, but I couldn’t handle another day of meat for breakfast, meat for lunch and meat for dinner. So I stopped Aktins, went back to eating as I was, and put on 6 pounds in a couple of weeks! Not for me. I’ll go into my own experiences of what worked this time in my next post, and there’s much more variety than just meat, meat and meat!