low carb
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JBcat123
Posts: 211 Member
I started with counting calories and it became an unhealthy obsession. so now I decided ill just eat low carb without counting calories 3 meals a day with 2 snacks in between. will I gain my weight back on this diet without counting calories? I don't know how I would manage to maintain when I reach my goal weight. do I just keep working out and eat the same or eat less? I need advice. I hope I'm not being unhealthy without counting calories and eating low carb diet instead without counting.
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Replies
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Can I ask why it became an unhealthy obsession and mainly why you're going for low carb?
Without any more info I would highly suggest a balanced breakdown of macros - good protein, complex carbs and healthy fats.0 -
You won't have to count calories forever. After awhile you get good at portion sizes.1
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all day I was thinking of calories...it made me crazy. then I started lowering cals to see quick results but for some reason lost nothing. this week I was eating low carb and lost 2 pounds. I havn't lost weight in months. I also ate peanut butter and jelly daily and lots of pasta within my calorie range....still didn't lose weight I just lost for the first time in ages eating low carb.0
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Cutting carbs will likely cause an immediate loss in water weight, but unless you track your meals you won't have any basis for knowing whether you really are eating fewer carbs. You ask if you should eat the same or less, but how would you know either way unless you track?0
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There are people who obsess over details and the log ends up becoming more important than anything, even health. If you obsess this way, you may want to find another way to restrict calories. There is no way of knowing if going low carb will work. If you over-eat your calorie limit, you will gain.
You may want to put together several standard menus, inputting it in to MFP to make sure they stay within your calorie limit. Then you can eat to that menu daily and know you won't go over.0 -
Did you use a food scale to weigh everything?0
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I always use a scale.
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Going Low carb doesn't mean you'll lose weight or even be able to maintain weight.
Weight loss- calorie deficit
Weight gain- calorie surplus
Going low carb doesn't negate calories in - calories out.
You'd gain weight if you ate at a calorie surplus even if you where going low carb or keto.
Low carb is just a way of eating , there's nothing magical about it .0 -
I agree with you that this isn't a good way to go about it and I'm happy you realize that.all day I was thinking of calories...it made me crazy. then I started lowering cals to see quick results but for some reason lost nothing.
@jgnatca has a great point about making menus and pre-planning. That way you'll know what's up without having to think about it all the time.
I still recommend a balanced way of eating and also trusting the process. If you've hit a plateu, you might want to change up your workouts to tell your body not to get too comfortable where it's at.
However, if you feel like low carb works for you and you feel like you have enough energy, then you should try that. But be mindful that low carb usually means high fat and thus smaller servings for the same amount of calories.
Hope you figure it out. 0 -
I started with counting calories and it became an unhealthy obsession. so now I decided ill just eat low carb without counting calories 3 meals a day with 2 snacks in between. will I gain my weight back on this diet without counting calories? I don't know how I would manage to maintain when I reach my goal weight. do I just keep working out and eat the same or eat less? I need advice. I hope I'm not being unhealthy without counting calories and eating low carb diet instead without counting.
@JBcat123 as you can read we all have different thoughts and experiences. As @thorsmom01 state there is nothing magical about Low Carb. CICO rules the day and to know one's net CICO results all is needed is a good set of bathroom scales.
When I stopped dieting and started eating for health after a while I did not need to count but in my case I do weigh myself when my feet hit the floor each morning to track my net CICO results.
I was at 250 and lost down to 200 pounds and have maintained at 200 +/- 5 pounds for the last year.
Because I goal was to manage my joint and muscle pain without Rx meds I started by cutting out sugar and all grains cold turkey since I was out of time to do something to manage my pain. In 30 days my pain was well managed.
Now back to where to count or not to count is left up to you and ONLY you. One has to track the net results of CICO one way or another.
After two weeks (a hellish two weeks) my cravings just quickly faded away. I can pig out as long as I leave off sugar and all forms of grains because I will get full and not be able to keep on eating like when I was living mainly on sugar and grains. Maintaining a 50 pound weight loss for a year is a first in my 65 years.
Low Carb High Fat after 18 months is working well for me. Others may find the opposite or something different leads them to better health. That is all that matters is one wants good health first.4 -
OP, I suggest you check out the main low-carber forum group here in MFP. It's where most of us Ketofiles tend to hang out:
http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/group/394-low-carber-daily-forum-the-lcd-group2 -
I totally get what you're saying! I've done low carb in past where I found convenient was I could go out and just knew to avoid carbs where before I spent so much time trying to figure out how many calories and on mfp there are always a million of the same thing that have wide range in calories! Only problem is I've never stuck with it for more than two weeks. Maybe I should try again.1
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The magic of low carb means that you will naturally be fuller, longer, not that you can just stop counting calories.
So I would start counting calories, until you get used to it at least. I logged calories religiously at first, and found that I am usually completely full at around 900 calories a day. After about of month of that, I felt that it was *safe* to stop counting, since I was unlikely to go over accidentally. You need to be very wary of snacks, especially. A single cap full of peanuts, for example, is like 200 calories. So until you get used to things like that, you should still log all of your meals.
Honestly though, I have had the best success with low carb by eating the same 4-5 meals, which can easily be saved and added in one click. I just got lazy and stopped coming to the site all together.
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GaleHawkins wrote: »I started with counting calories and it became an unhealthy obsession. so now I decided ill just eat low carb without counting calories 3 meals a day with 2 snacks in between. will I gain my weight back on this diet without counting calories? I don't know how I would manage to maintain when I reach my goal weight. do I just keep working out and eat the same or eat less? I need advice. I hope I'm not being unhealthy without counting calories and eating low carb diet instead without counting.
@JBcat123 as you can read we all have different thoughts and experiences. As @thorsmom01 state there is nothing magical about Low Carb. CICO rules the day and to know one's net CICO results all is needed is a good set of bathroom scales.
When I stopped dieting and started eating for health after a while I did not need to count but in my case I do weigh myself when my feet hit the floor each morning to track my net CICO results.
I was at 250 and lost down to 200 pounds and have maintained at 200 +/- 5 pounds for the last year.
Because I goal was to manage my joint and muscle pain without Rx meds I started by cutting out sugar and all grains cold turkey since I was out of time to do something to manage my pain. In 30 days my pain was well managed.
Now back to where to count or not to count is left up to you and ONLY you. One has to track the net results of CICO one way or another.
After two weeks (a hellish two weeks) my cravings just quickly faded away. I can pig out as long as I leave off sugar and all forms of grains because I will get full and not be able to keep on eating like when I was living mainly on sugar and grains. Maintaining a 50 pound weight loss for a year is a first in my 65 years.
Low Carb High Fat after 18 months is working well for me. Others may find the opposite or something different leads them to better health. That is all that matters is one wants good health first.
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GaleHawkins wrote: »I started with counting calories and it became an unhealthy obsession. so now I decided ill just eat low carb without counting calories 3 meals a day with 2 snacks in between. will I gain my weight back on this diet without counting calories? I don't know how I would manage to maintain when I reach my goal weight. do I just keep working out and eat the same or eat less? I need advice. I hope I'm not being unhealthy without counting calories and eating low carb diet instead without counting.
@JBcat123 as you can read we all have different thoughts and experiences. As @thorsmom01 state there is nothing magical about Low Carb. CICO rules the day and to know one's net CICO results all is needed is a good set of bathroom scales.
When I stopped dieting and started eating for health after a while I did not need to count but in my case I do weigh myself when my feet hit the floor each morning to track my net CICO results.
I was at 250 and lost down to 200 pounds and have maintained at 200 +/- 5 pounds for the last year.
Because I goal was to manage my joint and muscle pain without Rx meds I started by cutting out sugar and all grains cold turkey since I was out of time to do something to manage my pain. In 30 days my pain was well managed.
Now back to where to count or not to count is left up to you and ONLY you. One has to track the net results of CICO one way or another.
After two weeks (a hellish two weeks) my cravings just quickly faded away. I can pig out as long as I leave off sugar and all forms of grains because I will get full and not be able to keep on eating like when I was living mainly on sugar and grains. Maintaining a 50 pound weight loss for a year is a first in my 65 years.
Low Carb High Fat after 18 months is working well for me. Others may find the opposite or something different leads them to better health. That is all that matters is one wants good health first.
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How is your joint pain today? I need to lose weight and I am trying to decide between calorie counting or low carb. I also have joint pain issues brought on by pregnancy. Which was 3 years ago! It's called Symphasis Pubic Dysfunction and it is caused by a hormonal imbalance. I have been looking into arthritis and diet, I haven't been officially diagnosed with arthritis, but my Dr. told me that SPD is basically a form of it. It's really hard to find anything on the topic but the consensus seems to be eating a low carb way.0
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honeybee739 wrote: »How is your joint pain today? I need to lose weight and I am trying to decide between calorie counting or low carb. I also have joint pain issues brought on by pregnancy. Which was 3 years ago! It's called Symphasis Pubic Dysfunction and it is caused by a hormonal imbalance. I have been looking into arthritis and diet, I haven't been officially diagnosed with arthritis, but my Dr. told me that SPD is basically a form of it. It's really hard to find anything on the topic but the consensus seems to be eating a low carb way.
@honeybee739 my joint pain is still well controlled by diet as it was 30 days after Oct 2014 when I went off of sugar and all grains cold turkey.
You can still count calories if that is what you enjoy. Since I was going for health recovery I was not concerned about weight loss but just dodging the Enbrel bullet that the doctors wanted me to start taking for pain management. Being down 60 pounds is a great side effect however. My 40 years of pain and serious IBS symptoms resolving by diet only blew my mind but nearly two years later it seems for real. No food cravings makes it hard for me to gain weight if I wanted to because I have tried the year I maintained at 200 pounds. Now that I am eating more carbs I am in and out of nutritional ketosis for the last month so I am not sure if my pain will stay controlled or not. I still am off sugar (except the 5 carbon D-Ribose for weight loss) and all grains.
If you ever give LCHF a try make sure you stick with it for 90 days. Best of success. Any weight loss by most any method is typically helpful to reduce joint pain. Losing old fat and cause me more pain at the time.0 -
Lots of people who do low carb also count calories, as low carb is often a way to make staying in the calorie deficit easier or address hunger or craving issues.
Low carb often helps people reduce calories without counting (especially at first), so if you really don't feel comfortable counting it's worth a try to see if you like it. I'm not sure what the comment about eating PB&J and pasta was intended to get at, but whether counting calories or doing low carb, I'd personally try to eat an overall healthful diet including plenty of vegetables and a reasonable amount of protein (which both pasta and PB&J can be part of, but are not going to fit well into low carb, of course). You don't have to do this to lose weight, though, but I think it's good for other reasons, and can help with satiety.
You might also want to work on your reaction to calorie counting, especially the feeling that you should go as low as possible. Maybe try to think in terms of creating a healthful and sustainable diet that works for a lifetime, not super fast weight loss. If you continue to have thoughts like that (and you certainly could doing low carb too), I'd maybe seek out some help.0 -
Keep it simple!!! Low carb is fine as long as it is not too low. Read up on low carb sickness. There is nothing hard about logging your calories as MFP has most foods and their calories in their data base. just type in banana 70 and all the bananas in the data base with 70 calories will pop up.Easy peasy! (just an example) I found low carb boring and unsustainable!. You can gain weight on low carb too so do what's best for you but please keep it simple and don't over think it! Good luck!0
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Keep it simple!!! Low carb is fine as long as it is not too low. Read up on low carb sickness. There is nothing hard about logging your calories as MFP has most foods and their calories in their data base. just type in banana 70 and all the bananas in the data base with 70 calories will pop up.Easy peasy! (just an example) I found low carb boring and unsustainable!. You can gain weight on low carb too so do what's best for you but please keep it simple and don't over think it! Good luck!
@IWTBFCIN3 for nearly two years I ate LCHF (just under 50 grams of carbs daily) to reverse some medical conditions from 40 years of abusing carbs. I do not see LCHF as a weight loss program but as a way to give my body a break from the carbs commonly found in processed food.
In just 30 days after leaving sugar and all forms of all grains Oct 2014 at the age of 63 my 40 years of joint and muscle pain dropped from levels of 7-8 to 2-3. That is like NO pain in my mind. It is still low nearly two years later.
40 years of life defining IBS symptoms fully resolved in the first 180 days and have not returned. BP dropped from 135/88 to 113/71. HDL and triglycerides have moved from the danger zones to healthy zones. 40 pounds have melted off by now naturally. At age 65 my health markers are better than they were at the age of 45.
The kids were watching me become worse and worse and wondering if they too were going to develop Ankylosing Spondylitis and become limited in mobility and health. That is not good for the mind of teenagers.
When the doctors said they were going to start me on Enbrel injections as of Nov 2014 I started reading the research to see if I could fix my pain by finding a new way of eating. The hunch to cut out sugar and grains worked and I continue to refine my Way Of Eating has my body heals itself eating only whole foods.
I just got back from eating out. I had beef liver covered in cooked onions with black eye peas, cabbage, baby potatoes with baby carrots with water to drink. For desert I had 2 oz. of raw unsalted cashews.
Yes that was not a very low carb meal but they were whole food sources of carbs which I now eat from time to time. Eating for better health is my only objective. I do not find it boring, unsustainable or restricting. The thought of being put in a coffin due to a premature death from eating the wrong macros I do find restricting.
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