How do people go on a "no carb" diet?

La5Vega5Girl

When diabetics count carbs we remove the number of fiber from the number of carbs in the food. So if it says 2g carb. and it has 1g fiber. We count it as 1g carb.

^^ yes ^^

persistentsoul

I stick to under 40g total carbs under 20g net carbs most days with no problems. I see no reason to aim for no carbs at all though. As someone else said the only way to eat no carbs at all would be to exist on meat and fat alone which although might be doable, I doubt it is advisable. I see no benefit for a zero carb diet unless there is some unusual medical necessity for it or there is no other food around. Veg has lots of vitamins and fiber in it and is low calorie so get a lot for not many calories used up.

Toblave

Groups of people (Inuit are a popular example) have and do eat little to "no" carb (from vegetable matter) but I couldn't think of a reason to do it unless you had to. You body doesn't require carbs to function. The brain (and a couple of other organs) require glucose which can be synthesized from dietary protein, or muscle tissue in the absence of sufficient dietary protein, and the balance of the fuel could be provided in the form of ketones, which are produced by the metabolism of fat (dietary and otherwise).

However, that being said you would have to make some other significant changes to your modern life and diet. For starters, you would need to get far more sunlight to synthesize vitamin D than most currently do and you would also need to consume the offal or risk significant deficiencies in vitamins and minerals that are otherwise provided by fruits, vegetables and nuts. One could argue that a good multivitamin would fill in but I wouldn't trust it.

Lastly, fruits and vegetables are tasty.

baconslave

Brains do need glucose, which they can get by having the body convert protein, but they also run well on ketones.

As far as food goes, the brain is a fairly picky eater. Like a young candy-craving child, it prefers simple sugar molecules — glucose to be specific — and when the brain doesn’t get glucose, it gets crabby and distracted. Since the body most easily creates glucose by metabolizing carbohydrates, it stands to reason that limiting carbohydrates could dampen cognitive function.

When consuming low-carb diets in the short term, this is certainly true. In a 2008 study, psychologists placed 19 women on either a calorie restricted low-carb diet or a calorie restricted high-carb diet for 28 days. Throughout the study, participants’ memory, reaction time, and vigilance were tested at regular intervals. While those on the low-carb diet enjoyed a slight boost in vigilance, they suffered impaired reaction time and reduced visuospatial memory.

“The brain needs glucose for energy and diets low in carbohydrates can be detrimental to learning, memory, and thinking,” lead investigator Holly A. Taylor, a psychology professor at Tufts University, explained.

But the short-term isn’t the long-term. Though the brain prefers to compute on glucose, after about four days of carbohydrate deprivation it sates about 70% of its hunger on ketone bodies, the byproducts produced when fatty acids are broken down by the liver. And by most accounts, the brain can run pretty efficiently on this fuel once it grows accustomed to it after a few weeks.

In fact, researchers have shown that low-carb diets can bring about improvements in cognitive functioning in both aged humans and rodents compared to traditional diets. Writing at Psychology Today, psychiatrist Emily Deans accounted for how this might happen.

“When we change the main fuel of the brain from glucose to ketones, we change amino acid handling,” she says. This reduces the levels of glutamate in the brain, an amino acid and neurotransmitter that can cause harm in excessive amounts. Less glutamate leads to “a lower seizure risk and a better environment for neuronal recovery and repair.”

In adults, low-carb diets have no adverse cognitive effects in the long-term. A well-executed, year-long study published to the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2009 found no difference in cognitive functioning for subjects consuming either a low-carb weight loss diet or a high-carb weight loss diet. Both actually enjoyed improvements to working memory and speed of processing, a result presumably attributed to weight loss.

This was taken from here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rosspomeroy/2013/11/12/do-low-carbohydrate-diets-make-you-dumber/

The studies referenced are here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081211112014.htm
http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1108558

Just a friendly FYI, for those actually interested in the internal processes going on.

ashlivesjk

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MelRC117

A "low-carb" diet generally means no junk food (cookies, chips, pretzels, cake, etc.), and minimal grains (bread, cereal, pasta, white rice).

The best thing about this diet is that it means no giant bags of chips or boxes of cookies or loaves of cinnamon raisin bread sitting in your kitchen cabinets, calling out your name, tempting you to eat the entire bag or box or loaf.

And since you can eat all the veggies you want, a "low-carb" diet doesn't really have to be a "low-carb" diet.

"Junk" food means different things to different people. That's YOUR defintion. I eat low carb and I think to others, I probably eat junk. (Atkins Bars, bacon, diet soda, etc).

OP - This reminds me of the people that say they eat "no sugar" but they'll eat fruit, veggies, etc.

Iwishyouwell

I've lived, thrived, and had plenty of energy on large stretches of time on a very low carb diet. If it wasn't for my massive sweet tooth that's how I'd eat, voluntarily, for the rest of my life as my off/on years of low carbing killed my cravings for bread, pasta, pizza, chips, crackers, and most other high carb foods. I can, and have, gone years at a time without consuming some of those foods, and not because they were off limits, just because I almost never actually think about having them.

But "no carb". The closest you can get to that is basically an all meat diet. And yes, it's possible. I use to read a low carb board with a woman who lost 50 lbs eating low carb and then at some point, during maintenance, settled into eating one large steak a day plus water. That's it. Once in maintenance she just kept eating like that. She loved the freedom of not having to ever make any other food choices, said that eating zero carb satiated her immensely and she apparently never tired of her steak. She was a short, small framed woman whose caloric necessities were covered by one huge, thick, fatty cut of beef. I haven't been there in years but at the last time I saw her post she'd been maintaining for over 5 years and claimed to be in excellent health.

There are a few other boards online with sections dedicated to the "zero carb" approach.

You won't find a lot of people doing it, but like all things there are aberrations.