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

My husband occasionally goes zero carb for a week or two. He basically consumes only items that specifically say 0% carbs and 0g carbs. He can drop up to 20 pounds when he does it.

Not sure what the point is since he doesn't maintain the weightloss but hey...different strokes.

Technically, it's almost impossible to consume no carbs at all. Even eating just meat and fat, you're unlikely to really be consuming absolutely none. Throw in organ meats or brains, and you'll get a "bunch" [relatively speaking]. Lots of shellfish have carbs, too. Then your eggs and high fat dairy will have some trace amounts. Still, for all intents and purposes, when you're below 5g a day (not net... that's total), you can safely consider yourself no carb.

Someone mentioned nuts. Generally, those are considered non-approved food items by truly no carb people. Even around an oz of macadamia nuts will have more total carbs than no carb people eat in a day.

How is it done? Basically, just eat meat. The eating plan itself is extremely simple (meats, eggs, high-fat dairy). What vegetables are allowed are trace amounts of spices. That's just about it.

While the eating plan is simple, following such a plan is often extremely hard (if not impossible) for most people. The idea that a salad is a "bad" food is shocking. The thought of 0g of fiber is terrifying. The concerns about deficiancies like scurvy (although unfounded) can drive one to a panic. If you are asking this because you know someone who eats that way, ask them how they do it.

I did this by accident a couple of months ago :blushing:

I'm not new to keto & had been using it to keep my BG low. What I hadn't realized is, the longer you keto, the better your BG's trend (if you have an issue to begin with).

For BG's I needed to watch my total carbs but for keto I needed to watch net. So I ignored net and went with gross at some point to make things simpler. Looking back at my diary, I saw there were days when I only got 20-30 gross carbs per day & when the fiber was subtracted...well...it was waaay low :noway:

I increased my carbs to about 70 g and some days as much as 100 net & stayed within my BG targets but the waay upper limit (as in 90-100 mg/dl for fasting & 120-140 mg/dl post meals).

I've moved back down the to < 30 g per day after a few weeks and my FBG is reliably in the 80's and post meal BG's are < 110 mg/dl.

Nuts are my downfall. Cashews specifically, for 8 g of carbs for a small handful, it's too expensive for me to spend on a snack unless it's close to bedtime -___-

I try to save the lion's share of my carbs for meals.

Do you cry when you think about bread? I do

and pasta

Mmm. Bacon and eggs. ON toast. Mmmm


I think I might be being an idiot. Sorry

Gonna try this pizza crust tonight:

http://imgur.com/a/dT5I2

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.

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.