Welcome! In some ways LC is very simple and in others there is a lot to learn. You should visit the Launch Pad for resources. LC is different for everyone but its usually <100 gr of carbs a day, moderate protein, and the rest of your diet will be filled in with fat. Some here do little to no carbs and some are slow carbs, meaning they eat fewer carbs than the standard diets but more than 100 gr. I would suggest slowly reducing your carb intake if you aren't sure its something you can do long term or if you aren't sure how low you want to go.

I think that would be a good place to start, but don't worry about going over on fat at first, even if it makes you go over on calories. The fat will help make the transition a little easier and after awhile your body simply won't want as much to eat. Also, don't worry about cutting back too much on sodium at first. When you start cutting carbs your body will let go of a lot of water and this can give you the low carb "flu" that you may have heard about.

Welcome to the LC club, I'm glad to hear that your family wants to embrace healthier lifestyle, kudos!
There is a lot of info to educate yourselves and learn as you go into this wonderful journey. I'm pretty healthy person, but my family not so much, my dad has T2 but he's listening to what I have to say, though he is stubborn lol. Anyway, decide how low you want to start on carbs, Google Keto calculator and input your numbers based on your goals, this will give you some good starting numbers and go from there. Befriend people from this group and see their diaries, we all share recipes and advice to motivate and help each other. When we lose, we are happy and when we don't we complain but we have great support around here. Stick around, ask questions and you'll be on your way

Fifteen years ago I lost a ton of weight and totally made over my meal plans. My "healthy" breakfast three or four days a week became a bowl of Cheerios, skim milk and a banana. Over the years my weight climbed from 160 to 220. Just a pound or two per year but always upward. I also developed high cholesterol, gout, arthritis and finally T2.

It only took a few tests with my new blood glucose meter to realize what my healthy breakfast was doing compared with other options. My last bowl of Cheerios was Oct 2014. As of this morning that 160 weight is only one and a half pounds away.

There are other benefits as well. I can now carry a grandchild up a flight of stairs without my knees or breath giving out. I also have a reasonable expectation of holding a great grandchild someday. I think that's a reasonable trade for a bowl of Cheerios.

I have lost 105 pounds since July 21. I think low carb is so easy. I stick to under 20g of carbs a day. The first 2 weeks I did have the carb flu (felt like a mild hangover) After that was over all my cravings for carbs/added sugar went away. I eat mostly meat, cheese, eggs, green vegetables. I do eat some sugar free candy once in awhile, but not often. If you search low carb recipes a bunch will come up. There are plenty of things to cook for meals and desserts.

If you reduce carbs below 100g or so, it seems to suppress some growth hormones. So if your kids are still growing, I wouldn't go too low carb with them. Also, they do "fortify" bread with vitamins, so if you exclude bread from their diet, make sure they eat all their veggies.

It's 100% fine to exclude just about all processed foods from their diet. Sugary drinks, including fruit juices, are probably the worst offenders.

You can easily cut processesed junk food for your kids. They can still eat bread, rice, meat, fruits and veggies. The culprit is low fat stuff that is laden with sugar and High fructose syrop, and advertised as "healthy", pretty packaged poison. If I had young children they won't be having any of that, no cereals or any other boxed "goodies"

The keto diet was originally promoted for children with epilepsy, so there's actually a lot of info out there for children and keto diet / recipes. I believe the goals and implementation vary, though, so you may want to do more research and discuss it with your doctor.

An interesting story about "what kids crave":
I have been told all my life that children love white bread and turn their noses up at that weirdo whole wheat bread. When I was raising my daughter, I pretty much only fed her wheat bread. She still prefers it to this day (she's 23 years old). I also didn't feed her a lot of sodas and junk. She still prefers to drink milk and V8. I'm so proud of her!
Her breakfast of choice when I visited her last: Scrambled eggs and cheese.

-T.

wabmester wrote: »

If you reduce carbs below 100g or so, it seems to suppress some growth hormones. So if your kids are still growing, I wouldn't go too low carb with them. Also, they do "fortify" bread with vitamins, so if you exclude bread from their diet, make sure they eat all their veggies.

It's 100% fine to exclude just about all processed foods from their diet. Sugary drinks, including fruit juices, are probably the worst offenders.

Do you have citations for that? The only research I've seen that suggests such are the classical keto studies, where the kids were fed 60-75% of the calories they needed and what essentially amounts to fortified soybean oil. Everything else is the same myths that people tried (and failed) to apply to adults on LCHF. On the contrary, there seems to be a fair amount of evidence in favor of children eating lower carb (and in at least certain cases, even keto).

Then, of course, there's always the Inuit example. It's not like Inuit children had more access to carbs than their parents did.

And the fact that one of the things children need most are fats, to support their growing brain. Oh, and it's the presence of K2 in the diet (found in fats) that has the most profound effect on skeletal development, not so much calcium (after all, the US has the highest intake of dairy and its accompanying calcium, and yet most of us don't have jaws large enough to accommodate our wisdom teeth).

http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/adhd_low_fat_diet.html
http://christinecronau.com/health-benefits/healthy-children/
http://www.drbriffa.com/2009/05/08/higher-fat-rather-than-high-carb-diet-appears-to-have-benefits-for-nursing-mothers-and-their-babies/

Dragonwolf wrote: »

Do you have citations for that? The only research I've seen that suggests such are the classical keto studies, where the kids were fed 60-75% of the calories they needed and what essentially amounts to fortified soybean oil.

I didn't look into the details. I just remembered reading a keto kids study like this one:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18676520

Seventy-five children provided growth data. Weight z scores decreased significantly between baseline and 3, 6, and 12 months; height z scores showed no change at 3 months but decreased significantly by 6 and 12 months.

I've also read studies that showed reduced IGF-1 levels in ketogenic diets. IGF-1 is a growth factor.

Teneko wrote: »

wrenna, I might have bad advice, but...I tend to look at "good carbs" as being the ones in foods that are high in fibre. So for example broccoli has 4 carbs and 2 fibre, so the net carbs is only 2 total. Most foods I eat are under 3g net carbs and some days I'm pretty close to 0.
My goal is to stay in ketosis and be a fat burning machine to lose weight. My daily carb limit is under 20 - it's actually set to 16 (5%). My fat is set to 75% and protein makes up the remaining 20%. Total daily calories for weight loss: 1300.
If you add more fat to your diet, you might feel fuller longer.

-T.

This is how I do it too. Although, I don't normally even count my calories or my fat intake. I just add up the 20 carbs in my head


Good carbs come from veggies that are low in sugar, (Mostly the green veggies, besides sweet peas) Butter, mayo, sour cream, heavy whipping cream, coconut oil, etc. All natural food, without added sugar.

Dragonwolf wrote: »

wabmester wrote: »

Dragonwolf wrote: »

Do you have citations for that? The only research I've seen that suggests such are the classical keto studies, where the kids were fed 60-75% of the calories they needed and what essentially amounts to fortified soybean oil.

I didn't look into the details. I just remembered reading a keto kids study like this one:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18676520

Seventy-five children provided growth data. Weight z scores decreased significantly between baseline and 3, 6, and 12 months; height z scores showed no change at 3 months but decreased significantly by 6 and 12 months.

I've also read studies that showed reduced IGF-1 levels in ketogenic diets. IGF-1 is a growth factor.

Yeah, that looks like classical Ketogenic diet, which is the glorified soybean oil, but it's hard telling, since I can't get access to the full paper to see what the kids are actually eating. The MCT diet is essentially the same thing, but with coconut oil instead (seriously, you're supposed to get 70-80% of your calories from MCT oil) and more carbohydrates. Here's a good breakdown of the four interventions for children with epilepsy -- http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2012/263139/tab1/

From that paper http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2012/263139/ :

The diet restricts daily calories calculated by the patient’s dietitian with a distribution of 85–90% long-chain fatty acid, 6–8% protein, and 2–4% carbohydrates

That said, your claim was "anything under 100g," while the medical ketogenic diets typically limit them to 10-20g (usually, it's classical keto, or modified Atkins, MCT is rarely used outside of the hospital setting, because MCT oil is expensive and not covered by insurance usually).

I agree with Dragonwolf, you can't extrapolate from this study, which looks at the effect of a classical ketogenic diet vs. and MCT ketogenic diet for children with epilepsy to the general population of children without epilepsy. It isn't valid to pull quotes from a particular study like this and assume it applies to any kid on a low carb diet. I have access to the full text of the study, and the description of the diets is pretty poor, they don't describe them very well at all, except to say that in the MCT diet up to 60% of calories came from MCT oil! That is not a varied diet which someone feeding a child a "normal" low carb diet would follow. The study also restricted calories as well. The point of the study was to compare "classic" ketogenic diet (which they didn't describe at all) to the MCT ketogenic diet. They did not compare a regular diet to a ketogenic diet. In addition, some of the children had other health issues besides epilepsy.

My son is 12.5 and started a low carb diet on his own a week an a half ago, after seeing DH and I have success with it for the past 2.5 years. He unfortunately inherited many of the issues DH and I have (DS has already been diagnosed with Hashimoto's, for example), and certainly is headed towards insulin resistance on a SAD diet, even though his insulin level are "ok" right now. I am completely comfortable with my DS eating like DH and I do. For more "normal" kids who don't have the same genetic predispositions that DS does, I would recommend taking a look at a primal or paleo approach. They allow some starches and plenty of fruits and vegetables but avoid grains. Frankly, no one needs grains (although I do eat some gluten containing foods on occasion myself ).