LOW CARB - How much "low" is supposed to be ?

I have PCOS and eat super low carb - typically under 20g total carb per day. My average is about 15g.

You don't need carbs with every meal. That's ridiculous. You need appropriate nutrients - there are folks who eat NO carbs (carnivores) and function just fine on fat.

To each his own If you want to go low carb, most folks recommend staying under around 100g. Anything lower than that is up to you, your body, and how you feel.

ronda112 wrote: »

I can only lose weight at a normal pace (2 lbs a week) if I stay with low carb. It can get difficult. I tend to get to a point where I just do not want to eat at all. I try to stay between 30-40 carbs per day. I lose best if under 30. I can tell you one thing that is vitally important. You MUST eat some carbs with every meal. If you do not; you run the risk of bottoming out your blood sugar to a very dangerous level. This can actually cause death. Also if following a low carb diet be aware of the fact that if you start to feel light headed, sweaty, shaky etc, you need to get some carbs fast. I am a nurse of 20+ years and have seen this happen way to often since the Atkins craze. Low carb can be successful way to lose weight, we just need to be careful and mindful of how the body works with food.

This is true for individuals taking supplemental insulin, or a drug that causes the pancreas to secrete a baseline level of insulin - disconnected from eating.

No one with a normal glucose-insulin metabolism needs to worry about death from too few carbs.Our medicines are not good at mimicking the near-instanteous, perfect call-response healthy bodies have to food consumption. If there is too little blood glucose for the food-triggered insulin, the liver, through gluconeogenesis, will provide the glucose to balance the insulin. The risk comes when the glucose-insulin metabolism is damaged, and supplemented with a background level of insulin that has absolutely nothing to with the food consumed OR there is a mismatch between consumed carbs and the insulin bolus (injected insulin). No one with a normal glucose-insulin metabolism needs to worry about death from too few carbs. (That doesn't meat that there aren't some people who do have dangerous hypos on a low-carb diet - but it isn't the low carb that causes the hypo, it is the unrelated damage to the metabolism (e.g. reactive hypoglycemia).

I tend to stay under 15 until dinner and then decide what I want to dinner. I tend to stay between 20-50.