Good for you and you weight loss and blood sugar improvement.
Do you find this diet hard to maintain, because of the carb restrictions? I followed the same type of diet some years ago, and was successful in losing over 30 lbs.
It was very hard for me to continue on it, when I stopped the diet the weight went back on.
Yes, the low-carb diet is notorious for not being able to maintain after weight loss. Part of the problem is that we have highly evolved taste buds that are receptive to sugars. You don't have to eat pure sugars to get these taste buds activated, the act of chewing your food turns starchy carbs into sugars right in your mouth. We are stuck with these taste buds as part of our evolutionary heritage. Primitive man didn't have refined sugars in his normal diet, so the taste receptors probably helped him to distinguish foods that had nutritional value because they tasted sweet after chewing a while (my hypothesis), and he learned to reject food sources that tasted bad no matter how much they were chewed.
Whatever the real truth is, these days we are constantly surrounded by high-carb food sources that are being pushed at us all the time. Carbs are addictive by nature, but you do not need them. Type 1 insulin-dependent diabetics following Dr. Richard Bernstein's diet have lived on less than 20 grams/day for years and got healthier, not sicker. He's 80 years old himself, and would very likely have died a long time ago from his diabetes complications (Type 1 since he was 12 years old) if he had followed a conventional diet plus high-dose insulin.
Your body can turn protein into glucose, and even though you cannot directly turn dietary fat into glucose, your liver can do it enzymatically through a multi-step backdoor mechanism called gluconeogenesis.
http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis
How to defeat this problem?
- Make sure you are getting sufficient caloric content from quality foods. Most people trying to lose weight get extreme and want to see results fast. They cut the carbs, but they feel compelled to cut back on everything. Your body thinks you are starving it and you feel hungry all the time. Increase your fats, not the other way. Look for good fat sources like avocados, olive oil, flax seed oil, oily fish like salmon and sardines, whole eggs, and yes, fatty cuts of beef. Stay away from oils high in Omega-6 as they promote systemic inflammation, which is the real source of coronary artery disease, not dietary fat. If you can afford the stuff, get grass-fed rib steaks. They have best fat as it is much higher in Omega-3 than grain-fed beef.
- Eat several smaller meals a day. Six minimum. This will reduce your food cravings by stabilizing your blood sugar. Most people who are overweight have problems with hormonal control of blood sugar. For many this will gradually progress to Type 2 diabetes, but the way I see it is that Type 2 is just a continuum of earlier insulin resistance. 20 years ago when I spiked by first fasting blood sugar of 115 and was given the "pre-diabetic" diagnosis, my doctor at the time told me that I would eventually become diabetic no matter what I did, but that I could stall its onset if I lost a lot of weight. How to do it? Cut out the fat and eat a lot more carbs. LOL!
- Recognize that this isn't a diet, it is a permanent lifestyle change. It will effect everything in your life, especially in you interpersonal relationships. Nobody wants a "diet nut" at a dinner party. Social dietary pressures can be enormous, and most of the "good" stuff people will want to treat you to are loaded with carbs. Cave in a little now and then and the addiction starts to build, just like an alcoholic having a beer every now and then leads to a return to bad times. If you are diabetic, tell them your can't eat it because of your condition. If you're not diabetic, lie and tell them you are anyway. No one should feel pressured into putting anything into their bodies.
- Reduce stress in your life. Stress increases cortisol production in your body, which has many negative effects, not the least of which is to seriously mess with your glucose regulation. Just yesterday I became aware of a horrible family situation that had me on the verge of tears all day. I as so stressed out about it that I can't think of much else, and had a terrible night's sleep. I woke up to find my fasting blood sugar was 145... the highest it's been in over two weeks. And I hadn't had a tiny speck of carbs since 14 hours before that.
Stress is a modern day problem. Primitive man rarely experienced daily stress of the type we have today. A situation came up, he had a stress reaction, the problem was resolved quickly (or he perished), and he went back to eating grubs and berries. These days we are so used to being stressed that we actually seek it. Just look at how life-or-death the majority of the members here feel about a silly game of pool. I can't think of a more stressful life than that of a professional pool player... unless your name is Shane, Darren, Dennis, etc. and you are positive you will have a roof over your head next month. Relax. Life is supposed to be a fun game, one that nobody ever wins in the end anyway. Prepare for the future, but live in the moment. That's all we really ever have.
- Accept failure. Quitting an habitual activity is terribly difficult, even if it's not physically addictive like alcohol, heroin, or tobacco are. Heck, I used to be addicted to fly fishing, just like some of you are addicted to pool. Some folks are even addicted to conditioning and health.
We are what we eat, but we also are what we do. It is just very difficult to change in major ways. Even socially, people don't view us the same anymore if we change too much. Quitting stuff is tough on so many levels, and we are filled with feelings of self-loathing when we fail. Soon we are self-medicating with the very thing that we were trying to quit in the first place, and the guilt continues. Don't be so hard on yourself.
You quit things by learning how to quit things. I've quit smoking maybe twenty times in my life. I even went back once after seven years - a smoke here and there, then only smoking at the bar and leaving the rest of the pack there, then back to two packs a day for years. As of now I am smoke-free for over a year now. I can't even stand to look at people on movies smoking anymore, it just disgusts me. But I know it's there, ready to rear its ugly head at any time. If it ever does, I'm just gonna quit again. In fact, I've gotten really good at quitting stuff by now, so I guess in some twisted way, tobacco has had a positive effect on my life.
- 96% of dieters who lose a significant amount of weight without surgical intervention gain it all back, and maybe a little more. Those are just terrible odds to face. Better to not even try and accept who you are and be a happy fatty. I choose to think that I will be one of the 4%, and let the other 96% figure out what went wrong while they commiserate over a big bowl of Ben and Jerry's. The power of a positive outlook cannot be underestimated.
