LOSE WEIGHT BY COUNTING CARBS!
(From chapter 3 of "How To Save Your Family From Obesity")
Please do read and digest the previous chapter on controlling hunger before reading this chapter. It is an essential first step in weight management.
First, I want to tell you how I came up with the weight-loss program I am about to describe.
As a pediatric endocrinologist, I care for many youngsters with type 1 diabetes. Diabetics are very aware of what they eat. They have to be, since most of the carbohydrate they eat is covered by insulin injections. The majority of my diabetics do this by counting in grams the carbohydrate content of all their meals and snacks, and they then base their insulin dose on this value.
Like everybody else, young diabetics can gain too much weight; but I noticed something extremely interesting. I could hold a detailed conversation with my diabetic patients about their food intake, since they knew exactly how much they were eating. I could then suggest that they cut back on the carbohydrate content of a meal or snack. This did not mean, of course, that they would do exactly what I suggested, but a lot of them did and these patients were able to control their body weight very effectively. Why, I reasoned, could not everyone who needed to control or lose some weight do this, since it offered so many advantages over other weight-loss methods?
I call this method of weight loss carbohydrate regulation, and it is done by counting the amount of carbohydrate you eat in grams and then controlling this amount. I will describe how to do this shortly. As you work with this system, you will soon appreciate how easy, flexible, and effective it is. And most important – because vegetables and fruits are “free” carbohydrates and are not counted, this program allows you to continue eating in an American-Mediterranean way without having to turn to fad, or even other conventional diets, that may work for a limited time but then leave you stranded.
It is worthwhile to briefly examine some other popular weight loss methods to see how they differ from carbohydrate regulation.
One of the most common forms of weight control taught nowadays is portion control. The theory behind this is that people have gotten used to heaping up their plates with food and they need to be taught what constitutes an appropriate serving size for each food. Countless dietitians have achieved excellent results with this method. However, it provides no means for adjusting food intake according to how much weight loss is desired and for compensating for dietary indiscretions; and like most other methods its effectiveness wanes over time.
Another popular weight loss method is calorie counting. This method makes a lot of sense. Obesity is a problem of too many calories, so just cut back on them. However, not many people are prepared to go around every day with a calorie counter and calculator by their side. Diet plans with pre-determined calorie values are one way of making this method work, but the system has limited flexibility and once there is a bit of cheating the whole plan often starts to collapse. Calorie-based systems also push you in the direction of reducing fat, since fat contains twice as many calories as the equivalent amount of carbohydrate or protein.
So why not lose weight by focusing on fat restriction? There is, after all, a wealth of scientific literature on the effectiveness of low-fat diets for losing weight. The problem with this method is that whenever you skimp on fat, your carbohydrate intake increases. This is fine as long as you replace that missing fat with good-quality carbohydrate, such as whole grains, vegetables and fruit (as in our American-style Mediterranean meal planning). However, if you replace fat with sugary foods and highly refined starches, you are setting yourself up for increased hunger and failure.
The method described here of carbohydrate regulation aims for weight stabilization or gradual weight loss achieved by controlling the amount of carbohydrates you eat. This is very different from low-carb dieting, which plunges you immediately into severe carbohydrate restriction and drastic weight loss.
At first glance, low-carb dieting sounds very tempting. Lose a lot of weight quickly and then get on with life. It can also be a tremendous morale booster to watch excess fat melt away. You can do it!
Unfortunately, there is a big downside. During severe weight loss, metabolic responses are set into motion that try to push your weight back to where it was previously. What is happening in scientific terms is that your basal metabolic rate is decreasing. Basal metabolic rate is the energy expended by your body just to keep it ticking – your lungs breathing and your heart pumping. Because of this change in basal metabolic rate, the calories needed to keep at your new weight also go down. Therefore, to keep your weight steady, you now need to eat less food than you did prior to dieting. This can be very challenging and it is one reason so many dieters find that over time their weight gradually creeps back to where it was before they embarked on their crash diet and a year or two later precious little has been achieved. Some people even overshoot and end up heavier than they were before they began dieting. This is the well-known “yo-yo” effect.
So don’t go so fast. Lose weight gradually using the carb-regulated plan outlined in this chapter and avoid large shifts in energy balance.
Depending on how much weight you need to lose, a timeframe of three to six months, or even longer, may be realistic. Remember - it took time to gain all that weight and it is going to take time to get rid of it.
A very workable plan is to lose one to two pounds a week.
Another major difference between low-carb diets and the carb-regulated diet described in this chapter is that low-carb diets advise large increases in either dietary protein (as in the Zone Diet) or fat (as in the Atkins diet) to partially replace the carbs that have been eliminated. There is probably little harm in doing this over the short term. However, for most people obesity is not a short-term problem. High-fat and high-protein diets are abnormal diets and not a prescription for long-term health. By contrast, in this plan, since the carbs are regulated and not severely restricted, the amount of fat and protein you will be eating will not be much different from what you have been eating all along. Furthermore, because you will be adding additional vegetables and fruits, the percentage of carbohydrate in your diet will be little changed, and may even be slightly higher than it was previously.
This is how it works:
The only foods regulated are grains, starches, beans, nuts, and foods containing a lot of sugar, including sugar-containing drinks. All other carbohydrates, such as vegetables and fruits, are “free items.”
For further details see the continuation of this chapter in our new book "Saving Your Family From Obesity".
