I’ve repeatedly mentioned that we eat low carb, and have been asked a few times to say more about this, so I will.

I’ve been eating low carb since September 2007 and I’ll stick with it forever. It’s a topic I could talk about at ridiculous length, but I’ll try to keep it fairly brief here and just give a quick overview of how and why I started, what made me decide to make it permanent and a little about how it has affected our lives.

Life Before Low-Carb…

… was miserable and getting worse.

I’ve never been thin but over the years the weight had really crept up on me in an alarming way. This was not helped by an illness a few years back which meant I was, for a good while, on hormonal medication that pretty much guarantees you’ll pile on the pounds, and did I ever. I was huge and getting bigger.

I tried, really tried, to lose it multiple times.

I ate well generally, in fact the famous food pyramid pretty much reflects the diet I had – little or no junk food, proper home cooked meals, low-fat everything (to the point of paranoia almost). But still I got fatter.

If I ever managed to lose a few pounds on a diet they quickly came back and I was hungry all the time, so sticking to any diet long term was really, really hard.

Anyone can stand hunger for a while, but I know of few who can stick it permanently. Plus I really like food and dieting in the traditional way left me feeling very deprived.

How it Began

I started first, with a great deal of scepticism, after a friend persuaded me to read Atkins. I found even picking that book up hard – I honestly thought it was total nonsense, it flew in the face of conventional nutritional advice and involved eating lots of really “bad” food.

But as I read I discovered I could not find much, if any, fault with the logic behind the dietary recommendations and I’ve enough of a scientific background to be able to filter out hocus pocus.

I figured that trying two weeks of eating this crazy way wouldn’t kill me, so off I went.

It Works!

Two weeks later I’d lost 12lbs, was sleeping better than I had in years, had almost boundless energy, no tiredness during the day, my recurring headache problem was gone, my skin was glowing, I was never hungry, ate loads and loved the food I was eating.

I was stunned, totally blown away. How could I possibly eat three good meals (larger than usual ones even) a day, snack freely on the (rare) occasions when I felt hungry and yet feel great and lose weight?

But I did.

I’d turned the old pyramid pretty much inside out. Meat, fish or eggs were part of almost every meal, sugar was kicked out entirely as were bread, cereals, rice, pasta and potato – the foods that had been the core of my previous way of eating.

The weird thing was I didn’t miss them at all and I still don’t.

How Can it Work and is it Healthy?

Having seen for myself that eating this way definitely resulted in weight loss, I now began to wonder not just how it was possible but whether it was healthy. So much fat – I was eating chicken with the skin on, well marbled beef, full fat cheese and mayo, cream instead of milk; I was frying with oil and putting butter on my veg – I was actually had to keep a food diary to make sure I ate enough fat.

At this point around 60-70% of my daily calories came from fat (that drops a little as you go on), while the standard recommendation is that no more than 30% should be and many low fat diets dip well below 20%.

Was I a heart attack waiting to happen?

So I spent months reading everything I could find. I was lucky enough to have access to various online medical databases of published literature, so I could get to the source of many quoted references. More and more it became clear that there was really no solid scientific basis at all for the dietary advice in which I’d previously so totally believed.

Then Gary Taubes published his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories (later published this side of the Atlantic as The Diet Delusion).

I’d pre-ordered it on Amazon.com and got it a couple of days after it was released. It really showed up the paucity of data, actually the almost complete absence of data, on which most current dietary advice is based. It is a must read for anyone with an interest in nutrition, it really is.

I came to realise that is was not low-carb that had very little science to back it up (though more is needed), it was the whole low-fat/high-fibre dogma that was lacking in scientific support.

While I was reading and learning more about low-carb the weight was still falling off. By Christmas I’d lost over 3 stone and I felt fantastic. This was not a “diet” anymore, this was how I intended to eat forever.

Where I am Now

I’d had a full set of blood tests done just before I started, not deliberately, but by happy coincidence. They were not bad really, given the state I was in. My cholesterol, triglycerides and so on were all in the mid-high normal ranges, though the proportions of good to bad cholesterol could have been better.

I’ve had them repeated recently. The bad stuff is all lower, the good stuff all higher. I have exemplary blood!

I am now more than 5 stone lighter than I was this time last year, in fact I lost that weight in about 8 months.

I’ve taken a break from losing weight for the last three months, partly because I was honestly half afraid I’d never stop losing weight (mad as that may sound) and thought it was time to learn to maintain.

I’m dropping back into weight loss mode now and will lose another bit to get to the right weight for my height. I have total confidence that I can do this, because it isn’t difficult now that I understand completely how to do it.

Low-Carb for Life

I’ve thought long and hard about putting these pictures up, because looking at my old self is, I can assure you, not fun.

But a picture really can say a thousand words – I think the one on the bottom left captures how truly miserable (not to mention truly huge) I really was.

One of the things I did as I went along was dump clothes the moment they were too big. I have a complete new wardrobe because nothing I wore before, down to shoes, fits anymore.

I’ve become used to meeting people I haven’t seen for a while and having them say something like “Holy s***, what happened to you?”

I think the pictures make it clear why I say that I’ll eat this way forever, I’m eating low-carb for life, in every sense.

Tags: Diet, Nutrition, Weight Loss

Posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 9:34 am in Low carb
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