Hi Cratat,
Welcome to the low carb fun. I was similar to you a few months ago, and I had a success story (dropping over 4 stone) in 7 months and reversing the effects of T2 diabetes in the process. I'm going to try to give you the best advice I can from my experience. So here are the things that I found useful to know when starting out. Hopefully it's helpful:
Ketosis
This is the first two weeks of the diet. During this time you want to go as low carb as possible because you need to stop using carbs for energy and start using fats instead. This is the hardest part of the diet. You'll feel like **** because you're removing your energy source. Your body needs to adjust to 'uncarbed' energy. Most people quit at this stage because they feel sleepy or whatever. Don't quit! During ketosis, eat as much as you need. Eat a LOT of fats. Don't do too much exercise, your body needs time to adjust. So essentially for the first couple of weeks, you eat lots of fats, try to have less than 20g carbs a day (0 is better) and be as lazy as you want. The lower your carbs in the first two weeks, the faster your body will go into ketosis, which basically means using fats for energy.
After Ketosis
I stuck at 20g carbs a day because I found I could easily do that. You NEVER go hungry on this diet--eat when you are hungry. I never needed to count calories, I just kept my carbs low no matter what. You eat a lot of fats. Fats are good. Fats are energy to you now. Fats fill you up. The hardest part to get your head around is that fats are good. Once you get there, you find the dieting very easy.
Exercise
Yep, it's good to do this, but I'm a lazy sod who didn't do any. Seriously, there are snails who moved faster than I did on my diet. I still lost all my weight with no problems. Don't be a sloth like me, but you don't have to train for the Olympics either. Reasonable exercise should be fine. As my PE teacher once said in my year end report: "Claire excels at badmington because it's the sport that requires the least movement." Harsh, but true. Even so, I'm a size 12 now, which at 5'8" and being a sloth means the diet works with or without exercise. You'll be healthier with exercise of course. But one thing to remember, at 5 stone overweight, you're weightlifting all day, every day. Sometimes you have a good cardio just from walking around when you've got extra weight.
Diet
There are many foods you can eat on a low carb diet, so I've listed the main good foods and the main ones to avoid. In my experience, with a bit of baking, there aren't any foods you can't have, so I'll try to post up replacements next to the bad foods too.
Good Low Carb Foods - These are foods that have low or no carbs. You can eat as much as you want of them:
- Meat, fish, poultry (0 carbs, eat as much as you want. Red meat, white meat, it doesn't matter. They're all fat friendly, protein filled good things.)
- Cheese, cream, butter, eggs (0 carbs, eat as much as you want. Full of fats and proteins.)
- Leafy green vegetables (0 carbs, eat as much as you want. Full of vitamins, fibre and healthy nutrients.)
- Salad vegetables (0 carbs, eat as much as you want. Full of vitamins, fibre and healthy nutrients.)
- Nuts (0 carbs, eat as much as you want. Full or protein, fats and vitamins. Check individual nuts, but peanuts and almonds etc. are all negligable carbs).
- Berries (lowest carb fruits. Berries are the lowest carb fruits you can have, so if you're dying for some fruit, rasperries or strawberries (or any berries) are the best choice.
- Haricot Beans (low carb, protein, fibre and vitamins - used to make baked beans).
A general rule of thumb on 'Good foods' are based on the low carb count and high nutrients. To find the net carbs you minus the Fibre from the Carbohydrate. So for example, a can of haricot beans had 21g carbs in it, but it has 19g of fibre. So the net carbs for the can is 2g carbs. You need to get into the habit of checking the carbs on everything.
Bad High Carb Foods - These are the ones you need to avoid:
Foods you wouldn't think were good, but...
- Pre-made food. (Everything made by the food industry is loaded with carbs. You can't buy a salad without pasta in it. You can't buy a can of baked beans without 20g of sugar in it.)
- Bread. (Most breads have a stupidly high amount of carbs in).
- Baked goods (pies, pasties etc. You can make your own low carb ones, but bought ones suck).
- Cakes, crisps, chocolate, cookies (Only edible if you make your own or buy low carb ones).
- Potatoes (the most unhealthy vegetable on the planet).
- Sugar - This is one thing you avoid at all costs
- Starch - This is the other thing you avoid at all costs.
Food that you think is good, but...
- Chocolate (low carb milk chocolate is 1g-3g net carbs per bar. Dark chocolate is usually negligable carbs. Chocolate has iron, vitamins and all kinds of good stuff in it. Just avoid the sugar and starch-filled bars (Look for Atkins bars or no added sugar/low carb ones).
- Chocolate eclairs - ranging from 7g - 12g carbs, one of these is actually an okay treat after ketosis. It's better for you than a piece of bread is.
- An entire turkey cooked in fats - 0 carbs. Enjoy!
- Surf n turf - 0 carbs.
- Bacon and eggs - 0 carbs
- BLT (take off the bread and eat the rest - 0 carbs)
- A bacon double cheese burger (Remove bread bun, throw away fries and eat the burger, cheese and bacon 0 carbs.)
- Mixed Grill from a kebab takeaway (0 carbs)
What the hell can I eat? Food Alternatives...
- Breakfast cereal (designed by the devil. Avoid like the plague)
- Low fat (anything with the words 'low fat' on it is overloaded with carbs. It's designed to make you hungry and fat).
- Pasta, rice, breads (carb, carb, carb)
- Milk (use whole fat or cream. Cream is better on the carbs).
- Citrus fruit (Engineered to have more sugar in it. A satsuma is not a fruit. It's a lump of sugar disguised as one). You need to be wary of most fruits.
- Yoghurt (unless it's greek, it's going to be low fat and carb-filled)
- Potatoes (worst vegetable ever).
- Replace sugar with Splenda or Stevia or a sweetener of your choice.
- Potatoes can be replaced with a vegetable called a Daikon. Tastes the same but without the starch. It won't fry into a decent chip unfortunately, but mashed daikon is pretty much a mashed potato with no carbs.
- Slim Pasta - 0 carbs. Tastes like pasta, looks like pasta, is actually a vegetable. Great stuff to try.
- Bread - There are lots of low carb bread recipes. I like mine best of course
- Flour - Carbquik is good for pastry. For bread you can also use Allinson's wholemeal flour and wheat bran to make a high fibre bread with low carbs. Almond or coconut flour works great in cakes and scones.
- Pies, pastries and cakes - Low carb flour and some of the great recipes online.
- Sweets, chocolates etc - low carb chocolate bars are really yummy. I like the chocolate orange from Cavalier (called Woodies). It's nicer than the other chocolate orange and 1g net carbs per bar.
- Creamy desserts - oh hell yes! Pavlova with berries, cream and low carb meringue. Low carb cream dougnuts, low carb cream scones -- okay you need to make them yourself, but it doesn't mean you can't have them.
My favourite place to buy low carb things when I CBA to cook: www.avidlite.co.uk
Pretty much, barring crisps and chips, there isn't anything I haven't found a food replacement for. Anyway, I hope all this helps
I think my favourite lesson on this diet was that I could eat cream cakes all day and lose weight.
