It's hard to cut carbs in my household as it's full of tempting carbs and junk food, no veg at all apart from potatoes.
I am trying to keep my carb intake to 200 grams a day. I limit myself to 70 grams for breakfast, 30 grams for lunch and 100 grams for dinner. Tonight's dinner was grilled fish fingers, onion rings and garlic breaded mushrooms, three of each with a portion of mushy peas.
My family had chips and bread with dinner, which looked so delicious and now cooking strudel for afters.
Hi
@akindrat18
I have been reading through your threads and have a couple of thoughts that might help you. Just recently I have started working with a youngster, about your age and your weight and spending some time explaining to him some of the evidence about why carbohydrates are so damaging to many people.
We sat together and watched parts of the Noakes Deposition hearings- which are available on you tube , where Tim Noakes describes in reasonably understandable terms what went wrong.
Currently your weight and diabetes issues dominate your life, so why not devote a half an hour a day to following the evidence, where the history and what is happening to you is laid out in an understandable way? when you come across something that seems particularly relevant to your situation then why not then show part of that clip to your family - the clips themselves are only 15 -30 minutes long and some of the relevant points only a minute or two.
Take a look at this part of the hearing - hearing 41
About ten minutes from the start of that it shows an example of how this works and why it makes sense to completely cut carbs from your diets. At the extreme is shows a guy who lost 80 kilos in a few months by totally cutting out carbs. Clearly he is an extreme example - but that's not to say he's unique.
Once we had started doing this, my young friend then started describing his diet to me and it became clear to me that a big source of his problems was actually not even food really, but rather fizzy drinks. He was getting more calories and carbohydrates from fizzy drinks than I had ever imagined possible. I see there have been quite a lot of discussions about what you are trying to eat, but haven't seen anything much about drinks. The high blood sugars, will mean that you are constantly thirsty, so if you are drinking any of the drinks currently being marketed- sports drinks, energy drinks, fizzy drinks then these could be dramatically increasing your blood sugars. These need to be switched to the zero calorie versions at first and eventually ideally just water.
In the same clip , Tim Noakes also explains that the more overweight you are, the more insulin resistant you are and the more any carbohydrates will act to raise your blood sugar and with that your level of hunger and thirst. He also explains why the more overweight you are, the more likely it is that drastically reducing your carbohyrdrates will help you lose weight and control blood glucose, whereas simply limiting them will put you in a position where you are both still hungry and still not losing much weight.
My friend told me about how he has tried to lose weight before and the almost superhuman achievement it was in terms of will power necessary to lose weight through low fat especially when faced with the food his friends and family are eating. Your own weight loss in those circumstances is impressive especially if your family simply do not appreciate the damage that is being done by the carbohydrates that you are eating.
I appreciate that you have found it hard to stick to a low carb diet, however it is likely that because you are still eating too many carbs, even when lower than normal, you are also never actually getting rid of the driving hunger and thirst that goes with it.
My young friend, watched more of these hearings, and then concluded for himself that sugar and carbohydrates is poison to him, and that he was going to go "cold turkey" on the carbs for a while and see what happens.
In order to do this he effectively went on a " egg and something with butter" diet.
Each meal is about 400 - 600 calories and contains say
2 eggs, plus 2 rashes of bacon, or a sausage, or a beefburger , or 40g cheese plus two of either 50 g, mushroom, onions, tomatoes, spinach or any other above ground vegetable sauteed in about 10 g butter. He found he particularly liked green beans cooked that way. At the same time he decided to go to only drinking calorie free flavoured water.
So far the eggs have been poached, fried (in butter) , made into an omelette, scrambled, and the meats and vegetables have been cooked or finished in a little butter.
He has also tried getting a squash and chopping that into chip sized chunks and sauteeing those in some butter - the result is a pretty tasty chip. So he can still have "beefburger and chips" - just a different kind of chips .
He has also tried boiling a cauliflower then putting the cooked veg through a blender with some salt, pepper and cream or butter added - he swears that the results taste better than mashed potatoes. He did the same with carrots same positive " I like it" result.
He has tried making onion and mushroom gravy by frying some onions and mushrooms with a little butter, then adding in some water, gravy granules and a bit of cream with a teaspoon of flour and some salt and pepper - so that made "bangers and mash" and onion gravy - again almost carb free,
He is currently in a state of slight shock that having powered through the first two or three days, he is not feeling hungry and his weight is dropping fast. Indeed he has found that actually he only needs two of these meals a day most of the time and most of all that the food itself tastes wonderful . The reason low carb, high fat works, is not because there is some magic included in the high fat, it generally works because once you start eating it you stop feeling as hungry and so you end up eating much lower calories than before but without the hunger.
If you have a go at this type of diet, you will be eating almost no carbs so you would need to be very careful about the insulin you are taking. I have shown another T2 guy on insulin how to do this and he has found he can reduce his insulin a lot.
The really cool thing about eating this way, is that to the rest of the world it looks like you suddenly went hell for leather to actually try to kill yourself by eating all the stuff that everyone is scared of, yet for you its actually probably the right answer and will not only make you feel better but also improve your risk of a heart attack as well!
If you then top that off with switching your alcoholic drink choice from beer to a " single malt whisky " served with iced water on the side - (in moderation
you can rapidly become the " coolest" guy on the block.
Give it a try - it might work for you too.
I advised my young friend to do this because this is exactly what I have been doing and the results of that show up in my signature below . It worked for me !
good luck
