eveshamgal said:
And should I have stayed there?
The other week I atattend to feel really off. I was feeling nauseous all the time, felt cold had a headache etc so I ate some carbs and felt much better.
Was this me in ketosis? Is this something I should aim for and will the wretched feeling go away?
I had lost 19lb but since the end of July, following an increase in exercise, I've found it hard to lose weight. I've even put a bit back on despitey eating habits not changing drastically. This is very frustrating!!!
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I don't know if this helps, but it helped me when I was told it at the start of my low carb diet. Your body uses carbs for energy, meanwhile your fats sit on your body unused. Nutritionally fats have a lot of thing in them that the body needs, but carbs have nothing nutritional in them that the body needs. In fact, go back a few centuries and you'll find people didn't eat many carbs at all.
So when you go on a low carb diet, you are changing your body's fuel from carbs to fats. This is called ketosis. Sometime during the first two weeks on a low carb diet, you will have one or two days where you feel like ****. This is because you're starving your body of it's usual fuel source (carbs) and changing to unleaded (fats).
To make the change over as painless as possible, try to have as few carbs as you can in the first two weeks. I went for 20g a day or less, aiming for 0g in the first two weeks. (A lot of salad, cheese and creams since I'm a veggie). For meat eaters, throw meat into the mix. (any veg is good, barring potatoes and peas, which are high in carbs).
It depends on lots of variables too. Diabetes itself can have some pretty nasty side effects as well. But if you stick to low carb for two weeks, you will go into ketosis. The idea is to stay in it until all the weight is gone by keeping the carbs low. Again, I stuck to 20g a day with a lot of creative cooking and an instant reflex to check the carbs in everything I buy.
I'm now in diabetic remission, 40lbs lighter and still feeling fine. I also cut caffeine as it can also be a cause of T2 diabetes. So get rid of carbs and caffeine for the duration of your diet. Basically, that worked for me. I feel fine on my diet, barring those couple of days during the change over from one fuel source to another.
You never go hungry on this diet, and you don't eat unless you are hungry. It does mean an entire change in what you buy and until more products appear, you tend to need to cook and prepare a bit more that you usually would, but you shouldn't have any adverse effects.
If you're bouncing from low carb to high carb, you'll be in and out of ketosis, which I suspect will make you suffer the first two weeks of it over and over again. But it's hard to tell what caused the tiredness etc. Also, different people process diets differently.
Anyway, hopefully some of this is helpful