Weight Management

[Keith Saunders]

I'm after some ideas please for maintaining my current weight, while still being able to exercise and keeping my carbs low. According to NHS calculator I should be consuming 2600 calories a day - this is before any exercise allowance. I find that eating lo-carb also means low calorie and I am continuing to lose weight, which I really don't want or need to do anymore (suspect tomorrow it will show I've lost 3st since my diagnosis in December).

Any ideas, thoughts etc greatly appreciated.

 

[jpscloud]

Hi Keith, congratulations on your weight loss and improved HbA1c!

This is the problem a lot of people have on low carb - getting enough calories to prevent starvation mode or further weight loss after you are where you want to be.

The answer is protein and fat, a good way to get both up is to make savoury mince with whatever carbs/vegetables you have on your way of eating (I'm trying carnivore so no vegetables for me but I do have a lot of weight to lose).

Use the fatty mince which happily is the cheapest, 20% fat beef mince or lamb mince. Very flavourful and lots of lovely calories. If you eat eggs, butter those suckers up and eat more of them. If you eat yogurt (I avoid anything except Greek yogurt because of added sugars) add some cream to it.

If you haven't been eating much fat it's a good idea to increase it gradually so you don't get an upset stomach!

 

[Outlier]

My very low carb/keto is no way low calorie. I agree with jpscloud that the way to go is good-quality protein and natural fats/olive oil, and to go easy on the fats to begin with.

 

[Antje77]

I find that eating lo-carb also means low calorie

I eat things like pork scratchings, cheese, bacon, eggs, mayonnaise, a generous knob of butter on my veggies, nuts, cream.
All high calorie foods, that often improve the flavour of a low carb dish.

 

[MissMuffett]

I don’t count calories anymore just carbs but I know the butter, eggs, cheese and double cream I consume are very high in calories

 

[Deleted member 532959]

Might be a good idea to spend a little time weighing/tracking your food. Accurate digital scales are cheap on Amazon, and you can log your foods with a free account on cronometer. The bonus with cronometer is a pretty solid nutrition tracker.

The Most Accurate Nutrition Tracking App | Cronometer

Eat smarter and live better. Cronometer is your personalized nutrition app to track macronutrients and micronutrients and count calories.

cronometer.com

There are also various online calculators for BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate), and if you have some kind of watch tracker you can get a loose estimate of what your body is burning throughout the day. If not, there're also various online trackers to estimate energy output.

Some don't find tracking much fun, but if you log enough foods/meals, after a while you can pretty much judge things by sight. Weighing yourself daily, but only taking the average of those results (Weekly, for example) will give you a good idea of what's happening, without the daily influence of water-weight fluctuations and variablity of the weight of food in your body.

One last tip, to make tracking easier: Use a voice-recorder (Most smartphones have an app for this) to speak the weights of the foods you're preparing. It's easier than having to stop and write things down...especially if you've got messy fingers.

 

[Outlier]

We have indeed been told (sold?) this for some considerable time, though modern research does indicate that eating natural fats that come with the proteins, plus butter/olive oil, do not impact on heart health or cause furred-up blood vessels, which makes a lot of sense. Some earlier research indicates similarly though has possibly been suppressed to a certain extent, so we can keep an eye on those newer conclusions and interesting developments, as it will be some while before anything that impacts on Big Pharma sales won't get into the mainstream Press any time soon.