Low-fat low-carb is possible, but horrible, and not good for you long-term. Bodybuilders, and athletes trying to make weight, eat this way (trying to get as many calories and nutrients as possible from pure protein and low-carb produce). It will reduce your body fat and level your blood glucose out, for sure.
Low-carb high fat is delicious and nutritious. Although if you have higher cholesterol naturally, I think it’s best not to go absolutely nuts on the fats. But I’ve known a lot of people who eat this way, and many of them have improved their lipid panel by the numbers by eating plenty of natural fat but cutting way down on carbs (lowered LDL and trigs, brought HDL up).
Although I’m not eating this way currently, I feel and look my absolute best eating lots of fat and protein (and vegetables) and managing my carbohydrate fairly strictly. I have some chronic health issues (migraines, blood sugar problems - which are a big migraine trigger, IBS) and it makes everything SO much better. My blood lipids are naturally on the low side but my ratios improved on this type of diet.
Read the Paleo Solution by robb Wolfe. Baiscally it is carbs from mainly vegetables, protein and meat. The right fat is your friend and grains/grain products are not.
to answer your question, there are only 3 types of macronutrients, carbs, fats and protein. I am sure you can find some protein that is very low in fat or carbs but I am not sure what that would be. boneless skinless chicken breastg would be an example of protein but still has fat. Nuts are a protein but have carbs.
I have to say, I’m loving the South Beach Diet. It’s all the yummy stuff I eat anyway, without the bad stuff. I can probably even get my husband on it, although he’ll be sure to notice the lack of pasta, rice and potatoes.
Type 2 diabetic here. Several years ago I did the Atkins diet: severely limited carbs. Everything I ate was protein, sometimes with some fat. I lost a lot of weight, my blood sugar normalized. Everything was great for a few years. Then one day my endocrinologist sent me to a nephrologist (kidney doctor). It turned out I had stage-3 kidney disease. Not only was I eating way too much protein, but I was taking a lot of ibuprofen for knee pain. So I started cutting back on protein and eating some more low-glycemic index carbs. I also switched from ibuprofen to Aleve for the knee pain. The kidneys are looking a lot better now.
I’d think it was the ibuprofen that did the initial kidney damage and the excess protein was putting an extra strain on the damaged organs. But excess protein in otherwise healthy kidneys is not a health concern.
I was recently diagnosed with T2D. It’s hard. For between meals snack try whole wheat tortillas with vegetarian re-fried beans and cheese. Nuke for 40 seconds. Yummy, filling. You won’t have such a desire for carbs at the next meal.
Good for you. I was just about to post about good carbs and good fats vs. bad carbs and bad fats and refer you to both the South Beach Diet and the Eat Clean Diet (they’re similar; I find the SB book to be good for technical background and the Eat Clean books to be good as a guideline to living the day-to-day lifestyle. (If I were going to buy only one of the Eat Clean books I’d go with Eat Clean Diet Recharged.)
The Eat Clean diet (six small complex carb + protein meals a day) is an outgrowth of knowledge gained through bodybuilding. The Eat Clean concept was originated by the late Robert Kennedy, publisher of MuscleMag and Oxygen magazines, and has been promoted for years even before his death by his wife Tosca Reno. I don’t always eat the six meals, but don’t be frightened off by the concept: they don’t have to be complicated meals. An apple and a can of tuna can make a meal, as can some non or lowfat vanilla yogurt mixed with peanuts, etc., etc. You can always have more elaborate meals if you want to, you just don’t have to.
The great thing about both the SB diet and the Eat Clean diet is that once you get your blood sugar leveled out, you really don’t get very hungry. You pretty much stay the same all the time. I started out with the SB diet and sort of veered into the Eat Clean Diet last Sept. and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I haven’t been hungry even once since September, or at least not in the way that most people think of hunger. Every now and then I get a subtle feeling I ought to eat something, but I never have cravings of any kind. For example, this morning I had a small bowl of steel cut oatmeal with a sprinkling of walnuts and dried cranberries (topped with some sugar-free maple syrup. Yes, they make such a thing and it’s not bad; oatmeal needs a lubricant and S.F. syrup works as well as anything else). I also had two eggs fried in canola oil and saucer of sliced strawberries. Six hours later I still hadn’t gotten hungry, but knowing I ought to eat something I made a salad of greens, broccoli, onions, carrots, and fried pieces of chicken breast, which I topped with some Lawry’s Santa Fe Chili marinade, which make a perfect salad dressing and is only 15 calories per tablespoon.
Honestly, I eat most of my meals now because I should and not because I’m craving food, and, having settled into this way of eating I enjoy it every bit as much the meat-and-potatoes/fast food diet I used to eat before.
And as long as I’m on a soapbox I might as well pass along an unexpected thing that happened to me this afternoon. In the Eat Clean Recharged book, in addition to the health benefits Tosca Reno also talks about how this style of eating gives you more energy, makes your skin look better and gives you a healthy glow. I thought “Yeah, maybe” in regard to energy, but I wrote off the statements about healthy skin and beginning to glow as hype. But - and I kid you not - I ran into an old friend this afternoon who is a diabetic, and after discussing how I’d been losing weight he said I not only looked thinner but I had a healthy glow about me now that wasn’t there before. :eek:
Those were his words, completely unsolicited. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was sure the author was full of B.S. in that regard, but apparently not. So if you want not only to eat healthier and keep your diabetes in control, but glow while you’re doing it you might want to, ahem, Eat Clean for a while.
I’m studying Nutrition Science. All of the cells in your body run on glucose. Glucose comes from the breakdown of the carbohydrates we consume. In the absense of carbohydrates from which to make glucose, and when glycogen stores have been depleted, the body will turn to protein to convert to glucose. The body doesn’t care if the protein comes from your food or muscles. In times of starvation (or intentional dieting) brain cells can use ketones for energy instead of glucose. This isn’t meant to be a long term solution to the body’s need for glucose, it’s a survival mechanism.
Necessary means essential for life. If your cells don’t get glucose they die.
As few carbs as possible does not equal NO carbs.
You also need fiber in your diet for digestive health. (To be able to poop.) Fiber is a complex carbohydrate that is indigestible. The body can’t use those calories for energy, but they are needed to provide bulk in the colon to stimulate peristalsis (movement). If waste matter isn’t moving through the colon at the right pace, it causes problems. Too fast and not enough digestive juices are reabsorbed through the colon and diarrhea is the result. If the waste is moving too slow, too much of the juices are reabsorbed and you get constipated. Fiber helps regulate the movement.
Complex carbohydrates from whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and legumes are preferable to processed sugar, refined white flour products potatoes, etc.
The reason people lose weight on low carb diets is because they are consuming less calories. Fat and protein stay in the stomach longer than carbohydrates so you stay satiated longer and eat less. Junk foods are eliminated along with their empty calories.
Carbohydrate is not essential for life. As you yourself even note, in the absence of carbs the body will turn proteins and fats into glucose for energy. So carbs aren’t needed for life to continue; while protein and fat must be consumed or the person stops living.
Ditto this. Fat is NOT the enemy, as “common knowledge” nutritional advice would make you believe. Low carb + high fat is something to research. While carbs are not necessary, fat is. The nationwide fat-phobia, especially the saturated fat phobia, has really skewed our sense of what is truly healthy. A piece of “low-fat” fish, breaded, baked and served with salad coated in fat-free salad dressing? Not healthy. A beautiful, fatty piece of grass-fed steak served with salad dressed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar? VERY healthy.
You’d think with grocery stores stocked with fat-free/low-fat food we’d be the healthiest nation in the world, no? Exactly.
I see two different diets being advocated here, both being called “low-carb.” One group is describing what I truly considering low carb, that is, a diet high in protein and high in both saturated and unsaturated fats.
Another group is advocating decreased fats (lean meats, cutting out mayo and butter, baking instead of frying) and whole grains instead of simple carbs. That diet seems to me to be the conventional wisdom of nutrition, and not low-carb at all.
Saturated fats, by and large, aren’t good for us either, although a small amount from lean cuts of meat seems to be okay. There is some evidence that saturated fats cause a certain amount of dysfunction in the arteries, making them predisposed to constriction and clotting, and they leave what Dr. Agatston (a heart specialist and the developer of heart scan technology) in the SB diet book calls remnant particles after digestion that persist in the bloodstream longer than is healthy and contribute to arterial plaque. The good fats (poly and mono unsaturated) are found mostly in oils from nuts and seeds, and from certain fruits, such as avocado and olives.
That’s right. The idea is to eat healthy complex carbs from fresh fruit, whole grains and fresh vegetables which the body needs, and to avoid the simple carbs that spike blood sugar levels, creating feelings of hunger and more readily storing sugars in the blood as body fat. It’s a healthy carb way of eating rather than a low carb way of eating.
I’m sorry, we’ve only been able to make use of grains as food for a relatively short portion of Homo Sapiens’s existence. I’m not easily convinced that we “need” them; whole or otherwise.
Whole grains provide useful nutrients; require more energy to digest than processed grains; digest more slowly than processed grains, thus not spiking blood sugar levels like processed grains do; and they add dietary fiber, the benefits of which are widely known and accepted.
Still, no one is trying to convince you to eat them. We’re just discussing different approaches to weight loss and healthy eating in this thread and everyone is free to decide which things they take to heart and which they don’t. If you don’t want to eat whole grains (though I’d suggest you do a little research to help form your opinion), then don’t eat them.