c.i.--
Wonderful! I'm impressed and envious.
cicerone imposter wrote:Butrfly, Which ones are low-carb, no sugar, candies?
If you click on that link then do a search on low carb sugar free candy, it will display 5 of them.
Bookmarking this thread. I'm starting a new excercise plan and my very first diet after the holidays. Looks like low-carb is the way to go. Still trying to understand what carbs are exactly but by Jan. 2, I'll be ready to go. Looking to lose 20lbs.
eoe--
Love early New Year's Resolutions. Welcome to a group of strivers.
eoe, Low carb diet really works. I can attest to the success of this program, because in a little over two weeks, I lost ten pounds. I was a candy eater before this low carb diet, so that's been the hardest to stop. Butrfly provided a link for low-carb, no sugar candy, but my wife told me it may contain artificial sweeteners that may not be good for our health. Oh well, some sacrifice is necessary. I'm waiting to do my next lab test to see how my cholesterol is doing.
BTW, excercise is a necessary ingredient to any successful health program.
c.i.- I've had the chocolate from lowcarbchocolate.com. . . it's actually very good (those are the ones sold on Amazon). They melt quickly, which I don't understand, because usually low carb candy has lots of stabilizers, but oh well :-) Let us know if you order some :-)
And I too can attest to low carb diets. . . what I notice right away when I eat low carb for awhile is how much energy I have, and how little hunger. . . it's amazing. And the weight comes off. . .
This weekend, I think my blood sugar levels got too low for the first time since I've been doing the low carb thing. My body has been incessantly craving something but no matter what I ate the craving wasn't satisfied and I was starting to feel rather strange. Today, I went out and got a small garlic chicken pizza with barbecue sauce and the strange feeling and cravings finally went away. The boost of carbs from the bread and goodies on the pizza seems to have helped.
Anyone else had similar experiences while doing low carb? Think I'm going to invest in some test strips so I can keep closer track of the sugar levels.
We have also been eating apples every day. It's good for fiber, and I think pectin. Been working in the yard cleaning up the falling leaves every day for my excercise.
Sometimes, Butrfly, it does seem that you just bottom out. . . you can sometimes avoid it, or, well, fix it, by eating a large amount of high-carb veggies. . . not potatoes, but maybe some carrots, a bit or corn, or a whole ton of grean beans, something like that. . .
It used to happen to me when I first started that after doing any sort of exercise, my blood sugar would plummet and I would get shaky. . . if I didn't do anything about it, my legs would cramp and walking would be extremely painful. . . so I always had to be ready to get a jolt of pure carbs to bring it back up (I used coke).
Hopefully that's not what's happening to you. . . it mystified my doctor, because it looked like something was telling my body just to dump all traces of glucose in my system. Now I just have to be careful, but it hasn't happened like that in a while. Nowadays I keep green beans around at all times and if I start to feel that low-blood-sugar weakness (it's a very distinctive feeling, isn't it?), I hasten to cram down a bunch of those :-)
princessash, Your mention of legs cramping also happened to me more frequently than any time I can remember. I couldn't stretch my legs, or it would start cramping. Pointing my toes upwards relieved it.
that sounds like it, c.i. . . they would start tingling, feeling kind of like jelly, and then it would go away if I didn't have any carbs. . . then, a couple hours later (usually after I had been sleeping or sitting still) I wouldn't be able to move them, and I had to walk straight-legged for a few days or else head to the doctor so he could examine me again :-) Glad to hear I'm not the only one. . .
I should mention, since this thread is supposed to be about avoiding the pitfalls of these diets and not just espousing their values (:-)) that I started out on the Carbohydrate Addicts' Diet, not on the Zone, which is where I eventually settled.
For beginning low-carbers, this diet is a godsend, truly. When I first started it, they were in the first edition of their book. The idea, for those that don't know it, is that if you eat low carb (virtually no carb, actually, it's very atkin's-initiation-like in its inital stages) all day, you can eat carbs in a one hour period without causing your blood sugar to spike.
Which means that you don't have to give up cookies and cake and ice cream and pasta as long as you follow the low carb all day.
In subsequent editions, they revised this concept of "reward meal", because people, like me, who after losing a lot of weight successfully, started treating it like a carb orgy :-) Now, they advise you to start your meal with a big salad and a small portion of meat. After that, it's up to you, just as long as you keep a general idea of balance in mind (ie, one cookie for one serving of green beans and one serving of meat, and not three pieces of Nutella-bread and a bowl of pasta for the entire meal, my pitfall).
Once I got into the low carb "groove," this diet stopped working for me very well (I went into what they call a plateau stage for a couple months and was teetering on weight gain). So I started the Zone, which is much more structured, and DOES ask you to give up your cookies. However, by that time, I'd gotten so fond of veggies anyway that it wasn't as traumatic. If you'd asked me five years ago to give up sweets, I would've rebelled. Doing the Carb Addicts' was a nice "junior" carb diet, and it does work. I lost 40 pounds on it before I switched to the Zone :-)
And keeping that concept of a reward meal in mind, when I DO feel a terrible urge to have that bit of candy (I have a bag of jolly ranchers and a bar of marzipan on my shelf right now), I make myself sit down and have a big salad first, and then a piece of chicken, and then I can have the serving size portion of whatever carb it is, and I still haven't succeeded in sabotaging my diet :-) I've been on low-to-no carb diets continuously for, geez, like 5 years now. . . now I'm mostly trying to get myself to exercise more- I was spoiled by not having to do so much of that since I live in New York and walk everywhere :-)
A friend of ours is also on the Zone diet, and he eats tofu every day. He said his weight and cholesterol levels are way below average, although he doesn't look thin. We've been eating salad for many of our meals, and I bought some celery to munch on as a snack. I'm going to the market to find some dip. Many are low-carb, but the saturated fats and sodium can run pretty high.
Hmm. . . tofu I'm only partially fond of :-) what I find most helpful is that barry sears gives you numbers. . . what an actual correct size is. . . and what it looks like. After that, it's pretty easy to see the error of one's ways. . . (and that your typical restaurant steak is a full two zone meals :-))
Useful information for uncomfortable calculations:
http://www.cspinet.org/nah/09_03/calorie_calc.html
There's no hiding place down here.
Okay, my calorie intake should be 2271 per day. What am I able to eat?
Hmm. . . that calorie calculator is odd. . . it gave me many many more calories than I would ever dream of eating in a day. . . (2550, to be precise).
