Our conventional ideas about weight loss – eat less, move more – require a lot of willpower. Counting calories, exercising for hours every day, and trying to ignore your hunger? At DietDoctor, we believe that’s needless suffering, and likely a waste of your time and precious energy.
Eventually, people often give up. An excessive focus on counting calories has certainly not done much to reverse our current obesity epidemic.
1. Calories are not the only things that count in weight loss. Your weight is also hormonally regulated. If you reduce your hunger and the levels of your fat-storing hormone, insulin, you’ll likely have an easier time losing excess weight.
2. Get instant access to healthy low-carb and keto meal plans, fast and easy recipes, weight loss advice from medical experts, and so much more. A healthier life starts now with your free trial!
Are you ready? Here we go. Start at the top of the list (most important) and go down as far as you need. Click on any tip to read all about it. Perhaps you only need the first piece of advice?
3. While a low-carb diet has many proven benefits, it’s still controversial. The main potential danger regards medications, especially for diabetes, where doses may need to be adapted. Discuss any changes in medication and relevant lifestyle changes with your doctor. Full disclaimer
This guide is written for adults with health issues, including obesity, that could benefit from losing weight.
We don’t recommend counting calories, which is controversial. To learn more about the rationale for this, see our guide on restricting calories for weight loss.
Controversial topics related to a low-carb diet, and our take on them, include saturated fats, cholesterol, whole grains, red meat, and whether the brain needs carbohydrates.
If you want to lose weight, consider starting by avoiding sugar and starch (like bread, pasta, and potatoes). This is an old idea: for 150 years or more, there have been a huge number of weight-loss diets based on eating fewer carbs. What’s new is that dozens of modern scientific studies have proven that, yes, on average low carb can be the most effective way to lose weight.
4. Obviously, it’s still possible to lose weight on any diet – just eat fewer calories than you burn, right? The problem with this simplistic advice is that it ignores the elephant in the room: Hunger. Most people don’t like to “just eat less,” as it may result in having to go hungry forever. Sooner or later, many will likely give up and eat, hence the prevalence of “yo-yo dieting.”
5. While it should be possible to lose weight on any diet, some appear to make it easier and some to make it much harder.
The main advantage of the low-carb diet is that it may cause you to want to eat less. Even without counting calories, overweight people tend to eat fewer calories on low carb.
6. Sugar and starch may increase your hunger, while avoiding them may decrease your appetite to a more manageable level.
7. If your body wants to have an appropriate number of calories, you don’t need to bother counting them. Thus, calories count, but you don’t need to count them.
A 2012 study also showed that people who had lost weight experienced far less reduction in total energy expenditure (the number of calories burned within a 24-hour period) when they followed a low-carb diet compared to a low-fat diet during weight maintenance — a 300-calorie difference, in fact.
8. According to one of the Harvard professors behind the study, this advantage “would equal the number of calories typically burned in an hour of moderate-intensity physical activity.” Imagine that: an entire bonus hour of exercise every day, without actually exercising.
Recently, an even larger and more carefully conducted study confirmed this metabolism-sparing effect, with different groups of people who had lost weight burning an average of between 200 and almost 500 extra calories per day on a low-carb maintenance diet compared to a high-carb or moderate-carb diet.
9. Bottom line: A low-carb diet can reduce your hunger, making it easier to eat less. And it might even increase your fat burning at rest. Study after study shows that low carb works for weight loss and that on average it improves important health markers.
10. Do you want to know more about exactly what to eat on low carb, how to do it, potential problems and solutions — and find lots of great recipes? Check out our keto for beginners guide. Alternatively, you can make low carb even simpler by signing up for our free two-week keto challenge.
Get the full Diet Doctor experience with unlimited low-carb and keto meal plans, shopping lists and much more with a free membership trial.
11. Carbs and fat are the body’s two main energy sources, and it needs at least one of them. Avoiding both carbs and fat can result in hunger, cravings, and fatigue. Sooner or later many people can’t stand it and give up. The solution can be to eat more natural fat until you feel satisfied. For example:
Always eat enough, so that you feel satisfied, especially in the beginning of the weight-loss process. Doing this on a low-carb diet means that the fat you eat will be burned as fuel by your body, as your levels of the fat-storing hormone insulin are lowered.
12. You’ll become a fat-burning machine. You’ll be more likely to lose excess weight, often without hunger.
13. Do you still fear saturated fat? You may want to reconsider that. The fear of saturated fat is based on theories that recent studies suggest are misguided and incorrect.
14. Butter, steak, and cream are fine foods. However, feel free to eat mostly unsaturated fat (e.g. olive oil, avocado, fatty fish) if you prefer. This could be called a Mediterranean low-carb diet and works great too.
15. Eating when hungry also implies something else: if you’re not hungry, you probably don’t need to eat yet. When on a keto diet you can trust your feelings of hunger and satiety again. Feel free to eat as many — or as few — times per day as you feel is right for you.
Some people eat three times a day and occasionally snack in between (note that frequent snacking could mean that you’d benefit from adding protein or fat to your meals, to increase satiety). However, there’s some evidence that frequent snacking isn’t wise when trying to lose weight.
16. Some people only eat once or twice a day and never snack. Whatever works for you. Just eat when you’re hungry.
17. If you want to lose weight, avoid special “low-carb” products that are full of carbs. This should be obvious, but creative marketers are doing all they can to fool you (and get your money). They will tell you that you can eat cookies, pasta, ice cream, bread, and plenty of chocolate on a low-carb diet, as long as you buy their brand. They’re often full of carbohydrates. Don’t be fooled.
How about low-carb bread? Be careful: if it’s baked with grains it’s certainly not low carb. But some companies still try to sell it to you as a low-carb option.
Low-carb chocolate is usually full of a kind of sugar alcohol — maltitol — that may actually be partially absorbed by the body, but which the manufacturer does not count as carbs. If the maltitol is absorbed, it is likely to raise blood sugar and insulin levels.
18. The remaining carbs end up in the colon, potentially causing gas and diarrhea. Furthermore, any sweeteners can maintain sugar cravings.
19. Low-carb chocolate made with erythritol or stevia is likely to be okay. These three companies are not unique. There are thousands of similar companies who may be trying to trick you into buying their “low-carb” products, that often contain starch, sugar alcohols, wheat flour, sweeteners, and other additives.
Finally — you may want to forget about the old “everything in moderation” diet motto. It isn’t necessarily helpful advice for people who struggle with weight — in fact, it may be exactly the opposite.
20. Don’t eat everything in moderation. Eat as much healthy food as you can, whenever you are hungry. Eat as little unhealthy food as you can – if possible, none at all.
On a low-carb diet, you should aim to eat when hungry (see tip #2 above). And if you’re not hungry? Don’t eat. Frequently eating more food than you need to stay satisfied will slow down weight loss.
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Weight Management: Search to End Results Step by step Process
Step 1
Step 2
- SKU 4809 - 1: Ultimate program French Vanilla 1 Kit
- SKU 0194 - 2: Personalized Protein Powder 12.7 Oz.
- SKU 0366 - 2: Protein Bar Deluxe: Citrus Lemon 14 Bars per Box
- SKU 0364 - 2: Protein Bar Deluxe: Vanilla Almond 14 Bars per Box
Step 3
WEIGHT LOSS
MAINTENANCE
WEIGHT GAIN
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