Following a low-carb diet is a healthy way to decrease food cravings and promote weight loss. Additional benefits include reducing the risk of heart disease by improving blood lipids and blood pressure.
Here are 6 great tips to help you find the best low-carb diet to fit your personal preferences and needs:
Tip 1. A low-carb diet is not necessarily a high-protein diet
So often people assume that when you reduce carbohydrate in your diet it’s important to add a lot of protein. This is absolutely not true. It’s important to get adequate protein, of course, and if you’ve been getting some of your protein from high-carb foods such as grains you’ll have to shift your focus to other protein sources, but you don’t have to load your diet up with protein.
Especially as people approach midlife and their older years, it’s not unusual to find that adding more protein helps people to feel better.
Tip 2. How much carb for you?
Like protein, it’s important to figure out how much carbohydrate your body functions best with. People’s bodies vary widely in their tolerance to carbohydrate. Some can get the majority of their calories from glucose sources (starches such as grains and potatoes are mostly glucose), whereas others who are not glucose-tolerant may have to eliminate these foods entirely to function at their best. Most people are somewhere in between.
Atkins calls this “metabolic resistance”; some call it “carbohydrate sensitivity” or other names. It may have to do with how much damage there is to beta cells in the pancreas. At this point, scientists have not zeroed in on how to figure this out, so we need to do it for ourselves.
See more low-carb dieting tips on the next page …