Low-carb diet suggestions

[The Unavoidable]

Hey guys, over the last few months I've been cleaning up my act significantly (cutting out all junk foods, soda etc) and just been eating basic homecooking stuff like beans, rice, chicken, ground beef etc. As a result I've lost a lot of weight, and I would like to slim up even more. I've been looking into various ways of reducing carbs in my diet, and except cutting out rice/pasta/bread etc I really don't know where to start, or even what I would replace those things with at a meal.

Should I just double up on the meat? A pound of vegetables?


My current exercise routine consists of pretty much just 3-4 sets of 25 pushups, and about the same nr of stomach crunches and bicep curls at about 4-5 times per week.


Also, excuse any ignorance on my part since I'm pretty new to the whole diet/counting calories/carbs thing

 

[pikachu69]

Stick to what mother earth provides and you can't go wrong. Anything that is refined (like what you mentioned) bread, pasta cereals etc will contain carbs, glutens and other things that you body has a hard time dealing with.
Fresh meat both white and red, veges, fruit oats and nuts. If you have fruit be very careful, just because it is fruit, it does not mean it is ok to eat in quantity. Some sweet fruits like strawberries, oranges and grapes have more sugar content than some lollies. Stick to apples and bananas and you will be fine.
I would recommend something like this:
Breakfast:
3/4 cup of cooked porridge

Morning tea:
One piece of fruit.

Lunch:
Either a lean meat and salad wrap ala subway
or 1/2 cup of cooked veges 1/2 cup of cooked rice 200 grams of lean red or white meat.


Afternoon tea:
Low fat yogurt and fruit or
Rice wafers or
nuts and seeds

Dinner,
lean meat veges and potato. you need some carbs to help build muscle mass. If you strip to many carbs from your diet you will loss weight but you will find it hard to put on muscle mass.

Everything in moderation. Everything in moderation. Everything in moderation.

The best piece of advice I could give you would be to not starve yourself of everything you consider bad for you. This will only make it harder as most people only want something when they think they can't have it. Instead allow yourself one treat a week, say Sunday dinner is no limits what ever you want. But in moderation. Control your portion sizes and doing this once a week will not harm you and make the eating plan a little less painful. For most people portion size is more often to blame for weight gain, not just the kinds of food we eat.

My wife is a professional body builder and I see what she does everyday and she got down to round 8% body fat with the diet I mentioned above. She can also do 360 crunches in 8 minutes and she does it 3 times a day...

 

[Morgan C]

Low-carb/keto diets are really hard. Tried it for a while and lasted a week, not so much because I felt bad from it (maybe slightly 'foggy') but all you can eat is meat, eggs, nuts and.. that's about it. Plus too much fat at once (bacon + eggs) makes me feel like shit.

Personally I wouldn't bother with it now, if your current diet is working, stick with it. You WILL lose weight if you eat less calories than you burn, full stop (insert story about professor losing 30kg on just twinkies article, cbf looking up). Arguably your body composition depends on what you eat, but I haven't seen any definitive proof for this though. In any case, until you're at like 11% bodyfat, 170-180lb+, I don't think a keto diet will benefit you much/at all, and is way more restrictive than what you're doing.

But that 'exercise routine' of yours needs some work, boy! Get the heart pumping, go do some heavy lifts and some HIIT (I do around 10 reps of 100m sprints, working my way up to 20km/h).

 

[Harry Hughes]

Unless you absolutely need to go on a keto diet for the purposes of preserving a lot of lean muscle mass, then don't bother with it.
Obviously your workout isn't exactly strenuous, but if you want a good way to lower carbs, increase protein intake dramatically.
Go for 1lb of protein per lb of lean body mass. When you do significantly up your workout, at least then you will have gotten used to eating adequate amounts of protein per day.
Find out what your maintenance calories are. You can use online calculators to estimate (get to them via google) and go from there, varying until you find what works for you, depending on whether you want to maintain, lose or gain weight.

As for your workout routine, well bicep curls alone aren't going to do very much for the arms at all.
People that have anything that resembles decent arm development get a lot of it from doing back exercises.
I'd suggest hitting up local playgrounds (sometimes you might even find dedicated exercise parks, which are similar to playgrounds because they have a lot of bars and stuff, but obviously not any stuff designed for kids wanting to play around) and getting into chinups and pullups.



As you can see, the palms face towards you. This puts the arms into a position that works the biceps quite nicely, but also hits the latissimus dorsi (lats) muscle, which is around the middle of the back, quite well.

Pullups are basically the same thing, except your palms face away from you.
This puts more tension on the forearm muscle, more on your lats and also tests grip strength more.
Of course, still a bit of bicep involvement since it's a pulling motion, but not as much.

As for your pushups, try elevating your feet off the ground.
The higher your feet, the more you hit your shoulders (mainly the deltoid muscle), and the more resistance you get in general.
You can also have a friend put a weight plate on your back for more resistance too.
Also use different hand stances/grips.
Arms out wide (wide grip pushups) use more shoulder, a fair bit of chest but minimal tricep involvement.

Then there's this , called diamond pushups.
The most tricep involvement out of all the pushups, less chest and shoulders.
And of course just the normal width grip.
It's key to do all three I think.

Ohh, should also mention you can do the same for chin/pullups. The width of the grip changes the emphasis on what part of the lats you target.

So just a few ideas to extend the length of your workout and make it more challenging and fun for the time being.
I'm out for a bit, but I'll be back to post a little more if you want more ideas of stuff that don't require going to a gym.

 

[Morgan C]

...increase protein intake dramatically.
Go for 1lb of protein per lb of lean body mass.

Holy fuck. brb eating a person every day.

 

[midget donkeys]

Diets are a bad idea in general and can seldom be maintained. I have never seen anyone keep up with that Atkins nonsense long term. They usually end up with the person gaining all the weight back and then sum.

What you are already doing is great, changing your lifestyle. As some one else already said do not try to eliminate all carbs from your diet. If you’re going to eat bread, pasta, etc make sure it is whole grain. It’s not like a piece of wheat bread is going to kill you.

Your workout could be much more intense, but... What are your goals? If all you want to do is lose weight then you must consume less food than you burn. In which case your workout is fine and better than a lot of people that do no exercise at all.

If you want to build muscle mass then you need to be pumping some iron. That is an enormous whole other topic. Then your protein intact needs to be alot more than normal. Or if your goal is to increase your running ability your workout and diet will be yet different again.

I guess my bottom line is first off it sounds like you are already doing a good job losing weight, and two figure out what your fitness goals are. If you start lifting or running you might find that it is highly enjoyable (and addictive.)

 

[Skinny Viking]

Holy fuck. brb eating a person every day.

glad someone else saw that too

 

[MindMunch]

What worked best for me was to list all the healthy food that I like, then plan 6 different balanced meals with them, assigning each one for a day of the week (and "1 day off" because no one is perfect).

If you can handle eat the same stuff every week it´s pretty easy to follow and to buy the right stuff. What ruins most diets is having to think everyday what are you going to eat, or eating stuff that you don´t like. I usually make each meal 50% of the plate "salad", 25% "meat" and 25% "carbs". It´s more like a dietary re-education than a quick diet.

Some examples:
Meat: Chicken, tuna, turkey.
Salad: Lettuce, welsh onion, tomato, broccoli, cabbage, carrot, eggplant, shitake, shimeji.
Carbs: Rice, bean, pasta, potato.

 

[EerieVon]

What worked best for me was to list all the healthy food that I like, then plan 6 different balanced meals with them, assigning each one for a day of the week (and "1 day off" because no one is perfect).

If you can handle eat the same stuff every week it´s pretty easy to follow and to buy the right stuff. What ruins most diets is having to think everyday what are you going to eat, or eating stuff that you don´t like. I usually make each meal 50% of the plate "salad", 25% "meat" and 25% "carbs". It´s more like a dietary re-education than a quick diet.

Some examples:
Meat: Chicken, tuna, turkey.
Salad: Lettuce, welsh onion, tomato, broccoli, cabbage, carrot, eggplant, shitake, shimeji.
Carbs: Rice, bean, pasta, potato.

I do that too--have one splurge day. I think its good because a body has a way of adjusting to eating habits so by eating less healthy stuff one day it keeps your metabolism off balance--or at least thats how I justify eating pizza and wings every saturday

 

[The Unavoidable]

Wow, I had a feeling this topic would generate some respone but holy crap! Thanks everyone for your input and suggestions, and taking the time to answer my stupid questions!

My goal at this moment is to change. Over the last 8 years or so, I have been on and off heavy work out routines (spending 5 days a week at the gym) and doing more cardio stuff like running 10 miles everyday etc, but I have never managed to stick with it. After a few weeks/months of working myself like an asshole, I'm just fed up with it and start to slowly slide back into lazyness. So I know very well that my exercise routine isn't very macho at all, but at this point my goal is to get my body/mind used to maintaining a routine, and developing a life-style that works for me. So far I am really proud of what I have achived, and I look forward to what I can achive in the future!

After what you guys have said here, I've decided to skip the carb diet thing. Everything I eat in terms of bread etc, is whole grain and I've drastically reduced the amount of pasta/rice I eat with meals. (I'm pretty much eating half of what I was eating 6 months ago, and I feel fine!) so if there is no objections then I'll just keep it up!

I do planning on building more muscles in the future, and start "bulking up" for real, but like you guys said that's a whole different ball game! And again, thanks for all the help!

 

[Sloan]

I lost 60lbs in about one year by having a physically demanding job unloading trucks and cutting out soft drinks. I'm not a big junk food eater anyway so that wasn't a problem for me. From this experience, I think exercise is the #1 thing you can do to lose and maintain weight. As soon as I lost that job, I gained the weight back fairly quickly despite fairly good eating habits. Fortunately I weight less than I did in highschool, wtf was wrong with me I will never know.

 

[AllanD]

Whoever says diets don't work either doesn't have enough will power or doesn't want their end goal enough to force change. My diet is mostly ketogenic, EXCEPT when I go to the gym, which then I load up on carbs. Ketogenic is boring at first, but you get used to it. I no longer eat for pleasure, I eat for nutrients. The whole 1g of protein per pound is a little much, it won't all get processed. I've read that you should strive for 1g * your weight in kilograms x 1.5. Chicken, Beef, Fish, Green Vegetables, Eggs, Nuts, a multi-vitamin, and whey/casein protein should get you to where you want to be. Only eat carbs on heavy gym days, do cardio on off days, and you'll be fit before you know it. Also, drink a lot of water.

 

[Decimator]

I can say for my experience that controlling your eating is the main key to weight loss. I lost 20kg in 6 months just by eating less, no added excercise. when I noticed that the 90g of noodles contais roughly as much of calories as 400g of beef stakes, I started to avoid foods that contains a lot of carbs. Mainly cutting out all pasta/noodles, bread, potatoes and such. Low in calories and kinda low in carbs worked for me really great.

Nowadays I eat some bread, and whatever I want, but mainly still the healthy stuff, lots of vegetables, beef and chicken. I have tried to eat about a 2000kcal/day but I felt so fucking stuffed the whole day that I had to cut it down a bit. I think this is a permanent change for the way I will eat.

At one point I think I was at 68kg, but have gained few kg since I started excercising. Since I have no goal at weight loss anymore my goal now is to get to 100 push ups. I am currently at 70. Its nice to have some goal me thinks.

One nice thing for being lighter is that you need less booze to get drunk. Profit!

 

[midget donkeys]

That is a good attitude to have with regards to working out Unavoidable. To often some one will start a very hardcore workout program and then burn out and stop. The super duper training program that you do not maintain is not so super duper.

The 1 gram of protein per 1 lb of body weight thing can indeed work. But remember what it is supposed to do, add body mass. Your body can process that much protein if (pay attention to the "if") your doing an aggressive heavy weight lifting program. If someone wants to get pumped up like Hugh Jackman they need to eat a shit load of lean meat.

I also agree with the recommendation of doing chin-ups instead of curling if a chin-up bar is available. It takes the same amount of time but works several muscle groups at one time instead of just isolating the bicep. Which is a good idea in general, do exercises that engage the most muscles at one time.

 

[JackBurton]

Hey Unavoidable,

I used to do the Low Carb thing and I did lose weight with it, but I found that I lost too much muscle in the process and felt sluggish a lot of the time. I've been doing research on health and fitness throughout the years and it seems like a balance of the macronutrients (fats,carbs and protein) works best when none of them drop out too drastically. The main reason for this is that you stop producing certain hormones that aid in fat loss and muscle growth. With that being said, lean meat, some veggies and a source of healthy fat at every meal is best IMO. Also, the more intense your workouts are the more fat you'll burn, I've just started using Russian Kettlebells and they'll make you burn a lot of fat if you use them properly.

Here's a great video to check out (skip to 6:13)



I hope that helps. Congrats on your fat loss and good luck with the rest!