Do Low Carb Diets Really Work

You may think that low carb diets and low carb dieting are a fairly recent trend and that they lack any type of long term statistics or figures.

However you would be incorrect (just like I was ) when I found out that man named William Banting may be one of the first people to propose a diet that eliminated or drastically cut back on  bread, beer, sugar, pastries, and all other carbohydrates, and relied heavily on meat.

He published a small pamphlet about it in 1869 and quickly became a sensation in diet circles.

In the 20th century of course this was followed by diet fads like The Scarsdale Diet and the Atkins Diet.

The question is, if low carb diets are so great and they work so well, why are we all still struggling to lose weight?  (Approximately 64.5 percent of Americans are either overweight or obese, according to the United States Department of Health and Human Services. )

And the answer is: low carb diets, like all diets,  do work well in the short term. In the long term, they fail, and can actually harm your health.

When you first go on a low carbohydrate diet, your body is forced to raid its fat stores, which makes it burn glycogen, a type of carbohydrate.  Water binds onto glycogen, and when the body starts burning glycogen, the water is released.

In the early stages of a low carb diet, you will be urinating frequently and losing a lot of water weight.

This makes it appear as if your diet is a success, and has a lot to do with the popularity of high protein low carb diets. These diets start off with a bang, that’s for sure.

And this allows people in the diet industry to continue to promote low carb diets as the only real road to weight loss success. After all, the sale of millions of dollars of low carb diet books, recipe books, frozen meals, and prepackaged foods depends on the belief that low carb is the only way to go.

But here’s the problem: it is very hard to stay on a low carbohydrate diet for any length of time, because they have a number of unpleasant side effects like bad breath,  constant cravings for sweets, low energy, irritability, and constipation.

The minute you start eating normally again, the water weight comes back on. And most people blame themselves, rather than realizing that this particular type of diet is set up in a way that is doomed to failure.

Before starting any diet you should really discuss it with your doctor

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Healthy Recipes For An Energetic Lifestyle

With an epidemic that eating disorders like obesity, anorexia and bulimia have created in the country, health consciousness has pervaded the lives of most people today. The young generation also is becoming cognizant of the fact that if they develop a health problem in their younger age, tackling the problem at an older age will be many times more difficult.

When eating healthy is not a way of life, incorporating it can be extremely frustrating initially. One way of embarking on the route to a healthier diet is to create healthy recipes. The first step is to make the right choices. Choose skimmed milk instead of whole milk. Prefer a snack of fruits to a packet of potato chips. Replace the butter that you lavishly spread on baked chicken with Worchester sauce. Use high fiber cereals like brown bread and barley.

Replacing healthier ingredients for the fatty, starchy ones in a recipe can help in this process and can give you a further motivation that you require to continue with a healthy recipe diet. Use fresh poultry instead of those that have been treated. Use egg whites instead of the whole egg. Soups can be made healthier by creaming off the fat that forms on top by freezing them before reheating and consuming.

Encourage the practice of having family meals since regular meals tend to be more nutritious and inculcate smart eating habits. Stock up all the ingredients that allow you to make healthy recipes and limit your purchase of high fat, high starch and high sodium foods. Work in fruits and vegetables as part of a daily plan.

Even after taking these measures, if you find that you are not eating healthy, it is probably due to the snacking that you are indulging in between mealtimes. To ensure that even your snacks are healthy, schedule a snack time into your day routine. This could be mid morning or mid afternoon. Some healthy snack recipes could be low fat yogurt or fruit juices that have not been artificially sweetened and bran muffins.

Last but not the least, be careful against total deprivation as that will only want you to eat the indulgent foods more. The judicious decision to make is that of moderation and not depravity. Even with a busy schedule, it is possible for people to eat healthy foods even if they only have a short time in which to prepare their meals.

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