Two Weeks and Counting: Carbs, good or bad?

Thursday April 28

Today marks two weeks since I began this adventure. I'm thankful to have made it this far so that I could see that it gets easier, not harder. I still think the very first day was the hardest. It was like standing at the starting line before very long race and knowing that you still had the chance to back away. But once you are in full swing, once you find your stride, the danger of turning back is so much less.

This whole week I have not had the underlying sense of hunger and depravation that I felt the first week. The sugar addiction is gone and I feel great. I don't crave it in the least. Well, I should qualify that. I don't crave sugar just to eat sugar. But I do sometimes day dream about ooey, gooey cinnamon rolls, or chocolate chip cookie dough. But I can quickly snap myself out of such reverie.

But now that I've cut out sugar, which is unquestionably bad, I want to explore other carbs. Are they good or bad. How do they make me feel?

Although there are some nutrition facts that apply to every person, there also seems to be variety from person to person in how we process and react to foods. I think that carbs is one of those areas.

Since different calorie reduction approaches work better for different people, I decided that I was going to do an experiment where I would try a different approach for a week at a time and see how I felt and reacted at the end of the week. I'll spare you the blow-by-blow and give you the bottom line summary: low carb is definitely not for me.

I have heard some people say carbs give them blood sugar swings and when they cut out carbs they lose weight without feeling hungry at all. If that's true for their body type, they should run with it.

My experience is just the opposite. A low carb diet first of all makes me feel CRAZY hungry. Thanks to the explanation given by Sugar: the Bitter Truth I finally understand why this is. My brain gets glucose deprived which makes me feel starving, and it's very difficult and inefficient for my body to make glucose fast enough from either protein or fat. This slows my metabolism down and makes me feel like if I have to be on this diet for one more day I might die. I lost no weight the low-carb week while feeling horribly hungry, deprived, and miserable.

However, when I spent another week eating a balanced diet of complex carbs (no sugar of course), protein, and a small amount of fat, I hardly felt hungry at all even though I was experimenting with cutting at least 500 calories out a day. I lost 4 lbs in one week, while not feeling hungry. The difference is that whenever I began to feel a twinge of shaky, irritable, I-need-to-eat-or-I'm-going-to-die (aka "hangry"), I would eat a complex carb and immediately feel great again. On the low carb week, I would get that feeling but the cheese stick or the lunch meat or whatever low carb thing I ate did nothing to help with the horrible hunger feeling.

I really like the good old-fashioned count your calories method, although with modern technology, it's not really that old-fashioned anymore. My Fitbit tells me how many calories I've burned based on the exercise it's tracked, and so I enter what I've eaten into the Fitbit to keep the calories under my output. And the calorie value of every food on the planet is stored in the app on the phone so it's as easy as typing in the word: EGG.

But for those who don't have a Fitbit, there's many other free apps which will do the exact same thing for you. The most popular one I've heard of is My Fitness Pal. Entering food only takes about a minute after each meal, or sometime less.

But of course, I write all this down mainly for myself. I'm learning to be my own personal trainer, my own nutrition counselor, and customize a plan for me. Some people may hate entering food into an electronic device; they'd rather cut out a whole food group or follow the Paleo diet or South Beach, or Atkins. People are complex; personalities are complex. Everyone should do what works for them.

I'd much rather write everything down if it means I can give myself a little flexibility in what I eat. For instance, last night for dinner we ate a Mexican casserole that my family loves consisting of rice, black beans, corn, canned tomatoes and shredded cheese mixed together and baked in the oven. Because it has shredded cheese in it, I couldn't have eaten it if I was on Weight Watcher's Simply Filling, or South Beach. Because of the rice, I couldn't have eaten it if I was on Paleo or low carb. But I don't want to eat something different than my family every night or be super limited in what I can make them. Calculating the calories for this casserole was easy, we all ate the same thing, I felt full and satisfied, yet I ate 500 calories less for the day than I burned.

We all have to find our own groove. Sometimes it takes experimentation. Books and blogs can be helpful, but in the end, I am the one who has to find a way to make it work, and find something I enjoy sticking with.