Limit Your Carbs. Why not focus on calories?


Why limit carbohydrates? Why not focus on calories, as so many other diet and weight loss programs do?

I am not the only person who will tell you that pretty much any diet will eventually result in some weight loss, if you stick to it. The problem is that “sticking to it” is hard.  The stumbling block is always long-term livability, and how the plan fits into your real life once the motivation of the first few weeks has faded.

My main goal was to make this as simple as possible, and the number of calories you should eat for weight loss depends on your height, weight, activity level, and metabolism. It is a moving target—it changes every time one of these other variables shifts. Limiting carbs to 100 grams will result in weight loss whether you are starting out at 300 pounds or 150, and there’s no need to adjust the number as you lose weight or become more active.

Many foods have few or negligible carbs and won’t need to be counted at all, and because 100 gram a day of carbs is a relatively small number, as you become familiar with the carb contents of the foods you eat regularly, it will be easy (even for the math-challenged) to keep an eye on your carb goal without formal tracking.

What’s more, cutting carbs has a domino effect on your nutritional choices that not only has an addictive combination of sugars, fats, and chemicals that interfere with our hunger signals and undermine our willpower, but they also tend to be high in carbs, and so will be limited naturally by following this guideline.

In addition, reducing the amount of room given to the macronutrient carbohydrate leaves an open space on your dietary plate. The options remaining to fill that space are the other two macronutrients—fats and proteins—or low-carb vegetables, all of which are naturally filling.

In my opinion, carbohydrates are where things have really gone wrong in our food supply in the last fifty years or so. The changes in the proteins we eat are nothing compared to the transformations in the realm of carbohydrates, big business has created a staggering array of increasingly processed foods with the advance of food science and technology and none of it is good for us and our health. 

Below is a list of my favorite fruit and veggies with carb counts to get you started: 

*You can also download the form by clicking the download tab on the top right of the document.