Can We Stop Pretending Low Carb Diets are Special
Good Morning Titans,
I want to tell ya’ll a little story about how I gained 20 lbs. doing the keto diet a couple of years ago. I admit it. I fell for the lies about low carb diets and calories not mattering and that’s exactly what they are, lies. At the end of the day the calorie is king and if you eat more calories than your body expends then you will absolutely gain weight.
So How Did I Do It?
Literally every single day I would eat practically the same thing. For breakfast I’d eat 6 whole eggs, grilled chicken breast, and a lot of bell peppers, onions, spinach and cheese. For Lunch I’d usually have something like 2-3 chicken thighs and some sort of vegetable. Often times I’d cook the the vegetables using bacon grease. For dinner I was eating a HUGE Ribeye (at least 16oz) with four scrambled eggs on top and half a bag of broccoli. I was also very liberal with the amount of grass fed butter I would use. In addition to all of this I was also drinking a protein shake after my training sessions. At the end of the day I was eating waaaay above maintenance. All in all I was eating around 4414 calories a day, including 326g of fat, 334g of protein and only 36g of carbs. Yup you read that right. How I managed to get to that much food with such a low amount of carbs is still beyond me but somehow I managed to do it.
Anyway, eating this way had me slowly gain roughly 20 lbs. over a period of several months and I didn’t get any stronger even though I was on a program that should’ve been yielding strength gains. What I learned was a hard lesson that carbs are not the enemy. Now on virtually the same program I was on during that time, I’ve reduced my calories and I’m eating at least 200 carbs every single day. My strength has skyrocketed and my weight has stayed somewhat constant.
So Are Low Carb Diets Bad?
No, I don’t believe that there is anything inherently bad about low carb diets. In fact for many people something like Keto serves as an excellent starting point to living a healthier life style. Where diets like keto become problematic is when people start saying things like “pork rinds are heathy because they don’t have any carbs” or when people start unnecessarily adding fat to their coffee in the mornings. This is not a good idea and just adds more calories to your overall intake. If you can avoid doing that then you should be ok.
If Low Carb Diets Aren’t the Answer, Then What Is?
When I first started my journey of losing body fat several years ago I used an app on my phone called “Lose It” all it did was track my calorie intake as well as estimate my calorie output to make sure that I stayed in a deficit. I didn’t worry at all about my macro nutrient breakdown, my meal timing or anything else. It was strictly calories in vs calories out and this took me from around 235 to 180 in less than a year. Now that I’ve had a little more time to learn and I have more demands from my body I have tried to put a few more main points of focus on my nutrition.
Calories
This is the most important thing. If you’re trying to lose fat then you have to burn more calories than you consume. If you’re trying to build muscle then you must consume more calories than you burn. There is no way around this. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or just ignorant.
Protein
Every day you should try to eat one gram of protein for one gram of bodyweight. If your body fat percentage is on the lower side then there is some wiggle room to this but if you’re obese and trying to lose body fat then you might want to calculate on lean mass rather than total mass. It’s also important to not over eat on protein because any excess the body will turn to sugar and store as fat if not used.
Food Choice
Try to get a majority of your food (if not all of it) from whole food choices. You cannot identify an Oreo as one ingredient so, no matter how delicious they might be, you probably shouldn’t eat a lot of them. Some examples of these would be: anything that had a mom, rice, potatoes, green vegetables, colorful vegetables… You get the idea.
Meal Frequency
The human body can only absorb about 30-40 grams of protein at a time so try to space your protein intake out through out the day in order to make the most of what you’re eating. After all, protein is kind of expensive.
Nutrient Timing
If you are on a calorie deficit then try to time your carb intake to around your training so that you’re burning energy when you actually need it and not storing it for later.
So Why are Low Carb Diets So Popular
This is a really easy question to answer. People like to think that the reason they can’t lose weight is because they don’t know “The Secret”. I don’t know if this is just a western thing or if it’s all over the world but we want an easy solution to everything. When you tell someone that’s struggling with their weight that all they have to do is cut out the carbs they feel like they’ve just been given the keys to the kingdom and if they can just stick to that then they’ll reach their goals. During the first couple of weeks they lose a lot of weight (around 10 lbs. or so) and that solidifies what they believe. The problem is that they don’t realize that a lot of what they see on the scale is just them losing water weight. There’s a key root in the word “carbohydrate”. Can you guess what that is? If you guessed “hydrate” then you win. Carbs help us to store not only sugar (in the form of glycogen) in the muscle but water as well and when we take them out of our diet then the water goes with it. This loss of water weight helps make people believe their diet is working but it’s all just the scale lying to you.
So that’s enough soap boxing for the day. If you liked this article don’t forget to check every Monday for more just like this one but different. You can also like us on Facebook here and follow our Instagram here. We also have a YouTube channel that you can follow here. And as always if you have any questions at all don’t hesitate to email me at cameron@atlasstrengthshop.com
Release the Titan in You,
Cameron Ray