A few personal observations of my low carb experience

After watching the video "Why we get fat" I immediately started a 2 week personal experiment to rid all pasta, rice, bread, sugar, beans, legumes from my diet. I started on Sunday Feb 17, and thanks to the meticulous food log i have been keeping I can look back and write this review.

This list below is my personal experience. I'm not sure if its correct, but it is how food makes me feel this week:

1) before I started watching for the carbs i was eating between 1250 and 1560 calories and about 150-170 grams of carbs. After I implement the low carb, except for the first day Sunday I had 104 g of carb the rest has been lower than 60 grams. The last 2 days has been below 50 grams and calorie wise i have been less than 1250 every day.

2) I always eat something when I'm hungry. I believe that hunger is our body's way to tell us a message. I never starve myself or miss a meal. the first 2 days on low carb I ate 104 g and 74 gram respectively and like I said i felt really tired and hungry by 4/5 pm. I was so tired i had to lay down and take a nap. I think my body was used to use the carb in the food, but since i was eating less carb, and the body hasn't gotten used to use stored fat as energy, its nagging for me to feed it more carbs. I notice that if I feed my body cheese or protein or nuts, the hunger will not go away until i give in and feed it a bit of starchy carb. The second day i had to eat some whole wheat pasta (1/4 of cup) because of this same reason. However once my body readjusted to this diet for the past 2 days I was able to eat less total calories and feel full all the time. I think my body is burning stored fat and absolutely no carb craving.

3)I have to get rid of milk and yogurt. I have switched from low fat to whole fat yogurt and milk for a while. I usually drink a milk after work out. I have been doing this for more than a month, but I have to stop. I'm never too crazy for milk any ways and it has a lot of sugar even the whole milk. I cut back on dairy and now I feel much better.

4) I'm enjoying a new found freedom with this new food paradym. Like most of you I'm sure, I have been brainwashed in thinking that low fat is better. Now i think moderated fat (fattier cut of meat, cream, butter, avocado, coconut oil, coconut milk and nuts) are all good for us and I feel no guilt eating one of the home made grapefruit panacotta, or home made coconut chocolate both without using sugar or honey, just al natural.

5) I eat a lot of colorful veggies now that I'm low carb then when i was eating balance. colorful veggies such as kale, broccoli, cauliflower, butternut squash, spaghetti squash all have low carbs compared to fruits and super low glycimic index. Fernando says our bodies have evolved to eat this kind of veggies as opposed to fruits. Because fruits are only available in certain seasons, and climates and they weren't as abundant or as sweet as now.

6) over all i feel better with low carb diet and i feel it is more healthy for me. I think carb (rice, pasta, bread) are addictive. Once you have a little it is impossible to stop. So my strategies is not to eat them during the week and only eat them on the weekend. This way, I can satisfy my cravings for say Chinese food and ramen, but still during the weekday i don't have any temptation of over eating, because no rice is available lol. I will implement this lifestyle once the two weeks are up. I may extend it to 1 month. I'm planning on getting blood work done after 30 days.

7) I'm very happy that this diet is good for Jose, my diabetic father in law. He doesn't cook at all, so he has to eat whatever I prepare lol. He has replaced his old breakfast of 2 or 3 thick slices of whole wheat bread with 1 banana and blue cheese to a nopales omelet and an apple or pear. His portions have reduced for all meals. He is eating lunch with us now where before he was so stuff with the bread he would skip lunch and not eat anything until dinner. Myrna also likes all this new foods I've been preparing. I think the rice with arsenic article really got to her.