Doesn’t the carb-free diet make you lose weight? I’ll explain why
One of the most frequent things that I happen to hear from whoever writes to me is that despite having a diet without carbohydrates, he cannot lose weight: for what reason? Does the ketogenic diet, and in general the carbohydrate-free diet (whether it has fat or not) make you lose a lot of kilos, more than the traditional diet?
Now I’ll explain in a few simple points why even if you are on a diet without carbohydrates you are not losing weight:
– because you already eat few carbohydrates: the diet without carbohydrates must be cycled , that is, you cannot do it for six months or a year and then go back to eating however low carbohydrates and think about doing it again every time you put on some weight. Your problem is in fact carbohydrates, and your perennial tendency to reduce them, because you are convinced that carbohydrates are to be demonized and make you fat.
Not only is this not the case, but when you already normally eat very few carbohydrates , completely excluding them does not give you great advantages in weight loss. Worse, you reduce the body’s ability to use carbohydrates to lose weight more and more , worsening your metabolism and your hormonal situation in the long run. This is because the body needs glucose to live.
Don’t you give him carbohydrates? It will take glucose in another way. If this becomes the practice, clearly when we go back to eating carbohydrates, we will have to deal with a body that is used to doing without it, in nutrition, and looking for it elsewhere.
Consequence isthat when you resume eating carbohydrates you gain weight , you feel bloated and you develop the belief that you have some particular problem in eating them . So you eat a few anyway instead of starting to gradually reintroduce them, and when you then try to take extreme measures by completely eliminating them the trick doesn’t work , precisely because your body is already trained to get enough carbohydrates from food.
– Why Calories Matter: Carbohydrate-free diets are often advertised as diets where you don’t have to count calories . A wrong simplification, because it always counts how much energy we take in and how much we burn and even the diets that are sponsored as diets in which you eat to your fill actually exclude foods with medium or high energy density , that is, they are elimination diets. With the disadvantage that you not only consume few calories and are still on a diet, but you create nutritional deficiencies that in the long run damage your health and therefore metabolism.
– because the no-carbohydrate diet does not make you lose more weight than a standard low-calorie diet: the ketogenic diet initially causes you to lose more weight than a diet with carbohydrates for one simple reason. During the first few days , more fluids are lost, because the carbohydrate-deficient body (if the initial carbohydrate requirement is high) buys up glycogen stores from the liver and then other substances (amino acids from the muscles) to produce glucose (gluconeogenesis), thus releasing water. The effect is that in the first days we deflate: then the body optimizes the metabolism to do without carbohydrates as a direct energy source and instead exploiting the ketone bodies and fats (ketosis). This takes a few weeks to fully enter a state of ketosis.
The consequence is that short low carb regimens (low carb only) essentially cause you to lose fluids, while in the long term (from six months to a year), the loss of body weight is similar to a standard low calorie diet and the initial lost fluids are recovered.
In conclusion: the low carb diet can be useful for losing weight, as long as you don’t abuse it, and still be used to eating the right amount of carbohydrates. If that’s not the case, taking one or two week low carb crash regimes doesn’t increase our ability to lose weight.
For those who want to lose weight with the trick of reducing carbohydrates, the advice remains to cycle the low carb diet, or try to do days without carbohydrates and with a lot of fat (3-4 days) and recharge days with many carbohydrates and low fat. But this considering that in the weekly average the calorie deficit counts, so in any case we have to introduce on average fewer calories with food than we consume.
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