The title of the diet is self exploratory but I am still a little confused as to precisely how many grams of carbs a lady should be consuming per day?

The official diet does not mention a specific level of carbs. Dr Mosley talks about healthy vs unhealthy carbs rather than setting a limit. People here have generally found sticking to 50 g or under a day helps weight loss. You can do that if you mainly get your carbs from veges, if you want to add lentils, beans etc then you’ll probably go over 50 grams. Try different levels to see what works and what makes your body feel good.

Hi Apollo29

You don’t say if you’re a diabetic. Some of us on here have needed to go to around 25g carbohydrate to bring our blood sugars down, and some non-diabetics have had to go around that level to lose weight. It seems our tolerance of carbohydrates is another thing that is individual. As Natalie says, trial and error.

I seem to be fine on around 40g per day, but am not diabetic, if that helps. I haven’t tried any other level mind you, although I might if I get a really long plateau.

The other thing to consider – if you are using pulses – is exactly what a portion size is. I did a lovely James Martin recipe for fish with green lentils. His advice was more than 70g (dry) lentils per portion when I used 26g (!!!) per portion and everyone eating the meal said that was the right amount.

So think about reducing quantities as well. I think that’s key and you should find you enjoy your food

Btw I did 20g of carbs a day to kick start my weight loss – but it is very much individual.

Best of luck 🙂

Hello,

Thank you for your great responses to my first ever post. No, I am not diabetic but my lifestyle was in the high risk category so I am taking action now. That is good advice about watching my intake of pulse – yes I do believe that I have been eating more carbs than I should have according to the numbers on MyFitnessPal. I plan to experiment with consuming 40-50g per day and see how I feel. It’s only Day 3 and I have been pleasantly surprised at the lack of hunger pangs I’m experiencing although I do feel that my levels of concentration are suffering on the diet. Have any of you experienced this feeling? Should I expect my concentration to improve with time?

Thanks again to all the wonderful advice!

I think you need to experiment a bit and see what works for you. I’ve been keeping a log to see the correlations (but I’m a bit of a numbers geek anyway). I’ve also recently discovered you count net carbs, which are carbs less fiber. It gets a bit confusing as some apps do this for you, and some don’t (depending on whether they are US or UK based I think). I use my fitbit to log food, and this doesn’t subtract the fiber. I was getting a bit confused because when I used some of the recipes in the book, I was going over 50 grams (if there were pulses etc) but when I took off the fiber they were under. I averaged 35 net carbs last week and lost 1.3kg. Some people would lose a lot more than that on that level of carbs, but when I was on 50 grams I didn’t lose.
I expect I’ve just made that a whole lot more complicated than it needs to be! Probably best to see how you go, and if you stall in weight loss look into the carb issue.
Good luck with it!