What do you eat to keep under 20 carbs a day? I’m finding it quite difficult to keep to that & usually end up with around 40-50 even though I think I’m sticking to the diet. My weight is stuck& I’ve read posts saying the secret is to drop below 20 but what do you actually eat in a day to get that figure?
Is there a thread anywhere that gives people’s daily meals, which would be really helpful?

Hi Arianwen – this is a list of low carb foods https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/44-healthy-low-carb-foods#section27
Search keto recipes. That should help.
Maggie

Hi Arianwen! It can take a bit of practice to get your carb intake very low. You have to wrap your head around a different way of eating! You say you are 40-50 grams of carbs per day, that’s good! — so you are likely in ketosis and it should be pretty easy to go even lower.
Here’s my 20 gram day (I’m two years of maintenance but I still do low carb every single day and very low carb as a corrective measure).
Breakfast:
Either skip completely to get more fasting hours or if I’m hungry, 1-2 Tablespoons heavy (whipping) cream in my coffee, 1 oz slice of cheese. (This gives hours of energy)
Lunch:
Kale salad with tuna salad on top with avocado, or fresh fish and some green beans, or a hamburger patty with a side of greens and olive dressing — kale, collards, chard and all greens great for filling up. Can dress with olive oil and lemon juice or homemade mayo.
Dinner:
Fish and veggies, or stir fry with veggies and beef, chicken, pork, roasted pork loin with veggies, homemade mousakka, etc etc..
I stick with greens and green vegetables (remember you get to SUBTRACT the fiber from the carbs).
Try this for a week or two — then evaluate your own body’s response. Every one is different and what works for one might not work for you. You are looking for your personal “sweet spot” — your own carbohydrate “threshold” — you are going to find it, and it’s going to be much easier when you figure it out!

Hi Arianwen,
I did it in stages, I started out cutting out all the major sources of carbs, to get down to around the 40 to 50 g of carbs a day and gradually got my carb monster under control. Then my taste buds and my appetite both changed, so I both was quite comfortable making lower carb choices and started to skip breakfast, and gradually lunch slipped back in time, until I got to eating in a 4 hour window each day.

Thank you , that’s very helpful. I already skip breakfast, just coffee as never been a breakfast eater. I didn’t know, & don’t really understand about deducting fibre carbs, I just count carbs from veg according to My Fitness Pal.
Thank you California girl for your meal lists, I can see that I’m going a bit wrong with my salads as I have tomatoes, onions, red pepper, sometimes beetroot which all have carbs so mount up I suppose.

When you look at the carb number for a vegetable, there will also be a fiber number. Subtract the fiber from the carb for the “effective” carb number — i.e. garbanzo beans 1/2 cup is 20 grams carbohydrate and has 6 grams fiber. Subtract 6 from 20 and you get 14 grams carbohydrate for the 1/2 cup serving (this is the number you use).
This REALLY matters because you can eat foods with high levels of fiber in much larger quantities! So make sure you check.
I’m not knowledgeable about how My Fitness Pal logs veggies. Maybe someone else can let us know.
There is a GREAT discussion of this in Gary Taubes book “Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It”. I recommend it very strongly — its the perfect companion book to the BSD. Both Allie and I used that book — she lost 150 pounds and I lost 50 so it really helps!!

A lot of us use an app on our mobile phones to log what we eat. It depends which app you use and which country you are in, on if you have to calculate the fiber part of any carbs. – In the UK food labels show carbs minus the fibre. The app myfatsecret also records carb values minus fibre, while I understand the fitnesspal app doesn’t.

Ok, thanks. I’ve downloaded the Gary Taubes book onto my kindle. I’ll try using the myfatsecret app instead of MyFitnessPal. I’m in the UK, up on the moors, praying for some rain to put out the fires that are just up the lane!
Kicking myself this morning for having succumbed to a couple of glasses of wine last night. I’m really impressed with your losses.

Californiagirl, I find the Taubes book a little overwhelming with technical info. Anyone else?

Violinist, I too cannot understand the Why We Get Fat book. I started reading it over a year ago and am about half way through and it has all been so technical or like reading a book on anthropology. I think I have just about got to the point where he gets to the point but it has been sat on the floor by my chair for the past 6 months.

I hope Allie or Skinny can explain why this book changed their life. I really want to know!i

Hi Violinist! I’m sorry the “Why We Get Fat” book is such a slog (and sunshinegirl!) — I couldn’t put it down — so funny, but of course we all have our own reading preferences as well as food preferences so it isn’t surprising.
In a quick (and hopefully useful nutshell, sunshinegirl will think it’s “preaching to the choir”), the important thing from the book is that the old “calories in/calories out” theory is not the best way to lose fat.
Instead, we should consider the hormonal environment in our body and work WITH the hormonal environment in order to lose weight quickly and with less hunger.
There is a lot of new reasearch in this — and the research continues to support this theory. Try Dr. Bikman utube podcasts for recent research.
How do we accomplish this?
The most important thing is to get your insulin levels down as low as possible and for as long as possible. Insulin is your “fat storage” hormone. It “pushes” blood glucose into your fat cells and your muscles. All of that would be fine, as we need some fat on our bodies, but too much insulin also works to LOCK the fat into the cells and not allow it to be released even when you are feeling very hungry or even when you are hypoglycemic.
So you can be fat, have plenty of fuel on your body in the form of fat, and still be starving, or ravenously hungry or even hypoglycemic. You really ARE starving — you cannot access the fat stored because your high insulin levels are keeping it locked up, unavailable, in the cells.
How do we lower the insulin levels in our body? By eating foods that have a very low insulin response OR by not eating at all for a longer period of time. The first is a low carbohydrate diet — carbohydrates drive insulin production, or as one researcher noted, “carbohydrate drives insulin drives fat”.
Dietary fat (butter, olive oil, cream, meat fats, avocado, coconut etc) have an extremely LOW response with insulin.
Protein has a muted response, the insulin does rise with protein intake but not super high or super fast and it subsides quickly.
Carbohydrates can blow your insulin sky high in seconds, even as you chew the food. Some carbohydrates are truly terrible — refined flours, ALL sugars, fruit juices, potatoes, rice, pasta, cereals — they elicit an immediate and high insulin response.
They are best completely avoided and only rarely consumed.
Other carbohydrates, like green veggies and other veggies have a lot of fiber, so their sugars and starches can be broken down slowly by digestive processes and they don’t affect insulin in the same way.
So cut the bad carbohydrates completely and try to keep your daily carbohydrate intake low (40-50 grams) or very low (20 grams) if you aren’t losing weight.
The second way to lower insulin is to not eat for extended periods of time — this is fasting. See Dr. Fung (podcasts on u tube) for help with this. Optimum time fasting is probably 14-16 hours or more. This allows the body a long period of time where the fats stored in the cells can be released because fasting has lowered your insulin levels to a very low level.
There’s a bit more about insulin, but I’ll follow up with another post because this one is long!

The other important thing about insulin is this (I think JGwen has also seen this research) — your insulin levels begin to rise ten or fifteen YEARS before your blood sugar starts to rise (and we become diabetic).
Research suggests that we should be monitoring insulin (irs a simple blood test, inexpensive) when we are much younger. We could catch diabetes and prediabetes much earlier and implement dietary changes before blood sugar gets out of control.
It also turns out that the damage of diabetes ( all the bad stuff) might actually ALSO be caused by the insulin, not just the blood sugars. So damage might be occurring years and years earlier, when your insulin starts to rise.
And, it suggests to me, that anything that pushes your insulin way up is going to cause some damage — such as a chunk of sweet cake or similar.
This argues that we should keep insulin low ALL the time. So it turns out we maybe shouldn’t worry about blood glucose being high, but instead worry about insulin being high. If insulin is low, the blood sugars will take care of themselves.

Wow, thank you. It confirms I understood more than I thought. Ok, got it and will continue the book. I have been rereading Mosley too

Hi Violinist! I’m so happy that Julia (californiagirl) found your post first, because her communication skills
are far superior to mine 🙂 I’m sorry that you are finding Taubes’ book a hard read. You may prefer to watch
one of his you tube videos instead. Several years previously I had read his revolutionary 500 page work,
“Good Calories..Bad Calories”. In it he describes all of the work in the area of weight loss that has taken place
from just prior to WW2. It’s heavily footnoted, and took him 5 years to write. He’s not a MD, but a science
journalist. I found it fascinating to learn how the lipid hypothesis came into being, along with the carbo-
hydrate theory as well. Both of his books debunked the theory once and for all that all calories are created equal,
as well as the calories in/calories out myth. “Why We Get Fat…” was published about 8 years later, to
similar acclaim. I say that it was life changing for me, because I have never looked at our food supply in
quite the same way again. It was a question of realizing that I am insulin resistant, and don’t process carbs
the way the average person who is slim does. Once I accepted that, changing the way I eat was relatively
easy. The freedom to get off the yo-yo dieting bandwagon has been liberating…and for me it all began with
“Why We Get Fat”. The real curiosity is that I didn’t even discover these forums until I was already 3 months
into maintenance. Imagine my surprise to discover that I’d been doing the BSD all along!

Hi you to boffins (brain boxes), I am completely on board with what Taubes has to say, just that it took him an age to get round to it. As an example on his long windedness, he just seems to be getting to the point then he writes ‘an historical digression into lipophilia’. I got to chapter 15 on why diets succeed and fail and thought, yeah we are getting down to it now. But 2 pages on he moves on to ‘a historical digression on the fattening carbohydrate, quoting from Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Maybe I should watch his video and I will when I get around to it. Please dont think I am knocking his theories just his round about way of expressing them.

No sunshine girl! That’s why I said that with you I was preaching to the choir! I know you are on board with this and follow the same ideas!

A new expression for me today, S-G. Love it!

I also found Taubes a bit of a ‘slog’ to read, and although I did get the message, I would have been so much happier to have your précis in the first instance Californiagirl! I think if it’s the first book you read about the ‘science’ of insulin resistance etc. then it probably is a revelation. Having read lots of other material first I did find his writing style rather hard going but his work is nonetheless very valuable. I’m going to Dr Bikmans research as soon as I get a moment of quiet to myself.

Thank you for all those interesting posts.
Was just thinking, isn’t it funny years ago when my mum was battling with her weight the accepted way to diet was to cut out bread, potatoes, sweets, cakes, biscuits etc. Everyone who wanted to lose weight did that. Then over the years the mantra has changed completely to become low fat, still cut out sugary things but fill up on pasta, rice, boiled potatoes but not chips & ditch butter, cream etc

Arianwen, I think it was around 1980 that the low fat mantra became the “norm”, and look where it has led us!
My parents and grandparents just ate 3 meals a day, and this constant snacking was unheard of! The population
as a whole was far healthier during WW2, when sugar was impossible to come by, and everyone had to walk
everyday, because petrol was a scarce commodity as well. Ancel Keyes has a lot to answer for!!

Allie

My grandmother was born in the 1880’s so lived through two world wars, the Depression and no welfare or NHS; she never let me have jam and butter, it was one or the other. Amazing how times have changed.

If it’s any help, I found the best way to read the Gary Taubes book is with a pen and ruler, and I underlined the relevant bits as I read it. That seemed to make it easier to take it in, maybe because it slowed me down, and made me really think about what he was saying. I liked the book because it explained the reasons behind what we are doing, and how my body responds to what I eat. And knowing that has made it easier to stick to the plan.

Hi, new to this forum and looking for some help. I feel sure I should know this but is there a way to accurately work out how much Protein, Carbs and Fat I should be having? I am not diabetic, nor pre diabetic but I lost 4st last year and it is just starting to creep back on. I want to jump on that before it gets out of hand. I used one website and it gave me 25g Carbs, 61g Protein, 60g Fat – does that sound right?
I am 61years old, 1.49 metres tall, I weigh 57 kilos, do a minimum of 12,000 steps a day (up to 20,000 if I can) and I use My Fitness Pal to track food but I cannot alter the total goals without upgrading to premium which I am not inclined to do.
Grateful for any help.

Hi bordersgirl, you can change the macro goals on myfitnesspal wihtout paying for premium. I have changed mine.
Got to: – More – Goals – scroll down to Nutrient Goals, and you will see “Calories, Carbs, Protein & Fat Goals”. There you can play around with the percentages.
I hope that helps.
Elle