Over the years that I've been blogging, I've received dozens of emails from readers asking me what I'm specifically doing to lose weight.
Most of these people are struggling to make a low-carb diet work.
“What are you doing?” they ask. “I want to do what you're doing.”
While my main diet blog is devoted to very low-carb diets, and my moderate-carb blog is devoted to Weight Watchers and intuitive-style eating, I've never hid the fact that I'm not doing Keto.
I'm not doing Atkins, either, for that matter. Atkins requires you to return carby foods to your diet in a particular order.
I did do Keto for the first 90 days, this time around. I needed to get my blood glucose level under control, fast. But after that, I moved into a more generous low-carb diet.
What's the difference?
I'm not eliminating sugar or starches, so some of my food choices would not be considered low carb by the Keto or Atkins' communities.
I'm simply cutting back on portion sizes of foods I was already eating and switched up and swapped out some of my food choices, so they would fit within my carbohydrate tolerance level.
Some would call what I'm doing Lazy Keto.
But, since I don't have a gall bladder, I'm eating way less fat than Keto recommends. At maintenance, Keto requires you to raise your fats, even more, which I can't do without severe consequences.
For 32 weeks now, I have not been counting calories, carbs, or points. Yet, I have still managed to drop 40 pounds.
I'm happy with that 40-pound drop. On the average, it's more than one pound per week. I'm even happier to learn that maintaining that 40-pound drop is very doable. It hasn't been hard at all.
Maintaining has always been my downfall.
Shedding the pounds is easy compared to keeping those pounds off. Especially, since I'm not into counting macros any more. I want my diet to feel like normal eating because this is how I'm going to be eating for the rest of my life.
What does it take to be successful?
I've come to the realization that weight-loss diets fail because they radically depart from how you're eating right now. Food choices need to be more in line with your tastes and lifestyle. Otherwise, you're bound to return to your ideal of normal once you reach goal.
And returning to normal eating always means the weight is coming back.
To win the diet game, it's going to take small dietary changes, one meal at a time or one food at a time, so they become a permanent part of your life.
Something you keep doing even if you quit.
To help you do that, I'm going to spell out for you what I'm doing, and share the dieting principles I've learned along the way, so you can adapt your own current diet to be more in line with what you want to weigh.
I did do Keto for the first 90 days, this time around. I needed to get my blood glucose level under control, fast. But after that, I moved into a more generous low-carb diet.
What's the difference?
I'm not eliminating sugar or starches, so some of my food choices would not be considered low carb by the Keto or Atkins' communities.
I'm simply cutting back on portion sizes of foods I was already eating and switched up and swapped out some of my food choices, so they would fit within my carbohydrate tolerance level.
Some would call what I'm doing Lazy Keto.
But, since I don't have a gall bladder, I'm eating way less fat than Keto recommends. At maintenance, Keto requires you to raise your fats, even more, which I can't do without severe consequences.
For 32 weeks now, I have not been counting calories, carbs, or points. Yet, I have still managed to drop 40 pounds.
I'm happy with that 40-pound drop. On the average, it's more than one pound per week. I'm even happier to learn that maintaining that 40-pound drop is very doable. It hasn't been hard at all.
Maintaining has always been my downfall.
Shedding the pounds is easy compared to keeping those pounds off. Especially, since I'm not into counting macros any more. I want my diet to feel like normal eating because this is how I'm going to be eating for the rest of my life.
What does it take to be successful?
I've come to the realization that weight-loss diets fail because they radically depart from how you're eating right now. Food choices need to be more in line with your tastes and lifestyle. Otherwise, you're bound to return to your ideal of normal once you reach goal.
And returning to normal eating always means the weight is coming back.
To win the diet game, it's going to take small dietary changes, one meal at a time or one food at a time, so they become a permanent part of your life.
Something you keep doing even if you quit.
To help you do that, I'm going to spell out for you what I'm doing, and share the dieting principles I've learned along the way, so you can adapt your own current diet to be more in line with what you want to weigh.
My Personal Wake-Up Call
About 32 weeks ago, I suddenly lost my appetite.
I felt nauseated and horrible, so I decided to measure my blood glucose to see if anything wonky was going on.
It was.
My blood sugar was sky high.
That's why I wasn't feeling hungry. My body didn't need any more food. I had eaten too much already.
That experience was a serious wake-up call for me because my blood sugar was higher than it has ever been before. I don't remember exactly how high it was, but it was over 250.
Maybe, 275.
Gluten-free diets are higher in carbohydrates due to the rice flour and refined starches in alternative flours and pastas. However, I'm also on a medication that can raise blood sugar.
Combine the two, gluten-free substitutes and medication, and it was easy to see what happened: my insulin resistance had gotten worse.
I decided right then and there that I'd do a strict Keto diet for 30 days to get my numbers under control. At the end of that period, my numbers were still higher than I wanted them to be, so I recommitted to doing an additional 60 days of Keto.
At the end of that 90 days, I realized that Keto was going to be too much fat for me, come maintenance; and Atkins was too strict. So, I slowly moved into my own version of a low-carb diet.
Dessert on a Weight-Loss Diet? Yep, You Can!
I started off creating my diet with dessert.
At the time, hubby and I were eating ice cream almost every day, and I didn't want to give that up. I took a look at the diet ice cream selections available in our area and settled on CarbSmart chocolate ice cream.
It claimed to have 5-net carbs and about 100 calories per 2/3 cup serving.
What I didn't count on was my reaction to the sugar alcohols that were in it. The ice cream contained maltitol, which is really high on the glycemic index, so it's not good for my blood sugar.
The ice cream is probably why it took so long for my blood sugar to normalize.
Maltitol is known to give many people (including me) bathroom issues when you consume too much. At first, things went okay for me, but recently, I started reacting to it, pretty violently, so I'm going to return to regular ice cream once the weather warms up.
Oddly enough, real sugar is lower on the glycemic index than maltitol is!
Currently, I'm making desserts, such as gluten-free cakes, pies, cheesecake, and gelatin salads. My blood sugar has normalized, even with the extra sugar. Maybe because I'm balancing out those carbs by eating fewer carby foods for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Once I had desert squared away, I took a look at breakfast.
Breakfast for us has always included bacon, sausage, and lots of eggs, so trimming the carbs in the beginning meant giving up pancakes, waffles, hash browns, and biscuits with gravy.
Since the goal was to get my blood sugar down fast, rather than weight loss, I was still able to eat fatty meat and eggs:
My breakfast was very small, and still is, when compared to what I was eating before – even on my current plan because I'm just not hungry in the morning anymore.
I tried going back to 2 eggs with 3 slices of bacon or sausage and got pretty sick. The body didn't want the extra food in the morning.
I'm okay with that because it lets me have a larger dinner at night.
As time went on, I ran into a low-carb waffle recipe that used very little flour, so two Ego-sized waffles baked in a mini round waffle pan are only 16-1/2 carbs for both.
They make nice sandwich bread for egg sandwiches and also hamburger buns, as well as 8-1/4 carb waffles.
Since then, I've tried hash browns instead of bacon or sausage, and was fine; but I haven't tried pancakes or biscuits with gravy yet because we are usually having other carby things for dinner.
Pancakes is on my radar, though. I'm thinking of using the low-flour waffle batter and see how they come out.
The trick to losing weight without having to count calories, carbs, or points is to space out your carby foods throughout the week, rather than to delete all of them permanently.
Make carby foods a treat, a once-in-a-while indulgence, rather than something you have to have every single day.
Lunch was my next major change.
My number 1 rule?
Don't eat lunch until you're hungry!
Instead of heating up leftovers or baking chicken and serving it with a hefty side of rice, I made meat the main part of my lunch. I baked the chicken leg quarters I was already eating or heated up a couple of spareribs, but skipped the side of rice.
Rice is fairly low in calories, about 120 per half a cup of cooked rice, but it's almost all starch, so there is 20 carbs in a half a cup of rice. That is about half of my carb limit for the day, but I never, ever limit myself to just a half a cup.
It is easier to just skip the rice completely since the Thai Sweet Chili Sauce I normally toss it with is 10 carbs and 80 calories per tablespoon. With a normal 1-cup portion, 2 tablespoons of sauce would double the carbs for the rice.
Since dinner is somewhat heavier in carbs than a traditional low-carb meal, I often skip carbs at lunch and just eat the meat.
I save about 400 calories eating that way.
When I am tired of chicken, I have 2 fried eggs topped with a slice of cheese and a container of Carbmaster low-carb yogurt.
Sometimes, I eat a ham-and-cheese sandwich where the cheese slices are the bread. Other times, I take the time to make some of those breakfast low-flour waffles and eat a burger or tuna sandwich for lunch.
On the weekend, lunch is a dinner-salad, a meat-and-vegetable soup, or the filling that goes inside burritos topped with avocado, salsa, sour cream, and grated cheese.
This was a huge change for me.
Before seriously tackling my blood sugar and eating habits, I would snack throughout the afternoon. Usually potato chips. Or Cheetos. Or homemade cookies. Or cheese.
When moving to Keto for the first 30 days I did have sugar-free gelatin topped with whipped cream in the afternoon. That helped me get my blood sugar under control super fast without having to sacrifice my cravings for sugar.
Today, I rarely snack. If I do, it's usually a couple of ounces of hard cheese, slices of ham, or a leftover chicken leg. This has saved me hundreds of calories and carbohydrates.
I have not trimmed down the calories for dinner.
There's a reason for this.
Going too low in calories and carbs doesn't leave you anywhere to go once your body adjusts to the amount of calories and carbs you're eating.
This is why Intermittent Fasting and One-Meal-a-Day weight-loss programs are so popular within the low-carb community. People have cut back on carbs and calories so severely by doing Keto that fasting is the only option they have left once their weight loss stalls.
I didn't want to “start off” with a low-calorie, low-carb dinner.
I wanted to leave myself room to lower calories once my body reaches equilibrium. There will be plenty of time to cut back on portion sizes for dinner once my body has adjusted the energy used with the amount of energy coming in on a daily basis.
To do that:
We don't eat carbs for dinner every single day. And this is key. I stretch out the carby foods, so the body is always guessing as to what to expect.
The amount of food changes daily as well as the number of carbs, depending on what my weight is doing. This is the main reason why I no longer count anything. I use the scale to design my day instead.
The idea is to disrupt patterns and keep them from forming.
Sometimes, we have a low-carb dinner: fatty meat with lettuce salad. Other times, we have a low-calorie dinner: chicken breast or salmon with steamed vegetables. We might have a hefty meat-and-vegetable soup with a square of gluten-free cornbread on the side.
During the past 32 weeks, we've had gluten-free pizza, pork tamales, macaroni and cheese, lasagna, gluten-free french bread, and other carby foods.
We just didn't have them all at once. Nor every day. I picked what I wanted to make for the week, and then filled in with traditional low-carb meals.
Two to 3 higher carb meals per week is plenty.
Keep in mind that the more carbs you eat, the slower the weight comes off.
Weight loss works best when your glycogen stores – how your body stores carbohydrates – are on the low side. But you don't have to count carbohydrates to make that happen.
Body fat will still come off as long as you're in a calorie deficit.
This is why I structured breakfast, lunch, and snacks to be what they are. It makes it easier and gives me more room for what I would call traditional foods for dinner.
Which is why I believe in tailoring your weight-loss diet to fit in with what you're already eating. Trim back, rather than eliminate completely. That way, it won't feel like you're dieting.
Realistically, your weight-loss diet should look very different from mine because we both do not eat the same things.
And that's okay.
The intent behind this post isn't to tell you what to eat. It's to show you how you can trim the calories and carbs without having to count them every single day.
I started with dessert.
I do not want to give that up. Dinner at 5:00 pm and dessert at 7:00 pm is a tradition that hubby and I have started that I want to continue. It hasn't interfered with my weight loss or ability to maintain that weight loss, so far.
So I see no reason to change that.
I next cut breakfast by 1/3.
It was super easy to do that since I'm not hungry in the morning any more. If you are, and a big breakfast is important to you, then you can simply cut back somewhere else.
I next eliminated most of the carbs from lunch and stopped snacking in the afternoon.
That painlessly eliminated a lot of calories because low-carb diets help you stay full. The idea is to cut back on your typical portion sizes, so you won't have to count anything. Less volume means fewer carbs and calories.
For example, when I first started eating just the taco-burrito filling, I ate extra filling to make up for the missing gluten-free tortillas. I then realized that I didn't need that much protein to feel full, so I started dishing up just the amount of filling I'd eat if I was still eating tortillas.
This cut back even more calories and carbs for me.
Look at your meals and snacks. Where can you painlessly cut back? While having tortillas is nice, I'd rather give up the tortillas and cut back on potatoes and rice at lunch and dinner, so I can still have dessert.
I've learned that dessert is important to me.
You need to discover what's important to you. That way, you won't be tempted to bail when you start missing your favorite foods.
Make your favorite foods a part of your weight-loss diet and remove what you don't care about. This will make your weight-loss diet more yummy than it was before!
Currently, I'm making desserts, such as gluten-free cakes, pies, cheesecake, and gelatin salads. My blood sugar has normalized, even with the extra sugar. Maybe because I'm balancing out those carbs by eating fewer carby foods for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Trim Down Breakfast
Once I had desert squared away, I took a look at breakfast.
Breakfast for us has always included bacon, sausage, and lots of eggs, so trimming the carbs in the beginning meant giving up pancakes, waffles, hash browns, and biscuits with gravy.
Since the goal was to get my blood sugar down fast, rather than weight loss, I was still able to eat fatty meat and eggs:
- 1 egg and 2 slices bacon
- 1 egg and 2 small breakfast sausages
- 1 egg scrambled with leftover diced chuck roast and green onions
My breakfast was very small, and still is, when compared to what I was eating before – even on my current plan because I'm just not hungry in the morning anymore.
I tried going back to 2 eggs with 3 slices of bacon or sausage and got pretty sick. The body didn't want the extra food in the morning.
I'm okay with that because it lets me have a larger dinner at night.
As time went on, I ran into a low-carb waffle recipe that used very little flour, so two Ego-sized waffles baked in a mini round waffle pan are only 16-1/2 carbs for both.
They make nice sandwich bread for egg sandwiches and also hamburger buns, as well as 8-1/4 carb waffles.
Since then, I've tried hash browns instead of bacon or sausage, and was fine; but I haven't tried pancakes or biscuits with gravy yet because we are usually having other carby things for dinner.
Pancakes is on my radar, though. I'm thinking of using the low-flour waffle batter and see how they come out.
The trick to losing weight without having to count calories, carbs, or points is to space out your carby foods throughout the week, rather than to delete all of them permanently.
Make carby foods a treat, a once-in-a-while indulgence, rather than something you have to have every single day.
Lunch: Reach for Protein First
Lunch was my next major change.
My number 1 rule?
Don't eat lunch until you're hungry!
Instead of heating up leftovers or baking chicken and serving it with a hefty side of rice, I made meat the main part of my lunch. I baked the chicken leg quarters I was already eating or heated up a couple of spareribs, but skipped the side of rice.
Rice is fairly low in calories, about 120 per half a cup of cooked rice, but it's almost all starch, so there is 20 carbs in a half a cup of rice. That is about half of my carb limit for the day, but I never, ever limit myself to just a half a cup.
It is easier to just skip the rice completely since the Thai Sweet Chili Sauce I normally toss it with is 10 carbs and 80 calories per tablespoon. With a normal 1-cup portion, 2 tablespoons of sauce would double the carbs for the rice.
Since dinner is somewhat heavier in carbs than a traditional low-carb meal, I often skip carbs at lunch and just eat the meat.
I save about 400 calories eating that way.
When I am tired of chicken, I have 2 fried eggs topped with a slice of cheese and a container of Carbmaster low-carb yogurt.
Sometimes, I eat a ham-and-cheese sandwich where the cheese slices are the bread. Other times, I take the time to make some of those breakfast low-flour waffles and eat a burger or tuna sandwich for lunch.
On the weekend, lunch is a dinner-salad, a meat-and-vegetable soup, or the filling that goes inside burritos topped with avocado, salsa, sour cream, and grated cheese.
I Rarely Snack
This was a huge change for me.
Before seriously tackling my blood sugar and eating habits, I would snack throughout the afternoon. Usually potato chips. Or Cheetos. Or homemade cookies. Or cheese.
When moving to Keto for the first 30 days I did have sugar-free gelatin topped with whipped cream in the afternoon. That helped me get my blood sugar under control super fast without having to sacrifice my cravings for sugar.
Today, I rarely snack. If I do, it's usually a couple of ounces of hard cheese, slices of ham, or a leftover chicken leg. This has saved me hundreds of calories and carbohydrates.
Have a Normal-Sized Dinner
I have not trimmed down the calories for dinner.
There's a reason for this.
Going too low in calories and carbs doesn't leave you anywhere to go once your body adjusts to the amount of calories and carbs you're eating.
This is why Intermittent Fasting and One-Meal-a-Day weight-loss programs are so popular within the low-carb community. People have cut back on carbs and calories so severely by doing Keto that fasting is the only option they have left once their weight loss stalls.
I didn't want to “start off” with a low-calorie, low-carb dinner.
I wanted to leave myself room to lower calories once my body reaches equilibrium. There will be plenty of time to cut back on portion sizes for dinner once my body has adjusted the energy used with the amount of energy coming in on a daily basis.
To do that:
We don't eat carbs for dinner every single day. And this is key. I stretch out the carby foods, so the body is always guessing as to what to expect.
The amount of food changes daily as well as the number of carbs, depending on what my weight is doing. This is the main reason why I no longer count anything. I use the scale to design my day instead.
The idea is to disrupt patterns and keep them from forming.
Sometimes, we have a low-carb dinner: fatty meat with lettuce salad. Other times, we have a low-calorie dinner: chicken breast or salmon with steamed vegetables. We might have a hefty meat-and-vegetable soup with a square of gluten-free cornbread on the side.
During the past 32 weeks, we've had gluten-free pizza, pork tamales, macaroni and cheese, lasagna, gluten-free french bread, and other carby foods.
We just didn't have them all at once. Nor every day. I picked what I wanted to make for the week, and then filled in with traditional low-carb meals.
Two to 3 higher carb meals per week is plenty.
Keep in mind that the more carbs you eat, the slower the weight comes off.
Weight loss works best when your glycogen stores – how your body stores carbohydrates – are on the low side. But you don't have to count carbohydrates to make that happen.
Body fat will still come off as long as you're in a calorie deficit.
This is why I structured breakfast, lunch, and snacks to be what they are. It makes it easier and gives me more room for what I would call traditional foods for dinner.
Which is why I believe in tailoring your weight-loss diet to fit in with what you're already eating. Trim back, rather than eliminate completely. That way, it won't feel like you're dieting.
Easy Way to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories, Carbs, or Points
Realistically, your weight-loss diet should look very different from mine because we both do not eat the same things.
And that's okay.
The intent behind this post isn't to tell you what to eat. It's to show you how you can trim the calories and carbs without having to count them every single day.
I started with dessert.
I do not want to give that up. Dinner at 5:00 pm and dessert at 7:00 pm is a tradition that hubby and I have started that I want to continue. It hasn't interfered with my weight loss or ability to maintain that weight loss, so far.
So I see no reason to change that.
I next cut breakfast by 1/3.
It was super easy to do that since I'm not hungry in the morning any more. If you are, and a big breakfast is important to you, then you can simply cut back somewhere else.
I next eliminated most of the carbs from lunch and stopped snacking in the afternoon.
That painlessly eliminated a lot of calories because low-carb diets help you stay full. The idea is to cut back on your typical portion sizes, so you won't have to count anything. Less volume means fewer carbs and calories.
For example, when I first started eating just the taco-burrito filling, I ate extra filling to make up for the missing gluten-free tortillas. I then realized that I didn't need that much protein to feel full, so I started dishing up just the amount of filling I'd eat if I was still eating tortillas.
This cut back even more calories and carbs for me.
Look at your meals and snacks. Where can you painlessly cut back? While having tortillas is nice, I'd rather give up the tortillas and cut back on potatoes and rice at lunch and dinner, so I can still have dessert.
I've learned that dessert is important to me.
You need to discover what's important to you. That way, you won't be tempted to bail when you start missing your favorite foods.
Make your favorite foods a part of your weight-loss diet and remove what you don't care about. This will make your weight-loss diet more yummy than it was before!
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