My wife and I decided to try a low carb diet for 2 reasons. We both would like to lose some weight, not a lot, about 30lbs a piece.

I weigh 200 and should be about 165-170 for my height and weight.

The second reason is I am moderately allergic to gluten and cannot have it, she is mildly allergic so neither of us have it. I can handle cross contamination and all that, I just can't eat 1/2 a loaf of bread. Its a progressive condition so we gave it up so it never gets worse.

We gave up white bread and other things like that nearly 2 years ago for other reasons but finally gave them all up because of the gluten allergy.

We're on day 3, she feels decent but ate more low carb than me, I feel so-so but of course made the best of my last three days with carbs


I'm fighting two problems. One is my appetite and amount of food I ate has gone down dramatically when my gluten allergy started about 6 years ago. I quit gluten totally three weeks ago and I can eat a cow now in a single sitting

Since we're looking to lose the weight and maintain I'd like to find out about some regular food options that may be acceptable to someone who is just looking to lose a little, and then maintain.

I've heard all the stuff about its a lifestyle but we've given up so much there are a few things we'd like to keep around.

Neither of us have addictive personalities. I have had zero cravings for anything nor do I get them. I can put down a food and never go back to it again so getting off the wagon once or twice a month is not going to send us backwards.

There are things however we enjoy and would like to continue to have.

Veal Marsala at my favorite Italian restaurant. After I gave up gluten the chef there made me Marsala with corn starch instead of flour. They don't use much to bread it and I'll even have them cut it down more but its one of our favorite places that we'd like to frequent once a month. I've seen the recipes for making it at home and we will start making marsala dishes at home, we used to avoid them due to the fat content. We have a salad with blue cheese and of course no bread/pasta.

Spinach pasta, it is gluten free but has 43g carbs, 3g fiber, and 1g sugar so most of it is complex. Thats for 1/4 a box so my wife and I would probably split that. No carbs in the rest of what we make to go with it...is that something to really throw us off?

Low carb potatoes...we enjoy baked potatoes, scalloped potatoes, etc. They are 17g per potato compared to 34g for a regular potato. Not an every day thing but maybe once a week.

Basmati rice....we greatly enjoy Indian food and since Indian food is not high in gluten laiden dishes we've been eating it for 2 years now 2-3 times per week. I've heard its the lowest carb rice...we do not eat Naan for obvious reasons but I assume Pampadam would be out all together since its a corn meal tortilla.

I know the answer to this one already but figured I'd throw it out there...Sushi rice...again Japanese is one of our favorites once we discovered gluten/wheat free soy sauce but the rice is killer. We eat a ton of sushi, raw fish and veggies...we've resigned ourselves to not having it but thought I'd ask anyways

This is of course AFTER we meet our target weight and any of the above would be our only carb intake for the day.

We are going to be checking our keytone levels too, the idea is we can add in carbs until we go out of keytosis, correct?

She works out daily, 3-4 miles on a treadmill, bowflex, and stretches.

I do not but am getting back into it. The gluten allergy caused problems that are now resolving themselves muscle wise so I'll be getting back into it. My muscles are killing me from the diet so today we started on the vitamin supplements, hopefully that'll clear up in a day or two.

Neither of us are candy people....love ice cream but sugar is something we can stay away from without too much issue.

Except when we eat out everything we have is organic/natural.

Thanks

Hi Eric,
Welcome to LCE.
First of all, I would say, perhaps you should investigate several Low Carb food plans and decide which one would work best for you and your wife. Then, of course, get the book, study your plan, then implement your food plan. Basic low carb eating consists of meats,(beef, pork, etc) poultry, fish, fresh low glycemic veggies, cheeses, eggs, and healthy fats, like nuts and olive oil; that is just the simplest, basic form. The object is to get most of your carbs from veggies and protein sources and avoid sugar laden junk food, pasta, rice, potatoes, desserts. Doing LC *just a little* won't get you the results you want to see.
Again, I would encourage you to explore other food plans that aren't quite as restrictive as Atkins; perhaps South Beach, Protein Power, or CAD(Carbohydrate Addicts Diet) might be a better fit for you and your wife.

Just a thought.

Good luck on your weight loss adventure.

hth

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Shelley
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Visit Kassie's Korner



Life deserves a treat now and again, but life also deserves being healthy[with required disipline] to make it worth living!

Eric- Welcome!

If you've been eating a lot of carbs and cut back dramatically, you can normally expect to feel lousy for about 3-4 days while your body gets the carbs out of your system. Drinking plenty of water helps, and yes, those supplments should also help.

You might investigate the different LC plans available as Shelley suggested, and see if any are appealing to you and your wife and fit in with your dietary requirements. The plan I'm best aquainted with, Atkins, is considerably more restrictive than it sounds like you're interested in.

I always recommend people do start with an established plan, though, because I've noted folks are almost always much more successful in losing wieght when they start with an estabilished plan and leave the "exceptions" to later, experimenting with them one at a time to see how each impacts their system. It is a very individual process and what creates problems for one person another can get by with.

The way my body works, I know wouldn't be able to eat the kind of things you mention regularly and maintain my losses. I can't speak to what you're expereicne will be. But each person has to find their own path.

Best of luck to you.

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EatSmart Nutritional Scale Review

Thanks for the replies.

I checked into the Michael Thurmond system after reading about it in a different section on here.

I took their test and they picked me as body type E and the explanation pretty much nailed who I am physically. I'm going to research this one a bit more, asking for $119 up front didn't exactly fill me with confidence.

I remember 7 years ago we decided to eat "healthier" and we gave up red meat for the most part, switched to pasta, etc....I went to the doctor not feeling well and told her "The better I eat the worse I feel" now today its the opposite.

Believe me I love the food. We just came home from dinner, a filet, crab legs, salad w/ blue cheese, and broccoli.

I feel a million times better tonight that this morning. The supplements must be getting into my system, I tried the celery/peanut butter snack between lunch and dinner...dinner really made me feel better.

Regardless of where we end up we are going very low carb...I've done plenty of reading of different systems and personally I think a lot of those systems are designed around making it easy to follow and to get people around their own cravings and addictions to certain foods.

Since we're both lucky enough to not really have those cravings we went with the basics like staying under 30 carbs a day, in fact I'd say we're even farther under that.

Here is our menu the past 4 days:

Breakfast - every morning has been a 4 egg omelette with broccoli, cheese, and once or twice we tossed in red pepper. We split that in 1/2 between us and two pieces of bacon each.

Lunch - Her salad with chicken and blue cheese, me salad with steak and blue cheese. I also had 2 boneless chicken breasts which I dipped in a mayonnaise garlic sauce which I mixed with hoummous. That plus a large fatoush salad without bread. It has oil and red vinegar dressing with sumac.

Dinner - Salmon cooked in butter and garlic, salad with bacon and blue cheese...10oz NY strip with onions/mushrooms & salad and the past 2 nights 8oz filet plus 1/2 lb king crab legs and broccoli.

The only carbs were in the peanut butter we had as a snack and the 4 carbs, but 2 fiber, in our fiber supplement. No pop or anything else, only water and caffeine free iced tea. Nothing else except what I've listed.

We're done with the fiber pills and are taking 2 tbsp of ground flaxseed, one in the morning, one in the evening.

The first day we really feel good throughout the day we'll test our keytone levels and see where we are.

Everyone is different so we've kind of put things together based on how we feel and how our weight ends up going.

Thanks again

Welcome, Eric.

In the end, how you feel is probably going to be a good rule of thumb.

You might wish to read Gary Taube's latest book: Good Calories, Bad Calories. It's an unfortunate title for an extremely well documented review of the effects of different ways of eating on metabolism.

On the diet you've described, you should test positive for ketone bodies as soon as you have used up your glycogen reserves - 24 to 72 hours.

HTH.

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Well, it sounds like you're doing your homework, so I can't ask more than that... Keep us posted on your progress.

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EatSmart Nutritional Scale Review

sorry eric. i know you lost some posts in this thread, and particularly one where you talked about your plans, because i read them eariler today.

we had some technical issues and lost posts from this morning.

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EatSmart Nutritional Scale Review

Welcome Eric. Glad you chose this group for support.
All veggies have carbs that need to be taken into consideration. For example Romaine lettuce.

Good luck on your journey.

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Deb 5', 57 yrs., Atkins 6/9/03:175
Restart 10/1/05-155
Restart 9/18/06-156
Restart 1/2/08-159/125/115
Rung 4 berries but Carnivorous currently

Created by MyFitnessPal.com - Free Calorie Counter

The post that went missing was our decision to move to the No Sugar, No Flour diet.

We have several reasons behind it. About 6 years ago we went on this quest to lower our cholesterol. I did great dropping mine to 95 but the problem was my good levels were only 38 and my triglicerides were very high.

At the time I was substituting sugary/bad foods for my sat fat intake which lowered one number and raised the other.

2 years ago I had a severe allergic reaction to Cipro. It left me with shaking hands/arms, neck muscles so tight I could not turn my head, same with calves. I had extreme trouble in concentrating, memory, you name it. Read the possible reactions to the medication, I had every single one. I dropped everything, couldn't open bottles, it was not the best time of my life.

Today I am fine but one of the things that really helped in my recovery was eliminating sugar. I only ate foods low on the GI index. I had severe symptoms for 3 months and it slowly tapered off after a year only to come back in the winter.

I eventually re-added sugar and I seem to be fine. Before drinking a pop or something would send me into trembling so bad I couldn't hold my hands still.

So I've already spent time sugar free and we really opened ourselves upto a huge variety of foods.

The second is, I recently found out we're both allergic to gluten. My wife mildly, myself its a build up process. I can have it 1-2 days and be fine, 3rd day not so good. Since gluten allergies, or Celiacs disease is a gradual process stopping it now will leave me OK for the rest of my life. I developed it about 6 years ago, coincidently when I started eating "better".

I remember going into my doctor and telling her "The better I eat the worse I feel" and I was eliminating red meats/sat fat and replacing it with pasta and carbs.

So thats why we picked low carb, easy to do considering we're already sugar/flour free.

I had a few symptoms hanging around from the Cipro. One was after intensely working on something like working on the car or doing very detailed things like electronics soldering my hands would shake a bit, not bad, but enough to notice.

After dropping gluten that went away totally.

So what this has all taught me is that my reaction to Cipro seems to have effected the way I was producing sugar/carbs and storing them. My body seems to have righted itself but after a few days on this diet most of those symptoms returned.

When I cut down on my sat fat intake my cholesterol levels plummeted but my sugar levels increased.

So based on that I figure we can split the difference, lose a bit of weight, and not have to effect our diet so much.

We can have potatoes/corn again and more importantly corn starch which is a big replacement for flour.

Before we were eating no more than 15g of sat fat a day. We replaced all that with carbs, mostly from flour and sugar. We went through our daily menu and what we would like. I figure we can start out at 35g per day of sat fat, no simple carbs/sugars and probably hit around 120 on our bad cholesterol but greatly bring up our good and lower our triglicerides.

35 is on the high side but based on my tracking of our cholesterol levels and what we eat I think 35g per day will get us near 120.

The doctor told me years ago that I just had to get my good up but we already used olive oil and everything else that helped.

Eliminating the flour should get us where we want to be and lose weight in the process.

The last straw was when I took the Cipro, and now this all makes so much sense, it ate away my muscles. I lost all my muscle mass, my legs and knee's were in extreme pain. I had to get orthodics for my feet due to muscle damage.

I feel my body was starting to feed on my muscles again just from starting this diet. I did some reading on body types and I'm a type E, high metabolism and lean. They said my body type requires more complex carbs like potatoes and rice.

When my wife and I started both dropping things this weekend, and we never drop anything, I could tell what was going on and seeing it effect her was enough for us to look else where for us.

Everyone is different, having the carbs is not neccessarily a bad thing so long as your body uses them which mine seems to do.

Plus hey I already dropped 3lbs, only 27 more to go. If we hit that by June we'll be good.

I'm amazed at how well I healed. Compared to this time 2 years ago there is no remnants of my issues except my feet still bug me. However I always wore flat shoes and I was told the problem is genetic, bound to happen sooner or later. However from going through even a few days on the diet and seeing what got worse I now have an idea of what I was missing suppliment wise. We cut our suppliments back from twice a day to once a day and I could feel it helping the area's that were bothering me.

Eric,
I wish you and your wife good luck and good health.
Hoping No Sugar, No Flour is everything you need it to be.

kindest regards,
s

__________________
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Shelley
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Visit Kassie's Korner



Life deserves a treat now and again, but life also deserves being healthy[with required disipline] to make it worth living!