My First Attempt at Tweaking – Very Low Carb and Zero Carb Diets

(This is part 2 of a multi-part series on How to Tweak a Low Carb Diet. If you didn’t read part 1, you can do so by clicking on the how-to link.)

When I started low carbing in January 2007, the 2002 version of Atkins was considered the bible of low carb dieting. However, even among those who proclaimed you HAD to follow that version by the book, they were using the latest Atkins Nutritionals’ (ANA) recommendations to override the book’s instructions.

So if you were not eating a minimum of 20 net carbs per day on Induction and getting the greater majority of those carbs from vegetables (12 to 15 net carbs per day), you were either blasted for not doing Atkins, or you were written off as someone who was playing an I-am-on-a-diet game. You were also counseled to spend the majority of your calories on consuming tremendous amounts of fat.

Those calories had to be a minimum of ten times your current weight in order to avoid starvation mode. You had to drink a minimum of eight glasses of pure water per day plus an additional cup of water for every 25 pounds that you were overweight. Any coffee, tea or diet soda with Splenda was extra.

You had to follow the carbohydrate ladder printed in the 2002 book. That meant as soon as you came off Induction at the end of two to four weeks, you were only allowed to add an additional five net carbs of low carb vegetables to your diet – nothing else. Those 25 net carbs per day was composed of 17 to 20 net carbs of vegetables, and only five to eight carbs of other things.

If you were not losing weight, you were counseled to double check your vegetable carb intake, your calorie intake, and your water intake. If those were in line with the current thought of the day, then you were told to increase your fat intake even more – even if it caused your calorie intake to go over your maintenance level of calories. That was the only tweaking allowed.

Only if you were losing weight could you move up the carb ladder to the next level: cottage cheese. With those types of instructions, few individuals made it to the nut/almond flour and berries levels, although some folks said they didn’t like cottage cheese, so they could start experimenting with almond flour instead.

This was the climate I was living in back then. If you had a question that you dared to ask on an egroup or forum, you best be following all of that advice, or the low carb Nazis would quickly surface to put you strait. Very low carb dieting and zero carb diets were not allowed. If the advice of those in the know didn’t work for you, then you were either not following Atkins correctly (and couldn’t go around telling folks you were doing Atkins) or you had to be lying! Atkins always worked because Dr. Atkins said so.

The problem with that line of thinking is that we are all individuals. We come to the low carb table with different degrees of metabolic resistance, food sensitivities, metabolic rates, and health problems. Tweaking has to be a very individual task that will not be accomplished in exactly the same way for everyone.

Some people really do need to add additional dietary fat to their menus, but most people do not. Some need to up their carbohydrate level; some need to lower it. Some need to up their calories, and others need to lower them. Some need to eliminate particular foods that are keeping their digestive system inflamed, and some people just need to find a completely different way of dieting.

  

At the time, one of my Yahoo egroups had several individuals who were struggling with The Atkins Diet, as written, and began questioning the required vegetable intake. Could vegetables be blocking weight loss for a few select individuals? Was there anything special about vegetables as far as weight loss is concerned – other than the fact that they are healthy foods? The answer given to us by the ANA at that time was that in recent studies, people complained about constipation, lack of energy, and bad breath. In other studies, vegetables were shown to have a high nutrient density.

So the ANA raised the vegetable intake for Induction.

Now, that’s fine for those who can get into ketosis and lose weight on a higher carbohydrate content, but what about all of the people who can’t? What happens to them?

Basically, they were told that eating healthy is more important than losing weight. Low carb eating is supposed to be a lifestyle, not a diet. If the weight isn’t coming off, then – oh, well. That’s just the way it goes. Besides, what is the alternative? Return to your old way of eating and gain back all of the weight you’ve lost so far and maybe more? If the weight isn’t coming off, at least you have your health.

I kid you not. That is what we were told back then.

We didn’t listen to it, though. If we had, we’d still be sitting where most of the people who try to lose weight by following a low carb diet are sitting: healthy, but still fat. Granted, I’m not at ideal weight. I’m far from it, but that has to do with food sensitivities that have been giving me a hard time over the past couple of years – not because I tweaked my diet.

Some folks are lucky. I know one woman who lowered her vegetable intake, dropped her total carbs for the day to somewhere around 10 net carbs or less, and easily went the rest of the way to goal. She’s been happily maintaining her weight ever since. For her, she fixed her problem with the very first tweak. However, I personally discovered that dropping your carbohydrate intake that drastically does not work for everyone.

Over the years, I’ve tried several different types of very low carb and zero carb diets. The idea behind them all is that some people continue to have high insulin levels even with a minor amount of carbs. Some people don’t do well eating veggies, and some people find it is an easier way to go than trying to figure out which foods they are sensitive to.

I’ve tried high fat keto diets where particular nutrient ratios have to be met. I’ve tried eating nothing but beef and water. I’ve tried zero carb diets that allowed meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and cheese – no vegetables. I’ve tried very low carb diets like Atkins ’72 where I ate only protein foods, fat and salad. For the most part, these were high fat diets because when carbohydrates go down, dietary fat is all that is left to supply your calorie needs.

For me, these diets didn’t work. They caused me to gain weight very rapidly. The lower I went in carbs and higher I went in dietary fat, the faster I regained my weight. It was piling back on as quickly as eight to ten pounds per week eating that way. It was very discouraging, especially when my efforts at eating zero carbs resulted in my blood sugar levels getting seriously out of control. They literally soared into diabetic levels and resurrected my Neuropathy that had previously healed with a general low carb diet.

Cutting your carbohydrate level to below Induction is the easiest way to tweak a low carb diet, because it eliminates most of the carbohydrate counting you have to do. Meals are very easy, so that is the first thing I tried. Yes, I had serious health issues that resulted from those tests, but my experience isn’t the norm. There are many people who have been living on very low carbs for years and have no health problems from eating that way at all. Just because it didn’t work for me, that doesn’t mean it won’t work for someone else.

But since it didn’t work for me, I had to continue looking for an answer elsewhere.


Part 3: Atkins Versus Kimkins: Learning to Tweak My Low Carb Diet