Episode 55: What To Expect When Adding Carbs Back Into Your Diet
Thanks for joining us for episode 55 of The Ancestral RD podcast. If you want to keep up with our podcasts, subscribe in iTunes and never miss an episode! Remember, please send us your question if you’d like us to answer it on the show! Today we are answering the following question from a listener: “Hi ladies. I’ve been listening to your advice about eating more carbs. For the past few years with Paleo, I’ve definitely been under eating carbs unintentionally. My question is, what is normal to expect with transitioning to a more moderate carb diet? I have a lot more energy and better bowel movements, but I am also having a lot of abdominal pain and bloating. This is a noticeable increase since a lower carb diet. My typical carb intake in a day is white potato or acorn squash with breakfast, chia seed pudding with banana/berries for a snack, potato again with lunch, sweet potato with dinner, and fruit with nuts in the evening, plus lots of non-starchy veggies. I’m a group fitness instructor and quite active. P.S. I’m in Canada and just got accepted to a dietetic internship. Can’t wait to be a real food RD!” Are you experiencing bloating or other digestive discomfort when adding carbs back into your diet after a period of restriction? Don’t throw in the towel just yet! Many people experience some degree of gut issues when adding foods back into their diet. Often times these symptoms are not a sign that you need to keep avoiding the food, but rather a common occurrence when reintroducing foods. The good news is that the majority of the time the symptoms are only temporary as your body readjusts to eating a healthy variety of foods again. We have been learning that restrictive diets may not be so good for us after all. Listen today as we discuss the consequ Continue reading >>
What Is The Best Way To Start Iifym After A Low Carb Diet?
Switching from a low carb diet or keto to flexible dieting can be a bit tricky. Not due to IIFYM mind you, but due to the fact that when eating such a low carb diet, your body has been trained to perform a certain way. Once you start adding carbs back into your diet, your body might love it, or hate the change. It really depends on how long you were in depriving your body of glycogen for. If you we eating low carb or keto for a few months, your transition into flexible dieting will probably be a cake walk. All you’d have to do is slowly increase carbs over a period of 3-6 weeks until you get to your daily allotment. If you were doing keto or Atkins for a year or more, you might run into a bit of glycogen rebound (don’t research that term, I just made it up – basically just added weight from sodium, water, glycogen and fat depending on how hard you go with your carb orgy). Simplest Approach Moving Forward The best action most people can take is to ease back into a regular diet that includes all three macronutrients. Moving into it slowly, and following a structured program will help keep you focused so you don’t pig out on everything you were craving while you were eating such low carbs. Simply put, The best way to come off of a low carb diet or low-calorie diet it to reverse out of it. Before I go any further I want to be clear, that I am not talking about any of the popular reverse diets that are designed to rebuild your metabolism. I am simply talking about introducing carbs back into your diet in a slow and methodical fashion that will ensure a smooth and body fat-free transition. Let me also say that the best way to reverse out of any kind of diet is with the help of an experience nutrition coach. Click here to see our IIFYM Coaching programs. Where To Start Continue reading >>
Which Low-carb Diet Is The Best To Lose Weight? (and Yes, There Are Several)
Various low-carb diets have taken the health and fitness world by storm in the last few years. Suddenly, you can’t mention carbohydrates without a shameful hiss from every dieter in the office. Although there is some misinformation out there, low-carb diets have proven to be effective for losing weight through numerous studies and thousands of happy, successful dieters. The question is: which one is the good one? There are several low-carb diet plans that have similar principles, but are different in their approach to losing weight. Is one better than the rest? If so, how much better? Diets rely on several factors to be effective, including nutritional requirements, simplicity, and convenience. So, if you didn’t even know that there were different kinds of diets, let’s first take a closer look at the most popular low-carb diets and break them down piece by piece. What are the main low-carb diets? The three main low-carb diets out there today are the Atkins, ketogenic and Paleo diets. All three use a decreased carbohydrate intake as one of their foundational building blocks, but they do have their differences when it comes to other nutrients. The Atkins diet, as famed through their prepared meals, is one of the most popular diets on the planet (regardless of low-carb or non-low-carb). The Atkins diet works in phases. First, you cut out carbs almost completely (under 20g per day), then you slowly add them back in and fine tune the diet until you notice a change in your weight loss. This diet relies a lot on “listening to your body,” and although it does start out with extremely low carbs, these levels will increase throughout the duration of the diet. The ketogenic (or keto) diet has sparked in popularity in the recent years among health and fitness enthusiasts, Continue reading >>
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Running Without Carbs – A Week Trialling A Ketogenic Diet
After spending some a lot of time trying to understand the role food plays in running a marathon, this post is about my attempt train for a week whilst on a ketogenic (super low carbohydrate) diet. For an explanation of what ‘ketogenic’ actually means & why I’d do this to myself it’s worth checking out my previous post “Nutrition for a marathon – what should you eat?”, but here’s a summary of the most relevant part: During moderate to high intensity exercise, carbohydrate is the body’s preferred fuel source. There’s a limit to how many calories worth of carbohydrates you can store, and so for endurance events like the marathon it can be difficult to take on enough in order to avoid running out. The other main energy source – fats – are almost inexhaustible, so making your body more efficient at using them during exercise may help delay the point at which fatigue sets in. This theory was enough to make me curious about the application and effects of low carbohydrate, high fat (LCHF) diets. Could an approach almost completely opposite to the ‘carbo-loading’ norm actually help you run further, faster? Fatty fatty run run! The assumption behind following a carbohydrate restricted diet is that it helps the body become more effective at utilising fat as a fuel source. In short, eating yourself to metabolic flexibility. Whether this actually translates to improved endurance ability is another debate, but for now let’s just say there isn’t conclusive proof it doesn’t work, so I thought it was worth a closer look. To be clear from the outset, here’s what the week wasn’t about… I didn’t take any baseline data. I didn’t measure any effects (other than how I felt during the week). 7 days isn’t long enough to become properly fat adapted. Continue reading >>
How Low-carb Diets Wrecked Our Health: As Women Reveal How They Suffered Fertility Problems, Thin Hair And Fragile Bones, Do You Still Fancy A Trendy High-protein Diet?
Brooke Power, 27, suffered migraines and dizziness Nutritionists say a balanced diet is better Gillian O'Toole, 32, nearly passed out on the Paleo Diet Emma-Victoria Houlton loves her food; whether it's a Sunday roast with all the trimmings or an Italian meal, she's always happy to tuck in. But just five years ago, Emma, 29, would have baulked at eating pasta, bread, pizza dough, potatoes and Yorkshire puddings. Why? Because, like thousands of others, she believed high-protein, low-carb regimes like the Atkins or Paleo diets were the most effective way to be slim. Diet damage: Emma-Victoria Houlton, left, broke a bone in her foot due to calcium deficiency while Brooke Power, right, suffered migraines and dizziness during ten months on a low carb diet But, after cutting down on carbs so much that she wouldn't even eat dairy products as they contain lactose - a sugar - Emma-Victoria believes she has permanently damaged her health. 'I was only a size eight but found it hard to stay slim,' she says. 'Then, when I was 22, I saw a documentary about the Atkins diet, thought it was great and cut most carbs out of my diet. 'Breakfast was an omelette, lunch was chicken with lettuce and dinner was something meaty with vegetables like kale, cabbage, sprouts or runner beans, which don’t contain starch. 'I got all the classic symptoms associated with a low-carb diet: dry mouth, tiredness, crankiness and bad breath. But I saw great results - my 8st 7lb weight was much easier to maintain.' Unbelievably, Emma-Victoria, a creative director in Manchester, stuck to the regime for three punishing years. 'At restaurants, every meal had to be steak and salad,' she says. 'I'd go to a friend's house for dinner and if they'd made pasta, I'd eat a tiny amount, so as not to be rude, and end up f Continue reading >>
Cheating And You
Cheating, or eating hidden carbs, whatever you want to call it. Let’s have a brief talk. What is cheating? Cheating is, in the most simple terms, eating a lot more carbs than you would normally. There’s no hard and fast figure, suffice to say that if you had somewhere in the realm of 50g – 100g you would likely break your ketosis, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. It also stands to reason that you would possibly not have to go through unpleasant keto-flu again. How does it happen? Cheating can happen for a number of reasons, but there seem to be two main causes. Emotions Alcohol Comfort eating is something everyone I know does, and I’ll admit to eating an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s on my own, no problems at all, when feeling down. Though those days are also long gone. You could be stressed, sad, angry, or any number of other things, and may choose to seek comfort in sugary foods. After all, they raise your mood, though it’s only short term. You’ll probably feel down that you’ve stalled your progress or simply eaten foods that aren’t great for your body. You might even drink alcohol for a range of the same reasons, or, as is very often the case, it may be a social event. A birthday, after work drinks, oh how I could go on… One thing’s for sure, too much can and will impair judgement. The last time I cheated was definitely after a few refreshments and I said “Hey, you know what, chocolate is a GREAT IDEA!” But it wasn’t really. You’ll Feel Like a Failure – But that’s OK! The worst part is knowing that you’ve failed, but you must remember that it’s ok to fail, if you don’t, then you’re probably not doing a lot of trying or learning. I recently read some great advice on failing. It stressed one point, and one point only, Continue reading >>
Short-term Effects Of Adding Carbs To Very Low-carb Diets
In my last post, I noted that So far, all the negative experiences [from adoption of our diet] I am aware of have come from low-carb dieters who had difficulty after adding carbs and/or cutting protein…. It’s interesting that the same dietary change – adding “safe starches” to a low-carb Paleo diet – made some people feel better and others worse. In thinking about why adding starches can cause short-term trouble for some people, my first thought was a fascinating post from two years ago by Peter Dobromylskyj of Hyperlipid. Peter noted: Bacterial endotoxin is a breakdown product of the cell wall of gram negative bacteria. It’s a lipopolysaccharide and even quite small amounts of it are extremely unpleasant…. Now the scary thing is that eating a high fat meal, probably based on any fat which generates chylomicrons, markedly increases your uptake of endotoxin from your gut, which is obviously full of gram negative bacteria. Eating short chain fatty acids or carbohydrate [1] does not have this effect. Endotoxins are fat-soluble, and so fat carries them into the body. The paper Peter cited actually found an increase in blood endotoxin levels after people were fed a high-fat meal: In humans, no significant relation was observed between cardiovascular disease risk factors, carbohydrate and protein intakes, and plasma LPS concentration. Conversely, positive correlations were observed with fat and energy intakes. [1] The same effect was found in mice: Compared with the control mice, mice fed a high-energy diet showed an increase in plasma LPS. However, in mice fed a high-carbohydrate diet, the increase in plasma LPS was blunted compared with mice fed a high-fat diet. The conclusion: Experimental data suggest that fat was more efficient in transporting bacterial L Continue reading >>
Why Your Ketogenic Diet Isn’t Working Part One: Underfueling And Overtraining
“My training, racing, and health were all great… until I crashed.” For athletes, it’s not uncommon for the transition to a ketogenic diet from a standard high-carbohydrate diet to look something like this: Take all the carbs out of your diet, cold-turkey - feel awful… Build the metabolic machinery to burn fat more efficiently - feel great! Suddenly, out of nowhere - crash. Like a rollercoaster, you went from feeling terrible to feeling on top of the world, and then back to feeling terrible. The question is “why the crash??” You think: maybe I just need to do a few more fasted training sessions each week. Or, maybe I need to drop my carbs from 30 grams per day to 20 grams per day (broccoli just has too many carbs)... Nope. You might just need to train less and eat more. Still here? Good. This is part one of a series of articles examining potential reasons why a ketogenic diet may fail to produce the expected benefits. Regardless of whether things are just now starting to go downhill, or you never saw results in the first place, the most important step is recognizing that something isn’t right. Getting into nutritional ketosis is one thing, but just because you’re registering 2.0mmol/L on the blood ketone meter doesn’t mean the diet is working for you. Ultimately, performance and health are the goals, and they may or may not coincide with high blood ketones. There are many aspects of life as an endurance athlete that must be accounted for in the equation of optimal health and performance. The most important one that we regularly see is people struggling on a ketogenic diet because they’re underfueling and overtraining. So that’s where we’ll begin! Ultimately, performance and health are the goals, and they may or may not coincide with high blood k Continue reading >>
Why Low Carb Diets Lower Physical And Mental Performance
Fab Fit Over 40 with some commentary on low carb diets and why they lower physical and mental performance. There is absolutely no doubt one can reduce bodyfat to single digit levels by reducing carbohydrate intake while increasing protein and healthy fat consumption. But there can also be a distinct trade off when it comes to maintaining optimal performance. Your body needs full muscle glycogen stores to power through its weight lifting workouts. The only way you can ensure your muscle cells are full of glycogen is by getting enough clean carbohydrates in your diet. If your goal is to gain and or maintain muscle, you must consume enough clean burning carbs to support your training intensity. If you consistently eat a low carb diet, your peak performance will suffer! Many people (including Fabulously Fit Over 40) have used low carb diets including Ketogenic Diets and Cyclical Ketogenic Diets to maximize fat burning and attain a ripped six pack. Unfortunately, a hard training bodybuilder, fitness athlete or anyone looking to tone up/look better naked CAN NOT use a low carb diet over the long term.(Atkins etc) Why? They would grow tired of never having enough energy for their training performance. What can be worse than trying to perform your workout on super low muscle glycogen stores? If that isn’t bad enough already, low carb dieting can also significantly reduce your brain’s performance. Why do low carb diets alter mental focus and or mental performance? Our brains and central nervous systems prefer to run on glucose(carbohydrates). The brain is thought to use close to 100 grams of carbs daily in its normal functions. Not giving it enough carbs is akin to putting cheap gas in your car. This is the noticeable feeling people have of brain fatigue or lack of focus whe Continue reading >>
Targeted Ketogenic Diet: An In-depth Look
The Targeted Ketogenic Diet (TKD), simply put, is nothing more than a regular keto diet – with the exception of eating carbs around your workout times. That means any day you exercise, you will be consuming carbohydrates. If your goal is still fat loss, make sure to include the extra calories from the carbs in your totals. Assuming that you ARE reading this because you exercise, this means that fewer fats should be consumed on these days. Benefits of a TKD The TKD is a “compromise” between a Standard Ketogenic Diet and a Cyclical Ketogenic Diet, meaning that you can still perform high intensity activity, but you won’t have to be out of ketosis for long periods of time. For most people’s purposes, TKD can withstand performance in high intensity exercise – although not as well as CKD. It’s most appropriate for beginner or intermediate strength trainers or for those who cannot use a CKD diet for health reasons. As of now, there are no studies out that will show the limitations of weight training based on low sources of blood glucose. There are studies that give carbs prior to resistance and strength training, but have not found increased performance over the long run. However, many SKD keto-ers report strength and endurance improvements in high intensity environments if they consume pre-workout carbs. Most people that are involved in anaerobic training on an SKD typically report improved performance with pre-workout carbs. The problem is that SKDs can even be as limiting to low intensity exercise performance due to the limited glucose and muscle glycogen. If you’re an athlete, or in the process of training, I recommend that you experiment with carbohydrates around your training. Although performance increase is a great benefit of a TKD, it is not the primar Continue reading >>
After Ketosis...going Back On The Carbs
I had a question for anyone who had gone VLC or Keto and then decided to add fruit or sweet potato back in. I bloat when I eat carbs (possible intolerance?) and am wondering if this could be a simple adaptation period or if you can actually create carb intolerance by going VLC for a longer period of time? I am a semi professional athlete training twice per day, and am thinking of adding more carbs to help with recovery (I am very sore and it is starting to affect sleep). 1 3 Foods to Remove from - The Fridge Forever Cut a bit of belly bloat each day, by avoiding these 3 foods nucific.com 2 1 Worst Carb After Age 50 If you're over 50 and you eat this carb, you will never lose belly fat. HealthPlus50 Thoughts and experiences? Continue reading >>
Knowing What To Expect Can Keep You From Panicking
If you are eating a carb-restricted diet, sooner or later, no matter how much weight you've lost or how well controlled your blood sugar has become, you are going to run into the carby treat with your name on it, and when that happens, chances are you're going to eat it. What happens next may be the single most important moment in your diet. Are you going to be taken by surprise by normal physiological changes that occur? Will you start the three month binge-from-hell that leaves you wallowing in self-hatred while you pack on all the weight you lost and more? Or will you use the experience of going off-plan to strengthen your long-term diet success? The choice is up to you. Knowing What To Expect Can Keep You From Panicking When you boost your carbs above the low carbing threshold--the specific amount varies from person to person--two things will happen. You will become hungry and you will immediately gain a startling amount of weight. The reasons for your sudden weight gain are explained here. Why Carb Intake Causes Hunger Cravings The hunger is a bit more complicated, especially since it may not kick in right after you eat the carbohydrates that send you off-plan but may take a day or two to develop--when you are eating low carb again. If you experience intense hungers immediately after you eat your first carby meal, the explanation is this: After you have been low carbing for a while, your body stops producing some of the enzymes needed to digest complex starches and sugars. It takes a day or two for these to ramp back up. But in meantime, when you eat carbohydrates your blood sugar may go up a lot higher than it normally would, even if you don't usually have blood sugar problems. This is why some researchers have reported that low carbing can actually cause insulin Continue reading >>
Going Low Carb In Fight Camp? – Diet Advice For Fighters
In most minds a low-carb diet is the best way to lose weight. Fighters often need to lose a lot of weight in a brief period of time. A calorie-reduced low-carb or ketogenic diet is the most common option, with the consequence of feeling tired and moody all day. If you are a fighter, the added pressure of making weight might make you aggressively stick to the diet. This might also have negative effects on your training volume, something you don’t want when you’re preparing for a fight. Studies have proven that low-carb and low-fat diets are the most effective ones [1] when it comes to losing weight fast. Are they healthy, enjoyable and without side effects for your training and recovery? Definitely not! Drastically losing weight with a low-carb diet while increasing performance is contradictory. It’s not impossible, but let me tell you that low-carb isn’t the best option. High-carb isn’t a good option either. Let me share my experience from my previous fight camps: Preparing for fights on low-carb Preparing to defend my BAMMA title in 2015 I drastically reduced carbs. I had always done it like that. Someone warned me beforehand: “If you cut out all your carbs, your body will burn less.” Well, I was still eating a bit of fruit now and then so I wasn’t too serious about their advice. I didn’t believe another diet higher in carbs would be an option as the low-carb one was working so well for me to lose weight. I never missed weight at the 125lbs flyweight limit, so the diet was working. I looked good, I felt good and I performed well in the cage. I looked shredded! Looks-wise I was in the best shape of my life. Nevertheless, I was struggling with energy levels and my body switched into energy-saving mode during the weeks of preparation. If I wasn’t train Continue reading >>
Keto Vs Atkins Diet
The Keto vs Atkins debate has been raging for years with neither able to establish a clear advantage in the eyes of the public. Both have their passionate advocates and equally ardent detractors so trying to find a definitive answer to which is better can be challenging. Much of the confusion regarding which low carb diet is better centered on the fact that there is a significant amount of overlap between the two diets. But while the overlay is real there are genuine differences as well. Below we’re going to take a close look at both the similarities and the differences between the diets. First a brief overview of each. The Atkins Diet is often called the "Atkins ketosis diet", which you eat as much fat and protein as possible while avoiding foods that are high in carbs. This process has been known to work for many people along with medical proof from proven professionals. The Atkins diet has been highly popularized and it consists of 4 different phases: The Keto diet (read about it in-depth here) was developed nearly a century ago. Like the Atkins diet that came after it (and borrowed from it) this diet relies on drastically reducing carbohydrate intake and entering ketosis where the body is burning fat for energy. There are several accepted variations of the diet: The following table presents a side by side comparison of known issues with the 2 diets so you can better understand the important ways in which they differ. Possible Issue Atkins Keto Carbohydrate Levels With Atkins this changes from phase to phase, starting with drastic reductions followed by gradual re-introduction. Fixed level: Approximately 10% of average consumption. Carbohydrate Monitoring Method Net carbohydrates Total carbohydrates Protein Intake Three 4 to 6 ounce servings of protein daily. Appro Continue reading >>
What Is A Keto Diet? (the Ketogenic Diet 101)
The Ketogenic Diet (also known as Keto) has gone mainstream, leaving many people (including me!) asking: What is a Keto Diet? After all, you’re seeing ripped bodybuilders, figure competitors, and even normal men and women who just lead busy lives shed massive amounts of weight through this things called Keto. What is it? Why do it? Is it sustainable? What are the benefits? What are the downsides? These, and many more questions, I’m going to answer in this article, so if you’re asking “what is a keto diet?” you will have all the information you need to decide if a Ketogenic Diet is for you, you’ll have all the tools you need to get started. Related Reading: How I lost 23 pounds & 20 inches in 60 days of Keto What Is A Ketogenic Diet? A Ketogenic Diet, also know as the Keto Diet, is a very high fat, very low carb, moderate protein diet that is very popular because it can cause you to lose body fat very fast, and study after study after study has linked Keto with benefits against cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and more. Eating Ketogenically involves cutting carbohydrate intake from 200-300g daily down to 20-50g daily and replacing those missing carbs with fat. Reducing carbohydrates this drastically puts your body in a state of Ketosis. Ketosis is a metabolic state in which you body uses fat for fuel, rather than carbohydrates. When you eat normally, when you consume more carbohydrates than you body needs to run for the next 24 hours or so, you body turns those excess carbs into fat and stores them as (unwanted) body fat. But if you cut the carbs in your diet drastically, your body enters Ketosis and starts burning that stored fat for fuel, resulting in better health and body composition for you. 4 Types of Ketogenic Diets Cutting your carbs sounds Continue reading >>
