2021 Pre-Christmas Low Carb Bootcamp - the prep thread

[BIWI]

Morning all

Next week sees the start of our next Low Carb Bootcamp. This time around it will last for 8 weeks. The weeks are structured a bit differently from before, and will look like this:

Weeks 1 & 2 - strict Bootcamp
Weeks 3-6 - strict Bootcamp during the week, Bootcamp Light at weekends
Weeks 7-8 - either back to strict Bootcamp or full-on Bootcamp Light

The route you take in the last two weeks depends entirely on you - those last two weeks will be the last week of November and the first week of December, so you may want to be super strict in advance of Christmas activities - or you may feel that it's time to relax things, if you've lost enough weight.

The key to success on Bootcamp is preparation and planning ahead, so here's some stuff that might help you.

Some/many of you may have done Bootcamp before, but it's still worth reminding yourself about low carbing and the rules.

*Firstly - how do you do low carb?(

There are lots of different ways and plans! Each will have different levels of carbohydrate per day that is recommended. Keto and the first stage of Atkins (induction) are the strictest, with a maximum of 20g carbs per day.

However - on Bootcamp we don't count carbs. The idea is to make it as simple as possible to follow. So there are just ten rules which you need to follow, which should ensure that you see good weight loss, without needing to weigh or count your food.

(NB we also don’t count calories – this WOE (way of eating) is not about deprivation!)

Specifically on Bootcamp this is what we do:

First, you don't eat any:

• bread (of any kind – including pitta, naan, wraps, muffins, bagels etc, etc)
• pasta (brown or white) or noodles
• rice (ditto, brown or white)
• potatoes, sweet potatoes, sweetcorn (although baby sweetcorn is fine)
• flour/anything made with flour - so no cake, biscuits, pastry, pastries, thickened sauces, crumble toppings, batter)
• sugar (which includes honey, agave syrup, molasses)
• fruit juice
• full sugar squash/cordial and fizzy drinks
• sweets and chocolate (with the exception of the occasional piece of dark chocolate, which should be at least 70% cocoa, and only after the first two weeks of Bootcamp)
• pulses/legumes (including peas)
• artificial sweeteners
• balsamic vinegar (all other vinegars are fine - this one is sweetened, which rules it out)

For the first two weeks of Bootcamp you also don't eat any fruit, nuts or seeds, and don't drink any alcohol. If you're doing Bootcamp Light (after the first two weeks of strict Bootcamp), you can introduce some fruit - mainly berries - and some nuts/seeds, but in strict moderation. And you may have the occasional drink of alcohol (preferably restricted to clear spirits and dry wine - beer and cider, along with sweet spirits/liqueurs are to be avoided).

What can I eat, you may ask?!

• any meat or fish (but avoiding processed products as much as possible, e.g. ham, bacon, sausages, crab sticks, etc)
• most shellfish
• eggs, as many as you want
• plenty of good fats (this is a high fat diet), so butter, olive oil, coconut oil, lard
• cheese, full fat yoghurt and cream (although in moderation)
• plenty of veg and salads - this is where your carbs should mainly come from

And here are the ten rules:

1. For the first two, strict weeks you should eat three meals a day.
You must eat breakfast. It doesn’t have to be a lot, and it doesn’t have to be absolutely first thing, but you must have something. For the rest of the day, if you’re eating enough food and especially enough fat, you shouldn’t be hungry between meals. But if you are hungry, eat something. (Hard boiled eggs make a great snack). After the first two weeks of Bootcamp we will relax this, but these two weeks are critical in terms of helping you switch easily to a low carb way of eating - and if you start to feel hungry, it makes things much harder! Eating this way will ensure that your blood sugar levels are kept stable, which will mean that you are much less likely to experience hunger. A typical high carbohydrate diet can mean that snacking is a routine part of your day. Once your blood sugar levels are stable, by eating low carb, you should find that you no longer want to snack. But the rule of thumb here is ‘if you are hungry, eat!’. (Just make sure you are only choosing low carb snacks, of course!)"

2. Avoid processed foods
Focus on pure, natural protein as the basis for your meals - meat/fish/eggs. Things like sausages, ham, bacon, pre-prepared burgers etc should be avoided as much as possible. You can have them, but just not at every meal, every day.

3. Eat lots of fat
Eating fat will not make you fat. Honestly! But it will keep your appetite satisfied, and it sustains your body’s energy requirements perfectly. Fat does not provoke an insulin spike, unlike carbs which do (a lot) and protein (a little). Fry in butter, add butter to vegetables, eat salad with a home-made vinaigrette dressing (not made with balsamic vinegar though, as this is too sweet), add mayonnaise where you can (just check the carb count on your mayo first). Eat fattier cuts of meat – e.g. pork belly, roast chicken with the skin on and/or eat the fat off your lamb chops. Absolutely no low fat/light/’Lite’ foods of any kind!

4. Make sure you are eating vegetables and salads with your food
This is where your carbs should come from, and this is non-negotiable But try to choose only those vegetables that are on the green list (vegetables that are under 5g carbs per 100g, and which is on the spreadsheet). You don’t have to weigh/count carbs – this is one of the great joys of this WOE (way of eating), but if you’re new to low carbing it can be helpful to weigh your portions of veg in the early days, just so that you know how many carbs are in the sort of portions that you like to eat.

The vegetable carb counter is helpfully colour-coded into green (eat freely), amber (go easy) and red (best avoided as much as possible), which will help you to make your choices.

5. Be careful about dairy (apart from butter, which is unlimited)
Dairy can impede weight loss for some people. If you are drinking tea/coffee with milk or cream, try to restrict yourself to max 2 cups per day. There are a lot of carbs in milk, so if you are having several cups of tea/coffee per day, you will quickly rack up your daily carb count (e.g. 1 medium latte contains more than 12g carbs!) You may eat cheese but again, don't overdo it. Full fat yoghurt is the best way to include dairy in your diet - but beware, it does contain carbs. You should choose one that’s 10% fat – most of the supermarkets have a Greek yoghurt in their premium ranges with this amount of fat.

6. You must drink a minimum of 2 litres of water per day
The more weight you have to lose, the more water you should drink.
This is from this site. :

Water is essential to weight loss for those who follow a low carb way of eating. The minimum consumed in a day should be:

Your Weight----Litres
140lbs-----2.5
160lbs-----3.0
180lbs-----3.0
200lbs-----3.5
220lbs-----3.5
240lbs-----4.0
260lbs-----4.5
280lbs-----4.5
300lbs-----5.0
320lbs-----5.5
340lbs-----5.5
360lbs-----6.0
380lbs-----6.5
400lbs-----6.5

High levels of ketones in the blood stream can lead to a reduction in ketone production, therefore being well hydrated could aid in keeping the levels low and ketone production ongoing. Consuming enough water can have many other positive side effects, e.g. it aids your kidneys with the processing of protein, reduces the retention of water, helps with preventing constipation, and reduces the levels of ketones released by your breath, which in-turn will reduce breath odour.

However, drinking a lot of water can mean that you also need to keep an eye on your electrolyte balance. You need to make sure that you are consuming sufficient sodium and potassium. On a low carb way of eating, we should eat more salt, so make sure that you are cooking with salt and adding salt to food, if you like it.

Good, low carb, sources of potassium are spinach (raw), avocado, mushrooms, courgettes and asparagus, as well as salmon and yoghurt.

7. No alcohol
Alcohol is the easiest source of fuel for the body to burn, so it will always use this first before it starts to burn any fat - which is why you need to restrict it, especially in the first two weeks of Bootcamp, when we are encouraging the body to stop using carbs for its source of fuel and turn to fat-burning instead. If you really can't do this - at least try and restrict it to the weekend. Vodka with soda is the best thing to drink. Or Champagne, red wine or dry white wine.

8. No fruit
Really. Seriously. Honestly. None at all. Zilch. Nada. After the first two weeks of Bootcamp you will be able to introduce certain fruits, in moderation, but at this stage fruit is simply too carby. We are also trying to break the addiction to sweet things, so cutting fruit out is part of this process. If you are getting all your carbs from vegetables and salad, you will be getting all the nutrients and fibre that you need.

9. No nuts/seeds
Although they are a good source of nutrition and contain lots of fat – which is great for us – they also contain carbohydrate and, because they’re so moreish, you can quickly end up eating a lot of carbs. When we move to Bootcamp Light, after the first two weeks, you can re-introduce these, but be careful and go easy.

10. No sugar or artificial sweeteners
Sugar is an obvious ‘no no’, but artificial sweeteners are also an issue. One of the aims of this way of eating is to eat pure and natural foods, so including sweeteners is not recommended. Some people find that artificial sweeteners can impede their weight loss, and there is some suggestion that your body can respond to sweeteners as if they were sugar, by releasing more insulin - and therefore laying down fat. Given that the aim of Bootcamp is to help us lose our sweet tooth and addiction to sweet things, then it is a good idea to avoid sweeteners altogether in this first two weeks.

For those of you new to low carbing - and possibly even those who aren't! - here's a short piece about how low carbing works:

How does a low carb diet work?

When you eat carbohydrate, it breaks down into glucose. Your pancreas releases the hormone insulin to sweep glucose out of your blood stream. The current diet that we’re recommended to follow in the UK is a high carbohydrate one, and so our bodies are constantly having to release lots of insulin.

The effect of this is for your blood sugar levels to rise and fall quite dramatically. Every time your blood sugar levels fall, which will happen around 2-3 hours after you’ve eaten, you’ll feel hungry again. The more carbohydrate you eat, the more pronounced this will be – this is why you’ll find yourself hungry around 11.00 and 15.00 after a typical breakfast of cereal/toast/fruit juice, or lunch of a sandwich and a packet of crisps (and perhaps a chocolate bar!). And what will you snack on at those times? Generally, even more carbohydrate! The biscuits with your mid-morning cup of tea or coffee, a slice of cake in the afternoon, etc.

If you keep your carbohydrate intake low, this rise and fall of blood sugars is much less dramatic. Protein and fat have a much more limited impact – insulin isn’t released to deal with fat – so your blood sugar levels are more stable, and as a result you will feel much less hungry between meals.

Strictly speaking Bootcamp is not a low carb diet, but a low insulin diet. The hormone insulin is released when we eat carbohydrate and one of its effects is to block the release of fat from fat cells. Lowering our carb intake, and therefore our insulin levels, allows fat to flow freely out of fat cells and be used as a fuel source. Over the first couple of weeks your appetite will naturally reduce, and your calorie intake will drop without hunger… and you’ll lose weight.

And the last piece from me for now - about weighing.

Each week I'll start a new chat thread, and I'll post the Spreadsheet of Fabulousness (if you wonder why it's called that, you'll realise when you look at it - it's packed full of really important information and general helpful stuff)

You don't have to be on the spreadsheet if you don't want to publicly declare your weight. But you can also index your weight, if you don't want to be specific about it - if you want to do it this way, then you start at 100 and deduct one point for every pound that you lose.

How often to weigh?

This is up to you. Many of us are daily weighers as we feel that this keeps us more accountable. However, if you're going to do this, you must be prepared psychologically for the fact that your weight will fluctuate daily, and sometimes it may go up, despite following the plan. If you find that too difficult, then try weekly weighing instead.

Weighing should always be first thing in the morning, naked*, and after you've been to the loo.

(*And as always, my little joke - don't do this if you're weighing at Boots)

Additional ways of measuring progress

Although weighing seems the obvious way to measure progress it can, actually, be the least accurate. It's quite common for the scales to stop moving, yet you find that your clothes are fitting better. Therefore it's also a good idea to take your measurements at the beginning, and repeat these each week. It's also a good idea to find an item of clothing that's just a bit too tight, and try this on each week.

Recording weight on the spreadsheet

If you are on the spreadsheet, and you're weighing yourself daily, there are a number of ways to do this:

1. simply enter the weight you are on your weigh-in day (although the spreadsheet is posted each Monday, you don't have to stick to Monday if another day would work better for you)

1. enter the lowest weight you've seen for that week

or

1. enter your average weight for the week

A couple of very useful other threads:

a selection of low carb products Bootcampers have found, with photos and ingredients lists

FAQs about low carbing/Bootcamp

Thinking about next week, it's time to also think about what you're going to cook/eat. It's a really good idea to remove as much temptation as possible from your fridge/cupboards and make sure you've planned some low carb meals.

A really good source of inspiration is all the recipe threads, which are stickied at the top of the Low Carb Bootcamp topic.

But to help, each week I'm going to post a recipe - hopefully one that all the family will enjoy. (One of the real keys to success is making the same meal for everyone, rather than having to cook separately for you!)

This week's recipe is an old Bootcamp favourite - Cheeseburger Pie:

Cheeseburger pie
Serves 4

Ingredients:

500g high fat minced beef
50g finely chopped onion (or use shallots for a lower carb result)
150g chopped mushrooms
100mls double cream
2 heaped tablespoons of mayo (check the carb count and use the lowest one you can find - or make your own)
150g mature cheddar, grated
3 eggs
Worcestershire sauce
salt & pepper to taste

1. Fry mince, onion and mushrooms together until cooked. Season to taste, and add a good shake of Worcestershire sauce

1. Place in a pie dish/lasagne-type dish and flatten with a spoon

1. Beat the eggs along with the mayo, cream and cheese

1. Pour this over the top of the meat mixture and bake in oven Gas mark 5/190C for 20 to 25 mins until set and golden brown

This freezes very well.

Lovely with salad, cauli mash, or stir fry (It's also great, cold, in lunchboxes)

Next week I'll post a vegetarian recipe, to even things up a little!

Do we have a recipe for making our own mayo? I have recently discovered I am allergic to commercially produced mayo (additant not main ingredients) Mayo is one of the main ways i get fat.

@HillsBesideTheSea
I have been making this Mayo
allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/43635/mayonnaise--very-quick-stick-blender-method.aspx

Very easy if you have a stick blender.
Keeps well in a screw top jar in the fridge.

Thanks for the thread @BIWI

@HillsBesideTheSea that's the recipe I'd use. Just one thing though - don't use extra virgin olive oil for mayo as it makes it taste very bitter.

Posting on here for accountability

This WoE really does work if. you. follow. the. Rules.

Thanks for the new thread BIWI. One of my jobs today will be The Plan and online shop for next week's food and cheeseburger pie has just gone to the top of the list.

Also may try this, which I spotted on a non BC thread this week but happens to be low carb:

diethood.com/zucchini-lasagna-roll-ups/
(With full fat dairy obviously)

Think I have put on a few pounds since last BC but they will be off in the first couple of weeks. My added task this time is to take measurements, never bothered to do that before. I have been on a bit of a carby binge this week to be honest, definitely feeling ready to get back to BC and will be finishing the wine in the fridge tonight ready for a few dry weeks. 💪💪💪

Thanks @BIWI I lost 7lbs in 4 weeks on the last mini bootcamp (and then went off piste but have managed to hover about that weight) so hoping to keep on losing!

Thanks guys. Newbie here but I tried on my winter trousers yesterday and NONE fit. I’m training to be a nurse and I promised myself I’d be a healthy BMI by the time a graduate and I’m now less than a year away. So I really need to get on board

My issue just now is on fulltime placement shifts I don’t have a lot of time- so any quick and easy tips? I was thinking full fat Greek yoghurt for breakfasts, salads with meat at break time and then whatever meat hubby is having minus the carbs at night eg chicken stir fry without the noodles.

Have roped my husband in this time so we can stick to the same meals.
New dress arrived this morning for the school PTA ball so I must lose a few inches to get in that in 5 weeks time.

Thanks BIWI for getting us organised

Thanks, came looking for this thread. Definitely cooking a big batch of cheeseburger pie, it sounds delicious.

Low carbed off and on for years (terrible for falling off the wagon) because of IBS and eczema and lurked on threads but this time I'm going to do this properly.

Heaviest Ive been since I was pregnant 12 years ago after trying to save the rest of the country from the carbs by eating them all during COVID.

QQ, what about exercise? I want to restart, am i best to do diet first then add? Sorry if its a stupid one!!!

Exercise is fine! It's very good for us in all manner of ways - but a couple of things:

• it's very difficult to lose weight through exercise alone. You have to do a LOT of it to make a significant difference

and

• in the first few weeks of low carbing, while your body is transitioning from burning carbs to burning fat, you may find exercise harder and your performance less optimal. This is quite normal - but once you are fat burning, you should find that your return to previous levels or even exceed them.

There's a great book called The Art & Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance which is written by two American doctors, who have conducted their own, extensive research into how a low carb diet works for athletes.

@NisekoWhistler

Have roped my husband in this time so we can stick to the same meals. New dress arrived this morning for the school PTA ball so I must lose a few inches to get in that in 5 weeks time.

Thanks BIWI for getting us organised

It's always a good thing when someone says that their partner is doing it with them - definitely helps with compliance!

And also a really good idea to have a specific focus in mind - I, too, have a dress I need to fit into by the beginning of December. It's worth trying the dress on each week to monitor your performance as well as keeping you focused.

Yay. This is perfect timing. I'm checking in. I got to my target weight on this WOE between May and Aug 2020. The first time I had ever tried losing weight seriously. I lost 8KG!! Have put about 4KG back on since Feb 2021 so here I am again.

This is great - looking forward to getting started! I'm actually breastfeeding at the moment - am I right in thinking there's a bit more leeway for a few more carbs in the first couple of weeks?

Yes @SamuelWhiskey if you're breastfeeding then you should be following Bootcamp Light, rather than the more strict first two weeks (although this does depend on how little your baby is!)

I’ve blitzed my kitchen cupboards today. All flours, cereals, pasta and rice are gone! I binned the open packs and the unopened stuff donated to food bank (I’d only gone in to get a pack of crisps…)

I have to admit I’ve spent this week getting rid of chocolate and crisps down my gullet and am planning a “last supper” full on roast dinner tomorrow. From Monday though it’s full steam ahead.

@LowlyTheWorm good planning, but remember you should be having higher fat. So mayo with your salad or eggs, or avocado. Or tuna with oil, or salmon / mackeral / sardines. Or cheese.

Without the fat you might feel hungry. That can lead to some poor food choices.

@Glenthebattleostrich this is not 'a diet' it is more a way of living and eating.

In my mind a diet woud be a defined and limited eating programme, designed to lose an amount of weight. And it may or may not be a healthy way of living.

For me, this is a long term way of eating, for most of my meals. Very little proccessed food; lots of green veg; no sugar; healthy fats.

Not criticising your plan, just reframing the context. Not a diet, a healthier eating plan.