'Soft' warm-up approach to next week's Low Carb Bootcamp!

[BIWI]

Official Bootcamp starts next Monday - here's the sign-up thread

But I know that lots of people want to ease themselves into it.

If you've never low carbed before, it can be quite a good idea to do this, and it can help minimise the chances of getting 'carb flu' - the withdrawal symptoms when you cut down on your carbohydrates.

So if you're interested, this where it starts!

My advice:

• make sure you've got rid of all your Christmas treats

• ... as well as other carb-heavy stuff like biscuits, cakes, etc

• start thinking about the meals that you're going to eat in w/c 13 Jan - write yourself a meal plan (and think about all your meals, including your lunches as well as family meals, etc), and then make sure you write yourself a proper shopping list

• have a look at hat you're eating on a 'typical' day, and see where you cut down/out on the carbs -breakfast is likely to be your most carb-heavy meal, so think about how you're going to cut the carbs here (clue that will mean ditching toast, cereals, fruit and fruit juice!)

• if your diet is heavily reliant on pasta and rice-based meals, start thinking now about what you're going to cook instead

• make sure you are planning meals for the whole family to eat - try as much as possible to make sure that you're all eating the same food, rather than having to cook separate stuff for you - the idea is that this is a WOE - way of eating - and not a diet. So for example, if you're planning on having meat and two veg, plus potatoes - have meat and three veg instead. No-one will die if they don't have potatoes on their plate!

• look at how much tea/coffee you're drinking; if you drink them white, you will be consuming a lot of carbs in the milk. See if you can cut the number of cups down per day. Try and drink them black or use cream instead of milk

• think about the fact that you will be starting to eat a high fat diet; if you have anything that's low fat in your fridge/cupboard, get rid of it! Butter, cheese and cream as well as olive oil are all now going to be key parts of your diet

• similarly, think about all the artificial sweeteners you're eating/drinking and get shot of them. Diet drinks are not allowed on Bootcamp, so cut them down/out as much as you can

• fruit will not be allowed on Bootcamp (for the first two weeks); if you like to snack on fruit, consider replacing it with veg, e.g. slices of cucumber and peppers

• read, read, read and read more about low carbing have a look at the resources on the Spreadsheet of Fabulousness ; there's loads of good stuff here that will help you get your head around what low carbing is all about

• and have a look here some lovely recipes to inspire you

• and here is a link to Bootcamp rules ; make sure you are familiar with them by 13/1!!!

But above all, come and post on here with any of your questions, concerns and suggestions!

Good luck.

Don't mind at all CK! :)

Thanks!

I've been doing this for 5 days now, so time for an update.
I don't need to lose weight please don't hate me but my eating habits were WILDLY out of control.....I turned to this in desperation as quite literally just about everything I was eating was a carb, I felt like crap and I needed to change. I'd tried all conventional approaches to eat healthily but caved due to carb cravings every time. Bingeing was a common occurrence
So I've cheated (as I don't need to lose). Some almonds,berries, even sweet potato at one meal. Oh, and a couple of glasses of wine

Bizarrely though it has worked! I've eaten with control for the first time in ages, carb flu was horrid but brief and now I have a vastly reduced appetite, better energy and a sense of calm around food. The cupboards are choc full of cakes,sweets,crisps etc from Christmas but weirdly they hold no more appeal now than any other food.
For the first time ever I am genuinely not bothered that they are there and don't feel the overwhelming desire to eat them.

Oh, and I've lost 3 pounds!!!!!!!

Thank you BIWI

"sense of calm around food" YYYYY!!

Diets used to have me fretting about what/how much I could eat at the next meal; I was terrified of being hungry!

I have snacked ONCE this time (low carb) but my appetite is drastically reduced. I'm looking forward to meals because I know I can eat til I'm full; there's no thinking "But what of it's not enough???"

And also YY to not being bothered about sweet things. This is unheard of. I never met a cake or biscuit I didn't like.

I'm thinking about sweet things but not because I want them; but because I'm endlessly amazed that I don't want them!! I keep waiting for cravings to kick in....

Afternoon all, DH and I have been low carbing since Monday, apart from a small chocolate ball that I absentmindedly ate on Monday. The only thing we're doing that BIWI could get her stick out for is we are having diet tonic and sweetener in hot drinks. I know we're supposed to eat clean, but I also know I'd find it hard to stick to the woe without it. In time we'll ditch the sweetener.

This morning we weighed in and I've lost 2lbs and DH 4lbs. Happy days.

Hope ... Just go for it - I too have been on low calorie type diets forever and as I know the calories in EVERYTHING after years of starving - I know I am eating lots and lots of cals and yet .... My 'test' jeans now go past my thighs and I can get one buttock in embrace the fat !!

Just had a huge bowl of Broccoli and Stilton soup - yummy , totally full .

Ok, thanks Bronx, captainmummy & BIWI.

I can't remember everything I have had over the last few days but I usually have eggs (boiled or as an omelette) for breakfast, and a salad or soup for lunch. I haven't had any bread at all, but I did have a small amount of pasta or rice or potatoes with my main meals up until yesterday, and some dark chocolate on some of the evenings. I also have semi-skimmed milk in my tea & I like mayo on my salads. I know there are a fair few things I have to stop from Monday. In my defence, I shall say that my larder is still crammed full of chocolates & other goodies left over from Christmas and I have not partaken!

Yesterday, I had:-
B - 2 boiled eggs with mushrooms & half an avocado fried in butter.

L - large salad - spinach, rocket & watercress, with cucumber, green olives, feta cheese & blue cheese salad dressing

D - Salmon with sweet chilli dressing (I know, I know - but I am only easing myself into this), courgette & half an avocado fried in butter, & mixed veg - carrots, broccoli & sweetcorn.

I'm sure I must have snacked at some stage, but I can't remember what I had.

Today:-
B - Full fat Greek Yogurt, 2 boiled eggs & mushrooms fried in butter

L - pretty much as yesterday.

S - babybel cheese / cold chicken

I'm thinking that the problem is having the extra fat without taking the carbs down to a minimum. I'm also not drinking enough water. But throughout December, I was drinking a fair amount of white wine and I would have thought that giving that up alone would have caused a bigger weight loss!!

Anyway, it could well be that I have been in denial about what I have been eating and from Monday, I'll post everything I eat on here. (clutches teddy closely to chest)

Ok MrsHughJarse - will do! I'll dig out some size 14 jeans & see how I get on.

Hope - your food looks ok, except the sweet chilli dressing (but you know that) and your veg on the side is the higher carb veg. Sweetcorn (in fact anything with the word sweet in it!) and carrots are higher carb than we would like. And the blue cheese dressing on your salad - bought, or homemade? If bought check the label - I'd be willing to bet it has sugar in. Keep to under 3g/100 if poss.
Soups - again, check the label Or make your own from 'allowed' veg.
If you have been eating potatoes, rice and pasta 'up til yesterday' you have not been low-carbing - and eating low-carb/high fat and high-carb will put weight on. Read the rules, drink lots of water and you will be fine. It will work!

Thanks, Captain. You are right, of course. I'll be sticking to the rules from Monday. I'm going to the shops tomorrow so I'll be stocking up on all the things I need. I hadn't thought about the veg though, so I'll dig out the allowed veg list.

Eva I consider this a pretty big scandal. Everything that's touted as healthy is being scientifically proven to be bad for us. Fat is demonised in such a way that people dare not go near it. What really gets me is how food manufacturers (Flora etc) shout loud about how their polyunsaturated spread (yuck, could you think of a less appealing descriptor for a foodstuff?) is good for your heart, so millions of people buy it thinking it'll save their health. It won't, it'll only compound the problem. Don't get me started on wholegrains.

I read about paleo diets nearly a year ago, then read Gary Taubes (Why Do We Get Fat?) and Mark Sisson (The Primal Blueprint) over Christmas and promptly went through my kitchen chucking out anything contentious. The nutrition guide plate thing from the health visitor also went in the bin. Yesterday's sugar discussion in the press is definitely a step in the right direction, but they need to do the same for fats. At least now they're telling people full fat yoghurt has way less crap in.

Totally agree Plonky. I wonder how many nutritionists will be open to radically changing their advice? Must be hard to accept that everything you thought you knew might be wrong.

So glad people are learning about it themselves thanks to the internet.

I've spent three dayswhen I should be working reading through... Hi to all, old and new. I am determined to make this work - 3 stone to lose, I lost 1 doing it early last year but then stopped for some stupid reason.

Someone upthread (sorry, I can't remember who!) mentioned disordered eating - I suffer from this hugely, in fact am seeing a therapist for it, but somehow when proper LC-ing I really don't want to do it! So it helps there too.

Well done BIWI!

Interestingly I've had very positive or at least neutral reactions about LC from doctors, but shocked and belittling ones from nutritionist/dietician type of people. Ho hum. I don't really go into a lot of details about my eating habits these days, unless someone specifically asks or wants to know how I've lost the weight. (Very few HCPs are actually interested at all, as long as I've lost it). But when they ask I'm honest, because I want them to hear positive experiences about LC.

It's a bit of a carby twatty day round here today, but kind of planned and definitely a one-off, because I'm all meal planned and shopped ready for LC foods from tomorrow morning, again.

But today:
B: Fried eggs and coffee with coconut oil.
L: A cappucino, some 60% chocolate, an avocado and smoked salmon with cream cheese.
D: Homemade pizza (with an experimental base) and salad. And there's some chocolate covered nuts and a dry cider with my name on it, too.

Because who wouldn't want to extend their carb flu?!

Plonky - the depressing thing is that it must be 15 years since I first low-carbed, the first time the Atkins book was released over here. I'd been recommended to go and see a top gynae on Harley St because I suspected I had PCOS. He immediately started talking to me about weight and leant forwards over his desk and almost whispered to me that I needed to try low carb. At the time I'd never met anybody who ate this way, there was little in the way of internet resource for it, and I felt really embarrassed. But it worked. And all the PCOS symptoms I had disappeared as the weight fell off. I still can't believe, when you see how strong the low carb/paleo movement is now, how very mainstream nutritionists like John Briffa are joining in, that the message is still not really getting through. How many parents I see feeding their kids margarine instead of butter and worrying about the fat in everything. I read Taubes' massive tome 'The Diet Delusion' a few years ago and he so comprehensively annihilates, with scientific precision, the low-fat myth, that I was astounded that the book had next to no impact when published. Of course because there is no big resounding PR machine behind any of these individuals, and no real money to be made by saying 'hey, don't buy products!', nothing much seems to really happen. I'm hoping for a quiet revolution instead. Maybe one day we'll just realise that everyone's doing it...

PS: any tips for carb flu? I seem to have hit a brick wall with tiredness today (4 days in). Can hardly keep my eyes open!

helium I had that same almost whisper from my then GP when I got diagnosed with PCOS! Like they were afraid they'll get into trouble if anyone finds out they said that. Too bad I didn't believe them back then. :(

I was too scared of this guy to say no! He just TOLD me to do it, and was so authoritative the first thing I did was go to a bookshop (aah them were the days!) and buy Atkins. He told me he didn't care which book I bought, it just had to be low carb. He told me if I lost two stone my periods would regulate (I was having 40 day cycles) and they did. I never had issues again after that.

Helium/plonky - oh, low-fat 'spread' is a pet hate of mine! I can't beleive i used to think it was 'healthy' - emulsified, manufactured, dyed-yellow gunk that even rats won;t eat. Yum. And the current campaign to reduce sugar in drinks - yes, get everyone to drink fizzy stuff with sweeteners in! Don't people know what sweeteners are? Cancer-causing, cellulite causing, addicitive .....

Anyway.

I read a food diary written by some celeb which was then picked apart by a 'dietician'. It was low in carbs (not low-cab, but not a lot, and good carbs like fruit etc) - the twat/dietician suggested that without sufficient carbs she would 'not have enough energy' to do her daily work. I despair. The body runs on fat, not carbs. Carbs are converted to fat, for energy.

Captain I've had that same reaction from people. 'Oh you're not eating carbs? What DO you eat?' My DP's mum put out cous-cous because she was worried I'd be hungry.

I've been grain free since the tail end of November. I find it quite funny that people are astounded by us eating as we're supposed to (or as close an approximation as we can manage in a developed society). We ran on meat, fat and veg for millions of years before we got all civilised and started making processed food that kills us...

If you're just starting low carbing then it's definitely worth taking measurements as well as weighing yourself. In six months of low carbing my waist went from 36 to 29.5 inches and my hips went from 42.5 to 36 inches. The weight came off in fits and starts but when the weight wasn't dropping there would be another half inch off the waist or hips so I knew I was still losing. I even lost nearly an inch off my wrists and forearms I didn't even know I had fat wrists!

I got a bit cross on that wholegrain thread earlier - I shouldn't have read it, but I couldn't help myself

QueenStromba posted a really good post about the problem with whole grains, which I agreed with, and it obviously pissed the company off because AnnMumsnet had to come on and write a response from them. In which was a link to NHS Choices, called 'The Truth About Carbs' ...

... claiming it was all peer-reviewed research, blah blah blah

So I left the thread

Hope:

B - 2 boiled eggs with mushrooms & half an avocado fried in butter.

Lovely - perfect low carb food - and hopefully very satisfying?

L - large salad - spinach, rocket & watercress, with cucumber, green olives, feta cheese & blue cheese salad dressing

Depending on how much cheese, this is pretty low in both protein and fat - although obviously I don't know the ingredients of your dressing. I'm also betting that - unless you made it yourself - there will have been sugar, and therefore carbs, in the dressing

D - Salmon with sweet chilli dressing (I know, I know - but I am only easing myself into this), courgette & half an avocado fried in butter, & mixed veg - carrots, broccoli & sweetcorn.

The salmon is fine, along with the courgette, broccoli and avocado - but the rest is way too carby. Sweetcorn is really high in carbs. Again, there will have been a lot of sugar in the dressing

Today:-
B - Full fat Greek Yogurt, 2 boiled eggs & mushrooms fried in butter

Fine. Although it sounds like quite a lot of food! Still, hopefully you weren't hungry after that

L - pretty much as yesterday.

Same comments then!

S - babybel cheese / cold chicken

Overall, if you've still been eating pasta, rice and potatoes, and dark chocolate - you will have still been eating fairly high carbs. Sadly just giving up alcohol isn't always enough! (Although a massive badge for you for doing that )

Thanks BIWI. I realise there has been too much "cheating", but I thought I would have lost something, bearing in mind there is quite a lot to lose.

Does 2 eggs, some mushrooms and some yogurt sound like too much? Clearly, this is why I have a weight problem LOL.

I have been reading some of the success stories and am feeling that it might work for me, so I'll give it my best shot from Monday, and try to be not too bad until then.