Lose Weight Fast, Eat All the Carbs You Want

Low-carb is a myth.

Carbs are the devil! Mean pasta that goes straight to your thighs, grinning donuts scheming to give you a huge belly, potatoes getting ready to envelop you in a layer of blubber! Let’s face it, carbs are evil!

Or are they?

We are constantly bombarded with the idea that carbs are bad for us. If you want to lose weight, you have to let go of carbs. If you want to be thin, carbs are the enemy. If you ask someone how to shed a few pounds, the first thing they tell you is: stop eating carbs!

Ditching carbs is not a new idea. It’s been lurking around since the 70s when it was originally brought into the spotlight by Dr. Robert C. Atkins, who wrote a best-selling book about how a low-carb, high-fat diet is the key to a slender body. Since then, people all over the world made Atkins their best friend and worst enemy.

Their best friend because Atkins indeed works. And their worst enemy because Atkins doesn’t really work.

How’s that? Let me explain. You want to lose weight and start a low-carb Atkins-type diet. It works like a charm because together with not eating carbs you are also eating less and you start to work out. When someone tries weight loss they make sure they go at it with full force, all weapons out against the blubber monster. Original results: awesome! Long-term maintenance: horrible. The Atkins diet is not sustainable and people revert right back to what they started with. Or more.

Atkins is old news though. But only as far as the name is concerned. The diet has more recently been resurrected under the name of the ‘ketogenic diet’. With a few tweaks, such as Atkins is more protein oriented, while keto is for the fat lovers, it has a lot of fans. Millions of nutritionists, fitness coaches, people at the supermarket and your uncle Tom are all clamoring to tell you how effective this diet is.

For one simple reason: the diet does work! It works just as well as high-carb, though. Nothing more, nothing less. Everybody is promoting it because keto is already famous and it’s so much easier to stand for the boss than for the underdog.

Just to prove a point, check out this extensive research published in Cochrane Reviews.

According to Clean Eating:

The research […] included 61 randomized controlled trials that randomized a total of 6925 male and female participants who were overweight or living with obesity (average weight 210 pounds), without or with type 2 diabetes and without or with cardiovascular conditions, to either low-carbohydrate (less than 45% of total daily calories) or balanced-carbohydrate weight-reducing diets (45% to 65% of total daily calories).

The most common lower-carb diets used in studies provided 20 to 35% of energy from carbs and 20% or more of calories from protein. But some trials included in the investigation provided no more than 10% of energy from carbs and were very low in the macronutrient. For a trial to be included in this review, the weight-reducing phase had to be 2 weeks or longer, with the main goal to elicit weight loss in participants. The longest dieting phase was two years, but most trials lasted 6 months or less.

The results? There was no significant difference in weight loss between the low carb and high carb diets. In the short and long term, the average difference in pounds lost was under 2.2 pounds in favor of low-carb. And that’s most probably the difference in water weight.

So if you’re a carb lover, what can you do to lose weight while still enjoying the magic taste of your dark lord, the carbohydrate?

1. There is only one major truth to weight loss: eat fewer calories than you spend.

There will be a lot of detractors here to argue that a calorie is not just a calorie. But as far as weight loss is concerned, it is. You could be losing weight on pizzas and milk-shakes if you ate just a slice a day and took only one sip of the sugary creamy drink.

Weight loss is a simple game of calories in, calories out. Do all calories have the same value? Health-wise? No! Weight loss-wise? Yes!

2. Choose healthy carbs.

It’s difficult to lose weight and not go crazy-hungry while eating highly processed carbs like fries or bread because they are loaded with calories. The same goes for anything processed, not just carbs.

When you think of healthy carbs, think of every type of vegetable, leaf, and fruit out there. They are delicious, they are nutritious, they are low calorie, they fill you up and they are the best way to lose weight without feeling like you’re missing out on life.

When you think about it, the healthiest foods out there are high-carb.

3. Don’t overthink it.

The greatest hindrance in maintaining weight loss is spazzing out overeating one extra fry. Most people try to make everything perfect and when the pressure is too high, they end up overeating to calm down. And the process repeats again and again until you’re right back where you started.

Perfectionism ruins your results and puts a damper on the whole experience. The purpose is not just to lose weight, but also to maintain it. And if you’re too hard on yourself that’s just not sustainable.

Relax, keep it loose; being slender and healthy is a marathon, not a sprint.

Eat the salad every day, but be gentle with yourself and allow the cupcake every once in a while too.

And remember this: no matter how vilified they’ve been, carbs are the cornerstone of a happy body and a healthy life.

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