How to make a low-carb lifestyle easy

You’ve seen how the pounds have dropped off and you feel great — no sugar cravings, no hunger pangs between meals, and you’ve got lots of energy. After weeks and months of being strict with yourself, you feel the temptations of Krispy Kreme and MacDonald’s winning over common sense. The problem with achieving success in any diet is the tendency to get over-zealous and fearful of going off the diet. How do you enjoy your food and keep off the pounds? Here’s how to take the agony out of a low-carb lifestyle.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• A positive attitude
• Creative cooking
• Lots of planning

1. Put on the right attitude. Change your thinking from “I’m on a diet” to “This is a lifestyle”. If you think you are doomed to never touching a bagel or sugar ever, you will never succeed in maintaining a low-carb existence.

2. Stock up on whole foods. Low carb doesn’t mean no carbs. It’s a matter of changing your staples from simple carbohydrates to complex ones. For example, avoid white bread but allow yourself whole grain loaves, or replace white rice with brown rice, or normal pasta with whole wheat.

3. Snack a lot. Throw out the idea of three square meals a day — this was just a concept grown from the time the world became industrialized and needed to put workers in factories on an efficient schedule, only breaking for lunch and dinner. Bring an apple, nuts, or some cheese to work with you. Instead of diet soda that will only increase your sugar cravings further, try filling drinks like soymilk, rice milk, or almond milk that are great to pair with your snacks.

4. Plan your meals. Healthy people plan what they eat daily. Don’t see it as a chore, but again, as part of how you live. When you start getting hungry, you may cave into convenient options like chips or sweet drinks as a temporary reprieve — so be prepared.

5. Exercise regularly. It has been proven that a low-carb diet can help you lose significant weight even in a sedentary lifestyle. But if you want to keep off that weight, the only solution you have is to get your butt going. The old adage of burning more than you put into your body holds real for any kind of diet.

6. Rustle up your recipes. Eating the same stuff everyday is a one-way ticket to a doomed diet. Make an effort to give variety to your meals — the Internet has a plethora of delicious and imaginative low-carb recipes for you to surf through. Get creative and experiment with replacing high carb ingredients with low-carb ones. For example, thinly sliced, roasted eggplant can be used as a tasty replacement to white toast if you’re making bruschetta.

7. Cut down, not cut out. It’s hard to completely avoid carbs and you will feel very stressed out if you stuck so strictly to this idea. Work, appointments, parties, and travel will get in the way of your routine, but you can still make better food choices than throwing in the towel completely. It’s really about making sensible food choices — allow yourself carbs in the day so they have time to burn; and eat more lightly at dinner; leave out sugar in your coffee; baked potatoes are better than French fries.

Tips & Warnings

• If you stray from your low-carb diet for a few days, just jump back in. The point of seeing eating low-carb as a “lifestyle” is to take out the pain, so relax if you nibble on ice-cream or swig a few beers. There’s always tomorrow to make up for it.
• Be enormously patient. You may feel really hungry at first, so ease yourself into a low-carb lifestyle by cutting out bad carbs in one meal, then two, and then finally three.

[luiyuming]

on 5/31/2008 thank you - glad to know someone thinks this is good advice ;)

[llnair2006]

on 5/31/2008 get info I struggle with this and I will take some advice from this article 5 stars