Starring my Inner Food Rebel, some hard-won wisdom and a nice dollop of delusion…The Eating Coach presents her low carb experiment.
Timescale: March to July 2024.
Results in a nutshell: low carb partly works for me – but definitely needs combining with other strategies.
This experiment became the first piece in a puzzle that led me to a excellent place of neutrality as regards weight loss, something that had always been a thorny issue for me.
There is so much more to say, so if you are curious, confused or just plain frustrated as hell with low carb, read on.
I embarked upon this experiment in March, with the goal of finding out how effective a low carb diet was at shedding weight.
I did not have any more specific hypotheses to test. Maybe I should have.
Certainly I now wish I had asked the following questions:
Is low carb satisfying enough to be sustainable?
What do a wide range of experts say about it?
Is there any data on how successful people have been, both on a temporary and permanent timescale?
How Low Is Low Carb?
I quickly discovered that low carb is defined differently, according to who you are listening to.
Low carb is anything under 100g carbs a day.
No wait, it’s anything under 130g.
Hold on. You can make a strong start with 20g max a day.
(For reference, 300g a day is normal in the ultra-processed, ready meal junk food culture most of us have the misfortune to live in.)
I decided to be guided by myself, and spent a week adding up carbs in every meal (I was using low carb recipes already). The data I got was that I could feel satisfied on under 100g carbs a day.
So this was my starting point.
A Great Start
What worked well was that I didn’t need to restrict my food beyond low carb. I was never hungry.
March and April were great, with a lot of ‘novelty energy’ (shiny new object syndrome) being boosted by an easy average loss of about a 1.5lbs a week. NB It was not a smooth linear loss.
This overrode the disappointment I felt at not being able to eat whole unprocessed foods such as chickpeas (garbanzos), lentils and oats, which I love.
Here is me getting very excited in March:
Midsummer Badness
Things started to go wrong in May and June.
A few extra alcoholic drinks started to appear.
The odd high carb pizza.
And, I would bet, other items that I have blocked out in my mind.
The weigh ins stopped being such good news. In fact by mid June, I got so cross that I decided to stop doing them. I had gained weight.
What was happening? This was meant to be an experiment. Something to tell me how effective low carb was. With all of my experiments, if the data shows the method is ineffective, I stop. I think. I change the experiment or start a new one.
But here I was, just ploughing on, rebelling against my own experiment.
This is not the easiest thing to write. It has taken me until October to tell you this. I coach this stuff. Surely I, of all people, should know better.
But what is the point of making mistakes if others can’t benefit from them?
Enter The Inner Food Rebel
What was happening was that my Inner Food Rebel was cack-handedly running to my rescue.
I coined the term Inner Food Rebel (IFR) to describe the real force behind compulsive eating. The IFR rushes to your aid when it senses that you are depriving yourself of pleasure. And pleasure, to the primitive brain, is inextricably linked to survival. The things that (should) give us the greatest natural pleasure (social bonding, exercise, intimacy and of course wholesome food) kept our ancestors alive.
This rescue attempt feels like a tsunami of desire for pleasure, and that translates, for compulsive eaters at least, into binge eating.
My IFR saw that I was depriving myself of pleasure (in the form of truly satisfying foods) in this low carb experiment.
I had no idea that this was happening (Why? Why????? I’d seen it a million times with binge-eating clients), probably because shame was lowering my IQ.
Shame that didn’t belong to me about being The Eating Coach who was not in a good place with food. Who was letting one part of her mind, The IFR, take over the wiser Harriet.
I never binged (I have trained myself out of that response), but processed carbs did sneak in while I wasn’t thinking.
The Turnaround
In July, I went to France for a week. What was interesting about this country was that
- The supermarkets sold very little processed food
- A healthy weight was the norm
During this week, I also listened the the audiobook of Ultra-processed People, by Chris Van Tulleken.
In it he says
…humans have evolved to eat to eat carbs as the foundation of our diet, and carb-free food is harder to eat…You can avoid carbs in the same way you can hold your breath, but eventually most people will crack.
It made so much sense. I saw how much not just my tastebuds had missed my pulses and oats, but my whole body.
Ultra processed People is about the massive toxic effect that ultra-processed food (UPF) is having on not just weight but health as a whole and mental wellbeing.
It was time for a new experiment.
I recorded a lot of audios for that experiment, which will be available, and my personal findings are for another blog post. But I can tell you they are pretty exciting!
To come back to this low carb experiment, here are my conclusions…
Conclusions of My Low Carb Experiment
Low combined with a moderate carb diet works best.
What does this look like in practice?
For example Monday might be what I call keto day, where I stick to stir fries, cauliflower rice, low carb fruit such as strawberries and a decent amount of fat.
Tuesday will include moderate carb meals such as lentil soup and I might added some slices of frozen banana to my sugar free granola.
For me, moderating carbs in this way has not been enough. For example, removing a lot of (but not all) UPF is good for weight loss. And playing around with a shorter eating window (AKA intermittent fasting) also helps.
The weight has started to come off again, but most importantly I have never enjoyed food as much as I do now.
Even better, the mental benefits of the reduced UPF diet have helped me to become more neutral about the scales. Instead of dreading the weekly weigh in, I am developing an almost fervent desire for accurate data.
I am presently on a new experiment that integrates elements of both the low/moderate carb AND the no UPF experiments, and I will report back on that when I have some useful data to report.
Finally, I want to say that in retrospect, I actually appreciate the return of The Inner Food Rebel this summer. The chaos she caused prompted me to try a different tack, and eventually I was able to neutralise my food shame. It has been a humbling experience and, at the same time, very empowering.