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CarbSmart Podcast 24 Transcript

Welcome to the CarbSmart Podcast, where your decision to embrace low-carb nutrition becomes a fun and delicious lifestyle. I’m your host, Dana Carpender, here to guide you through the ins and outs of everything low-carb. With the new year comes diet season with people resolving to improve their nutrition, whether for weight loss, health, or both.

Carb restriction is, of course, a great way to achieve both. So, let’s talk about it.

DANA: Happy New Year and welcome to the wonderful world of low-carb. We have more fun here than people suspect. Some of you are old hands, some newbies, others have eaten this way before. Fallen by the wayside. Happy to have you all.

I’ve been eating this way since dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Okay, since 1995. Clearly, I have never regretted it. I have fielded questions about low-carb nutrition all these years.

The question I most commonly get is: “How many grams of carbohydrate should I eat in a day?”

My reply is always “How the hell should I know?”

More recently, I also get “What are your macros?

The answer is “I have no clue.”

This journey started with a nutrition book from the 1950s. I bought it a used book sale. It asserted that obesity was not a matter of eating too much, but rather a carbohydrate intolerance disorder.

Since by then my health food diet had gotten me up to a size 20 at 5 foot 2 with nasty energy swings to boot, I took notice.

The Old Way of Dieting vs The New Way

I remembered that when I was a kid, everybody knew that if you wanted to lose weight, you gave up potatoes, spaghetti, bread, and sweets. Every diner had a diet plate of a bunless hamburger patty, a scoop of cottage cheese, and either sliced tomatoes or half a canned peach. I figured, I might as well give the old school approach a try.

I was clear on what foods were high-carb, so I just dropped them from my diet.

For instance, instead of a piece of skinless chicken, broccoli with fake butter-stuff and brown rice with the same fake butter-stuff, I would have the chicken with the skin and the broccoli with real butter. No weighing, no measuring, just eating low-carb foods to satisfaction.

The results were immediate and dazzling.

I am currently about 70 pounds lighter than I was when I started. Despite being officially old – 66 – I also feel better in most ways than I did before I started in my mid 60s. Certainly, my energy level, mood, and mental clarity are better than they were when I was eating the typical health food diet – Low-fat and high in “healthy whole grains.”

Considering how much I’ve aged, that’s remarkable. I can trust my appetite to tell me when and how much to eat. I had heard, perhaps you have too, that if I just ate a “healthy diet” and paid attention to my body, my body would know how much food it needed. Back when I was basing my diet on what were called good carbs, my body thought it needed enough food for the 101st Airborne Division.

I was hungry all the time. Perhaps the biggest surprise when I quit the carbs was how much my hunger abated. My point here is that I promise, I have one, is that I didn’t start with an official low-carb program. I think people focus too much on details.

Exactly how many grams of carb am I getting?
Am I in caloric deficit?
What should my macros be?

I had read the original Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution back in 1972, and even tried it. You’ll be shocked to know it worked. But at 13, the idea of a permanent change in eating habits was beyond me. In the late 90s, having gone low-carb, I read what books I could find. Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution, Protein Power, The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet, and The Zone.

Back then, those were what books were in the bookstores. As carbohydrate restriction caught on in the early 2000s, more books came out. I read those too and also found more old stuff like The Drinking Man’s Diet, Calories Don’t Count, and Eat Fat and Grow Slim. Back in the day, we had internet bulletin boards, a forerunner of Reddit.

These were places where people interested in a given subject could post email to the whole group. I haunted the low-carb bulletin board. I quickly learned that different approaches were working for different people. For example, The Heller’s Carbohydrate Addicts Diet, consisting of two average sized, very low-carb meals a day, and one reward meal of equal portions of salad, low starch vegetables, protein, and whatever carbs the dieter wanted, but only as much as they could eat in one hour, was dreadful for me.

Despite the title, it reawakened my carb addiction demons. My weight loss stopped. I also felt awful after my reward meal. I quit that experiment after crashing blood sugar made me nod off in front of dinner party company. Yet on the low-carb bulletin board, there were people who had lost 50, 60, even 100 pounds on the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet with never a bad day.

Who was I to tell them it was a bad diet? The Zone Diet designed by Dr. Barry Sears, prescribed a ratio of 30 percent of calories from protein, 30 percent from fat, and 40 percent from carbs. Not super low-carb, but lower carb than the average American diet. According to Sears, this ratio performed some sort of hormonal magic, keeping the dieter in the zone, where energy and performance were high, weight was coming off, and hunger was nearly non-existent.

You know, the results I was getting from a basic Atkins and Protein Power style low-carb diet. The Zone did not work for me. Like, at all. I was hungry all the time. Eventually, Sears told people who were hungry on the Zone Diet to eat less carb and more protein. So, my original low-carb diet. Yet, I talked to a few people who found Sears’s ratios worked well for them. These were generally people who had been trim and athletic in their youth, only growing a spare tire when they hit 40 and got a desk job. Not so effective for those of us who had been fat and carb addicted since childhood. Once again, who was I to tell the people who were doing well on the Zone that it was a bad diet.

Hearing about other people’s experiences with the various forms of carbohydrate restriction was what inspired me to write my first book, How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost 40 Pounds. I wanted to explain all the ways I knew of cutting carbs so that people could find what worked for them.

Questions to ask yourself from How I Gave Up my Low Fat Diet and Lost 40 Pounds

Is your diet working for you?
Are you losing weight?
Is your hunger satisfied?
Are you clear headed and energetic?
Are you having an easy time sticking with it?
Is your health improving?

These are the metrics that matter. If your diet is not working for you, stick with it. It can take time to work out the best approach for you, and that may change over time.

Remember, there is no finish line.

Whatever you do to lose weight and improve your health is what you will have to do for the rest of your life to maintain those benefits. It’s worth finding your own best path. So, tweak your diet one change at a time.

Maybe you need to pay attention to your blood sugar numbers or ketones.
Maybe you need fewer carbs.
Maybe you should eat more protein and less fat or less protein and more fat.
Maybe you should count total carbs instead of net carbs or vice versa.
Maybe you should try intermittent fasting or fat fasting.
Maybe you need to cut out the cheat days.
If you have cravings, are you eating a food to which you are addicted?

Dana Carpender’s Signs of Carb Intolerance

For some of us, there are foods we are addicted to, and as with alcoholism, the only solution is to avoid them completely. In How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost 40 Pounds, I included this checklist of symptoms of carbohydrate intolerance to help readers gauge just how severe their issues might be, and hence how restrictive a diet they should try.

I have had a weight problem since I was quite young.
Obesity runs in my family.
I have bad energy slumps, especially in the late afternoon.
I get tired and/or shaky when I get hungry.
I’m depressed and irritable for no reason.
I binge badly or frequently on carbohydrate foods.
I carry most of my weight on my abdomen.
I have high blood pressure.
I have high triglycerides.
I have high cholesterol.
I have Type 2 diabetes.
I have heart disease.
I have had a female cancer (breast, ovarian, uterine)
I have had a stroke.
High blood pressure runs in my family.
High triglycerides run in my family.
High cholesterol runs in my family.
Type 2 diabetes runs in my family.
Heart disease runs in my family.
Female cancers run in my family.
Stroke runs in my family.
Alcoholism runs in my family.

If the answer is “yes” to more than two or three of these, you’re likely to be pretty intolerant. The more yes answers, the more intolerant you’re likely to be. And the more people in your family have these problems, the more intolerant you’re likely to be. (I had at least ten yes answers before I went low-carb! Obviously, I haven’t changed my family health history, but I don’t have those energy slumps and depressed spells anymore.) Keep this in mind when choosing an approach.

The more of these symptoms you have, the more carbohydrate intolerant you are likely to be. The more intolerant you are, the more restrictive an approach you are likely to need. Even having four or five symptoms can signal real trouble.

I had 10 of the symptoms before I went low-carb. And if what’s working for you is weighing and measuring and tracking macros, go for it! I’m all about what works and what you can live with permanently. It is possible that after several months of weighing and measuring and tracking macros, you’ll be comfortable eyeballing it.
On the other hand, you may find that sort of exactitude is just what you need. It’s all about what works for you.

Welcome to the wonderful world of low carb and to the CarbSmart Podcast. Let’s have a happy, healthy 2025.

What form of low-carb diet are you pursuing? Is it giving you the results you want, or do you feel you need to adjust a bit?

Let us know in the comments below.

And at the risk of sounding self-serving, trying a new low-carb recipe once or twice a week is a great aid to building a happy low-carb life.

Share this podcast with everyone you think might like it. And don’t forget to like and subscribe. Subscribe and hit that notification bell because you don’t want to miss a single episode.

Until next time, stay low carb, happy, and healthy.

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3 Question Interview with Fred Hahn – CarbSmart Podcast Episode 20

In today's three question interview from CarbSmart. Dana Carpender interviews Fred Hahn, owner of Slow Burn Fitness and author of The Slow Burn Fitness Revolution and also Strong Kids, Healthy Kids. He's also a long time low-carber. Let's hear what Fred has to say about low-carb nutrition and fitness.