What Is Considered Healthy Low-Carb Eating?

What is considered healthy low-carb eating? This topic is very debatable, even within low-carb circles, and that’s why I wanted to write about such an important subject.

As someone who used to be a big, fat slob weighing in at 410 pounds, I think I know a little something about the turnoff of most diets. People can get discouraged by the perception that a diet is excessively and unnecessarily rigid. That’s exactly why I despised low-fat diets so much. There were too many don’ts and not enough cans.

Low-carb, on the other hand, offered freedom of choices that ran the entire food spectrum, including low-carb versions of bread, pasta and candy like the ones offered by CarbSmart.com. In other words, you don’t feel like you are dieting when you are on this way of eating because the options are plentiful and delicious.

Is anyone going to try to argue that they think the way I ate during my weight loss and the way I still eat today is NOT healthier than the way I used to eat prior to my low-carb lifestyle? You don’t even want to begin to look at what my typical menu was like before low-carb. Let’s just say I ate a lot of sugar, covered in sugar and washed down with many glasses of fresh sugar! There is little doubt in my mind how I ever got as big as I did.

So the question is not whether I am eating healthy, but rather whether I am eating AS healthy as I could or even should be. Is that what we are debating here? If so, then I don’t have any arguments with that.

I could very well be eating even healthier foods than I am today, but I am still in the midst of a process where my mind and body are in sync about what I can eat to help keep my body weight maintained. If I can maintain my weight loss throughout 2005, then that will be an accomplishment that I have never done in my entire life.

Keep in mind that I only recently lost 180 pounds in 2004 and it has been just eight months since I lost that weight and kept it off. This is the longest I have ever gone after being on a “diet” without gaining back the weight. I intend to keep it that way for the rest of my life, but that may mean that I eat a few more processed and sugar-free products in the meantime than some of my low-carb friends would have me to consume. I don’t have any problem eating this way because I have successfully maintained my weight by doing this.

Will my food choices begin to evolve to other choices at some point? I have no doubt in my mind that they will. By taking incremental steps towards the goal of eating more whole foods, drinking less diet sodas and consuming less sugar-free candy in due time, I believe I will get there someday over the next few years.

As long as my body weight remains constant or decreasing.

As long as my body weight remains constant or decreasing, I do not sense an urgency about drastically changing my current eating and drinking habits overnight. The changes will come, but give me some time. Now that my health is no longer in immediate danger from being morbidly obese, I think I have the time to decide what is best for me to eat in the coming decades.

If someone is overweight or obese, I think it is much more important for them to make that all-important decision to change the way they are currently eating first. If you can get someone who is in that condition to just start watching their carbohydrate intake as I did, then that is essential to getting them on the path to better health and healthier eating.

It may take a few years before they start eating more of the whole, unprocessed, natural foods that are considered healthy, but it will eventually happen. Let’s get the weight off of them first and then worry about tweaking their eating habits a little more later on.

That’s the beauty of the Low-Carb lifestyle.

We don’t all have the same way of doing it. For some people, they don’t mind eating meat all the time. For others, they get full on delicious and nutritious fruits and vegetables. Still others swear by the so-called Frankenfoods and couldn’t live without them.

The funny thing is that no matter how you do your low-carb lifestyle, it just plain works. Keeping your carbohydrate intake down is effective for weight loss and weight maintenance no matter what kind of scare tactics and outright lies the media and health experts want to throw at it. Millions of people stand and testify to this fact by living low-carb every single day.

As long as someone keeps a close eye on their net carb intake and keeps it within a range where their body will not gain weight, then I believe that can be described as healthy low-carb eating.

Copyright © 2005 CarbSmart.com. All rights reserved.