Carbs are the main villain of any written piece about dieting these days. Cast your gaze around the internet and you’ll find a seemingly unending torrent of advice on weight loss, whether it’s from professionals, amateurs, or just Facebook friends that found a way to successfully diet for themselves. People love giving other people advice, and when it comes to dieting, carbs are the first thing to go out the window, as they fill us up and mostly provide little nutritional value.
Carbs, however, are delicious, and play a large part in many delectable dishes that food lovers enjoy thoroughly, making their removal from the dieter’s plate a sour affair. To renege on that removal, we have put together a food lover’s guide to low carb dieting, and we hope it will help you to pepper your day with helpings of healthy carbs.
Replacement
First off, we should look at the idea of replacing many of your unhealthy carbs with healthy ones. Say you’re cooking yourself a burrito, and you need a tortilla to wrap the tasty fillings with, but you are trying to avoid carbs in order to pursue your weight loss goals. Try wrapping your fillings in a fresh iceberg lettuce leaf instead of a tortilla, as this will keep all of your fillings together nicely while adding some crunch and a healthy spin to your tortilla dinner.
Additionally, there are a variety of supplemental shakes that can assist with the hunger associated with weight loss. These alternatives are developed to be nutritionally balanced, ensuring that you are still getting the nutrients required by your body. However, these supplements and shakes don’t entirely replace the need for a balanced diet, and should instead be used alongside healthy eating choices.
Must Read: Why Get Rid Of Carbs Before Working Out?
Filling Up
Carbs make you feel full and satisfied, even when they aren’t satisfying your body’s needs nutritionally. This is why instant noodles are so bad for you; they satisfy your mouth with intense flavours and concentrated sauces, and they fill your stomach with empty calories in the form of nutritionally void noodles.
If you eat nothing but instant noodles for a few days, you’ll begin to feel tired and weak, even if nothing else about your lifestyle changes. This is because bad carbs are not replacements for nutrition, they just make you feel full. Try filling up on salads instead, as these can occupy a similar volume to the bad carbs, but bring the nutritional value of vegetables to backup that fullness.
Good Carbs
Good carbs are potentially the perfect replacement for the bad carbs in your diet. This is because they feel much the same in your stomach but in smaller portions and with the benefit of added nutritional value.
Some forms of carbohydrates are a great source of fibre and other important nutrients, making them a very beneficial addition as part of a healthy weight loss program. The key thing to remember about good carbs is that you need less of them to fill up, and they should make you feel a bit less offensively full.
There are, of course, carbohydrates that can be detrimental to weight loss.
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Bad Carbs
Bad carbs are the enemy in this dieting world, and even though they taste delicious we need to guard against them as best we can. Bad carbs are refined carbs, and come in the forms of doughnuts, pasta, potato chips, bread, and baked goods.
Unlike good carbs, these are not forms of food that are naturally occurring, and many of them have high quantities of sugars and salts in them, making them quite fatty. They are ok to consume occasionally, but once a week should be your maximum, which we explore in the next section.
Cheat Days
Finally, the concept of cheat days is a relatively recent thing. It comes from the idea that a diet can exist steadily for 6 days of the week, but on the 7th day you allow yourself a “cheat day”, where your diet no longer applies.
These are usually paired with workout regimes that can negate the effects of these cheat days fairly quickly, so the diet is easier to manage by allowing you to still enjoy some bad foods, and the bad foods have little effect on you because you spend all week eating healthy and exercising.
With this guide, you should have a good understanding of weight loss tactics and the way to eat healthily without completely restricting yourself. Remember that vigilance is the key, and to not let yourself get too carried away on a cheat day.
