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Low Carb and Weight Loss: They Go Hand in Hand

There is an English proverb that says you shouldn’t dig your own grave with your knife and fork. Never has this been more appropriate than today. Obesity rates worldwide, but especially in the West, are skyrocketing. And no wonder. The typical meal today is fast food and junk, which are swimming in empty calories, fat, and refined flour and sugar. Combine that with a sedentary lifestyle and watch the pounds go up. A number of people are going on low carbohydrate diets to shed the flab, believing in the relationship between low carb and weight loss. And for many of them, the effort is well worth it the results they have achieved.

Even though the Internet and health publications are rife with report of the failure of low carbohydrate diets or the pitfalls of high protein regimens, you can still find many testimonials swearing to the positive link between low carb and weight loss. Reducing diets have come and gone, but never was there as much of a dramatic effect on weight reduction as controlled-carbohydrate regimens, particularly the Atkins diet.

Losing two to four pounds a week is the expected rate on this diet, but there have been testimonials of lost weight of as much as 150 pounds in one year! Generally speaking though, weight loss that is too rapid is not healthy. You’ll only end up feeling lethargic, tired, and you’ll look that way, too.

Reducing diets like Atkins advocate the limited consumption of carbohydrates daily. Take note that they do not ask you to give up carbs entirely. What you are meant to do is to choose your carb sources; specifically, vegetables and certain fruits; not from starchy, sugary and simple carbohydrate-rich foods like French fries, peanut brittle, and lasagna. But if you do go on a low carb diet, you can still partake of these dishes. How? By choosing those that have been adapted to suit the low carb diet; those whose offensive ingredients have been replaced by appropriate substitutes like soy flour and sucralose.

Once you start feeding your body with foods that are rich in protein and other nutrients and stop filling it with bad carbs, your body will turn to the fat that it has stored and burn it to give you energy, much in the same way as a car uses gasoline to enable it to run. Combine low carb reducing diets with exercise and watch the pounds melt away. Perhaps only then will you truly realize the positive relationship between low carb and weight loss.