I've been LCHFing for maybe about 6 weeks now.
You perhaps wonder: what's LCHFing?
Watch my lips: low carb with high fat. If you aren't eating carbohydrates in normative quantities you have to eat something else. And your options are either protein or fats.
Simple, right? Either/or.
I had been eating low carbs anyway (for two years) but I went lower still and made up my nutritional needs by being free with the fats: cooking oils, salad dressings, creamed sauces, cheese, eggs, fat in meats and fish. I fatted up my food while also trimming back on the vegetable matter I ate.
That was the knack, the dietary shift -- and being considerate over what fat you eat.
Rather than eat vegetable matter casually -- albeit low carb vegetable matter -- I parred back to a few low carb selected items each day that I valued and enjoyed. The irony is that by doing this I celebrated the veg more as it was more pristine on the plate than it had been in the past.
I reduced my dependence on meat protein by cooking up meat stocks rather than stews.
I'm still tweaking....but it was easy. It was like eating French...Cuisine française -- but then LCHF is a Swedish concoction.
But hey, preliminary results are great.
- In 6 weeks of eating so I have lost 1.5 kgm- 2kgm of weight and reduced my waist measurement by 3 or 4 cm.
- My blood glucose readings( I have Diabetes II ) have fallen from an average of 6 mmol to 5.4 mmol. (That's moving within the range of normal.)
It's too early to register changes in blood pressure or cholesterol but the blood glucose changes in such a short time are a fantastic response.
Such that the result surprises me.
While I have been consolidating my exercise regime I have never found that any type of exercise I do to impact on body weight (although my HIIT habits should undermine my insulin resistance which can then lead to falls in blood glucose).
Another variable is that I have parred back my alcohol consumption by half, by spritzing the wine I drink with mineral water. The problem with alcohol (like frank sugars) is that the body prefers to store and convert it to fat before it gets around to any other stuff digested. So alcohol consumption can undermine weight lost regardless of a drink's carbohydrate content.
My problem is that I use alcohol -- red wine -- as an analgesia, a very pleasant analgesia, for muscular pain and stiffness. (I have hadFibromyalgia for 27 years).
[And no -- I'll never giving up my red wine habit as wine works like nothing else.]
So if this trend continues that leaves me with an outstanding challenge of reducing my blood pressure -- a diabetic's standard side effect and a family habituation.
While further weight loss and sundries hopefully should register on the sphygmomanometer I'm hoping that my indulgence in more consciously cardio exercise activities -- running and urban soul line dancing -- will also roll back my numbers.
You want to bring down your blood pressure pro tem? Go for a run. Works every time.
So all up, I'm smugly pleased with myself.
