Tell me if this sounds familiar to you.
Breakfast time. You want to eat healthy because you want to lose weight. You pat yourself on the back for choosing:
A bowl of oatmeal with ½ cup of skim milk, a handful of raisins, sprinkled with cinnamon.
A banana.
8 ounce glass of orange juice.
Got your dairy, fruit, fiber, a little protein… good choice! Healthy, right?
Wrong.
Low fat? Sure. Low calories? Yeah. So what’s the problem?
CARBOHYDRATES!
½ cup oatmeal: 10 grams
½ cup skim milk: 11 grams
¼ cup raisins: 31 grams
Banana: 21 grams
Orange Juice: 26 grams
Total carbs: 99 grams
A woman eating the recommended 1800 calories a day, needs about 200 grams of carbs each day.
Eating that “healthy” breakfast, just cost you half of your daily intake of carbs.
Now, if you had chosen an “unhealthy” breakfast such as:
2 eggs: 0 grams
1 piece of toast: wheat (8g)*
2 pieces of bacon or sausage**: 0 grams
½ cup skim milk: 11 grams
*bread: check labels – depends on the brand. Obviously avoid anything with added sugars, like honey wheat. White bread has about 12g. I found a low carb version that has 5g.
**use turkey bacon or sausage to lower the fat content.
Total carbs in the “unhealthy” breakfast: 19 grams.
My story
That “healthy” breakfast, was my daily breakfast for a long time.
When I spent a summer working as a cook on a schooner in Maine, every meal we had had a carby base to it – rice or pasta (so it didn’t blow away in the wind!) plus fresh bread and a dessert. Not to mention oatmeal for breakfast every morning.
I ate it all.
And I put on 20 pounds that summer.
When I got home, I was miserable and sluggish and tired. I knew a lot of it had to do with the weight so I decided to go on a diet. I kept track of my calories for a week to see what I was getting… convinced that overeating was causing the weight gain.
Nope. That recommended 1800-calories a day? I was getting more like 700.
Yay for malnutrition!
So I cut out pop and tried avoiding other sugary foods and started trying to actually INCREASE my calories. (It’s harder to do than you think. Especially if you are trying to get healthier foods in. Sure, a donut would up the calories, but it’s all sugar and sugar is the one thing I think we all KNOW is not good for you.) I also added some activity. My self-imposed rule was that I could watch tv all evening if I wanted… but I HAD to walk on the treadmill for the first hour of doing so before parking it on the couch. (Ah… life before the responsibilities of a house, husband, pets and children.)
It took awhile, but it worked. I eventually dropped the 20 pounds, though I was still 10 pounds over where I should have been.
I learned to live with it… and with the fact that I had blood sugar issues. I would go from feeling fine to suddenly starving, shaking and about ready to pass out. (Or actually passing out – that happened a few times, too.) I knew there was something wrong, but I didn’t know what it was and figured it was just how my body was or it was my fault for waiting too long to eat.
Met my future husband. Got married. Started trying to get pregnant. Discovered after going off birth control that I wasn’t ovulating.
A year of dealing with that stress caused more weight gain.
(Raise your hand if you’re a stress eater like me! Now think about what it is you eat when you’re stressed… I can guarantee you it’s not a salad. It’s something sugary and high carb.) Finally got a diagnosis of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). Two more years of fertility treatments and more weight gain thanks to more stress and all those fun hormones, and we were finally pregnant. And I’d put on 15 pounds.
During my first OB appointment, my new (brilliant, amazing, awesome) doctor, said, “You need a low carb diet. People with PCOS don’t process insulin like they should, which is what leads to the messed up hormones that prevent ovulation. Plus, a low carb diet will help you feel better.”
WHAT? THREE years of infertility, three years of blogging, three years of researching and I had never heard of this.
But he was right. Though I didn’t truly discover how right until after I had my son and was trying to lose the baby weight.
Before I started his recommended low carb diet, I had to do some research. I ate healthy. I hardly drank pop… was a huge fan of milk and water. I loved fruits and veggies. I knew I probably ate too many bread products, but it wasn’t like it was all donuts and sugary cereals. The only thing I knew about “low carb” was the Atkins diet and I’ve never been a fan of fad dieting or anything that involves deprivation of a certain thing.
I was shocked by what I found. All those healthy foods that I loved – chock full of carbs.
So I spent a week eating my same diet just to see how many carbs I was getting.
The recommended amount for a healthy person? Around 200g. Recommended for someone with PCOS? My doctor had suggested 50 grams so I didn’t “gain 80 pounds” during my pregnancy.
After keeping track for a week I found that I was getting around 400-500 grams. PER DAY!
And my body couldn’t handle it. No wonder I felt like crap all the time. No wonder I didn’t lose weight easily. No wonder I couldn’t get pregnant.
However, 50 grams – that’s really hard to do. I settled on 100g and lasted a few months but being pregnant and trying to stick to a low carb diet is REALLY hard. I gave up and was thrilled to find out that pregnancy changes how my body processes insulin. I didn’t have to be as strict and felt just fine.
I was on and off watching my carbs after I lost the pregnancy weight (and more!) until we started trying to get pregnant again and I realized I wasn’t ovulating regularly. I got serious about my carbs again, started eating around 100g a day and started ovulating on my own. (yay!)
What did all of this teach me?
Obviously, I have a medical condition that necessitates the 100g limit, but if I was young and eating what most people would consider a “healthy” diet but was getting 2-3 times the normal amount of carbs and less than half of the calories I should have been getting, I knew there had to be others making the same mistakes I was and struggling, too.
After talking with some friends and family, I found I was right. They were all finding they were doing the same thing - too little calories, too many carbs.
I’m CONVINCED that our country is overweight because we are malnourished from not getting enough calories and at the same time, consume too many carbohydrates.
Don’t believe me? Spend a week eating like you normally do. Don’t change a thing. Keep your same routine, eat your normal meals, skip breakfast if that’s what you always do, drink your normal beverages, have your favorite snacks. Go out to eat. But keep track of two things: Your calories and your carbs.
Unless you are crazy strict about your diet already (and therefore probably don’t need to lose any weight), I guarantee you that you will be shocked by what you find.
Don’t get me wrong:
Carbs AREN’T bad. Your body needs them. Unfortunately, our society lives on processed foods full of manufactured, sugary carbs. Healthy things have added sugar in them… because it’s addictive. You like it, you get addicted to it, you want it, you buy it. Keeps them in business. It’s up to you to weed through them and make the healthier choice.
Does this mean you can’t eat a donut or birthday cake or a bagel?
ABSOLUTELY NOT! Deprivation doesn’t work at all – that’s why fad diets usually fail.
Just be aware of your carbs. Have a low carb breakfast to get a good start to the day, don’t go overboard on your carbs at lunch and dinner and you’ll have plenty of room left over for something unhealthy – whatever you want it to be. Within moderation of course. One donut, not 6.
Speaking of, how come you could eat that entire batch of brownies you made? Besides the fact that they are delicious, I think it’s because you ARE hungry. You’re hungry because you’re malnourished.
And you are addicted to sugar/carbs.
