Low Carb Magic

What is the Secret to the Low Carb Diet?

May 14th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

high protien and low carbohydrate diet Before you start your search for the best diet programs and products, you need to understand what your low carb diet will entail and how it actually produces weight loss. So before you can understand what is the secret to the low carb diet, you first need to ask the question; “What is a low carb diet?”

Knowing the answer to this question will give you a head start on your weight loss diet before you even deprive yourself of that first tasty treat. A low carb diet goes under a host of different names:

Low carb diet

Low carbohydrate diet

Reduced carbohydrate diet

Controlled carbohydrate diet, and

Low glycemic diet

This is really a rather broad term made popular by popular diets, such as, The Atkins Diet, South Beach Diet, and Zone Diet, just to name a few. But the common characteristic of the low carb diets is that they limit the consumption of certain foods that are high in carbohydrate.

Many of these low carbohydrate diets follow the “Don’t Eat White Foods” philosophy – meaning no sugars, potatoes, white rice, or white flour. Some diets begin with a very low carbohydrate intake and allow for additional carbs to be added over time (e.g. Atkins Diet). Others use a moderately reduced carb intake, but usually well below the USDA Food Pyramid recommendations.

As a rule of thumb, let’s look at the low carb dilemma in percentage terms. If you consider that a person’s normal diet should strive to gain 55-60% of its energy from carbohydrates, then any diet with this percentage below approximately 40% should be considered a “low” carbohydrate diet. Unfortunately, most of the popular diets deal with this factor in terms of absolute grams of carbohydrates.

So, what is the secret to the low carb diet? Reduced carbohydrate intake. As you can see, any diet that promotes a reduced carbohydrate intake can fall into the “low carb” diet category. But as I found out, the key point to remember is that the general concept may be the same, but the execution can be radically different and so can the results.