I have a hard time sticking to any kind of diet, in fact as soon as I go on a diet I start gaining weight (because food is always on my mind). I was thinking about going carb free every other day, since I can’t stick to anything for more than two days in a row. Has anyone tried this approach?
Carb free every other day
LeCheffre
(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman )
#2
This is not a great idea. Ketogenic diets, low carb in general doesn’t work that way. You need a few days to shift your metabolism from carb burn to fat burn.
This is not a calorie deficit approach. You have to work the program.
6 on, 1 off might work if you are working out, lifting weights and doing high intensity interval training. But one on and one off is setting yourself up for failure.
Capnbob
(Rob)
#3
Keto is about managing your hormones (specifically insulin) and letting your body’s metabolism do the rest (reduce inflammation, burn fat, etc.). If you do a day on and day off, you are reducing your average insulin load so will see some benefit (though probably not much) but not really giving your body the chance to do its metabolic repair since the next day you are flooding insulin again.
Pretty sure this would not work along the keto pathway though it might work temporarily from a calorie restriction POV. However you will inevitably put any weight you lose back on since you haven’t actually fixed metabolic issues and probably made it worse (lowered BMR).
240lbfatloss
(Ken)
#4
For maintenance, after you’ve reached your fat loss goals, it’s not unreasonable with carbs low to moderate.
It would be hard to sustain fat loss, especially in the beginning.
It’s important to be strict the first couple of weeks in keto to enable the hormonal adjustment process. After a few weeks you could experiment, starting with carbs on one day or even over the weekend, to see if you can sustain fat loss.
Baytowvin
(TJ Borden)
#5
I have. I tried a couple times post Atkins 15 years ago. At the time it was pretty common as an approach. I didn’t work. It was basically caloric restriction.
As others have said, the ketogenic way of eating resets the way your system processes energy and reacts to what you’re fueling it with, and that reset takes time.
4dml
#6
Sounds like you need a tool that works with any kind of diet. A tool that trains your mind to stop thinking about food all the time. A tool that will increase your self discipline so you can commit to something for more than two days.
That tool is called fasting.
Robert_Johnson
(Consensus is Politics)
#7
I don’t think of Keto as a diet. I think of it as a way of life. It’s the way I need to eat from now on to live. It’s not unlike a person being allergic to peanuts. One peanut, even touching a peanut, can put them into anaphylactic shock.
With me, it’s anything that causes my blood glucose to rise. Carbohydrates are poisonous for me. Makes it easier to think of it that way. Took me a couple of weeks of forcing my self, reminding myself, hey that’s stuff will kill me. Eventually that’s just how I started seeing it. Even the food I loved so much, like French fries. Potato salad. You get the idea.
The great thing about Keto is you really shouldn’t lose weight. It’s possible of course. But if you get your body into Ketosis, it’s going to be extremely difficult to gain weight. When I started Keto, I was measuring everything wrong. I was eating around 3,000 calories a day. No exercise. Completely sedentary. And I still lost 40 pounds in two weeks. That’s possible because I was eating ZERO CARBS and only one meal a day. I was never hungry, that’s another plus to not eating carbs. The real hunger pains just go away.