I am about to venture into an entirely different territory here – food. Food bloggers, don’t worry, I won’t be taking up your space at all. I will be talking about food as part of a healthy lifestyle.
Here goes the first of its kind – the Food post.
Ever since I first started wondering about which food is good and which is not, the question “what shall I eat” have never really left my mind.
As a teenager going through that sensitive stage between 13-16 years old the purpose of food was shifting from “just eat whatever to feel full” to “just eat whatever doesn’t make me fat”.
It was a really long pursuit with lots of trial and error, but eventually I figured out that sugar makes you fat. And soon after that the real culprit was out – carbs.
Overnight carbs became my sworn enemy.
I remember thinking “OK. So that’s easy, just minimise the carbs and life is perfect”.
Not. So. Fast.
The week that came after the day I started reading the labels on all the foods that I were eating became the most horrifying week ever. I won’t take the risk of sounding negative here, so I will just call it the “The Week of Enlightenment”. During this week all the skeletons were coming out the closet. And there was a huge number of them, far more than I realised. By the end I was so “enlightened” that I just wanted to curl up and die. Almost everything I ate was either super high or high in carbs. There was almost nothing left that fitted my new criteria of “low/no carb”.
What was I going to eat from now on?!
Hoping for an easy way out, I decided to just give it all up. I thought if I give up everything all together it will be easier to grieve and survive this loss. I lasted till dinner time. At around 7 my blood sugar level was so low I had to eat something sweet and fast. I could not even think of anything else at all. It was all like FOOD FOOD FOOD SUGARRRRR. On repeat. So this strategy was never going to work.
My next strategy which proved slightly more successful was to burn off all the carbs that I eat doing exercises. I liked exercises and really didn’t mind doing more, I also liked carbs, so this strategy sounded like a win-win. To my dismay it really didn’t work. The reality was that to burn off all the calories I was consuming I had to exercise for 5-8 hours a day. I tried to google the most generous estimates of how many calories are burned during exercise and even then it still meant I had to exercise 5 hours a day.
I lasted 2 days.
After trying a wide variety of stupid strategies and feeling complete exhausted I finally took a first step on the road of low carb life – made a reasonable plan. The plan was very simple and looked something like this:
Super duper plan |
|
| To replace: | Replace with: |
| cereal (high sugar) | oat porridge with blueberries |
| sweet yogurt | natural yogurt with fresh banana chunks |
| chocolate bar | apple or orange |
| bowl of pasta | spinach salad with lentils and goat cheese |
| … | … |
Schedule |
|
| Replace cereal by 7th of September | |
| Replace sweet yogurt by 14th of September | |
| … |
I stuck to my guns on this one. And it worked.
Of course, I still eat some carbs. It is a small amount and it always comes “sugarcoated” in lots of fiber. I shall keep the details for a future post 🙂
In the mean time, if you want to cut out some carbs from your diet you can make a plan and get started.
Good luck!
StyleWithKate 
Wow! What an interesting article, especially because the question of exactly what “carbs” are lingers in the minds of many people. Thank you for detailing your journey for others to see. This was very helpful.