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No Carb Diet Plan

The Top 100 Weight Loss Tips gains another article with this, number 51 in this series. We are on course to bringing you a set of one hundred new, unique and highly relevant articles that can help you to lose weight if you follow their advice.

This article looks at another type of diet plan that advocates the complete removal of carbohydrates from all your food. I'll see just how effective it can be or if there are any pitfalls you need to know about.

What is the No Carb Diet Plan?

As its name implies, the no carb diet plan means the complete removal of all foods containing carbohydrates. This can be a difficult thing to do as for one thing, there are relatively few foods that don't contain any carbohydrates and for another, you body will naturally crave foods containing carbs soon after embarking upon this kind of diet.

There are also health risks that go along with the complete elimination of carbs from you diet as they form a part of the nutritional makeup of your food that your body needs for normal functioning.

So, what does this mean exactly?

Well, most importantly, this is a diet that you really should not continue with for more than two weeks. That is because you will degrade cell structure with prolonged abstention from carbohydrates and could suffer the effects similar to those experienced with malnutrition or starvation.

Stripping Fat

The good news is that this is a diet plan that bodybuilders use to burn off all their excess fat a week or two prior to a competition, so the benefits to your overall body shape, weight and ratio of fat to muscle are great. It this case, they exercise hard while only consuming large amounts of food high in protein and some fats.

Eating foods containing fats may sound like a counter-productive way to lose weight, but without any carbohydrates in your diet, you'll need low levels of fats to keep your body working as it needs to gain energy from somewhere and proteins do not provide enough on their own. Proteins are the building blocks of muscle tissue and that is why bodybuilders eat a diet plan rich in them as their primary aim is not to lose weight but to gain muscle bulk.

Gaining Muscle

For slimmers, gaining some muscle bulk is desirable as it means your body will burn more calories resulting in fat loss which converts to overall weight loss.

Without carbohydrates providing the energy the muscles need to burn in order to exercise, the body will take that energy from stored fat, which causes the rapid reduction in the body's levels of stored fats and leads to a net reduction in weight. So the key to the no carb diet plan then is exercise.

If you think you won't be able to exercise hard daily for at least thirty minutes, then you should probably not try this diet.

By exercise, in this instance I'm not talking about walking or any other form of light exercise. I'm talking about serious aerobic workout that raises your heart rate, makes you breathe hard and sweat a lot.

And you have to sustain this without a break for a minimum of thirty minutes every day. Longer is better as the longer you can sustain hard aerobic exercise, the more fat you will burn. At the end of the day, you also must sleep for eight hours so that your muscles can repair and grow, which continues the calorie burning process.

So what foods are allowed and what are not?

What to Eat?

It would be better to tell you what you can have rather than what you can't as the latter list will be so long I'll still be writing this next week! Well, here goes and it doesn't look too appetizing!

Egg whites (not yokes), soy products such as tofu, all green leafy vegetables, some root vegetables (not potatoes or parsnips), lean chicken breasts, fish, onions, garlic, herbs and spices. That's about it, folks! None of these food can be fried or roasted, by the way, only steamed or grilled.

Still want to do this diet? Then get your exercise program organized first and then plan to do this for a maximum of two weeks, after which you must resume a diet containing carbohydrates, although you should continue with your exercise program to ensure the weight stays off.

100 Weight Loss Tips number 50 follows in the next post!

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Posted on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 in Top 100 Weight Loss Tips | 3 Comments