Daily exercise stabilizes your blood sugar levels, improves your cardiovascular health, increases your strength and stamina, and helps you get a better night of sleep. You may feel more tired immediately after beginning a new exercise program, but you should quickly enjoy increased energy levels, as well as an improved mood because of the endorphins (chemical signals in your blood that act like your body’s own version of morphine or painkillers) running rampant in your bloodstream.
The more you exercise, the more lean muscle you develop. And the more lean muscle you develop, the higher your resting metabolism. (Your metabolism is sort of your internal rhythm, or the rate at which you burn calories when completely at rest.) With a higher resting metabolism, you burn more calories while you’re sleeping, working at your desk, or even just breathing. How’s that for efficiency?
Exploring vitamins and supplements
On the Whole Foods Weight Loss Eating Plan, you’re encouraged to take in most of your vitamins and minerals through the whole foods that you consume. However, a few important exceptions may exist. If you’re at risk for osteoporosis, you’ll want to calculate your calcium intake, and if it doesn’t meet your daily need, add a calcium supplement to your daily regimen. Certain health conditions and certain stages in life may make considering a vitamin or mineral supplement appropriate as well. Antioxidant nutrients like vitamins C, E, and beta-carotene and the minerals zinc, copper, selenium, and manganese may help lower your risk of disease and the ravages of aging. New guidelines for supplements and information on upper limits can help you to know the amounts to take and still stay within safe levels.
For more on incorporating vitamins and supplements into your low-carb lifestyle, take a look at Chapter 21 and Appendix C.
Maintaining Your Low-Carb Lifestyle
As with making any long-term change to your diet, the key to enjoying the ultimate benefits of your low-carb lifestyle is sticking with the plan. Part 5 is loaded with tips and tricks to help you set yourself up to succeed.
Making the commitment
The first step in making the low-carb commitment is mental or psychological. Customize your food habits to meet the demands of your lifestyle and your low-carb diet. If you can get your family, roommates, or other housemates to follow the diet with you, you’ll definitely have a better shot at success, because you can completely remove tempting foods and sweets from your cabinets and fridge. But don’t stress if others aren’t interested in the plan. You can still cook for the whole family with the plan and adjust your own portion sizes to coincide with it. You’ll just need to be careful not to indulge in cookies or snacks. For more on getting (and staying) committed to the plan, check out Chapters 18 and 19.
Planning ahead
Let your lifestyle help determine your food-plan strategy. If you know that you have no time in the mornings, prepare your healthy breakfast and lunch the night before. Plan your meals before you’re hungry. Making healthy choices is much more difficult when you’re hungry and refined foods are handy.
Picking yourself up when you fall
I wish I could say that no one ever slips up on this plan, that no one ever gives in to temptation and succumbs to that extra baked potato or slice of cake. But the fact is giving in to temptation is part of life. You’re human and, therefore, you aren’t perfect. However, don’t beat up on yourself when you slip up, and more importantly, don’t use it as an excuse to throw all your progress out the window. So, you had a piece of cake and didn’t save any carb choices for it? Analyze what went wrong in your plan and resolve to have a better day tomorrow. These small setbacks can be the gateway to long-term success. If you can learn from them and make better choices next time, you can have better overall health and weight control. Refer to Chapter 20 for more details.
Chapter 2
Delving Deeper into Carbohydrates
IN THIS CHAPTER
Nothing has polarized the nutrition world as much as the low-carbohydrate diet, but this diet isn’t new. It’s been around for more than 100 years — and for most of that time, it has been controversial. The quick-weight-loss effect of the low-carb diet, its permission to eat as much meat and fat as you want, and the lack of hunger in those who follow it has always attracted many fans. However, very-low-carb diets were hard to maintain.
In this chapter, I show you why the low-carb diet is controversial. I discuss the migration of the American diet toward more calories from increased snacks, sugars, soft drinks, and bigger portions of all foods. I give you ways to evaluate low-carb diet plans to help you make the best choice for you. And most importantly, I give you an overview of the Whole Foods Weight Loss Eating Plan — my version of the low-carb diet — which is healthy for a lifetime and will also help you lose excess pounds.
Evaluating the Controversy
The low-carb diet gained modern-day popularity about 50 years ago only to later be squelched by the fully accepted and heavily promoted low-fat diet. Cholesterol was implicated as a major determinant of heart disease, and diets high in saturated fat were found to raise blood cholesterol levels. Lowering fat intake in the diet enjoyed approval by the scientific community and was embraced by national health organizations and public policy. There was a halo-effect over the low-fat diet and horns and a devil’s fork over fat. Fat was branded as the ultimate dietary villain, for several reasons:
Heart disease was increasing and was correlated with high cholesterol. Scientists discovered that saturated fat increased cholesterol levels in the blood. Scientists also sensed that people were slowly becoming a little fatter. A fat gram contained twice the number of calories of protein or carbohydrate grams, so a good way to reduce the number of calories people ate was to reduce the number of fat grams consumed.
Fat was also blamed for cancer and a host of other diseases.
The low-fat diet approach enjoyed almost universal acceptance and respect from the scientific community and the public. Fat in any form was demonized. And, the concept of low fat being healthy became deeply ingrained in society. Along with the lowering of fat in the diet was the recommendation to replace the fat with carbohydrate foods that were virtually devoid of fat.
Then