What is a carb diet?

It’s that time of year again. The start of the new year. The time many people either commit or recommit to their weight loss and health improvement vows. To help, I went through all my almost nine years’ worth of posts and handpicked those I figured would be most valuable.

Here they are with brief introductions. And all in one place.

Some of the most accessed posts I’ve ever written were the two posts on all the tips and tricks I know for starting or restarting a low-carb diet. Following these will get most people through any difficulty they may encounter.

One of the post I go back to myself when I need inspiration is the following one. It’s about an amazing woman whose success led me to use a different strategy to generate my own internal motivation.

Many people have terrific success with low-carb dieting. Then slowly end up drifting back into their old way of eating and, ultimately, their old weight. They then decide to recommit and low-carb again. Then find it doesn’t work as well the next time around. These next few posts tell you why and how you can overcome the problem. (It started out to be two posts, but many comments encouraged me to add another short post in between parts 1 and 2.) I’ve found the books mentioned in the Part 2 post to be helpful in many areas of life besides diet.

The debate continues to rage over whether it is the restriction of carbohydrates or the reduction of calories in a low-carb diet that brings about the weight loss and other positive changes. Here are two posts in which I give my take on the debate and a third describing some real caloric torpedoes to low-carb diets.

I included the next post because it describes what leptin is, how it works and why low-carb diets allow more of it to get to the brain where it exerts its anti hunger effects.

The inclusion is the post of mine that has received the most hits and the most comments of any other post, so I figure it touched a nerve on a lot of people. It’s a basic overview of the metabolic process of ketone production and how it all works with a low-carb diet. I’ve had a zillion people ask me what the photo at the top of the post has to do with the post. The answer is, I guess, that it doesn’t have anything to do with it. I put it there because ketones fueled our ancient ancestors through many a hunt, so I figured the picture was apropos.

The last post contains an article I wrote a few years ago for a now defunct magazine. It talks about how and why low-carb dieting works but also about why it can’t be done in a half assed way. Like so many things in life, a low-carb diet requires commitment to reap the full benefits.

I hope you enjoy this roundup or one-man low-carb rodeo. And I hope it answers a lot of questions many of you might have. It will certainly help me to have all these in one place because I can now just send people with questions to this one post instead of parts of the list above.

As always, please let me know what you think in the comments section. And, for newbies (or even oldbies) this site contains an extremely active forum administered by terrifically capable people who can walk you or talk you through a lot of problems, plateaus and other tough spots.