Continuing on with our exploration of the reasons behind the rules of our Slow Carb diet so you can make informed decisions about your own personal ‘dietary rules’.
4. Don’t Eat Fruit
While fruit does contain vitamins and antioxidants, it is loaded with sugar. So the carbohydrate content of fruit unfortunately is too great to justify the vitamins. It’s much wiser to rely on vegetables for their antioxidants and other benefits and leave the fruit for your cheat day.
Tomatoes and avocados, which I think of more as vegetables, are technically fruit. They are allowed in the Slow Carb Diet because they aren’t high in fructose.
Apart from just being high in carbohydrates, fruit contains sugar mostly in the form of fructose, or ‘fruit-sugar’. The problem with fructose is that our bodies can only process it in our liver.
Our livers aren’t designed to handle the high fructose in a diet rich in fruit (or high fructose corn syrup). So when we eats lots of fructose our liver converts it to fat and either stores it as fat in our liver or sends it off to be stored in our fat tissue.
As Gary Taubes points out in Why We Get Fat, ‘Even forty years ago biochemists referred to fructose as the most ‘lipogenic’ carbohydrate – it’s the one we convert to fat the most readily’.
But of course that’s not the only problem with fructose.
Over time, exposure to fructose makes our livers more and more resistant to insulin which also causes our muscle tissue to become more resistant to insulin. Which means we need more insulin to do the same job of regulating our blood sugar levels. Enough said.
5. Avoid dairy products
milk & yoghurt
Unfortunately you should avoid yoghurt and milk except for cheat days because they contain lactose, or ‘milk-sugar’.
The reason for this is that while dairy products have a low glycemic index, meaning they don’t contain a lot of carbohydrate or cause a large spike in blood sugar. They have a high insulemic response, meaning they stimulate a large amount of insulin for the small amount of carbohydrate which is something we don’t want.
If you’re interested in reading up on dairy products and their insulemic response, there’s a scientific paper here which discusses a Swedish study.
cream
Cream does contain some carbohydrate, but of course much less than milk because of the higher fat content. So cream is allowed but try not to overdo it.
cheese
Cheese is a tricky one. While it does contain small amounts of carbohydrate, it varies from cheese to cheese. And the study above didn’t include cheese so I’m not certain whether the same high insulemic response applies to cheese.
Tim Ferriss recommends avoiding all dairy except, butter cream and cottage cheese. Gary Taubes allows cheese in limited quantities (up to 4oz a day or 115g – which seems like a fair bit of cheese to me!). To be safe I’ve kept all the recipe cheese-free.
But it’s up to you. You can either omit cheese until you’re happy with your weight and in weight maintenance mode OR eat cheese and if you’re happy with your weight loss, no problems. Then if you aren’t happy with your weight loss, you can ditch the cheese.
butter
Butter is fine and excluded in this rule because it is which is mostly fat and water.
6. Learn to Love Fat
a new way of thinking about fat
It’s time to change your view of eating fat.
Fat is not going to make you fat, it’s the carbohydrates that are.
One of the biggest mistakes people make when they reduce carbohydrates is to still try and maintain a low fat diet. It’s not going to work. We need fats because they help us feel full, fats also minimise insulin spikes and lets face it, they taste good.
Gary Tabues actually recommends replacing carbohydrates in our diet with fat. If we replace our carbs with protein, we can run into problems such as weakness, nausea and diarrhoea. These issues are avoided if we eat less protein and more fat.
This is one of the most difficult mind sets to overcome.
Repeat after me: low fat = bad.
why were we told to go low fat?
The reason nutritionists used to recommend a low fat diet was they were looking at the nutritive value of different nutrients without considering how our bodies process, store and burn energy. Basically one gram of fat yields about 9 calories whereas one gram of protein or carbohydrate yields around 4 calories.
While in theory it sounds like we can eat the same number of grams of protein or carbs and have half as much energy to burn (or store) as if we at the same number of grams of fat. This doesn’t account for the effects of insulin on whether we are storing or burning energy.
know someone who has lost weight on a low fat diet?
They got result because they were also, inadvertently reducing their carbohydrates, especially the most fattening carbohydrates.
a word of warning about fat
Of course there’s a warning. As Tim Ferriss notes, drugs and environmental toxins tend to be accumulated in the fat of animals. So if you’re eating animal fat from beef, pork or lamb it’s best to buy the best quality you can afford. Factory farmed meat is asking for trouble, and then there are the ethical considerations…
The other point to consider with fat, is that variety is just as important with our fats as it is with any other food groups.
While olive oil is wonderful, it’s a good idea to include a variety of fats and oils in our diet. Try to seek out things like macadamia oil and avocado oil to include with your other fat sources.
back to: Reclaim Your Waistline Overview
Add to my Old Favourite Recipes