Friday was the last day of my four-week slow-carb diet experiment. It has been a great experience and I have learnt many lessons which I plan to implement in my diet for the future.
Stats first: I now weigh 66 kg which is 2.8 kg less than the day when I started the diet. My total inches have gone down to 129.0 from 133.5 (lost 1 inch on the thighs, 2 on the waist, 0.5 on the hip). Even after taking experimental errors into consideration, this is definitely a good enough reduction.
cheat day breakfast
Before I talk about the lessons learnt, I have to admit that I have allowed myself a few deviations from the diet in the last two weeks. I’ve had a few chocolates (two or three in the week) and beer twice in the last two weeks. These weren’t allowed on the diet as I had planned but I happened to have them anyway. Apart from these confessions, I have stuck to pretty much everything i.e. no fruit, no milk, no white carbohydrates and no sweetened drinks.
Here are the lessons then:
- Sweets: I need tighter control on my sweet tooth. Normally, I need something sweet after every meal even if it’s something small. Then I tend to have something sweet in between my meals – cookies, chocolates, biscuits, muffins, etc. Now on, I am going to be careful about these. Try to keep to having only one sweet thing a day, if I can manage it.
- Breakfast: Before starting the diet, I rarely had breakfast. I was usually in a hurry to get to the lab and that meant skipping breakfast was an easy option. Not any more. A healthy breakfast (spinach and sweet corn is awesome) does plenty to keep me active till lunch time.
- Low carb: Too much carbohydrate isn’t good to maintain weight. I am definitely ok to skip french fries, bread and rice. I will have roti but only if I really want to. I will also be restricting my intake of sweetened drinks allowing myself only fruit juices.
- Snacks: As I realised at the end of the first week, on this diet I had to have five meals. Usually, my snack used to be something sweet but in this diet I instead chose to have carrots or peppers with humus. I think it’s a much healthier choice. I eat more but take in the same number of calories.
- Cheat day: I think it’s a great idea. I will keep up with it. On Saturdays, I will allow myself to gorge on whatever I like (a cheesy pizza, yum!). On the remaining days, I will try to keep my carbohydrate intake low.
One of the important aspects of doing this experiment was to understand the difficulties of keeping control on my diet. I have to admit, it’s hard. I don’t think that a low-carb diet is something I can keep forever even if that’s a healthy alternative. But it’s doable. I know if ever I add those unnecessary kilos to my body, there is a way to get rid of them.
But more importantly, I know the cost of losing just 3 kg is substantial. So it’s better to keep an eye on the diet. Eating habits are amongst the hardest habits to change. Now that I’ve already spent four weeks trying to adopt a diet, it should be easier to keep the lessons in mind and to continue with the habit that I’ve formed.
Contemplation 