Low Carb / High Protein / High Fat Diets

Low carb (less than 50 or even 30 grams a day), high protein, high fat diets might at first work. The reason? After the initial adaptation period of two weeks, in the absence of carbohydrates, the body has no choice but to go into a state of ketosis (carbohydrate deprivation) and start burning fats for fuel (this is assuming that more than 50% of your calories are coming from good essential fatty acids like olive oil and flaxseed oil). Basically, your body shifts its carbohydrate metabolism into an exclusively fat burning metabolism. Now, like any diet, the same basic principles apply. Even though you will be burning fats exclusively this does not mean that you will be able to eat everything and anything without getting fat. Remember if you take in more calories than what you burn, you will get fat.

We have tried such diets for as long as a year at a time. In our opinion the following are the drawbacks:

• As you can imagine, if you are only allowed 30-50 grams of carbohydrates a day, your life will not be very tasty. You will only be limited to a small selection of foods.
• Even though at the beginning you lose incredible amounts of weight, it is mostly water weight. We also did not find a big difference between losing fat in a low carb diet and losing fat on a moderate carbohydrate diet. Both diets provide similar benefits.
  
• While on a low carbohydrate diet, the muscles feel flat due to the fact that the glycogen (the carbohydrates that are stored inside the muscle cell and make the muscles look firm) gets depleted. On a moderate carbohydrate diet, your muscles always feel firm and tight.
  
• We experienced joint pains after the ninth month on the diet. We were drinking two gallons of water a day so lack of fluids was not the problem. We wonder if it was the lack of carbs that caused the fluid in the joints to diminish but this is mere speculation. Once we switched back to a moderate carb diet, the joint pains disappeared.
  
• You have to pay close attention to your cholesterol levels and to nutritional deficiencies caused by the lack of variety in the diet.
• In order to get all the good fats in the diet, we had to take them in liquid form; not very tasty

In our opinion, even though this type of diet might work, we don't believe it can be maintained for a lifetime. If you feel like trying it, then please remember to pay close attention to cholesterol levels and nutritional deficiencies. However, we believe that to get in shape the best approach is a more balanced one.