Why Low Carb Ireland?

About a year ago a friend of my wife was having health problems. Overweight, high blood pressure and the like. Not a happy person. He went to his doctor who was not very helpful - eat less fat and exercise more. But he had taken this advice before and just ended up see sawing between unhealthy and healthy weight. So the patient decided to research the problem himself. He was recommended to go to a doctor who could help. He got some blood tests which indicated that he was not well at all and needed to make some radical changes to his diet. So this is where the low carbohydrate diet comes in. It worked and the patient is now an extremely healthy advocate of all things low carb.

My Experience

I weighed about 12 stone. I wanted to be about 11 stone. I am five feet nine inches tall so 12 was way too heavy. I had tried over a number of years to lose the weight. I had gotten to 11 and a half and then slid back up. 11 was looking impossible.

I did reasonable amounts of exercise and didn't eat a lot of junk, so something was wrong. The last time I had been at my ideal weight was when I was training for a marathon - over 10 years ago. I didn't have the time to do that sort of exercise at this stage of my life. And my knees would just say no anyway.

When I heard about the success that our friend had with low carb I decided to give it a try. We did some research online, read blogs, watched videos and the like over a period of a few weeks before we started. Needed to convince myself that we would know what to eat and would have shopped appropriately before jumping in. We didn't want to have to abandon the experiment because all we had in the press was potatoes.

Once we got started my weight dropped quite rapidly. I went from 12 to 11 and a half in a couple of weeks and hit my target of 11 stone in about 6 weeks. Then the weight loss slowed. Christmas intervened at that point and being Irish this is an extended holiday indeed. Carbs were consumed and the weight went back up. After Christmas I reverted to the low carb regime and got back to a healthy weight very quickly.

So I was starving myself right? Well no. Starving yourself will work if you are a toughy, and have will power in endless supply, but we all run out of will power eventually. Low carb helps control your appetite. More on that in the coming weeks.

What type of posts can you expect to see?

There are lots of reasons why this diet works and a bunch of solid research, both done and ongoing. I am going to give details of some of the science, links to videos that are worth watching, book reviews and links to other web sites and blogs about low carb living.

I am a keen cook. So one of the questions I had was what will I eat? An important concern. So I will write about some of the recipes and give shopping tips. You will be surprised by how much of the supermarket you just get to skip. Liberating once you get used to the idea that you won't be hungry.

I will also post information about exercise. There are a vast range of benefits to exercise. Realistically weight loss is not one of them, but the other reasons matter. More about why exercise is ineffective for weight loss in a post in the next few days.

In this blog over the coming weeks  I hope to be able to convince you that this is a worthwhile lifestyle choice. Comments are welcome.

Anthony