Eat Carbs and The Weight Just Falls Off

Because of the confusion about carbohydrates – carbs – I thought I’d try a little experiment to see what happened.

I call it the wholemeal bread diet. I’m not recommending this I’m just telling you what I did because I wanted to test this out.

I’ve consistently lost hundreds of grams of weight every week since I started it and it rubbishes the idea that you have to give up carbs to lose weight.

Here’s what I did:

• Three meals per day with a snack in between each meal.
• Good quality, but readily available sliced wholemeal bread.
• No butter, mayonnaise or any other spreads on my bread.
• Two hard-boiled eggs (with one yolk removed) for breakfast, chicken, sardines, etc. for lunch and evening meal.
• Canned fish is in brine, chicken is skin off.
• Fruit – several per day (I’d recommend vegetables too) either as is or as a smoothie.
• Porridge and two more hard-boiled egg whites as my post-workout meal.
• I measured how much chicken or other meat I put in to sandwiches – e.g. 60g chicken.
• My snacks are peanut butter or marmite half-sandwiches. I usually wake up in the night hungry (have done for years) and that snack is a half marmalade sandwich.
• I have one piece of chocolate (7g, 46 kcals) after lunch most days. I take just the one piece and then leave the packet in the cupboard.
• I avoid processed foods.
• I still have fish and chips on Friday, but try not to eat all the batter and chips. I also have the occasional muffin or pastry – but occasionally.
• At least 30 minutes walking each day.
• No adverse effect to my energy levels.
• My trousers are feeling looser now.
• Most of the calories are coming from the bread. There’s not much fat and that comes mostly from the fish, eggs or meat. The protein is a healthy amount (remember, there is protein in the bread, peanut butter, etc. not just in the meat, fish and eggs).

Notes:

• Bread is not the perfect source of carbs, but it is dead easy to make a sandwich instead of reaching for something less healthy and sliced bread comes ready measured.
• Sandwiches without any butter, mayo or spread tend to fall apart so it can be messy to eat so sometimes better to make an open sandwich e.g. sardines on toast and eat with a knife and fork.
• The peanut butter I use is pure peanuts with nothing added (no salt, sugar or other oils).
• Marmite has a surprisingly high amount of protein, but has such a strong taste I have to spread it thinly. A lot of taste makes for a high impact snack taste-wise without being high calorie. You can add herbs and spices to food to make them tasty without adding many additional calories.
• Chips, yes, I like them too, but sometimes when you actually taste them mid-chew some chips are not very tasty and I think “why am I eating these” – I have had chips that I couldn’t stop eating …  once … a long time ago. Don’t eat out of habit eat a treat if it really is good. If I have a muffin I sit down and enjoy it.
• A 30 minute walk every day will burn 180 Kcals – that’s 180 g weight loss per week in that alone.
• A strip of four squares of chocolate would be about 180 kcals and, if eaten every day, would lead to 180 g extra weight each week.
• A few hundred grams lost per week is a good figure and is not so much that the body goes into panic mode and tries to store extra fat.
• I let go of the notion that I should feel full after a meal and old ideas of what a plate of food looks like. If I’m not hungry then I’ve had enough and bear in mind it can take 20 or more minutes for the ‘hungry indicator’ to turn off after a meal. If I’m still hungry then I make myself another half sandwich.
• I weigh myself each morning, but I add the reading to a chart and read the 7-day moving average as my true weight. Body weight can rise and fall hundreds of grams daily so a single spot reading will never give a true picture.

I think the key is to think about what we’re eating, plan what to eat – be realistic about food that is easy to prepare and be realistic about portion sizes.

A variation I’d recommend would probably include more variety in vegetables and sources of good, slow carbohydrate.

It’s also key to take responsibility and recognise that what we eat and what we do will affect our weight – it’s not magic, it’s not controlled by some external force – it’s simply calories in versus calories out and that’s something, on a conscious level, that we can control.

For many people it’s the unconscious level  that poses more of a challenge and I don’t underestimate. I will write more about that in future blog posts. 

Photo credit - Apologies to Allinson for pinching their photograph, but I hope they treat it is 'homage' - I like their bread and eat a lot of it.