For anyone who has access to the paper (http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1900694) and is skilled in reading medical research papers, I would love to know if they account for snacking. When I briefly tried a low-carb diet (just out of curiosity, not to lose weight as I'm already quite healthy) I found that I was unable to snack because almost all snack foods are loaded with carbs. I can only eat so much beef jerky before I get sick of it, and couldn't find any snack food that fit the diet that was also appealing.
On my normal omnivorous diet I snack when I feel hungry, usually opting for trail mix, toast (from bread I bake), or a piece of fruit (sometimes chips, but not often). Since none of my available snacks were acceptable on the diet I just opted for drinking coffee and a big glass of water when I felt a little hungry between meals. As a result, I ended up losing a few pounds over a few weeks.
I'm curious if the same thing happened with the participants on the low carb diet. Did they lose weight and become healthier because none of their snacks fit the diet, so they ended up not snacking?
I've did low carb a few years ago to lose some weight and I'm on it again now to burn off the effects of free startup food over the summer. Here's what I've found as far as snacking is concerned:
Jerky: a standby but actually it often has more carbs than you'd think -- one 3oz package usually has 12-15g of carbs, which is around 3/4ths of my ideal consumption for a day.
Nuts: almonds are the best, but others work too.
Cheese: cheese sticks make a great on-the-go snack, you can find them in a lot of gas stations. I also will do cured meats + cheese when I want an easy dinner, though it's a tad expensive.
Pork Rinds: good for when you're craving something like chips. I sometimes dip them in salsa.
Veggies: some low-carb folks have success snacking on celery and carrots, but I have difficulty at times.
But, to be honest, a lot of my problems with eating in the past involved snacking. I eat when I feel like eating, rather than when I'm actually hungry, and so my eating habits become tied to emotions rather than biological needs. And once I start eating sweets, I don't stop until I feel sick. Having fewer options makes it easier to abstain, as you said. However, did you actually feel hungry/need to snack often when you were eating low carb? I rarely feel hunger between meals like I did when I was eating carbs regularly.
My goal with low carb is to get my habits back to the point where I no longer eat because I'm bored or because it's in front of me. I'm also cutting out artificial sweeteners this time around to try and reduce my sweet tooth (last time I drank tons and tons of diet soda, but I'm finding that seltzer/club soda is an acceptable substitute) (I also heard that sweet tastes produce an insulin response regardless of actual sugar content).
Its weird that this pops up on HN because I have been trying a low carb diet for the last 2.5 weeks (with quite a bit of success). I have run into the same issue as you in regards to snacking. The best snack I found was flavored almonds. They are about 4 carbs an ounce and come in a bunch of flavors (coconut is my favorite).
I have had a huge sweet tooth my whole life but I find the thing that I crave the most is fruit (I know fruit is sweet but not like ice-cream and candy). I've always ate a ton of apples and now that I can't I am craving them like crazy. Also, no bread is really hard, especially since good whole wheat bread seems so healthy and is so satisfying, and it limits your options for most meals like pizza and sandwiches.
I hear a lot of knee-jerk reactions about the diet saying how it must be awesome to just eat steak, chicken, etc. all the time, but it gets real old real fast. Without bread/buns, bbq source, and common high carb toppings, it become really repetitive. Cheeseburgers are amazing but they are a hell of a lot less appealing with no bun, onions, tomato, or ketchup.
All this being said I do not see keto or whatever you want to call it as a long term diet/lifestyle for me. I have been convinced that I used to eat way too many carbs, but I think I just need to balance my meals more and do some portion control. Eating no more than like 20 carbs a day is really hard and for me it affects the quality of my life too much. But, I totally understand that there are people out there where this diet is basically the only thing that works for them, so I think it's awesome that more people are at least trying it.
"I hear a lot of knee-jerk reactions about the diet saying how it must be awesome to just eat steak, chicken, etc. all the time, but it gets real old real fast."
One thing to consider is that while your old diet is obviously bad when you look at it through the low-carb lens, it is also subtly bad as well, because your entire cuisine was bent around carbs replacing fats, and baking, sugars, bread, dough, sugars, potatos, sugars, etc etc etc. If you're going to successfully do low-carb over the long term it's important to also make sure that one does not simply try to eat "old diet - carbs" every day, but that one explores the culinary options that are available to you when you no longer fear fat. Go down your oils aisle and start trying them out. If you haven't been using your spice rack, start trying them out. (Well, first throw away your several-years-old spices and buy new ones, then start trying them out.) Start cooking ethnic foods from ethnicities that didn't go low-fat. Start making your own salad dressings.
(Basic recipe: Spoon a dollop of mayonnaise into a bowl. Pour in some vinegar and mix thoroughly. Pour in an oil and mix thoroughly. Insert ingredients to taste. There's ways around that first step, but this makes experimentation fast (my grandparent's generation call mayo "salad dressing" for a reason), and you can use this to bootstrap up to your own opinions. Your first couple may suck, and I'm leaving the recipe underspecified sort of on purpose, but you'll dial in fast.)
When eating out you may often end up eating "old diet - carbs", such as a bun-free hamburger, but for what you cook yourself it's important to go discover the really quite wide world of cooking options that America just sort of silently turned away from in the past 50 years. There's a lot of flavor and variety in the fats, but it takes some time to explore them, because you're darned near starting from scratch.
And to be honest, there are simply some things in the carb world for which there is no replacement. For instance, I'm well aware of the pains of missing gluten since I've got (proper) Celiac, and there's really no substitute for such a metaphorically and literally flexible protein, for instance. But fats have their own thing to offer that carbs don't.
> Cheeseburgers are amazing but they are a hell of a lot less appealing with no bun, onions, tomato, or ketchup
This is true, but honestly the only one of those you really need to cut out is the bun. The onions and tomato add up to 2-3g of carbs, and the ketchup is another 4g, so the whole burger in a lettuce wrap would be 6-7g of carbs, not at all bad for a meal! For reference, I use myfitnesspal to keep track of my food consumption and to research carb/calorie counts.
> Eating no more than like 20 carbs a day is really hard and for me it affects the quality of my life too much
Would 50g be more sustainable? Or 100g? From what I've seen, the 20g limit is mostly an introductory phase. 50g is still a huge reduction from what most people consume on a daily basis.
Agreed. The 20g limit is not sustainable long-term. Even 50g can be hard or impossible (from a health perspective) for some people to sustain. Diets are not really all-or-nothing -- check out marksdailyapple.com for a more flexible approach to low-ish carb eating.
Playing with carb intake can be very educational: while low-carb diets benefit a lot of people, different folks have different needs. Your athletic pursuits, sex, pregnancy status, thyroid health, etc, are all really important to consider.
"Keto" and "paleo / low carb" are different. Keto goes to the extreme, allowing almost zero carbs, to induce ketosis in your body. Paleo is more "no grain, no dairy, no legume", but fruits are still allowed and encouraged for providing natural, sweet-tooth-satisfying carbs.
There's an old book called "Life without bread" that was a pre-Atkins low carb diet written by a German Doctor named Wolfgang Lutz. He claimed that, after much trial and error, 72 grams (about 6 slices of bread) was the cutoff, and further restriction didn't particularly help patients in any measurable way.
True, nuts were a good choice. Unfortunately the cashews and almonds supplied at my office were all unsalted and I couldn't be bothered to buy my own for the brief trial.
When I temporarily went off keto, one of the first things I did was to buy one of those huge containers of salted mixed nuts from Costco. I gorged on the entire thing for three days and my mouth hated me for the next week. I thought I had suddenly come down with bad toothaches. Nope, I just burned all the skin off my upper mouth and gums from excess salt consumption.
You might like sunflower seeds. Salted and husked - $3 a bag and they last a long time. THey have fibre and good fat, taste good but not so good that you over eat.
I'm currently on a keto diet and have lost like 60 pounds.
For my snacks I eat pepperoni, beef sticks, almonds(so many different flavored versions. smokehouse jalapeno is my favorite), cheeses, pork rinds, sugar free jello(cut with HWC), and this chocolate pudding/mousse I make.
This is about what I do:
1/4-1/2 cup heavy whipping cream, 2 tbsp cocoa, half a scoop of chocolate whey.
Then just whip it until it gets the texture you want. Barely whip for pudding, whip alot for a more mousse like texture. Sometime I'll freeze it in cubes and they taste like fudge pops.
I've made two concerted attempts at diet adjustment via low-carb diets. The first time, I made it about 3 months and was done in by my inability to fight the snacking urge. I couldn't sleep at night because I was so consumed by wanting to munch on something crunchy.
I'm about 2 months into round 2 now, a few years later, and snacking hasn't been much of an issue at all. The difference: The first time, I was also working out for about 90 minutes a day while this time I'm doing no exercise beyond a good bit of walking around town each day.
When I do need a snack, my go-tos are cold cuts (turkey or ham) and dill pickles, which I find I can eat by the jarful without much impact on my diet.
People often recommend nuts and jerky, but I don't find them to be satisfying and I'm hungry again fairly soon. For my daily snack at work, I really like Chocolate Brownie Quest Nutrition Bars. They are high in fiber, and if you eat one with some water it keeps me going for 3-4 more hours. I've tried a lot of alternatives, and these are the best I've found: http://www.amazon.com/Quest-Nutrition-Protein-Chocolate-Brow...
One of my favorite snacks these days is guacamole spread on rice cakes. It's not zero-carb, obviously, but the carb level doesn't seem excessive to me.
Guacamole is better on chips, but if I have chips around I'll eat too many of them. On the other hand if I try to eat the guacamole by itself, without any sort of crispy substrate, it's just unappetizing.
I'm sure that's part of it, but I've had great success with no-carb diets (ketogenic) and I guarantee I eat more calories than most people do, even with snacks.
When you take the carbs out, your body starts using body fat for energy. It's great, really.
On my normal omnivorous diet I snack when I feel hungry, usually opting for trail mix, toast (from bread I bake), or a piece of fruit (sometimes chips, but not often). Since none of my available snacks were acceptable on the diet I just opted for drinking coffee and a big glass of water when I felt a little hungry between meals. As a result, I ended up losing a few pounds over a few weeks.
I'm curious if the same thing happened with the participants on the low carb diet. Did they lose weight and become healthier because none of their snacks fit the diet, so they ended up not snacking?