When you talk about a low carb diet plan, it involves a diet eating natural and unprocessed foot containing minimal carbohydrates. It’s been proven scientifically that a low carb diet plan helps with weight loss while optimizing health and lowering the risk of any disease.
Basically, the amount of foods you can eat, and the foods you should eat depend on things like how healthy you are, the amount of weight you want to lose and the amount of exercise you do. Based on this, you can follow these general guidelines for a low carb diet plan:
You can eat fruits, nuts, healthy oils, vegetables, fish, meat, eggs, seeds, high-fat dairy and perhaps some tubers and non-gluten grains. The foods you should not eat while on this diet are wheat, trans fats, HFCS, sugar, highly processed foods, seed oils and ‘diet’ and low-fat products.
So in a more clearly defined aspect, you need to avoid these 7 foods:
- Sugar – foods like agave, candy, ice-cream, soft drinks, fruit juices and many others.
- Trans fats – hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils.
- Gluten grains – barley, rye, wheat and spelt, and includes breads and pastas.
- Artificial sweeteners – sucralose, aspartame, cyclamates, saccharin and Acesulfame Potassium. Instead, it’s better if you use Stevia.
- Diet and low-fat products – dairy products, crackers and cereals.
- High Omega-6 seed and vegetable oils – soybean, sunflower, cottonseed, safflower, corn, grape seed and canola oils.
- Highly processed foods – avoid eating food processed in factories. Moreover, it’s even better if you maintain a habit of reading all ingredients’ lists of foods, especially ‘health foods’.
Your diet should be based on these real and unprocessed low-carb foods. This includes eggs, where the omega-3 enriched or pastured eggs are the best, meat like lamb, pork, chicken, beef and others where the grass-fed varieties are the best, nuts and seeds like walnuts, almonds and sunflower seeds and vegetables like broccoli, carrots, spinach and cauliflower.
In addition to this, you should eat more of nuts and seeds, fish like salmon, haddock and trout where the wild caught fishes are a better choice, fruits like apples, pears, strawberries, blueberries and oranges, high-fat dairy like cheese, heavy cream, yogurt and butter and fats and oils like coconut oil, olive oil, cod-fish liver oil, butter and lard.
Though you are permitted to eat these foods, if you are on a diet to lose weight, you need to be careful about eating cheese and nuts as you can easily overeat them. Don’t eat more than a piece of fruit every day.
If you don’t want to lose weight
You can however afford to eat a bit more carbs if you are an active and healthy person who needn’t lose weight. You can eat tubers like sweet potatoes and potatoes, legumes like pinto beans, lentils and black beans and non-gluten grains like quinoa, oats and rice. You can also eat dark chocolates with 70% cocoa or higher and dry wines with no added sugar or carbs in moderation, if you want.
Though permissible, both dark chocolate and alcohol will hinder your progress if too much is consumed. You can however drink coffee, tea, water and carbonated soda without any artificial sweeteners when on a low-carb diet plan.