Hi Nancy and Lisa in particular, and the rest of the people - men and women - who are reading this thread!!!

Once again, Lisa and Nancy, thanks very much for starting this thread and for all the recipe ideas. I particularly like the idea of the melted dark choc with coconut oil!!! I like to have 70% cocoa chocolate as a wee snack, but adding the VCO would be a great idea!

Lisa: could you input my stats into your programme and give me an idea of the ratios in grammes that I should be aiming for? I hope that won't take too much time out of your day. According to Groves, the amount of carbs on the Kwasnieski plan would be between 50-75g of carbs, but he doesn't say how many grammes of protein, just quotes the percentages, which mean sweet nothing to me.

Current weight: 62.8gkg; goal weight: 59kg; height: 1m65. Is that all you need?

This is to everybody:

All this info on this thread is almost too much for me to take in right now, but it crossed my mind that the basic idea of the OD might be better for females in particular (athletes excluded) than the "standard" low-carb diet, which have always tended to prescribe "as much fat and protein as you want". (I'm re-reading GCBC right now, and that's what comes across in the chapter on "Unconventional Diets" - carbs are the only thing that is restricted; protein and fat can be eaten in unlimited quantities).

Seeing as women have more body fat than men (and overweight women even more fat), as well as less muscle, it would kind of make sense (to me at least) that women would actually need a tad less protein to provide the necessary nutrients for metabolic functions than men would. Equally, as our bodies contain more fat, perhaps they then also need proportionately more fat - in relation to the leaner bodies of men - as a nutrient??? I'm just thinking aloud here, but does that make sense to the rest of you?

Equally, whilst trying to keep your body in fat-burning, weight-loss mode, we presumably need to keep our insulin levels as low as possible. If insulin drives fat storage, and fat storage is exactly the opposite of what we want if we are trying to lose weight, then we need to do all we can to keep those insulin levels down, which means keeping carbs and protein low.

In the case of carbs, I think these would get preferential treatment by the body for conversion into energy anyway as they are metabolized fastest. If there are only a few carbs in the body at any given time, I imagine these will be too few for the body to convert them to fat. Equally, if we try to ensure that the body is only getting enough protein to cover its needs for metabolic functions, but is not tempted - so to speak - to use the protein for conversion into energy, then the only thing remaining for long-term energy provision is the fat in the food we eat.

If the body's main fuel - after burning off the few carbs in the system - is dietary fat, but this fuel is released relatively slowly because it takes the body longer to metabolize it than other fuels, then presumably, to take up the slack whilst this metabolic process gets underway, the body will then start burning up its own fat???

In one of Barry Groves' books he puts it like this:



Perhaps what also needs to be added into the equation is that other sources of energy need to be low too, such as protein. Additionally, for optimal weight loss, IMHO, you need to cut alcohol out of the equation completely, too, although that is of course a matter of personal preference. Seeing as German beer is my preferred source of alcohol (with all that maltose, as well as the actual alcohol in it!!!), I have been on the wagon whilst low-carbing recently: with success; it has speeded up weight loss considerably!

My final thought is that I think I have now found out why my usually successfully strategy of around 70g of carbs a day doesn't seem to have been quite so successful over the last few days: I may have overdone it on the protein!!!

Last Saturday morning, when I went shopping, the weather was great here and so I bought four slabs of fatty pig meat for a BBQ with salad for me and my family. Unfortunately, the weather then turned cold and the BBQ idea didn't happen... As a result, I ate the pig meat for lunch on four consecutive days... And I seem to be in the middle of a stall... There has been some downward movement, but not as much as I had hoped. I wonder if I have been overdoing it on the protein???

At any rate, thanks to the inspiration of this thread, I am going to try to cut down the protein a little and see if that speeds up weight loss again.

Hope I haven't bored the pants off everybody with this long post... Just needed to clear all that out of my head so I could start thinking about other stuff!!!

amanda