Low Carb Diet for Weight Loss Goals : Tips from top Sports Scientist
Many weight loss experts recommend a low carb diet for weight loss goals when it comes to achieving your goals for better health and fitness and reducing that belly fat!
If you have struggled your whole life with failed diets and excercise programs you are more than likely “carbohydrate resistant” and will get immense benefits by switching your eating to a high protein, low carb diet for weight loss goals, as recommended in a book by a top sports scientist in South Africa, Professor Tim Noakes.
In his latest book “Challenging Beliefs”, Noakes says he believes the low carb approach is a key to better health and sports performance as well as permanent weight loss for his body type.
Above all he says it may well save him from dying of early-onset diabetes like his father and uncle before him.
Professor of the University of Cape Town and Sports Science Institute, Tim Noakes is one of South Africa’s most respected sports scientists, being both a Sports Physician and Exercise Physiologist. He describes his somewhat radical personal approach to a low carb diet as being counter what most nutritionists would recommend because of their training.
But having experimented successfully with low carb eating for himself he believes it is a life saver for certain people who have inherited a carbohydrate resistant metabolism.
It has taken me 61 years to suspect that bread and cereals – the biblical staff of life – as well as rice, pasta and refined carbohydrates may not be
healthy for me personally as I had always believed.
Low Carb Diet for Weight Loss Goals: Do’s and Don’ts from Tim Noakes
- Tim Noakes’ book advocates the low carb diet
Noakes never eats:
Sugar (must be completely removed from your diet)
All sugary drinks including cola drinks and sweetened fruit juices
Bread
Rice
Pasta
Potatoes
Porridge
Breakfast cereals
Some high energy fruits like bananas
All confectionary – cakes and sweets
Desserts containing sugar and carbohydrates
Artificial sweetners and products containing these products (like “diet” colas)
Vegetable oils containing high concentrations of omega 6 fatty acids
Instead he restricts his food choices to the following food and beverage groups:
Eggs – from free range hens
Fish – an excellent source of omega 3 fatty acids
Meat – not processed and preferably from sources that are organically raised eating grass. This group includes biltong, preferably game or ostrich.
Dairy Produce – milk, cheese and yoghurt – all full cream and from organically fed cows.
Vegetables – mainly leafy, low carbohydrate sources like lettuce but also including broccoli, tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, avocado and many others. The choice is based on their nutrient value and their low carbohydrate content.
Nuts – especially macadamias, walnuts and almonds but specifically excluding the non-nuts, peanuts and cashews which are high in carbohydrates.
Fruits – only those which have a lower carbohydrate content like berries and apples.
Water, tea and coffee (all unsweetened)!
Beating Addiction for Success with the Low Carb Diet for Weight Loss Goals
Like Noakes, I have had to recognize and overcome my own “addiction” to refined sugar and carbohydrats exactly as he recommends: one day at a time. He writes:
For to change one has to rid oneself of an addiction for easily assimilated carbohydrates – an addiction that is at least as powerful as those associated with cigarette consumption and some recreational drugs like heroin. It is not easy to give up addictions. And like all addictions, addicts have to take each moment of their recovery one day at a time. In a sense those of us who are unable to metabolise carbohydrates, are never cured of that addiction. We are always in recovery. We have to take each new day of our cure, one day at a time.
But for those who like me are convinced that they have a really good reason to change (in my case to avoid dying from adult-onset diabetes – the fate that struck my father and his brother) and are prepared to change what we eat for the rest of our lives, then we may be up for the challenge.
Self-discipline needed for the Low Carb Diet for Weight Loss Goals
Professor Noakes admits that this is not a diet or eating plan for the faint hearted (or weak willed) but the results convinced him of its benefits.
This eating plan requires some initial discipline to be successful. As I have said, it takes discipline to insure that we do not relapse into our former addiction. Those who will be the most likely fully to commit to this change are those who have the greatest reason for and desire to change. Initially I had the greatest motivation to change – I do not want slowly to degenerate in the demeaning grip of adult-onset diabetes. I then discovered that once I had rid myself of my addictive food choices especially rapidly assimilated carbohydrates, I felt so incredibly good that I would never want to go back to my former eating ways.
Noakes cites several other ground-breaking books by authors who advocate the low carb diet for weight loss goals and improved health. I will review these in a separate article.
Having myself recently achieved my own weight loss goal to lose 60 lbs in nine months following a low carb diet for weight loss goals, I highly recommend you investigate the low carb lifestyle. I’d love to hear YOUR views, experience, and success stories.