Mary-Lou Harris (FdSc, Dip ION, ITEC) senior nutritionist for the New You Boot Camp is clear that a no carb diet is not only damaging to your overall health ‘both mentally and physically, but it also PROMOTES weight gain, as your body will go into an adaptive response’ which is your body’s ‘survival mechanism’ when something goes out of balance.

Mary-Lou teaches on camp that when you do not have sufficient quality slow releasing sugars through your food intake, your body adjusts this imbalance by raising your sugars through its own internal means either by craving quick releasing (and unhealthy) carbs or fizzy drinks, caffeine alcohol or cigarettes. It will even resort to making you anxious for no apparent reason, because very little raises your sugars faster than going into a ‘Fight or Flight’ state, albeit a ‘fake’ one just to raise your blood sugar. Your brain relies heavily on sugars for its source of energy.

If you would like to get full benefits of low-carb, then you must remove certain foods from your diet. These are mostly sugars and starches and include grains, legumes, candies, sugary soft drinks and other high carb foods. If you want to go very low on the carbs and get into ketosis, you must also cut back on fruits. Despite the hype about these foods, there is no actual needfor them in the diet. We didn’t start eating grains until about thousands years ago and we certainly didn’t start eating processed junk foods until very recently. There definitely is no nutrient in starchy or sugary foods that we can’t get in huge amounts from animal foods or vegetables. And remember that low-carb diets doesn’t mean no carb. There’s room for plenty of vegetables, more than enough to satisfy your needs for all the nutrients and energy for your body and brain.

This means that when you are studying, or your work is mentally challenging or requiring taxing brain work, this is the time you  will notice that you tend to crave more carbs.

http://authoritynutrition.com/10-things-dietitians-say-about-low-carb-diets/

New You Boot Camp clients learn how to easily change these carb cravings by choosing to eat sufficient quantities of excellent quality carbohydrate foods like oat cakes, oats porridge, wholegrain rice cakes, brown basmati rice, buckwheat (which is not wheat-it’s a seed) etc.

Mostly in your liver and muscles your body stores carbohydrate, , in the form of glycogen. Depending on your size and fitness level, you can store roughly in the range of 1500-2000 calories of storage carbohydrate. When your carbohydrate store is getting empty, for instance when you eat less than 30-50grams of carbs per day, it may become very dangerous for you because you can have ketosis which means your body isn’t getting enough carbs, and is starts to release lots of fats from fat tissues. These go to the liver and they turned into those molecules which can cross the blood brain barrier and they provide energy because of the lack of glucose. This natural response of the body happens when we are starving.

Also low carb diet and ketosis which has been proved by to be therapeutic can help with epilepsy, diabetes and brain cancer.

People who are on low-carb diets lose a lot of water weight. The glycogen stores in the muscles and liver go down and along with them the water they tend to hold on to. When you deplete muscle glycogen, there is a directly proportional increase in muscle fatigue, and also an increase in muscle catabolism (direct metabolism of your body’s own muscle protein, or conversion of that protein into glucose via gluconeogenesis). Many people on a low-carbohydrate diet simply stop exercising, because it can hurt so much. Additionally, low-carb diets reduce insulin levels, which cause the kidneys to release some of the sodium and water they are holding on. But after you’ve lost that amount of water weight then you will continue to lose weight, but this time you will burn fat.

http://www.weightlossresources.co.uk/logout/news_features/lowcarbdiet.htm

The trick is to keep it to the size of your own fist, from the wrist up (approximately 2-25% of your dinner plate). This way, New You Boot Camp clients continue to sustain appropriate healthy weight loss, without compromising their mood, memory, energy levels or overall health.