Carbs Explained - Good Carbohydrate

Focus On What A Good Carbohydrate Involves

There's been a lot of press, both good and bad, about low carb diets. First you hear they're good, then you hear they're bad, then you hear the truth - you need carbs, but not just any carbs - good carbohydrate.
Do you even know what that means? What, precisely, would good carbs entail?

The Good Carbohydrate Diet

Now here's a diet you probably haven't heard of before! It's actually not an "official" diet. It's a diet created by a woman named Barbara Jean who did a bunch of research on low carb diets only to find that she didn't think it was the healthiest way to lose weight. What she learned was that it was healthier to choose good carbohydrate foods.

As a result, she completely changed her eating habits. She learned that foods she thought were good for her actually might have been preventing her from losing weight (like her favorite fat-free yogurt -- she found out it had a lot of sugar, which is why it tasted so good). She invented the good carbohydrate for herself based on what she learned about good and bad carbohydrates. Surprisingly, she found that switching to low carbohydrate diet foods only took a little tweaking of her current diet.

First of all, she didn't switch the kind of food she ate at breakfast. She still ate a bowl of cereal every day, but instead of Frosted Flakes, she opted for Cheerios or Raisin Bran. This is the first place she saw the difference between good carbs and bad. She had learned that foods with good carbs make you feel full longer, and she found that to be true immediately with that small change. Then instead of waiting until lunch to eat again, she decided to throw in snacks throughout the day.

She made something like an "eating schedule" for herself to follow that looked something like this:

Breakfast:

Raisin Bran, Cheerios, or other whole grain cereal
1 cup milk
1 banana

10:30ish:

Small apple with approximately 1 Tablespoon peanut butter

12:30ish:

3 oz. bag of baby carrots

1:30ish:

Salad consisting of romaine lettuce, diced tomatoes, diced onions and diced green peppers and fat-free Italian dressing

2:30ish:

Frozen low-cal dinner (low carbohydrate dinners are fine too, as long as they're low cal)

3:30ish:

1 cup grapes

Dinner was harder because she had her husband, who had only recently heard about this low carbohydrate thing, to consider. He cooked half the time too. Whenever they had something unhealthy, which wasn't very often, she just enjoyed it in moderation. But most of the time they ate lean meats. And if they had pasta or rice for a side dish, she made sure it was whole wheat pasta or brown rice. They only had potatoes about once a week.

After a month or so of eating good carbohydrate food, she was losing weight. Not only that, but she was exercising too, so she was losing inches. Maybe Barbara Jean's good carbohydrate diet can benefit you as well.