[Slimming] Carb counting to loss weight and maintain your silhouette

Few years ago, I was working as a nutritionist in one of the famous weight management company. I had been writing several types of meal plan to fit in different individual’s health conditions. Before I start designing a meal plan for them, I would need to know their dietary habit, occupation & working condition and lifestyle. All these information was crucial for a highly individualized meal plan to modify their dietary habit without compromising their personal and cultural preferences.

After years of working on meal planning, I found that most of the people have major problem in managing their meal portion size. In another word, they tend to overeating. Overeating was something that on the top of the list you really need to get rid of to keep yourself fit and silhouette. So if you’re someone like that, you could start with “Carb Counting” to control of your meal size, especially your daily carbohydrate portion size (which the major constituent of daily meal).

((Well, it remind me to again pick up Carb counting to reduce some weight for my wedding))

Atkins diet was kind of popular in the past few years, the diets promotes a high protein low carbohydrate diet. The switch of main energy source from carbohydrate to protein might lead to ketone acidosis which I refuse to introduce to any of my customer and friends. Yet the diet wasn’t suitable to be adopted and practiced for long term which might have adverse health effect. I prefer Car-counting as it could help to modify a person dietary habit to achieve a long term weight management. So I find “Carb-counting” as a perfect method for all the people who wanted to lose weight and maintain it easily (Say no to Yo-Yo weight).

This method involved some calculation, where you need to calculate the number of servings of carbohydrate you could have for a day. So let’s start with the calculation:

1.         our daily calorie (kcal) = body weight (kg) x 25(kcal/kg)
2.     Your daily calorie from Carbohydrate (kcal) = Your daily calorie (kcal) x 0.5
3.     Your daily serving of Carbohydrate = Your daily calorie from Carbohydrate (kcal)/ [15 x 4 (kcal)]

Example: 

1.      My weight is 50kg, so my daily calorie will be 1250 kcal (50 kg x 25 kcal/kg).
2.     From which, 625 kcal ( 1250kcal x 0.5 )of energy come from carbohydrate.
3.     625 kcal of carbohydrate equal to 10.4 servings (625 kcal/ (15 x 4 kcal) ) of Carbohydrate .

Now you know what is the maximum servings of carbohydrate you could have in a day, so simple spread the numbers among 3-4  (or 5) meals. I would take more carbohydrate in the morning and afternoon, so I usually plan for 4 servings for breakfast, 4 servings for lunch and 2 servings for dinner.

But how much is one servings? One servings equal to 15g of carbohydrate, and look at the picture below to find out what is the serving size of food that you eat every day.

You can play around with different kind of food with same carbohydrate serving and have fun with the food game. 

Sometimes if you crave for some sweet dessert, just find out the carbohydrates count of the food, and minus a little from breakfast and lunch for the room for dessert. Never give up the pleasure from eating, that’s could keep your mood up and enjoy the lengthy process of weight loss.

Bear in mind, start it slow, and take your time to adopt the whole method. Meanwhile you could make use of some free app or website to help you on adopting this method.

Note: This is not a quick method to lose weight, please be patient and practicing it from day to day, coupled with exercise.