Low carb is actually low calorie?

As I mentioned in my previous post on decreasing hunger if you stop and think for a minute how many calories you are actually eating on this diet you might be in for a shock.

People think high fat and think high calorie, this is not always true. I remember at one point thinking to myself how many calories am I actually consuming and I was shocked to see how many it was.

Thinking about it from this point of view. To lose a pound of weight you need to have a calories deficit in the region of 3500 calories. At the time mentioned above I was losing around 4 lbs a week, every week. That means over the course of a week I had a calorie deficit of around 14,000 calories. I was really overweight so assuming that my average daily metabolic calorie consumption (with a bit of exercise) was 3000 calories that is 21,000 calories.

So from the above we can work out that if I am burning 21,000 calories and estimating that I am in deficit by 14,000 I must only be eating around 7,000 calories a week or 1,000 a day!!!

At the time in question my diet was basically:

Bacon for breakfast, chicken, lettuce and cheese for lunch and then roasted meat and vegetables for dinner.

I added up the above and was shocked to find that even with a high estimate I was only about 900 calories a day. That was a bit of a shock. I was not sure how the low carb diet was working but I was convinced that it was some sort of chemical balance type thing that meant I was burning fat but to some extent at least it looks like the low calorie intake was playing a part. Certainly the maths seems to back that up.

One thing I would say is to make sure you keep an eye on nuts. I had some the other days and ate more than I intended, whilst there was only around 5g of carbs there were 500 or so calories, still I haven't broken the diet and haven't got a huge amount left to lose.

So if people start giving you problems for being on low carb then tell them it is low calorie, if they are still not happy stick around for my next post which will be (hopefully with a better title) On a low carb high fat diet are you actually eating more fat?