The high cost of low carb diets
The high cost of low carb diets

This post is about The high cost of low carb diets.

The high cost of low carb diets

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have learned about the thousands and thousands of low carb, high protein diets that flood the market. Basically, all these diets are essentially the same thing, just marketed a different way. For example:

  • The Atkin’s Diet
  • The Carbohydrate Counters Diet
  • The Grapefruit diet – Which originally was an all protein, sans grapefruit diet.
  • The Drinking Man’s Diet
  • And the list goes on…

Do they work?

The first thing you need to know is that YES, these all-protein diets do actually work if you follow them properly, but…there is always a but, in working with people who have eating disorders (a large portion of our society), they have one thing in common and it goes something like this.

“Man I sure need to lose “XX” amount of weight, I’ll try one of those all-protein diets.” They read the diet and think “Well I read the directions and it says I should eat “X” amount of protein and very little amount of carbs. So what I’ll do is make up for lost time and eat ZERO carbs and more protein to speed up the process.”

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG…All WRONG!

Here is why.

There is a big misconception about carbohydrates. For some reason we have all been fed the standard line of marketing, Carbs = Bad, Protein = Good. This is completely wrong. We humans NEED carbohydrates for energy.  Carbohydrates are the easiest way for us to get the energy we need to run our bodies. The simplest way to remember this is Carbohydrates = Energy.

The problem is eating too many carbohydrates and not burning off those excess carbohydrates equals fat storage. So the more carbs you eat without exercising or having a way for your body to burn off the excess the fatter you will become.

Too much protein

This is where we go in the complete opposite direction and think that all we need to do eat is protein and we will lose weight. Since we aren’t eating carbs, we think that our bodies will just use the excess fat storage as energy THEN we will lose weight. This works only up to a point. Here is how fat loss works.

The high cost of low carb diets

When we do not feed our bodies carbohydrates, our bodies will then use fat storage to sustain it. When your body starts to use fat to sustain itself, it produces a compound known as Ketone. Ketone build up is Acidic or acidosis. If you have been reading my blog for a while, two years ago I wrote a post entitled “What is PH Balance, Shampoo, Disease or Health?”. In this post I explained that in our bodies we have a pH balance and we need to be slightly alkaline to be healthy. Ketone build up makes our body more acidic. This is the reason why your doctor recommends that you to drink at least 1 gallon of water per day when you are on any kind of diet, and even more when you are outside and sweating.

Water is considered neutral on the pH balance scale. Since Ketone builds up faster than you can drink water, your body will naturally turn more acidic then alkaline, therefore causing your body to want to store fat to keep your body from killing itself. When this happens, since your body still needs energy to sustain itself and it doesn’t have any carbohydrates to burn, it will start to eat away at your vital organs to keep itself alive. See the problem?

In extreme cases when ketone levels reach extremely high acidic levels, you can find yourself in the same condition as a diabetic who has not taken their insulin.

So when thinking about going on one of those high protein, low carbohydrates diets, be sure you also take into consideration all of the other side effects that can show up – Ketone build up being only one of them. Better yet, skip the high protein, low carb diet, and start eating correctly and skip any sort of shortcut…I mean diet.  😉

This concludes my post on The high cost of low carb diets.


Charles Lloyd
Charles Lloyd

Self processed fitness missionary and author of most of the ridiculous fitness articles written on Charles Lloyd Fitness.com. I am not really a writer, but a workout fiend who happens to have a blog. The single mission of this website is very simple: Get You In Shape. I have been blessed with the gift of good health and want to share it with you. Join Me.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.