BellaOnline Forums Food and Wine Low Carb Low-Carb Fad

On the various other posts I agree with most of you. I just wanted to add a note about hair loss. Hair loss is NORMAL when you diet because it's how your body deals with changes. In essence it gets rid of the old hair and starts making new hair - and you see that as hair loss.

I wrote about that here -

http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art16071.asp

but expect at least some hair loss during any dieting. When it grows back in, it'll be much healthier, though!

My hair hasn't fallen out on low carbing. It's actually shinier than it was before. :-)

It was falling at such a rapid rate on low cal/fat dieting. I was literally cleaning fistfuls of hair out of my brush every day. It was frightening.

I'm currently on a Low Carb diet in order to lose weight before I go away. Have I lost any hair? Not really an amount I would be worried about. Have I felt light headed? Yes. Irritable? Yes. Has my stomach gone in more and then sudden gotten bigger again? LOL Yes.

Back to drinking water... and counting the days until I can say I've gone back to my prepregnancy weight. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I'll work back to front. If your stomach went in and out I really doubt that you lost fat and then gained it again mysteriously there while you were losing weight. You probably mean that you *bloated*, yes? Bloating definitely happens when you eat things that your intestines aren't used to handling, i.e. a lot of low carb processed foods have maltitol in them. Did you mean that you bloated for a day or two - or do you really mean that you gained solid belly fat while losing weight??

Irritable is next. Hmmmm. Usually irritability that is diet-related is caused by blood sugar swings. I know many people that used to get VERY irritable when their blood sugar dropped. But the whole point of low carb is that your blood sugar is kept stable by drinking water regularly, eating regularly and eating low glycemic index foods. So the question there is - are you drinking water frequently? Are you sure never to go more than 3-4 hours without a healthy snack? Are the things you are eating low GI? If the answer to those things are yes, then are you sure that something *external* isn't irritating you?

On the light headed, a lot of people have that just because of low blood pressure or weak blood vessels. Many people get that especially when they stand up quickly, because now the blood instantly has to pump higher to the brain. I know I do.

Light headedness can also be a sign of a lack of nutrients, that your pancreas isn't properly handling things. I would really make sure you are taking ample multivitamins and taking them regularly.

Light headedness really shouldn't be a result of low carbing. If anything people get light headed on high carb diets, when their body goes from the soaring sugar to the low sugar in their rollercoaster metabolism. When their blood sugar plummets to that super-low, it causes light headedness. But again because low carb sits at an even blood sugar level, that shouldn't be a problem.

I was definitely light headed because I didn't get to eat something every 4 hours and it was affecting me greatly. I was out with my mother one day shopping for Easter and she can shop for hours and I wasn't able to eat anything. Now, I know to take something with me if I can. If I go out I usually drink less water than when I am home and able to just get things from the fridge, etc. I was irritable because of not being able to eat when I needed to.

I was bloated for only a few days. Guess I was getting used to what was in the food, etc.

hi victoria,
there was quite a long time period in my life in which i was not eating enough protein or essential fats. so even though i was eating only good carbs, i did feel the light-headedness sometimes, if i had been really hungry and eaten a lot of carbs. with me though, it was not a bad feeling. it felt like a tremendous urge to want to sleep.

but not having enough sugar will also leave you feeling weak. each of us needs to find the level that we perform at best.

Before, when I wasn't eating low carb, dinner would always do that to me, no matter how I felt before eating it. Afterward I would always feel like I was soooo tired. I'd always heard it wasn't a good idea to sleep on a full stomach though so I would sit like a zombie on the couch for a few hours and watch television. Looking back on it as I feel now, it wasn't a good feeling.

I also noticed that I don't lose weight nearly as much if I don't drink enough water.

I'm not trying to quibble semantics here, but that's not a matter of being light headed because of the low carb food you're eating. It's being light headed because you are NOT following the diet and NOT eating food regularly! <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Low carb diets say clearly that you MUST eat food regularly to keep your body running at a smooth, even keel. Pretty much any healthy diet will tell you that. I carry low carb bars with me, and bottles of water. I always have something to eat every 3-4 hours. If you don't do that it's not healthy, and your body is reacting to warn you of that. That's not a "bad end result of low carb". That's a normal body reaction to lack of food - which low carb explicitly tells you to prevent. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

It's sort of like saying you're on low carb but when you ate a pound of sugar you gained weight. Low carb tells you not to eat pounds of sugar. So to do that would not be low carb. Low carb also tells you not to go more than 3-4 hours without eating. So it is very, very important that you eat regularly to keep your body on that even blood sugar range. To not eat is just as bad as to eat lots of sugar. Both send your blood sugar levels outside the normal range.