Alright, I know that everyone must be ready to fight me on this but hear me out for a second.
I will give you this: I agree that low carb diets work for a VERY short period of time. That's the key. All those low carb diet products out there focus only on the fact that this program does work but they leave out the part about very short time, specifically 2-3 weeks, if even that long. Usually, for most people, they only work for about a week or two. Rarely have I ever heard anyone say, in complete honesty, that low carb diets work for longer than 2 weeks.
The one good thing about low carb diets is that it forces you to cut out foods that you should be avoiding in the first place. Things that are banned in low carb diets are definitely candy, ice cream, chewing gum and high-starch vegetables, which can be eaten very occasionally. Those are always good to avoid based alone on the high starch or carb content in these foods. So that's the one redeeming factor here.
The rest of the story is definitely not so great! For long term efforts, low carb diets do nothing for your weight loss goals. Instead of burning fat and losing weight, your body is doing something that seems totally alien to us but is completely natural in your body's healthy functioning.
For those who (for some reason) stick with low carb diets for the long term, the body will attempt to balance out the acid build up in your blood from all of the protein this diet tells you to eat. There is so much excess protein (everything in moderation, I say) that it can leech calcium from your bones and cause acid build up in your blood. The body's natural reaction is to balance everything out and keep it on an even keel. The medical term for this is osteoporosis! Clearly, this is a bad effect directly influenced from low carb diets.
Even if that is a result that is specifically for women, here's something that will apply to everyone. The human brain uses tons of nutrients in his normal functioning, glucose being one of them. Yes, you've heard of glucose before; it's a simple sugar, which is basically a carb. When you eat a low carb diet, you're basically depleting your body of glucose. So basically, low carb diets can negatively affect your brain's normal functions, something none of the low carb diets advertise.
I'm not completely anti low carb. I definitely think that low carb diets have its place, usually only in the first week of a new nutritional plan. And I don't deny the results that do come from it, both good and bad. But my argument is completely for what is the best way to lose weight and low carb diets used for the long term is absolutely NOT the best way to lose weight; it's not even a good way!
Low carb diets should ONLY be used for your first week of a new nutritional plan. And successful nutritional plan should, must, include a healthy diet balanced between proteins, carbs, fats and fibers and it should also incorporate an exercise regimen. While eating healthy will help you lose weight, exercising will put your results nearly over the top. There is no reason NOT to exercise. Even if you don't start of exercising because of your weight, once you've lost that weight, you absolutely should exercise! To lose weight, you can't get better than a great healthy diet plus effective exercising!
It's all the craze right now, these low carb diets. Everyone who's anyone is trying it out to lose weight. Sounds fun right? Looks healthy right? Well, you'd be wrong. Yes, low carb diets do make you lose weight initially, but have you actually seen people keep it off after the initial honeymoon phase? Not likely.
But all hope is not lost. There definitely are ways to make a low carb diet work for your weight loss goals, to fine tune and perfect this type of diet. You will need to focus on controlling your body's cravings for certain foods, particularly sugar cravings. These are bad, no matter what way you look at them; sugar cravings are bad.
Regular low carb diets don't focus on controlling sugar cravings. You would need to do this by producing and stimulating more of the fat-burning hormones, rather than the fat-storing ones in your body. I can hear everyone now, wondering that there are different types of hormones. Well, absolutely there are! The fat-storing ones are so common in today's foods, with all the junk food and fast food places throughout; it's very likely that you, yes you, are eating a food that is promoting the fat-storing homrones.
Here is a perfectly good reason why low carb diets are only a temporary fix (that is if you don't focus on fat-burning hormones): there are plenty of long-term health risks closely associated with low carb diets. You might be kind of confused because all of the media has been telling you that low carb works! Well, they're wrong. Low carb diets don't provide lasting weight loss results. What they do provide are potential long-term health risks. One in particular for women is osteoporosis.
Think about this one too: your brain has so many amazing capabilities and all we need to do to keep it strong is to make sure it's taken care of. So pause your weight loss ideas for now. Low carb sounds great but really, your body needs some sort of sugar or glucose to function properly. Odd as it may sound given the above info, your brain in particular definitely needs some glucose, not enough to keep you on your weight loss plan forever but still enough to function on a daily basis.
Other health risks include over-consumption of saturated fat, which can lead to heart attack or stroke. So while minimal sugar intake is a great plan for losing weight, cutting sugar completely out will harm your body; low carb diets promote cutting out sugar completely. Clearly not a wise choice.
So when you are contemplating all the diets and weight loss programs available now, make sure to research each of them thoroughly to see if losing weight with that method isn't going to result in health issues later on; as much as fads are cool, make sure to avoid jumping into things blindly, and weight loss programs definitely count.