Reducing carbs
Years ago I watched the movie "What dreams may come" and Robin Williams' great performance. More importantly the message the story is giving to the audience. Years later when I heard about Robin Williams' passing away by suicide I was really disappointed as the actor who was carrying a strong, meaningful message did not seem to get the message himself.
After a while his family revealed the result of his autopsy: lewy body dementia. When I started reading more about this health problem, I was relieved as no one would call his death a suicide anymore but a result of a devastating health problem. Such a terrible health problem that gradually impairs brain activity and eventually kills the patient with no treatment in sight.
When I dug into the culprit causing this sickness I have found carbs as the usual suspect. Just like Alzheimer's and even cancer, carbs are at the center stage.
Cancer cells rely on so much more carbs than healthy cells that CT scan is often accompanied by radioactive sugar injected to the patient's body.
Carbs are also responsible for Type II diabetes which also causes coronary artery diseases and eventually heart attacks.
Despite all these well established scientific truths, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans updated for 2020-2025 is ignorantly advising you to get 45-65% of your calories from carbs. It is likely your primary physician will be preaching the same thing.
Food industry is prospering thanks to the mass production of relatively cheaper to produce foods loaded with carbs. The possibility of their using lobbies to influence such guidelines may help explain this ignorance.
How to reduce carbs?
If your partner is doing most of the cooking at home, it will be useful to bring up the above points to set up stage. Implementing this change shall not be regarded as trying just another diet but embracing a solution as a lifestyle that protects your brain, your heart, that is, YOU.
Sugar, bread, rice, pasta and potato (french fries) are obvious carbs you need to ditch without looking behind.
I recommend using an application like MyFitnessPal to track your macros for your meals. The good thing is that you will find yourself repeating certain meals over time and you can copy these in this app with one tap.
You may want to limit net carbs (carbs minus fiber) to 30 grams. Such a limitation will look quite restricting at first. At that point you need to evaluate what is increasing the carbs most. Again MyFitnessPal will provide you the carbs in a sorted list. You may start to reduce or eliminate the top items until you reach your target. You can also find alternatives such as cauliflower thins from Trader Joe's instead of bread.
In short time you will notice that you start making wiser choices to use your 30-gram carb limit. For instance, eating one whole banana with 27 grams of carbs will not leave you any room to eat other things. So the wiser choice will be leafy greens: asparagus, broccoli, lettuce etc.
How to compensate for the missing carb calories?
I was lucky to come across very knowledgeable experts that all agree that the protein is the primary macro you shall be structuring your macros around. A common misconception is that you need less protein as you age. It is quite the opposite. As you age you lose more muscle. To compensate that you need to increase your protein intake. Recommended amount is around 1 gr per your weight in pounds. You can even go above that if you are trying to build more muscles with resistance training.
Here is how it works. Decide on your calories: lets say 2000 calories for a 200-lbs person. So you have max 30 grams of carbs (120 calories), 200 grams of protein (800 calories). The remaining goes to the fat which is 120 grams of fat (notice fat is more energy dense; 1 gr fat = 9 calories while other macros are 4 calories per gram).
Pasture raised and finished eggs, beef, chicken, fish will be your go-to food choices thanks to their superior macro profile and micro-nutrients.
Pure keto diet followers will go big on fat. In my opinion and experience, it depends on your goals. If you are trying to lose fat, go easy on fat and compensate with protein. If you are in maintenance mode and you have already achieved efficient fat burner status, enjoy more of those fat bombs in the form of keto deserts. Frankly, I kept losing fat even though I was eating my homemade keto chocolate mousse or keto peanut cups on the daily basis.