My daily Carb Division/Plan

 The one thing that was actually helpful about my visit with the nutritionist was that I learned that I should divide my carbs over the day, and not eat all of them at night. I still get cravings at night, and she said it was fine to have an extra carb serving as 'dessert' right after dinner because it helps keep my fasting sugars lower the next morning. I've tried that and it's true! My morning sugars are now on average 30 or 40 points lower, and more like 150 and 140 than the 180 to 200 I used to have after struggling at night with super low carb attempts.

So my daily division looks like this:

NET Carbs over the day: Amounts are + or - 3 grams
Make sure I don't end up with only +3 grams, that would be 15 over.
DO NOT COUNT VEGETABLES
(except legumes and starchy veggies like corn)
10.00-11.00 17 gr breakfast
13.00-14.00 17 gr lunch
16.00-17.00 17 gr afternoon snack
19.00-20.00 17 gr dinner
20.00-21.00 17 gr evening snack

That's about a total of 85 grams normal carbs and leaves me about 15 net grams for vegetables which are unlimited if they're lower carb (like salad and celery and radishes) and normal portions for things like carrots.

Also I make sure each meal is no more than 20 percent in carb calories and the low carb snacks outside of afternoon and evening snack need to be 10 percent and those carbs are made up of vegetable or the 1 gram in cheese or in a hardboiled egg. This helps me avoid blood sugar rollercoasters. If I keep my carbs within that range my sugar reaction is much less severe. How I can quickly see from the tracker if I am within the 20 or 10 percent is in a previous post.

I've been doing this for about 2 weeks now and I'm finally seeing my weight balance out to almost the same number each day/week instead of the crazy up and down that I used to have with 5 lbs up if I'd binged a lot, and 5 lbs down after a real keto-day. I also have less binges because if I crave something, I can put a 17-gram portion in my next meal/high carb snack. For this the flexibility of being able to decide what I want an hour or even during making my next meal or snack is very important though. So for me the planning your meal a day or two ahead method does not work to avoid binges, it makes them worse.

This does lead to sometimes eating empty calorie foods, but I try to limit empty calories to one time a day, so if I have been very healthy in my carb choices all day (a tiny bit of less glycemic whole grains, some low glycemic fruit, legumes, a little corn, oats, things like that) then I let myself have an empty calorie 17 grams for dessert/evening snack, and otherwise I choose a piece of fruit or berries for that.

I think I might have found a plan that works somewhat for me, or at least better than the extreme keto that leads me to crazy binges. Let's see how it holds up over time! 

Written on Mon Feb 23, 2015