You might wonder how many carbs you should eat daily to lose weight quickly.
Your concerns about low-carb intake are a good step forward, as one of the main culprits for weight gain is the consumption of excess carbs.
It is easy to achieve fast weight loss by reducing the number of carbs you need daily. In other words, limit your sugar and starch intake to the optimal level.
But with insufficient calorie intake, you will soon begin to feel brain fog and fatigue. When you are low on energy, you feel an instant urge to eat more carbohydrates.
For this reason, the brain keeps sending you “signals of appetite” when the energy source is running low.
It does not mean you must keep eating lots of calories a day to satisfy your hunger and appetite. Your brain can be trained to adapt itself to running on ketones when sugar is not available.
Let’s talk about how important it is to stick to a low-carb diet to lose weight and keep health problems like type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol at bay. The type and amount of carbs you eat each day affect your blood sugar levels and heart health.
Health benefits of a low-carb diet
Dieticians may have told you a hundred times that a low-fat diet is the best way to lose weight. Every dietitian might give you a lot of advice about how to eat less fat and fewer calories.
Everything sounds excellent and practical, but when you follow the low-fat and low-calorie diet, you will soon discover that the results are different than expected.
Secondly, it is hard to stick to a low-fat and low-calorie diet for a long time, especially when you live a very active life that requires lots of energy.
There are 3 types of carbs that we eat: starches (also known as complex carbs) sugar, and dietary fiber. Refined or simple carbs are low in fiber, minerals, and vitamins.
In this case, another diet suggestion that is often given is to eat very little sugar and starch.
You need to consume very little wheat, rice, long grains, cookies, cakes, white bread, etc., which are rich in starch and sugar. To limit carbs intake, include beans and legumes in your well-balanced diet
The alternative to a starch and sugar-free diet is healthy proteins, dairy fats, and vegetables.
The low-carb meal plan is the clear winner among all the diet plans. A low-carb food can also satiate your appetite and supply the body with optimum calories and essential nutrients without causing you to gain weight.
The scientific reason behind consuming fewer carbs for weight loss is simple. Mostly, the body gets energy by burning carbs for fuel. In cases where the body does not receive sufficient carbs, a metabolic process called ketosis comes into effect. In ketosis, the body begins to burn fat for energy.
You will lose weight when your fat stores become your primary energy source.
We have multiple benefits from eating fewer carbs.
Besides achieving a slim figure, we can prevent cardiovascular and diabetes issues to a great extent with low-carbohydrate food. We can achieve lower blood sugar, healthy blood pressure, and triglyceride levels and fine-tune the HDL and LDL cholesterol levels in the blood by eating less carbohydrates.
We agree that traditionally popular low-calorie and low-fat diet plans will help you shed pounds, but you can have a healthier life and more significant weight loss results by reducing carbs intake.
Comparing various weight loss studies shows that diet plans focusing on lower carbs intake have more health benefits, They’re more advantageous than commonly followed low-fat diet plans.
Of course, recent studies only partially support low-carb diet plans, instead advocating for a combination of fewer carbs and a Mediterranean diet.
How many carbs do you need to eat per day?
Carbs, the body’s main fuel source, are sugar-based molecules found in many foods. They play an important role in many health and fitness goals,
Strictly speaking, no general rule can tell someone exactly how many carbohydrates they should eat every day.
The physical energy requirements of each person are different. One individual’s “low-carb diet” plan may be high-carb for another.
Each person has to figure out how many carbs she needs based on her age, daily activity level, metabolic health, eating habits, and personal preferences.
For example, a sportsperson who engages in active sports should eat a lot of carbohydrate-rich food compared to an older woman who lives a sedentary life.
Some people are high on “carbohydrate intolerance,” an inability to process the nutrients in carbs into energy. This weak metabolic syndrome causes Type II diabetes and promotes obesity.
So you should understand your energy requirements and physical energy levels to decide how many carbohydrates per day you require.
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that carbohydrates needed each day account for 45–65% of total daily calories from carbs. The minimum daily carbohydrate needed for adults is 130 grams, or 45 percent of daily calories, or at least 30 grams per meal.
If you consume 2,000 calories a day, between 900 and 1,300 should be from carbohydrates (4 calories per gram). For this, you have to eat between 225 and 325 grams of carbs a day.
Common standards and criteria
Let us look at some standard norms and practices for diet plans with fewer carbs, which seem to work well for most people.
A moderate carbohydrate intake per day is 100-200 grams. This moderate level is good if you want to stay fit without increasing weight.
Usually, the carbohydrate intake requirement depends on the person’s weight, i.e., the total body weight (in pounds) multiplied by 12 will increase the number of calories per day required by the individual. So if a person weighs 150 pounds, she would need 1,800 calories daily.
Here we consider carbohydrates required per pound of body weight only. However, we cannot generalize these requirements equally for all, as some will require much more carbohydrate intake per day as they may have to perform physical activities that require a lot of energy. Again, as weight loss happens gradually, you must keep adjusting the calorie intake according to your current weight.
How many grams of carbs per day for weight loss?
Carbohydrates are the primary source of calories needed by the body. Nearly 60% of the calories required by the body should be supplied by the carbs we eat.
For faster weight loss, we need to eat fewer calories, which would mean fewer carbohydrates in our diet.
If a person requires about 1,600 calories per day, limit the carbohydrate intake to about 180 to 240 grams per day at the maximum.
One of the best ways to reduce excess carbohydrate intake is to remove all unhealthy carb sources from your diet. The common bad ones are wheat, added sugar, pastries, desserts, pasta, sugar syrups, white rice, etc.
Cutting back on your daily carbohydrate intake does not require you to go hungry to lose weight.
The best diet plan for you is one that emphasizes foods with minimal carbohydrates:
- Have a variety of vegetables in your diet,
- Choose natural fruits (fructose-rich fruits should be limited),
- Have tubers as starch sources instead of wheat and white rice (not more than 150 grams),
- Eat more fish and lean meat.
If you are looking forward to maximizing the weight loss process, bring down the carbs you eat by a few grams every other day. Finally, you will take no more than 100 grams of carbohydrates daily, which will get your body into ketosis and supply energy to the brain via ketone bodies.
It is not healthy to make a drastic reduction in carb intake all of a sudden with the intention of quick weight loss. The decrease in carbohydrate consumption must be gradual to allow your body to adjust to the changes naturally.
Within a few weeks, you can limit the daily carbohydrate intake to as low as 50 grams.
If you have added a lot of vegetables, seeds, nuts, fish, and meat to your daily diet, then you get the optimum level of carbohydrates from them.
Side effects and warning
Eating fewer carbs does not mean eating any carbohydrates at all. We intend to limit carbohydrate intake precisely according to the body’s daily calorie requirements. If you try to avoid carbohydrate diets, they will damage your health over time.
A person under medication should not think about eating a very small amount of carbs without the physician’s consent.
Remember that every person is unique, and what works well for one person may not be suitable for another. Individuals must determine their specific carbohydrate needs based on their current life situation. The chart below indicates the carb needs of the different categories of individuals.
A lower carb intake may not be appropriate for people who engage in weight training, active sports, or manual labor. A lack of carbohydrates will deplete muscle glycogen and cause muscle fatigue and physical weakness.
If the body is supplied with fewer carbohydrates than required, the liver will be under heavy stress to produce glucose from fat and protein. The process of turning proteins into glucose also has toxic ammonia, which will increase the occurrence of pathogenic infections.
Guidelines for eating fewer carb
The goal of a daily weight loss diet is to live a healthy life for the long term rather than to lose weight temporarily.
We should decide upon healthy levels of daily carbohydrate intake on a realistic and healthy diet plan that involves fewer carbs, unprocessed foods, fruits, nuts, seeds, vegetables, healthy fats, and lean protein.
We should refrain from including junk foods, even foods low in carbs, on our menu.
It is best to have naturally fiber-rich foods and whole grains.
Wheat and rice are readily available to us, but we should have them in minimal portions or avoid them as much as possible as they contain too many carbohydrates.
A daily diet with fewer carbs is indeed ideal for steady weight loss. It works well for reducing belly fat significantly. Many diseases affecting the body can be prevented by shedding visceral fat.
You will only be able to stick with eating limited carbs if you can handle the lack of energy you will initially feel.
Finally, among all the daily diet plans available, the carb-restricted diet is simple and easy to follow. It is a healthy diet plan that you can adopt for your entire life.