In my experience, maintenance has been the single most frustrating part of this WOE, because I've had a very hard time eating enough carbs. I don't really care for grains any more, and never liked beans to begin with, so I get pretty much all of my carbs from fruits, veggies, dairy, and nuts. You really have to work to get enough carbs without grains if you have a higher maintenance carb level, say more than 50-60g. For example, I ate about 65g net yesterday, in the form of:
1 medium apple (17)
2 tbsp peanut butter (5)
1 zucchini (5)
2 oz mushrooms (2)
2 tbsp chopped onion (1)
1 oz cream cheese (1)
1 artichoke (8)
1 pint strawberries (20)
1/4 c cream (2)
2 glasses chardonnay (5)
not to mention roasted pork shoulder, steak, and melted butter with the artichoke. In other words, I was stuffed like a goose, and there's no way I could have eaten another bite, let alone 10-15g. Those carb numbers are pretty typical for me -- I might have yogurt or starchy veggies instead, but my daily breakdown is just about always between 50-70g (lower, if anything) if I just eat as much of my preferred fruits and veggies as I want.
I just don't think people understand how hard it can be to get your carbs up to really high levels on lower-GI foods. "Add more veggies" is a nice theory, but it doesn't work well after a certain point because of the sheer volume of food involved. Yes, 3/4c of carrots may have 10 net carbs, but that just means that I could eat 2 cups of carrots at lunch, 2 more cups at dinner, and still be 35-40g short. Turnips aren't too helpful either -- at 8g per large turnip, 4 of them (1 1/2 lbs worth of turnips) would represent less than half my daily carb needs. An entire monster 2-lb spaghetti squash, about 8 cups cooked, is only 60g, and 8 cups of spaghetti squash is a *lot*. Even sweet potatoes won't help you get to your CCL, since they're only about 20g apiece, and again, that means you could eat two or three of them a day *on top* of what most board members would consider a normal day's carb intake. So yes, I really do understand what you mean about choking down the carbs, because I often feel the same way myself.
The ONLY veggies that will make significant contributions to your carb intake without requiring you to eat ridiculous amounts of them are beans/peas (like navy or pinto beans, not green beans or green peas) and corn. For me, these are a better carb bang for the food-volume buck than whole-wheat bread -- a cup of corn or beans has around 30-40g depending on the type of bean, which works out to be about the same carbs as 6-8 slices of Nature's Own LC bread but is easier to eat. You should probably be eating some of these *every single day*, maybe at every meal.
The other thing I notice from your journal is that you're using the LC shakes, and my advice (from experience) would be to drop them. I used to drink them for breakfast pretty much every day, because they were a quick, filling, portable small meal, and they're less frankenfood-y than the bars. Finally I realized that they were *too* filling, and that I didn't need to be eating something that would keep me from being hungry for a couple hours but only provide 2-3g of carbs. Now I eat an apple with some peanut butter, or some of my homemade almond-flour banana bread, which fills me up for just about as long but supplies ~20g of carbs instead.
The key to raising your carbs is thinking about food volume, and avoiding foods that are very low-carb but high-volume or high-satiety. The LC specialty foods are very non-helpful in this regard, and you should probably mostly cut these out.. Salads are also something you should probably try to pass up in favor of cooked veggies, again because of the carb/volume ratio. I have a hard time with this one, because I *love* eating big salads with meat, eggs, cheese, and dressing, but they're just too low in carbs, even if you add other veggies in with the lettuce. If you're raising your carbs, it's better to eat 3-4c broccoli than 3-4c lettuce. Likewise, peanuts are a better choice than macadamias, and cow's milk yogurt is better than goat's milk yogurt.
Sorry to be so long-winded, but I hope this helps -- I understand and sympathize, because I've gone through the same thing. It's hard to shift your mindset into maintenance mode, and harder to physically eat the food. I'm still not managing the latter as well as I could be, and I get so ticked off about it sometimes -- this is maintenance, for Pete's sake! I shouldn't have to use Fitday! It's supposed to just come naturally! But it's easier now than it was a couple months ago, and I hope it will continue to improve with continued effort.
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Hybrid Mode
