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Comment by crusso | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I just listened to the Security Now guy (Steve Gibson) who has been going super low carb and has done a couple of geek specials on the subject. Very good information in the two podcasts he did. Here's the link to the first one:

http://twit.tv/show/twit-live-specials/124

If you have a lot of energy problems during the day -- besides exercising, going completely very low carb is a good way to even out the post-carb crashes that plague lots of people like myself.

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Dropping carbs dramatically after living a life where you ate a normal/high amount of carbs is going to, most likely, make you miserable. If decreasing your carbs is of interest to you, do so slowly over time.

I can't really agree with this. The hardest part of going cold turkey "no carb" is the first week; after that, just watching weight literally fall off (I lost 15kg in two months) and having a constant energy level without the "carb crashes" are an excellent reward, which is important considering the time most people give up dieting is early, before they've really had a chance to change their lifestyle.

completely agree with you.

This has been true in my experience. I'm not sure if this approach is always better, but over time I've been gradually reducing carb intake and what used to feel impossible without being miserable (50-60 net carbs/day) is now painless.

However with the gradual approach, you probably won't get that dramatic shedding of weight some people talk about. I don't care about that, personally, because I get enough satisfaction out of steady progress and make a game out of optimizing my diet with delicious yet low/moderate carb food.

low-carb is cool but make sure to get some carb before/after exercising. Especially it's important to mix some carb with proteins after the workouts.

It depends on your goals. If you're super low carb and trying to lose weight they a moderate amount of carbs would be good, but if you aren't low carb and trying to lose weight then I'd skips the carbs (Carbs after a workout are mainly used to boost protein uptake in the muscles, not to restore energy, you don't burn enough during a workout to need more than time to restore the glycogen in your muscles).

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