What’s more important – counting calories or carbohydrates or carbocalories?

What’s more important – counting calories or carbohydrates or carbocalories?

Every day at least one patient asks me, is cutting calories or cutting carbohydrates more important if I want to
lose weight? The answer is you have to cut both. If your calories ar much over 1500 a day, you’re probably not
going to lose much weight. If your total carbohydrate intake is much over 60 grams a day (20-25 grams per
feeding), you’re probably not going to lose much weight either. The good news is that there’s not much difference
between the weight loss on 500 calories a day, compared to 800 calories a day. And if you limit your
carbohydrate intake to less than 10 grams of carb per feeding, you can speed up your weight loss significantly –
as long as you keep your calories below 1500 a day. In 1973, Donald Mart wrote a book called the
Carbocalorie Diet. Carbocalories were calculated as (20 x carbohydrates grams + calories)/24. Mart said that if
you kept your CarboCalories under 100 a day, you’d lose 5 pounds a week. More on the carbocalorie
tomorrow.