Adrienne Smith wrote:
>
> When you say that you generally restrict carbs, but nothing
> too extreme, do you mean that you eat liberal amounts of fruit??
> I have energy problems lifting weights when relying only on
> non-starchy veggies for my carbs and no fruit no grains no tubers.
> I really want to find a combo that works that will also allow me
> lose weight.

No, not liberal. I eat an occasional apple or pear, but not every day,
and we're slowly working our way through seventy pounds of blueberries
we froze last summer. I like to eat some blueberries most days because
of the especially potent antioxidants in them. Other than that we get
our carbs from generous amounts of chard, kale, broccoli, beet greens,
pigweed, cauliflower, onions, tomatoes, turnips, jicama, cucumbers,
ramps, fiddleheads, snow peas, snap peas, eggplant, and other low-carb
vegetables. Also from walnuts and almonds, and from cheating--the
occasional stolen handful of chocolate chips, or spoonful of honey, or
piece of rugelach or biscotti (we have such things around because of my
wife's work). I don't cheat much, though, because I've found that just
one such straying per day puts me right back into weight gain. But the
bulk of our diet is meat (beef, lamb and chicken) and fat, and eggs from
our chickens.

As far as running out of energy when weight lifting, I don't think it
takes a whole lot of carbohydrate to replenish your glycogen stores.
Todd Moody and some others on the list know more about that than I do.
And it doesn't matter whether those carbs come from high or low density
sources, as far as I know. Do you have a lot of experience with
weight-lifting? I don't know why low-carb veggies and a little fruit
wouldn't be plenty. It certainly works for me. I can do a heavy
whole-body workout in an hour or less, once or twice a week, without
running out of steam. And my strength and muscle size have been
increasing steadily over the past year on that regime, while the fat has
been going away just as steadily.

Hilary McClure
Danville, Vermont