Note that this rule doesn’t say anything about what you can or can’t eat. It also doesn’t say anything about how much you can eat. Rather the emphasis is on the timing of carbohydrate consumption — eating most of your carbohydrates over one relatively short time period of the day. You can eat a wider variety of food with the CC Diet compared to many other diet programs with the only requirement that you eat virtually all of your carbohydrates at one of your daily meals. You will find that this does not require as much discipline as you might expect because the low and steady insulin levels that you will have most of the time will moderate your appetite by unleashing your capacity to burn stored fat. In addition, your daily carbohydrate meal will tend to satiate your desire for carbs so you won’t feel deprived. The CC Diet provides enormous flexibility in the types of foods it allows. You don’t have to avoid fats or carbs or animal products. You can eat these foods — every day if you’d like — but there is a special rule for carbohydrates: you can’t eat them at every meal. Although the CC Diet requires that you concentrate your carbohydrate foods and eat them at one time of the day, it does not have to be the same time every day. It could be at lunch one day and at dinner the next depending on business, personal or social needs. Another advantage of the CC Diet is its lack of rigidity. It is not a diet which requires constant and daily compliance. We are all of us human and we all fall off the dietary wagon from time to time. Obviously the CC Diet will work best the more often it is followed but occasional lapses will not undo its effectiveness. This is in contradistinction to, say, a strict low carbohydrate diet where, if one deviates and eats some carbohydrates, ketosis ends and hunger returns.
All of the calories you eat can be divided into three types: proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Technically alcohol is a fourth, separate type of calorie, but for our purposes, since alcoholic beverages share the ability of carbohydrate to block fat burning. We will regard alcohol as a subtype of carbohydrate. Hence, on a CC diet your consumption of alcoholic beverages should be confined to the time period of your main carbohydrate meal — slightly before, slightly after, or during this meal.
Foods that come from animal sources such as meat, poultry and eggs tend to contain relatively small amounts of carbohydrates. Plant-derived foods such as vegetables, fruits and grains, on the other hand, are often rich in carbohydrates. Fruits tend to be high in carbohydrates. Vegetables that grow up above ground such as salad greens, broccoli, cauliflower, and kale tend to be low in carbohydrates while belowground vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, turnips, and parsnips are often high in carbohydrates. Carbohydrate foods are unique in that they have a tendency to raise blood glucose more quickly than other types of calories. Sustained elevations in the level of glucose in the bloodstream will raise insulin levels which in turn can create a host of problems including weight gain, diabetes, and an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. When carbohydrates are eaten at multiple occasions during the day, the body experiences multiple elevations in insulin which precludes fat-reduction —the exact opposite of what we are trying to achieve.
We need to consider the three broad categories of carbohydrates (and alcohol):
A recent scientific paper out of Israel by Dr. Sofer and colleagues showed that when most of the carbohydrates for the day are eaten at one meal (dinner), there was greater weight loss as well as other health benefits.[i] This confirms an experiment done twenty years ago by Richard and Rachel Heller, authors of the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet, that showed the frequency with which carbohydrates were consumed during the day was the key. Many people will find it most convenient to have their carbohydrate meal for supper although you are free to switch it around and have your carbohydrate meal for breakfast or lunch. If you have a high carbohydrate breakfast — oatmeal, pancakes, pastries, bagels, fruit, etc. or a high carbohydrate lunch — sandwich with bread, pasta, potatoes, etc. — you will want to have low carbohydrate meals for the other two meals of the day. Carbohydrate Concentration means having the overwhelming majority of your carbs during one meal.
Here is an example of a sample day where breakfast and lunch are low carb and supper is your carbohydrate meal.
2 eggs with breakfast meat or
Protein shake prepared with no-added sugar soy milk or hemp milk
Salad with tuna, salmon, chicken and/or
Vegetable beef/chicken soup (no noodles)
Salad — ad lib
Protein (fish, poultry, meat) — ad lib
Vegetables — ad lib
Carbohydrates and alcohol — ad lib
Weigh yourself every week. Aim to lose one or 2 pounds a week until you reach your goal weight. If you are not losing any weight (or gaining weight) there are several things you can do. Drink one or two glasses of water mixed with psyllium husk (available at health food stores) 15 to 30 minutes before beginning your carbohydrate meal. This will fill your stomach and likely reduce the calories you ingest with that meal. Eating a big low-calorie green salad before a main meal can be similarly helpful.. If you’re still not losing weight you mayl need to decrease the amount of carbohydrates you consume and you should consider choosing lower fat cuts of meat and reduced fat dairy products and minimizing use of added oils.
In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of carbohydrate concentration and the CC Diet — and to confirm its links to caloric restriction — we would like to invite you to participate in a simple experiment. We want to test the hypothesis that sustained adherence to carbohydrate concentration will not only cause you to lose weight but will enable you to achieve a permanent reduction in your daily calorie intake, even after your weight equibrates at a lower, healthier level — and without calorie counting.
If this is correct, not only will you achieve the many health benefits associated with greater leanness but you may also achieve some of the healthy-aging benefits associated with calorie restriction or intermittent fasting in animal studies..
In order to perform this experiment, we ask you to estimate your caloric intake averaged over three days, both before you begin your carbohydrate concentrated diet and after six months; of course, you can estimate it at any intervals you want on the diet. We suggest you keep a food diary and use the caloric figures found at the excellent website www.fatsecret.com. Then fill out the simple form including your height, weight, waist measurement, gender and year of birth. You can enter data as often as you like, but we would like to know how you are doing at 6 months. You can let us know using our form or ask us to remind you to let us know.
The CC Diet is simple to follow, palatable and flexible. It allows you to eat the foods you love while shedding excess pounds and optimizing your health. The problem is that not enough people know about this diet. By participating in this simple experiment you will be able to help obtain the necessary scientific foundation to establish the CC Diet broadly.
In order to spread the message of the CC Diet we will need to enlist the support of conventional medical practitioners as well as public health officials. These people are scientists and scientific documentation will be required In order to convince them as to the value of this program. The rationale for most popular diets is based on little more than what is referred to as “anecdotal evidence.” They are based on anecdotes or individual stories rather than scientific studies. Most new diet programs rely on relatively thin evidence such as individual testimonials and before-and-after photos, as proof for how well they work.
The excellent scientific study by Sofer mentioned above confirms that distribution of carbohydrates is critical to many health parameters. But it was done under conditions of caloric restriction with both the CC diet group and the control group under substantial caloric restriction conditions. We want to establish, with our experiment, the additional fact that CC diets will lead to sustained reductions in weight and caloric intake without regard to enforced regimes or constant high degrees of will power. We consider our diet to be appetite-mediated rather than a white-knuckle diet.
The world is currently faced with epidemics of obesity and degenerative disease as well as a health budget crisis. These crises can’t wait. They threaten the health of both adults and children and have been directly linked to the ever-increasing expenditures on health care which currently consume 17 percent of our GNP.
The need for diet programs that can help is urgent. We invite you to try the Carbohydrate-Concentration Diet for yourself and help further this important work by participating in our experiment and tracking the changes in your own health.
P.S. We would also like to know — and you will find it interesting and easy to determine — what your degree of caloric restriction is compared to what we call “reference man”, a person of your same height, and with a similar exercise pattern, but with a body mass index (BMI) of 22. In others words, are you eating more or less than a person who is much like you but very fit in terms of body mass index. This can be easily computed at a website. For more background see the FAQ. The BMI of 22 was chosen as a standard because it is right in the middle of the “optimal” range for BMI.
Measuring your calorie consumption relative to “reference man” will help us compare how well this diet is working compared to caloric restriction regimes used in animal experimentation, or to the calorie restriction achieved by Okinawans in the middle years of the last century, and it will give you a better idea of the degree of calorie restriction-mediated health benefit you are likely to achieve with carb concentrated dieting. You can read more about this in different parts of the website, especially in the FAQs under Carb Concentrated diets.
We would also like you to save the blood reports from your doctor visits before and after you embark on carb concentrated dieting — so that, if we move forward with this project and decide to examine blood reports, and if you wanted to share them with us, we could use them. For the moment, however, we are not ready to make use of them.
Drafted by Dr. Terry Grossman as a more reader-friendly opening than had previously appeared on the website. This article included editing contributions from Stone and McCarty. For a historical summary of how the effort to advance this diet has proceeded so far, see Recent History of Low-Carb Dieting.
[i] Sofer S et al. Greater Weight loss and hormonal changes after 6 months diet with carbohydrates eaten mostly at dinner. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2011 Apr 7. [Epub ahead of print]