On New Year's Eve I joined a friend at a soba (buckwheat noodle) shop
for traditional "otoshi koshi soba" - eating a bowl of soba to send out
the old year. A typical bowl has, I believe, about 60 gm of carbs and
about 370 calories.
This was after being on strict low-carb (20 carbs/day) for the past two
weeks and after losing 11 lb that way.
Instead of getting cravings though, I actually felt very full
afterwards. In fact, I didn't feel like eating anything for a good 8 or
9 hours. Even when we went to hatsumoude (the first shrine visit of the
year, after midnight) I wasn't tempted by all the food stands with high
or low carb offerings, like yakitori, grilled squid, etc.
Nicky also commented in this group: "I eat buckwheat noodles every
couple of months, as Pad Thai. A small bowlful does nothing nasty to my
blood sugar, doesn't cause cravings, etc, etc. Buckwheat isn't a wheat,
it's a relative of japanese knotweed!"
To me, the ONLY point of a low-carb diet is to control hunger so that I
don't overeat in general. But I think you also have to be calorie
conscious in order to achieve final goal weight. So I try, when
possible, to subsitute lower calorie low-carb items, such as chicken or
fish instead of red meat all the time. I would also use things like
butter buds to add butter flavor to broccoli rather than melting actual
butter on top. Things like that.
I am wondering, though, if regardless of theoretical carb count
(buckwheat noodles have a lot of carbs) if the fact that they don't
cause cravings means that they don't affect blood sugar the way some
carbs do and if so does that mean there is no reason not to treat them
as though they "acted like low carb foods" and eat them without
reservation, like I would eat a hamburger?
In the long run, if I snacked on a bowl of buckwheat noodles and really
felt full from that for a long time, I would lose more weight wouldn't
I? It's less calories than snacking on, say, cheese.
Maybe for each person each *particular food* item needs to be considered
before deciding whether is good or not on a low-carb (maybe better
termed "low blood sugar"?) diet.
A counter-example would be macadamia nuts. Those are "theoretically"
low-carb (though the data ranges all over the chart depending on where
you look), but if I eat them I get hungry for more, just like I had too
many bad carbs.
Maybe it's all much more "case-by-case" for each food item and not
strictly the number of carbs, per se. Maybe the "glycemic index"
approach is better for controlling hunger? The problem with that diet
though is that there are some ridiculous, obviously dangerous items that
are technically low GI as well, like chocolate eclairs and pudding!
Anyway, what do you think?
doug