Welcome to Low Carb Love. My name is Terez, and this is my website. I started this site because I am passionate about living a Low Carb life.
It all started about 7 years ago now, when I started following a low carb lifestyle. And since then, I have spent a lot of that time building up my shopping hours, trawling the shelves trying to find things that I could eat and that were actually tasty at the same time. As you can imagine, 7 years ago, there wasn’t much.
I then started to experiment in the kitchen, to make some low carb alternatives of things that I used to love, like biscotti, chocolate cake, muffins, bread and many others. And, well, if I am to be honest, it was hardly a resounding success. I would take my wares into the office to share with my colleagues and proclaim that they “absolutely MUST try my gluten-free-sugar-free-low-carb biscotti“. I realised that these people were very kind, because they obliged knowingly every time, and slowly chewed on the dry morsels forced upon them. And once I was happy that they had had enough, I would ask for their feedback with my widest grin ever. Their invariable response would be: “so that was the gluten-free-sugar-free-low-carb biscotti? Is it also supposed to be taste-free?”.
I stopped taking samples.
But, I continued to experiment. And the great thing is that those same people would often comment on my health and the way I had maintained my weight-loss without pills, or injections or fad diets. They would envy my lunches of thick pieces of steak or salmon with salad drenched in olive oil or mayo. Eventually I was selling muesli, advising people on recipes, and where to find the cheapest and best almond flour, xyiltol, coconut oil… you name it! I was the local low carb dealer, I could hook you up, no problem.
And that is where we are today, I want to share my knowledge of low carb with you too, I am your dealer in the good stuff. I have experimented with most things when it comes to low carb, and I will continue to experiment and try new things. As long as the ultimate goal is health.
You’ll notice that I don’t spend too much time speaking about weight-loss or diets. Everything you will read on this site is focussed on “lifestyle” and “health”. That is because weight-loss isn’t achieved and maintained without health, and health isn’t achieved or maintained without a consistent healthy lifestyle.
I only gained that insight about 10 years ago, a year after I was diagnosed with anorexia. I’m getting ahead of myself, let me start from the beginning…
Why the aliens are responsible for my fat
As a child, I was always the big girl in class. My mom used to give me all of the feeble excuses… “It’s just puppy-fat my darling” or “You’ve just got big bones like Catherine Zeta-Jones”. Firstly, mom, the puppies should keep their fat for themselves, and secondly, as a gawky round-faced spectacled ten year old, I was nothing like graceful, curvy movie star Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Here’s a life truth. There are only two types of people. Those who as a child, teased other children. And those who grew up as the children who were teased. Now, I won’t hold it against you if you were the former, but if you were the latter like me, you know that the words hurt more than sticks and stones.
The one good thing about those words, was the way they would enliven my creativity. I was the thirteen year old, lying on her bed dreaming of how I was part of an alien experiment (this must’ve been because X-files was a hit at the time), that was testing my strength of character to withstand those tormenting taunts. If I passed the test, and only fought animosity with kindness (or just by blatantly ignoring the little brats), then they would beam me up to their space-ship, somewhere over Edenvale, Johannesburg, and would proceed to remove the outer casings of my podgy body. They would have to unscrew each area, starting with the lower legs. Once each casing had been removed, it would reveal a petite, little, slim, trim, beautiful me (not unlike Vanessa, the prettiest girl in school).
During my teenage years, after I had given up on the aliens, I tried every diet I could find. Weigh-less, weight-watchers, x-diet, cabbage soup diet, raw diet, acid alkaline balance diet, vegetarian diet, fasting… I tried all of the meal-replacements, and weight-loss supplements and pills you could find in clicks. And guess what? I lost weight! But, and a very big but (soon to be butt), because you know what I am going to say… within two weeks of being off of the such-and-such diet, the weight just reverse-lipo-suctioned itself back on my body.
Eighteen years old, Matric dance came and went. I don’t want to talk about it.
How being healthy led me to being anorexic
By the time I was nineteen, after spending 6 years bouncing on the proverbial weight-loss-up, weight-gain-down trampoline, I decided to take things into my own hands. I had read a few books on nutrition and already I was starting to see the light, in that what should be followed is something long-term, and the focus should be health. The problem was that my mouth was telling people that I was following a healthy lifestyle by eating only small helpings of fruit for breakfast and lunch, and veggies for dinner, and exercising like an athlete in between, but my brain was telling me that this was what I needed to do, to be the Kate Moss look-a-like I always thought I should be.
After losing 15kgs in a couple of months, I was rushed to hospital. The Doctors thought I had bulimia, because everyone around me could see that I was eating “healthily”, what they didn’t see was that it was extremely restrictive and layered with hours of energetic exertion.
Luckily for me I learnt my lesson quickly and knew that I had a problem. I had an unhealthy obsession with being healthy, and with my weight. And the truth lies in the word “obsession”. All of those years of dieting had taken up every area in my brain to think about how much I weighed and what I looked like.
The solution, was to not obsess. It’s the same as not thinking about a green rhinoceros. It didn’t work out very well. I tried a few more diets including Atkins, and that posed a huge problem for a serial dieter like me.
Now, the problem with the Atkins diet, was that I actually enjoyed it. I loved the food I was eating. What’s not to love when you can eat platefuls of meat, cream, butter and cheese? I began to have success and started losing weight, slowly, but consistently. I felt more energetic and alert, and had fewer colds and flus during winter. I won’t carry on, because this is beginning to sound like an advert. But, wait, there’s more… 😉
A year passed, and what started as a diet had become a lifestyle, I didn’t want to go back. I started to understand my body – every time I had a piece of white full-carb bread, or something full of wheat I would feel the effects on my sugar levels and I’d feel lethargic within minutes.
The past seven years haven’t always been easy, especially when I encountered people telling me that eating so much meat, cheese and fat was bad for me. Even my medical aid would rap me over the knuckles if I filled in their surveys truthfully (they have therfore taught me to not do this if I want the points).
The Lessons
Apart from the important lesson learned to fool Discovery and get more vitality points (I hope they’re not reading this) there are three even more important personal lessons from my journey that I wish to leave you with:
- Health is a lifestyle – it’s not something you do for a day or a week
- Health is THE goal – weight isn’t a problem if you’re lying on your death bed from diabetes or cardiovascular disease
- Every body is different – only you can tell what works and doesn’t work for your body. You’ll know, if you listen closely enough and if you’re true to yourself.
My story is a very personal one, and this is really the first time I have shared it publicly and in so much detail. I have shared it so that if it inspires just one person to make a positive healthy shift in their life, then I would’ve achieved something great. I would love to hear about your story. What have you been through to get to where you are today? What are some of the lessons you’ve learned?