About Low Carb Life

Hello, I'm Paul. I grew up in England in the 1980s when dietary fat was public enemy number one. Everything "healthy" was low-fat, and sugar was considered harmless — associated with energy, childhood, all the good things in life. Nobody was counting carbs. Nobody was questioning whether the advice was right.

After university and through my twenties and thirties, my weight steadily crept up. I was eating what I genuinely believed was a healthy diet — low-fat products, careful portion sizes, the standard British version of "eating well." It wasn't working, but I assumed the problem was me.

The books that changed everything

I'd heard of the Atkins diet in the early 2000s. The media mocked it relentlessly, and when news broke that Dr Atkins had died of a heart attack, that was enough for most people — including me — to dismiss it entirely. My fear of fat was deeply ingrained.

I tried plenty of diets over the years. None of them stuck, and my weight continued to climb. Then I stumbled across Dr Mark Hyman and the idea of food as medicine — that what you eat isn't just fuel, it's information your body acts on. That led me to his book The Blood Sugar Solution, which opened a door I haven't closed since.

It was Gary Taubes's The Case Against Sugar and Nina Teicholz's The Big Fat Surprise that really shifted my thinking. Reading those books felt like the ground moving under me. The evidence for what we'd all been told about fat and sugar wasn't what I thought it was.

Finally giving it a proper go

In 2018 I finally committed to low-carb eating. I cut sugar and refined carbohydrates right down, started Dave Asprey's Bulletproof Coffee in the mornings, and began eating real food — fatty cuts of meat, generous olive oil, full-fat everything — for the first time without guilt.

It felt strange at first. Wrong, even. Decades of conditioning don't disappear overnight. But within a few weeks, fat-adapted and no longer riding the blood sugar rollercoaster, something shifted. My weight started falling. I wasn't hungry all the time. I wasn't counting calories or starving myself. I just wasn't spiking my insulin every few hours, so my body could finally do what it was supposed to do.

That led me to explore fasting — 5:2 (as made famous by the late Dr Michael Mosley), time-restricted eating, 16:8, OMAD, and eventually extended water fasts. My friends are, by now, thoroughly tired of hearing about it.

Who this is for

I've come to believe that a significant proportion of the population — perhaps approaching half — are, to varying degrees, carbohydrate sensitive. Not everyone gains weight on a typical Western diet; some people genuinely can eat bread and pasta and stay effortlessly lean. But for many of us, insulin sensitivity and carbohydrate metabolism work differently, and the standard dietary advice actively works against us.

If you've tried eating "healthily" by conventional standards and found it doesn't move the needle — you're probably not doing it wrong. You might just be someone whose body responds better to fat than to carbs. That's not a character flaw. It's biology.

Low Carb Life exists for that group. Practical recipes designed for a UK kitchen, honest nutrition guides, and tools to help you understand what's actually happening in your body — without the evangelism and without the nonsense.

Where we're headed

This site is still growing. My goal is to build it into a genuinely useful UK resource — the kind of place I wish had existed when I was starting out. That means more recipes, deeper guides, and eventually tools that make low-carb living easier to navigate day-to-day, whether you're shopping at Tesco, eating out, or just trying to work out what to have for dinner on a Tuesday night.

For years I wanted to build this but never had the time — a demanding job, three young children, and the usual chaos of modern life kept getting in the way. It's taken a while, but it's here. I hope it's useful.

— Paul