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During my recent appearance on Good Morning America, host Chris Cuomo mentioned that he felt woozy when he first started a low-carb diet while on vacation in Jamaica. After talking to him, I'm pretty sure this happened for a couple of reasons. Find out what they are, and learn the other tricks to starting a low-carb diet so that you'll look great—and feel even better.

Low-Fat and Low-Carb Don't Mix

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Chris mentioned that he was eating a low-carb, low-fat diet. This is a common mistake. A good low-carbohydrate actually needs to be high in fat. After all, you still need energy. And that's exactly what fat is. By cutting back both carbs and fat, you'll be severely limiting the types of food you can eat, and will then have to rely mainly on protein. This often means you won't be eating enough calories, which will make you feel tired, but it's also not a very palatable diet—so it's typically not very pleasant for most people.

So the first key to following a low-carb diet is to eat plenty of fat. That doesn't mean to gorge on bacon and butter, but it does mean you can include those foods in your diet, provided they don't cause you to overeat. However, this isn't usually a problem when eating a lower carb diet because the fat they contain helps you feel full long after you eat.

For example, in one six-week study in our lab, men who followed a low-carb diet lost seven pounds of fat and gained two pounds of muscle—all while eating as much food as they wanted. In fact, because our goal in this study was to find out what happens to heart disease risk when you don't lose weight on a low-carb diet, we constantly encouraged these guys to eat more. Yet they still lost weight. What's more, the study participants' risk of heart disease went down significantly.

This is worth noting because many people have wrongly been led to believe that eating fat or simply eating a low-carb diet will lead to a heart attack. But the fact is, more than a dozen peer-reviewed studies published since 2003 show that a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet is more effective at reducing overall heart-disease risk than a high-carb, low-fat regimen. And each of these meal plans ranged from 50 percent to 70 percent of total calories from fat.