Today started with an Atkins bar at about 8am. At Noon, I ate a pint of the mock potato salad. Then at 3pm I had another bar.

I did feel rather dizzy during the day, but I attributed this to my getting maybe 4 hours of sleep the night before.

It was when I got home that all hell broke loose.

I had 2 bowls of the beef stroganoff with sour cream, which is really filling. Then I had some slices of kielbasa – at least a half-dozen. Then finished it off with a half-dozen slices of some cheddar cheese and 2 squares of the Lindt chocolate.

Still in ketosis – the stick went dark. Personally, I don’t obssess on the color – if it turns a little bit, you’re in ketosis – the color has more to do with how much water you’ve drank and how efficiently your body is burning ketones – neither of which I concern myself with.

I’ve also been drinking some 4C drink mix – they use Splenda instead of Crystal Light, which uses Nutrasweet. I haven’t tried their 2Go products – I buy the tubs. Of the flavors they offer in this container type, I like the Pomegranate best – the fruit punch is a kid-taste and the lemonade is just so pedestrian. I like the Crystal Light Orange stuff, and 4C apparently makes something similar, but not in a tub. Oh well…

Today’s temptation: Mc Donalds. I get a call on the way home to pick up fries and chicken nuggets, so I ride home with the bags next to me. Then home, there’s chips, cookies, and noodles seemingly everywhere I look. 

I resisted, though. Perhaps this is why I scarfed down all the low carb stuff I did.

But this isn’t a race, nor a diet, really – it’s a lifestyle. I need to restrict my diet like a diabetic does – as I’m probably going to end up being one if I don’t – or as a vegetarian, or a devout member of the Muslim or Jewish faith would. 

This morning weight is 205.4 still down 8.6 lbs. from the start. 

Impressive for some, but for me, an indication I really let myself go this time, and my internal ’set point’ shifted higher. Oh well, I’m in this for the long haul, and the trend it in the right direction.

Here we go again…I got some food to use up, I put it together in a spontaneous manner, and it comes out edible – yummy even.

Having bought way too many peppers at the farmer’s market, I took 4 of these, chopped them up, then added a few somewhat aged tomatoes – still good, though on their way to tomato decrepitude.

I took these veggies and put them in a frying pan sprayed with Pam, threw in some olive oil, and began cooking them on high.

The nasty spitting of the oil let me know that perhaps it was a bit too high, so I lowered it to medium and threw in 2 eggs. I mixed this up, then added some soy sauce, fresh ground pepper, and sesame oil.

Sesame oil is an off-the-beaten-track kind of ingredient for most. It’s a very flavorful oil that give much of Chinese cooking an extra ‘oomph’. I recommend getting some to try, at least.

Anyhow, the peppers were starting to get soft, and I took a taste. Hmm – not enough salt. In went in some fresh ground. Took a taste…perfect.

The result is a very ‘wet’ concoction – something that would go great over rice or noodles. This works well for the rest of the family who require their starches. I eat it with a spoon.

The taste was great – I’ll definitely make this again. I would probably change the process and cook the eggs first, as the eggs seemed to disintegrate – which didn’t impact the taste, but wasn’t visually pleasing.

Give it a go – and try the sesame oil – it’s worth the try.

I’d say this is safe for induction if you eat this in moderation. It refrigerates well, so it can span the next couple of days as leftovers.

OK, this time I think I did it.  I Googled it, and NOBODY has used “Carbin’ Footprint” as far as I can tell.  I’m copyrighting it here and now, so if you want to use the term legally, send me an email and we’ll talk.

So anyway, I was thinking about how it’s been over a third of a year now that I’ve been eating really low carb, and how it compares to when I started Atkins in 2003.  I was packing my wife’s breakfast this morning and I ate three raspberries from the container.  That’s probably 98% of the fruit I’ve eaten since the first of the year.  I’d have to say that, even though I’m not logging my daily food intake anymore, I haven’t really changed anything much.  My “Carbin’ Footprint” is pretty much what it has been for over four months.  If I had to guess, my daily net carbs are likely between 20 and 30 grams. 

I haven’t continued to lose weight after the first 8-point-something pounds, probably because I insist on maintaining my usual pattern of alcohol consumption.  I’d been down twice that much during the dry period in March, but the piper has to be paid somehow.  I’m giving up worrying about the weight loss now, though, as long as I stabilize somewhat.  Who knows, with the warmer weather coming, I might burn a few more calories than I have been throughout the winter. 

Speaking of warmer weather, for a lot of us that means spending more time outdoors, attending family outings, preparing dishes to take to backyard parties and such.  Sometimes it might seem difficult to keep our Carbin’ Footprint small while still providing something that everyone else is willing to eat.  It doesn’t have to be that way!  You also don’t have to deny yourself a lot of what’s being served by others if you think about it.  But you DO have to think about it.  Here are a few things to keep in mind while you’re getting ready to join in the festivities:

• Grilling means meat, for the most part.  This is great for low carbers!  Try to concentrate on pure meat, like steak and hamburgers.  Don’t be shy of things like hot dogs and sausages, but do keep in mind that they are processed meats, and can contain sugars.  Ribs are usually dripping in barbeque sauce loaded with high fructose corn syrup; if you are entertaining others, you can dry rub a rack of ribs, refrigerate them overnight, grill them to brown them, then cut them up and finish cooking them in the oven in a low carb BBQ sauce like Dinosaur brand.
• Buns are not a requirement.  I’ve been eating sliced-up hot dogs and sausages for five years, nothing wrong with that and it doesn’t require any effort on your host’s part.  If you want to be proactive, bring along some small low carb tortilla wraps for yourself.
• Condiments are fun, but can be high carb.  Regular catsup and sweet relish are made with sugar.  Chopped onion is full of sugar.  Stick with mustard, which is typically low carb.  If you must have catsup, think about bringing your own low carb version (Heinz makes it).  In the same vein, how about making your own relish by throwing some dill pickles in the food processor?
• Sides abound at family get-togethers.  I used to eat platefuls of wonderful potato salad and coleslaw years back.  The good news is there are delicious work-arounds for these high carb dishes!  I make a terrific low carb coleslaw dressing that my regular carb family BEGS for every summer party, and it’s super easy to throw together: put one and a half cups of mayonnaise in a very large bowl, add two tablespoons each of sour cream, white vinegar, and Splenda, then add a teaspoon each of black pepper and salt.  Mix well, and then stir in a bag of shredded coleslaw (or shred some cabbage and carrots if you’re willing), blend well and toss in the fridge for a couple hours.  You can make a low carb faux potato salad using purple-top turnips too, and you can Google this yourself for recipes since there are so many out there.
• Snacks will be everywhere.  You just won’t be able to avoid being around things like potato chips, corn curls, and crackers.  If you are able, you can always bring a bag of fried pork rinds for yourself to munch on.  Sometimes there will be plenty of the other offerings that go with the above mentioned items: crackers often come with cheese and pepperoni; dips are usually accompanied by veggie platters.  If you’re the one serving, think about guacamole, which is naturally low carb.
• Beverages!  Watch out for sugar, watch out for carbs.  Diet sodas are usually available now wherever you go.  If you’re serving beer, you probably have your own stash of low carb brew (Mich Ultra is still popular), but if you’re being served, try to stick to “light” versions which are typically pretty low in net carbs (5 or 6) anyway (just remember, things add up!)  Say yes to white wine, say no to wine coolers and other bottled flavored concoctions that are sweetened with sugar.  If straight alcohol is available, try cocktails made with non-sugar mixers (watch out for things like iced tea and cranberry juice which are popular but usually high carb).  Of course, don’t overdo it if you have to drive later.
• Someone always manages to bring dessert for after all that food.  Cookies, cakes, gelatin-based desserts, ice cream.  Hopefully you won’t be tempted.  If you somehow are, remember all your efforts up to this point and be strong.  Are there any nuts around, maybe?  If you brought some things of your own to the party, maybe you were thinking of this moment when you tossed in that bag of sugar-free chocolates!

Wow, I’ve got a hankerin’ now for some picnic food!  Hope this has given you some ammunition for the coming months.  If you have any tips of your own, please share your comments.  Have fun, eat well, be a low carb example, and keep your Carbin’ Footprint small!

Last night as I was going through the grocery store sale papers in preparation for this week’s shopping trip, it struck me just how simplified my life has become since going low carb. 

One of my favorite things to do is shop.  Whether for food, or electronic gear, or something someone asked me to find a good deal on for them, it’s the thrill of the hunt that gets me every time.  Years ago, when I took over the task of doing the grocery shopping for my wife and myself each week, I learned that the best way to get the most out of our food budget was to “cherry pick,” that is, to take advantage of the best advertised deals at each of several local stores rather than shop one store exclusively.  Many people don’t want to spend the extra time it takes to scrutinize the weekly ads, figure out where to get what, and then make stops at more than one place.  For me, it’s a game; clip the coupons, find the best prices, plot out the route, bring home the spoils.

It was more of a big deal years back when the world was our oyster, food-wise.  Not much was out of bounds, and there was so much to choose from.  Going through the sale papers required a sharp eye, good memory, and the analytical skills of a financial planner.  When other shoppers were, for example, buying boxed potato side dishes for $1.39, I was stocking up on the 99 cent sales and getting dollars off with coupons to boot.  It seems like a small victory perhaps, but you add them all up and they amount to a substantial savings each week. 

How things have changed.  Most of the pictures of items in the ads get glossed over now as “not applicable.”  One chain’s weekly circular is very quick to go through since it now mostly consists of things like meal ideas, recipes, home furnishings, and overpriced high-end food items.  The other chains’ ads require more careful examination, but they are still easier to go through than in the past.  What catches my eye now is meat, poultry, seafood, certain vegetables and fruits, and staple items.

Here’s an example of what I would have been interested in before 2003, and now ignore: ice cream, frozen dinners, boxed pasta salad mix, orange juice, cookies, baked goods, french fries, frozen pizza, frozen waffles and pancakes, pie, garlic toast, yogurt, margarine, milk, chicken nuggets, pasta, canned fruit, rice, sugar, flour, cereal, brownie mix, beans, potato chips, snacks, crackers, fresh corn, grapes, pineapple, bananas, potatoes, apples, oranges, turnovers.  Wow.  I just breeze through that sale paper and hit the high points: Porterhouse steak for $6 a pound, bagged salad BOGO (Buy One Get One free), split chicken breast for $1 a pound, broccoli for 99 cents a pound, etc.

Not that there aren’t low carb versions of some of the above that we consume, but sales on those items are few and far between.  This week there is a sale on Breyer’s Carb Smart ice cream bars at one store, so there’s a few cartons that will go in the freezer.  Dannon, the only low carb yogurt maker I’m aware of, still makes their Carb and Sugar Control  version that I can get in one of two flavors still offered at one store.  Calorie Countdown  dairy beverage is still made by Hood and still available in the fat-free version at that same supermarket as the yogurt.  We rely on Dreamfields pasta (5 digestible grams of carbohydrates per serving) to be able to enjoy the splendors of Italian eating, as long as we’re willing to spend the money necessary to pair it with a low carb sauce (check out the net carbs in most of the popular brands and then look at the expensive ones, you’ll be stunned).

So what does a trip to the store entail now?  There are only a few fruit and vegetable offerings that need to be considered.  I know where I’m going to be buying the meat and seafood based on the sales.  Where I spend my time lollygagging now is the cheese department; as I’ve said before, this is the low-carber’s candy store.  A couple containers of parmesan crisps, a half pound of good prosciutto, butter, fresh eggs, frozen omelets, low-carb frozen entrees, and whatever cleaning supplies and other staple items I’ve planned for because of sales and coupons.

We had a departmental meeting at the office during the week; being a working meeting, lunch was provided.  As we waited in line at the buffet of offerings, I mentioned that my favorite part of these events was seeing just what, if anything, was available for me to eat.  As I went into “Crazy Uncle Larry” mode, some of my cohorts mentioned that they tried Atkins but couldn’t manage to get past the first two weeks.  Another said that it just didn’t seem sensible to be on a diet that excluded entire food groups. 

These issues seem to be hardships for many.  For me, it makes things so simple.  Once, long ago, it felt like I was having choices taken away from me.  Now I view it as having pressure removed from my life.  Thoreau was a big proponent of simplification:

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!  We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.

With that, I take my leave of you for the while, and go to do my work: Shoppin’!  See you next time.

I’ve come to recognize the sad simple fact that I will never in my life have an original thought. I thought “Graze Anatomy” was pretty clever; apparently, so have a lot of other people (Google it and see). Oh well, on with the post…

For a variety of reasons, I decided it was time to look into grass-fed meat. LCC had written some things a while back about it, and when I’d mentioned in a post that I was interested in moving toward a higher meat content diet in the belief that meat basically contains everything needed for healthy subsistence (as intimated in Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories), one of our readers, Dave Dixon, advised me of the following in a reply:

Be careful about assuming that eating nothing but meat provides all of the nutrients you need. This may not be true for grain-fed meat, which is known to contain less of most micronutrients than grass-fed meat, sometimes a lot less. Hunter-gatherers also eat the entire animal, preferring organs to muscle meat. The organs often have much higher micronutrient density than the muscle meat.

I did some early research a couple months ago, and then investigated further a couple weeks ago when I was ready to buy something.  Where I live, there aren’t any real opportunities for buying locally farmed grass-fed meat, so if I want it, I have to get it via the internet.  There are a LOT of sites online where you can buy grass-fed meat.  According to some estimates, the number of U.S. farms producing grass-fed meat has grown from about 40 in the late 1990’s to over 1,000 today (but they all don’t sell over the internet).  I spent a bit of time checking out packages and prices and finally decided to start with American Grassfed Beef in Missouri.  One of the many packages they offer contained a selection of steaks that appealed to me: four 8 ounce cuts each of tenderloin, ribeye, and strip steak, and eight 4 ounce ground beef burgers.  I added a couple sirloin butt steaks for a total of $175, and if you spend over $150, they throw in a 2 pound chub of ground beef.  Orders over $50 get free ground shipping, but you can get air freight for an additional charge.

Over the previous weekend after I’d placed the order, I was at Wegmans and picked up a package of fresh bison sirloin steaks for the heck of it.  Although the package made no mention of it, I assumed  these huge animals would naturally be pastured.  I got into a conversation with one of the meat department workers who told me the Black Angus meat they sell is grass-fed.  I’d asked there about this before and was told that Wegmans does not sell grass-fed meat.  Looking at the label on one of the Black Angus packages, it did say that no hormones or antibiotics were used, but it also stated there are no “animal by-products” in the “feed.”  Wanting to get to the bottom of it, I went home and did some more research and found that Wegmans gets their Black Angus meat from Meyer Natural Angus.  Meyer’s website declares that:

Our cattle are raised on a strictly vegetarian diet. They are fed only natural feed and rations, such as pasture grass, hay, grains and legumes, and then finished on a corn-based diet for true corn-fed flavor.

This points up what was stated in a CBS news report about grass-fed meat a couple years ago: 

With so many producers rushing into the market, the definition of grass-fed varies.  Some meat is sold as grass-fed when grass is only part of the animal’s diet.  “In the eye of the consumer, grass-fed is tied to open pasture-raised animals, not confinement or feedlot animals,” said Patricia Whisnant. “In the consumer’s eye, you’re going to lose the integrity of what the term ‘grass-fed’ means.” 

(Whisnant is the operator of American Grassfed Beef and also heads up the American Grassfed Association, by the way.)  The report also stated that all beef cattle graze on grass at the beginning of their lives, but the general difference is that grass-fed beef herds graze their entire life in pastures, while conventionally produced cattle spend the last three or four months of their lives being fattened with corn or other grains in feedlots.

So, if you’re looking into purchasing grass-fed meat, you’re going to have to do your homework to make sure you’re getting what you want.  That bison I bought?  It was delicious.  But it wasn’t grass-fed as I’d assumed.  I checked out the website of Great Range Brand Bison, the producer of Rocky Mountain Natural Meat, and found these animals are grain-fed.  They show a nice photo of a herd of bison out on the range, so I suppose, like the beef cattle mentioned earlier, the bison also start their lives grazing in the pasture.

My box of meat from American Grassfed arrived last Thursday, right on time.  The carton was like a mini-freezer, and although the package of dry ice included had melted, the meat was frozen solid.  Each item was nicely vacuum packed and neatly labeled.  We left out a four-pack of the burger patties (which took two days to thaw in the fridge) and had them for dinner over the weekend, adding bacon and guacamole.  They tasted just great, and I can’t wait to try the steaks.

Buying meat this way is by no means inexpensive.  My order averaged nearly $16 a pound, and a good chunk of the package by weight was ground beef, which I’m used to buying for $2 a pound on sale at Wegmans (90% lean).  I certainly can’t afford to eat this grade of meat on a regular basis.  To be fair, I’m more of a steak eater than a roast eater, and there are less expensive packages that include roasts and such that go a lot farther for a dollar (they’re sometimes grouped by the sellers in what they call “family packages.”  It’s still an expensive venture to explore, but there must be people out there doing it or there wouldn’t be such an explosion in the number of farms trying to meet the need.  It is possible that demand may shrink in the wake of what the economy is going through at the time.

When I get through some of the steaks, I’ll let you all know what my thoughts are about the whole shebang.  In the meantime, I’ll tell you something as long as you promise to keep it a secret: At these prices, I’m NOT serving any of this to my cook-out guests!

I’m always amazed and impressed at the number of people out there in cyberspace whose search engine queries are about what one experiences when starting Atkins or some other carbohydrate-restrictive diet.  It usually results in a high number of daily page reads of a post LCC wrote last August.  I tend to forget about those strange feelings one typically has during the first week of induction, although at the time, it can be unnerving and mysterious to someone who isn’t expecting it.  I’d read a couple things in 2003 on the Atkins website about having odd feelings as your body switches over from using its usual “syrup” (my term) for fuel and has to get used to running on ketones, so I wasn’t completely in the dark.  I also wasn’t hit as hard as some people are, from what I’ve seen in blog posts.  The feelings shouldn’t last too long (two weeks maximum), and when the body has become accustomed to its new operating system, things should work just fine from there on out.

That there are so many daily inquiries about these topics means that a lot of people out there are perhaps seriously considering low carb as a way to reduce their weight.  I hope they are also realizing from the reading they’re doing that this is not a diet, per se, but a change in the way one lives one’s life.  It isn’t a very difficult way to eat, although it may seem restrictive when one considers most of the commercial food and beverage products available are to be avoided.  Dining with others or dining out means having to say no to certain items, but this should not be a reason for avoiding those events or feeling uncomfortable during them.  The plethora of edible things our society has come to regard as typical fare has led to over-consumption of unhealthy foods, and the results of this should remain foremost in the mind of the low carber.  I recommend that the low carb inductee obtain a copy of science journalist Gary Taubes’ book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, and read it from cover to cover to gain an immediate appreciation for the many fantastic things they are going to be doing with regard to their health.

It’s a good time to be starting low carb, even though it isn’t as big a news story as it was a few years ago during the huge Atkins boom of the early 2000’s.  Not that restricted-carbohydrate diet plans are new concepts; they’ve been around in one form or another for over 150 years.  But with the advent of the blogosphere, so many low carb adherents are putting their own insights out on the internet that our community has become its own best friend, helping others who are just starting, and supporting those of us who have changed our lives for the better by living low carb.  The internet is a heck of a resource whether you’re simply looking for a low carb recipe or if you’re trying to find information about how to help encourage more people to learn about the benefits of this nutritional approach.  We don’t have a blog roll on our site, and maybe it’s time to install one (I’ll talk to the boss).  One of the easiest ways to jump to other sources of information and personal reflection is to click on blog roll links.  (Low Carb Confidential owes a lot of hits to being on other folks’ rolls, and we thank all of you who are responsible.) 

So, if you’re new to low carb (or just curious) and have stumbled across this post in your search, welcome.  Look around, read as much as you can, visit some blogs, subscribe to some by email or RSS feeds.  Ask questions if you have them and can’t find answers by just searching.  There are a lot of smart and knowledgeable people out there who are more than happy to help.  Whether you’re confused about a low carb issue or are just looking for some motivation during a tough patch, let us know.  We’re here for you.

“Listen to me, LISTEN to me!  I’M NOT CRAZY!”

I woke from a dream just a few hours ago and, after contemplating for a while, a concept struck me that is so bizarre that it might just be possible.  I was so excited about getting it down on paper (well, this white stuff on the monitor, anyway) that I was restless the rest of the night and couldn’t wait to get out of bed and onto the computer.

The tail end of this dream had me working in some sort of factory with production lines.  I don’t remember what was being manufactured, but it reminded me of the book printing and binding factory I used to work at as a teenager.  Mister Spock (that’s right, the Vulcan) was my line manager, and at some point I was being asked to try a piece of one of his pies, as he was quite the baker.  (Apparently the Vulcan credo, IDIC, had changed to mean ‘Infinite Destruction from Infinite Carbohydrates.’)  Although I balked at first, my coworkers wore me down.  I gazed longingly at the open pie oozing the alien’s specialty, Cherry-Apple-Orange filling.  I ate a piece, and then had seconds.  It was wonderful.  And then I woke and felt guilty and had this epiphany.

I weigh myself every morning.  A lot of people say not to.  David Brown, a regular LCC reader and erudite responder, advised me a short time ago in a reply to one of my week-long daily analyses that so many things are going on in the human body on a daily basis that it’s impossible to anticipate what one’s weight will be at a moment in time based solely on the previous day’s nourishment.  I believe him, but I still perform this daily ritual anyway because it helps to keep me from becoming complacent about what I’m eating and drinking and how it will or won’t affect my weight.

That being said, if you’re a daily weigher like me, you must have at some point wondered why, after a not so particularly “foody” (for lack of a better term) day, you gained an unlikely amount of weight, and after days where you’d been less than conscientious about what you were ingesting, you wound up losing weight.  What could the reasons possibly be?

Here’s where it starts to get a little weird, but stay with me.  We’ve lately been bandying about this concept of insulin secretion as a result of seeing food, smelling food, thinking about food, even eating things that don’t have carbohydrates but that perhaps fool the body into thinking they do based simply on how they taste.  So what if, just what if, during the night, while we’re dreaming, our dreams are driving our pancreas and other organs to secrete insulin and hormones based on what we’re dreaming about? 

Let’s say you’re dreaming about eating, and it doesn’t matter what it is; aren’t you really just thinking about eating while in a subconscious state?  Isn’t it possible that your body will react physiologically in the same way as it would if you were awake?  So, instead of burning calories from fat depots for fuel during the long night, you’re conserving those depots and adding to them with the foodstuffs you recently took in.  Conversely, how often have you dreamt about something involving great physical stress or some kind of strenuous activity and woke to find yourself hot and sweating?  Your body was obviously going through some internal machinations to mimic the physiological effects of motion all the time you were just lying there in bed.  (There’s a further twist to this whole concept I just thought of that I may explore some other day: that our dreams are driven by what’s going on physiologically during our sleeping hours rather than the other way around.)

If this dream state cause-and-effect concept is even possible, is there a way to control it?  How do you keep from dreaming about eating?   Can you somehow encourage your mind to subconsciously put you through a grueling nightly workout?  Somebody out there will probably suggest some sort of hypnotic process or some other mind conditioning would work.

Before you consider me some sort of whacked-out crackpot, just think about it all for a bit.  And let me add this one thought: I had a not-too-heavy day of eating yesterday, and only 20 net grams of carbs, yet I woke this morning to weigh OVER TWO POUNDS MORE THAN YESTERDAY and I KNOW for a FACT that it was because of that damned Mister Spock’s Cherry-Apple-Orange pie!

Alright, now that I’ve got your attention…

Seen anything resembling the above post title in any magazine ads or infomercials lately?  Any two-page spreads in your newspaper’s Sunday coupon section with bikini-clad babes and skinny dudes holding the waistband of their old fat pants out two feet from their abdomen with giant blurbs claiming that you (yes, YOU, tubbo!) can lose up to 80 pounds or more and trim away 18″ of unsightly fat in just SIX WEEKS!!!? 

Where are they, these commercial low carb weight loss ventures?  In a world filled with Jenny Craigs and Weight Watchers and Nutrisystems, where are the CarbWatchers and L.C.Megalosses?

Those of us living low carb the way it should be done know it works.  Surely, a commercial program would be a certain success, and it probably wouldn’t need as much fine print (“results shown in this ad are not typical; your personal results may vary significantly”) and it wouldn’t have to include caveats like, “when combined with the recommended physical exercise program (see booklet and video enclosed).”

There are LOADS of books out there with scads of weight loss plans of every type.  Every magazine with women as its demographic target has some sort of amazing new weight loss secret splayed across its cover each and every month (I’ve been looking while I’m standing in line at the supermarket, so prove me wrong).  You can even go online and sign up with eDiets.com or dietwatch.com (to name two) and get a personalized weight loss program for a fee.

The South Beach Diet venture has probably come the closest to pseudo-low-carb commercial success of all the low carb plans.  I’ve eaten a few of their frozen products that had fit into my OWL lifestyle, but for the most part, the net carb counts are too high for doing true low carb.  But while they have plenty of products out on the shelves, there isn’t any commercialized program like Nutrisystem that hawks them AND gets you to pay good money to be included in their enterprise as a member.  Weight Watchers, on the other hand, was doing fabulously well even before they came out with their own line of commercially-available food products; WW works, so it’s said, not because their plan is any better or worse than any other diet plan, but because adherents stay with it longer due to the “social” nature of the program (group meetings, support advocates, etc.).

In the heyday of the last real low carb boom, Atkins Inc. was selling frozen meal “programs” out of their catalog, delivered to your door for what I thought was a pretty penny and out of reach for most folks.  A lot of their other products were more reasonably priced, though.  Their website had lots of success stories and testimonials, and I wonder if things might have been different if they’d taken the slightly lower road and went the way of the two-page color spread with bikini babes and skinny dudes wearing fat pants.  Maybe the Atkins Nutritional Approach would today be as powerful a force as some of the other programs.

Personally, I’d like to see CarbWatchers ads sometime soon.  I’d like to see little logos on hundreds of food product packages proclaiming the number of “CarbWatcher Points” in them.  Wouldn’t it be great to read that some glitzy celebrity who wanted to lose a few pounds became a spokesperson for CarbWatchers after dropping four dress sizes doing low carb?

I had this thought yesterday as I was sitting in a department meeting watching the secretary chew her gum like a cow strung out on crystal meth. 

 We’ve been rolling this concept around in the blog that it isn’t just food that stimulates weight gain from the secretion of insulin as a result of sugar in the blood.  Taubes’ book, Good Calories, Bad Calories mentioned insulin secretion as a response to sensitory triggers prior to actual ingestion of food, essentially meaning that smelling, tasting, seeing, or even thinking about eating can cause your pancreas to jump the gun.  LCC recently cited an article claiming that artificial sweeteners can have a negative effect on weight loss, and though the article didn’t specifically say there was a measured increase in insulin following the use of artificial sweeteners in the test subjects, there were mentions of links to metabolic syndrome and confusion of the system as to assessment of calorie intake.

I remember reading quite some time ago that chewing gum is actually bad for you because one of the things the body does in response to eating is to have the stomach secrete digestive acids.  However, if you don’t have any actual food in your stomach for the acids to work on, guess what?  It goes after your stomach lining. 

Personally, I never really saw any attraction in chewing gum.   It’s one of those things, like smoking, that has no actual purpose, yet someone developed the products, got their use into mainstream society, and here we are with ingrained habitual use of purposeless, and in some cases dangerous, articles.  I’ve watched people who chew gum, and they tend to have this kind of blank stare thing going on, as if their mind is being anesthetized.  They don’t seem to have knowledge or conscious control of what’s going on between the nose and the chin, it just happens automatically (even to the point where some of them blow bubbles and pop them without realizing it, like the secretary I mentioned earlier). 

Many years back, I read a book about self-improvement, and I was able to overcome many of my own little habits that I never even recognized until they were pointed out.  There’s an underlying nervousness in people who have to fidget and be otherwise occupied physically instead of just maintaining a calm demeanor, but if one can recognize and then work toward controlling those impulses, they can be eliminated from one’s behavior.  Chewing gum is one indication of this nervousness, and if you’re observant, you’ll probably notice other nervous habits of chewers, like pen-cap-snapping, foot tapping, and more.  In case you’re a chewer, or someone who has some other habits of nervousness, please believe I’m not trying to be judgmental here, just pointing out that these things are engaged in for a reason, and whatever that underlying reason is, you can become a more relaxed person by self-realization and self-moderation.  And now, we return you to our regularly scheduled blog post, already in progress.

Anyway, I got to thinking, on top of the gastric acid production, wouldn’t the act of chewing gum also stimulate insulin secretion, and as a result, weight gain?  It shouldn’t even matter whether the gum is naturally or artificially sweetened, since it would be the act of chewing that provided the impetus for the release.

I did a quick Google on it, and surprisingly found an article right off the bat that said quite the opposite of my supposition, and for quite a different reason: dangerous weight loss from chronic diarrhea resulting from the ingestion of sorbitol (a sugar alcohol, used in many chewing gums, that has a laxative effect).  You have to chew a lot of gum daily for this effect to happen, and many low carbers who have eaten more than their fair share of sugar free products containing sugar alcohols can attest to the associated laxative issues. 

There wasn’t one link that I could find that said anything other than weight loss associated with chewing gum, and most of those pointed to the diarrhea issue.  So I guess I can’t propose to the chewers that their habit is sabotaging their weight loss plans.  Darn!

Well, I said I was going to do it and I finally did it.  I composed a letter and sent it to a couple key people at Wegmans, a large supermarket chain headquartered in New York State.  Regardless of where you live, you’ve probably seen Wegmans’ name in print at some time in the past decade since they’ve consistently been in Fortune magazine’s top ten “Best Places to Work.”

Most of us (myself not included) do our shopping at a single store, and so each chain puts on sales and promotions each week to lure shoppers to their particular stores.  After waging this battle for years and not really coming out ahead, Wegmans decided they had to present something to the public that the other chains weren’t.  They developed a program they call “Consistent Low Pricing,” with which they try to convince the public that it doesn’t have to read weekly sales ads to see where the best overall deals are for the week.  Wegmans prints advertisements that show they have the lowest price of all local stores consistently, week after week, on many items people buy regularly, and therefore the best “bottom line” value for a weekly shopping trip is at their stores.

The problem is, and I made this point in the letter, that while it may be true that Wegmans may have the best total price for the items “test priced” from chain to chain, one does not get “something for nothing.”  The prices for most meat and seafood at Wegmans is astronomical (in my humble opinion).  I stated in my letter to their Senior Vice President for Consumer Affairs and their manager for nutrition programs that, with this marketing approach, Wegmans tends to steer shoppers toward keeping their weekly food expenditure low by buying inexpensive staple products that are typically, by nature, high in carbohydrates, and they therefore are contributing to the obesity epidemic our country is suffering. 

Wegmans has, over the years, significantly increased the number of store-branded items they stock their shelves with that cost a little less than the name brand versions.  One of their store lines is branded “Food You Feel Good About;” these items usually have some alleged “healthful” aspect to them, such as, “made with whole grains,” or, “low in fat.”  I mentioned to them in the letter that it is ironic that the motto doesn’t say, “Food That Is Good For You;” these are products with features that the public has unwittingly been led to believe is good for them, and they therefore “feel good” buying it for consumption.  I chuckle when I see a sack of Wegmans’ brand potatoes that have blazoned across the plastic bag the words, “Food You Feel Good About.”

I can’t fault the chain entirely; they still are the only store in my area that still carries Hood Calorie Countdown dairy beverage, and two flavors of Dannon Carb and Sugar Controlyogurt.  But I chided them that they carry only the chocolate and fat free white versions of the dairy beverage, probably in the erroneous assumption that fat, being a dietary enemy, should be eliminated.  If this is the case, why do they bother carrying the chocolate flavor, since it contains 2% fat?  I also mentioned that they recently decided that low carb adherents and diabetics do not need to choose from more than two flavors of yogurt (they used to carry four of the five available flavors), while everyone else gets to choose from the dozens and dozens of other types of yogurt cramming the dairy case.  (PS – They also moved the two remaining flavors to the very bottom of the yogurt case.  Easier to find?)

I considered reprinting the letter here in its entirety for your reading pleasure, but it’s six pages long (you all know how I tend to go on and on).  Other than the standard lessons in actual nutritional science, and advising that they all read Gary Taubes’ book as soon as possible, what I’ve told you in the above paragraphs pretty much sums it up.  This is what I advocated we all start doing in a post I wrote a while ago, and I think that I’m going to start writing my government representatives as well.  They may all toss my letters in the trash, but I’ll feel better that I at least tried to do SOMEthing to help.  Who knows?  Maybe one of them will make a change in their personal life as a result.  I know I did.

Here are the basic details of my third week without drinking during this grand experiment in my 12th week of induction:

Monday, March 17, 2008
weight in morning: 220.2 lbs (no change from previous day), 32.0%BF (body fat), 48.0%BW (body water)
     Meat for the past two nights has consisted of corned beef round (what do you expect on this weekend?!?), and even though the meat has zero carbs, does the brine it’s pickled in have any effect on fluid retention? Will it cause a temporary standstill, or worse, a gain?
     17.1 grams of net carbs and 1267 calories

Tuesday, March 18, 2008
4:45am – no color on ketostick; 219.0 lbs (1.2 lb loss), 32.5%BF, 48.0%BW
     Admittedly, yesterday was an unplanned low calorie day and may have been the chief contributor to the decent loss. To give you an idea of the lopsidedness of the whole nutritional scheme of things: of the 1267 calories, about 1088 (86%) were from meat, cheese, and eggs; of the 17.1 net carb grams, only 4 (23%) were from those items. I’m enjoying eating Lindt’s 85% cocoa bar as my evening snack. It’s hard to believe this product has no sugar alcohols yet packs about the same calorie and carb impact as a low carb candy bar. True, you get a bigger serving with the low carb product, but I like savoring the rich cocoa as I nibble at it slowly. My wife suggested dipping it in peanut butter, something I am tempted to do tonight.
     As far as the stick color goes, I lay in bed this morning thinking about it, and wondered if I’m taking a reading at the wrong time of day. At daybreak, I’ve essentially spent the last 8 hours or so digesting my last meal and then letting my resting body operate strictly on the fat mobilization process. Am I trying to examine my ketone production at a time when it might possibly be at its lowest level of the day? A stick check at 7:00pm showed no color either, so that theory doesn’t look sound.
     18.6 grams of net carbs and 2028 calories

Wednesday, March 19, 2008
4:30am – no color on ketostick; 218.4 lbs (0.6 lb loss), 32.5%BF, 48.0%BW
     Okay, two weeks ago, off booze, downward swing big time. Last week, increased fatty deli meats, upswing of a pound plus over seven days. This week, off deli meats, downward swing again, by nearly 2 pounds in three days. I’ve hit a new low weight for this year and weigh exactly what I weighed on this day of the diet in 2003. Reader and advisor David Brown says not to try to micromanage daily changes due to the myriad functions the body performs and the differences in daily energy input and expenditure, but I look at myself more as someone watching his investments every day; I’m not making daily changes based on value fluctuations, but I am monitoring trends and making adjustments after seeing what I perceive as a pattern. Or I’m just obsessive-compulsive. Potato, po-TAH-to.
     21.6 grams of net carbs and 1412 calories

Thursday, March 20, 2008
5:45am – no color on ketostick; 217.2 lbs (1.2 lb loss), 32.5%BF, 48.0%BW
     I’m good with this! YEAH! Three pounds in three days. Now THIS is LOSING! Screw the ketostick!
     20 grams of net carbs and 1590 calories

Friday, March 21, 2008
6:00am – no color on ketostick; 217.2 lbs (no change), 31.5%BF, 48.5%BW
     No gain, no pain, making this a pretty good Friday. What else can I say? See you tomorrow!
     18.5 grams of net carbs and 1625 calories

Saturday, March 22, 2008
5:30am – no color on ketostick; 217.0 lbs (0.2 lb loss), 32.0%BF, 48.0%BW
     Another new low for the year!
     23 grams of net carbs and 1727 calories

Sunday, March 23, 2008
6:00am – no color on ketostick; 217.4 lbs (0.4 lbs gain), 31.5%BF, 48.5%BW
     And on the sixth day, he rose.  (Four tenths of a pound.)  I knew a whole week straight of losses or no gains was too much to hope for.  Happy easter to ya. 
     Today is the last day of the alcohol abstinence experiment, coupled with the elimination of deli salamis.  Oddly enough, although it was not so difficult to get used to after several days a few weeks ago, I more and more found myself wanting to have a martini the last few evenings of this long holiday weekend.  What the heck is it about them that I’m missing?
     27.5 grams of net carbs and 2556 calories

Monday, March 24, 2008
6:00am – no color on ketostick; 216.8 lbs (0.6 lb loss), 31.0%BF, 48.5%BW
     A loss, a loss, my kingdom for a loss!  This comes as a bit of a surprise, actually; you can see by my carb count that something went amiss.  I’d had some mixed nuts as a snack early in the afternoon, which cranked up the carbs pretty quickly, and then dinner consisted of an Italian sausage link with fried peppers and onions, all relatively high in carbs. 
     As a celebration of three weeks of experimenting, I finally had my martini.  I don’t expect to drink during the week now, and if I didn’t have one last night, it would have been essentially another week before I would, so I rationalized it.  You know what?  It tasted really, really good.  Better than I remembered.  I nursed it like it was the last drink on Earth.  Now I can begin the “Alcohol Control” experiment, because I still want to keep losing. 

And that’s my little foray into weight loss research.  It’s not going to make any journals, but I think I showed myself some interesting associations.  A 6.2 pound loss in three weeks after having been on a stall for six weeks, kicked off by stopping alcohol consumption.  Maybe it would have been more, but then, I also learned that high fat, processed meats can also cause problems.  Thank you all for your interest and your helpful comments.

Last weekend I spent some time hanging round in a different part of town, so to speak. If you’ve spent any time reviewing the info on the web about low carb, you’ve probably come across groups other than Atkins folks who follow a substantially similar dietary lifestyle, but approach it from a different angle. A couple I’ve found so far are:

• Diabetics. Low carb is a great way to manage diabetes.
• Bodybuilders. They tend to emphasize the exercise first, and eat way more protein, but these folks, looking for noticeable results, have some really good information on their sites. Here’s an example.
• Gastric surgery patients. If the size of your stomach is small, you can’t eat junk food, nor can you fill up on junk. Low carb is nutrient-dense, and is the way many of these people lead their lives after surgery.
• Paleo People. There are a few varieties in here, lumped together, but these people try to eat as natural and raw as possible. You’ll find these people frequently espousing raw milk – even raw liver – sorry, I’m not going there anytime soon, but they do have a number of points worth considering.

One aspect that I found interesting, and Megamas touched on in this recent post, was the notion of low carb junk food – recreations of high carb foods in a low carb way, that are supposed to be a replacement for our cherished comfort foods – the ones that are making us morbidly obese and killing us.

They have their place: I would much rather see someone gnosh on an Atkins bar than those sugar-laden ‘energy’ bars that are the norm – it’s just that a lot of people go on low carb, live on these things, don’t lose a lot of weight, and say it’s because low carb doesn’t work.

I myself have been in a stall since January. I lost 20 lbs. very quickly, but then stopped at 195. This weight has always been one of the weights my body is comfortable at, but I’m not. I have a pair of pants I call my ‘reference pants’ – they are the smallest pants I expect to wear in my wardrobe. I can get them on, but my eyes bulge slightly, so I have more weight to go – I want to be between 170 and 180.

Looking at my diet after reading the paleo literature, I saw that I was living on two things that might be sabotaging further weight loss: artificial sweeteners and deli meat.

Latest news on artificial sweeteners says that it makes us more hungry because our bodies taste the sweet and pump out insulin even though there’s no sugar – so it can still mess with our hunger mechanism.

On the deli meat, I have no research, but a lot of research says that the nitrates in a lot of them are bad for you, and many (like bologna – a guilty pleasure of mine) have added sugar.

Based on the above, I decided last week to try to be more ‘paleo’ and reduce the sweeteners and deli meats.

I upped my vegetable count with a lot of raw vegetables, ate more unmolested meats like hamburger, and reduced my intake of artificial sweeteners. I still had them, as well as some deli meat and some low carb bread, but it was much less than usual.

The result: 5 pounds lost this week.

I didn’t feel particularly deprived, though I need to come up with a way to enjoy water more. I find straight water is too ‘flat’ – I had a friend tell me the minerals they add to Dasani water gives it a subtle ‘flavor’ that makes it more paletable – I tried it, and he’s right, but I don’t like the waste of buying water. Anyone out there have a trick for flavoring water without artificial additives?

Also – to my surprise – I’ve been enjoying the raw vegetables.

In reflection, I think there is a possiblilty to resensitize my taste buds to more subtle flavors, without pouring on the fake sugar or salt. I had both this week – I’m no saint – but the reduction in both seemed to serve me well.

I’ll try to do this for another week and see how it goes.

Let’s (actually, let me) talk about food for a few minutes.  What I’ll be saying is, of course, my own opinion, and not to be taken as a call for anybody to change what they’re doing or how they feel about it.  It’s just something to think about.

I’ve read with interest many low carb recipes, some here on this site, that attempt to recreate high carb favorites in a reduced carbohydrate version.  Just yesterday I received an emailed blog post detailing the efforts of some pretty adventurous and amazingly clever kitchen experimenters who have been developing various doppelgänger bakery-type items (check them out here).  In the heyday of the last low carb boom several years ago, food manufacturers were tripping over each other trying to satisfy the demand for low carb look-and-almost-taste-alikes of venerated food items.  There even was, for a very short time, a genetically modified low(er) carb honest-to-gosh, out-of-the-ground potato.  When the boom went bust a relatively short time later, new companies folded and established ones cut their losses by dropping their low carb offerings and concentrating on making what the majority of the public wanted.

That so many people wishing to control their weight via a low carb diet would still want to eat the way they ate before their dietary change is testament to our ingrained (no pun intended) habits.  We want to lose pounds, but we still want our bagels and toast.  We want to be thinner, but we still want mashed potatoes with our roast beef.  We want orange juice and milk and beer and pancakes and muffins and pie and cereal, and we want them all to look, smell, and taste like the genuine article while having none of the adverse side effects.  We are willing to either take great pains in making these things ourselves, or we’ll pay king’s ransoms for something someone else made.  I myself spent an ungodly amount of time and money collecting ingredients and then attempting to bake “authentic low carb English muffins.”  They came out barely edible (I’d hardly call them “authentic”) and considering the amount of oddball leftover ingredients, many of which had to be obtained at health food stores and will never be used again, I’d say each of the twelve muffins I made was worth probably $9.57.  I may have felt differently if the actual net carb count was significant (as with the old Karb Cruncher bagels I used to be able to buy that had 5.7 net carbs each), but these dinky “low carb” English muffins I made supposedly had about 14 net grams of carbs each.  A short time later, Thomas brand (that’s right, THE English muffin makers) came out with lower carb versions that had 16 net carbs each, and they both looked and tasted like the real deal.

I guess what I’m asking here is, are we all missing the point?  Are we so in need of variety, of those old “comfort” foods our moms fed us, of all those convenient concoctions of grain and sugar we gobbled down for years and that were responsible for us needing to lose weight in the first place that we can’t live without them in some form? 

Until a short time ago, I’d been eating many things I don’t eat today: cereal with milk and fresh fruit; English muffins with peanut butter; pancakes with maple syrup; sandwiches.  All these things were lower in net carb count than their “real-life” versions, but were still not able to be used during Atkins induction, so I have had to avoid them since the start of the year.  I had no plan to be on induction as long as I have, but due to unexplainable circumstances, I’m not where I want to be yet and therefore am continuing on the restricted path.  For a while, it took some getting used to not having some of these familiar foods, especially since my wife was continuing to consume them.  But after a few weeks, my perceptions of what those things used to mean to me started to change, and after reading Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories, the added knowledge of what some of these foods were doing to me physiologically made me even less interested in them.  What was I gaining eating a bowl of reduced-carb cereal with low-carb dairy beverage and low-glycemic fruit at 25 net grams of carbs?  A breakfast of bacon and eggs is just as satisfying and has roughly the same number of calories, but comes in at less than 2 net carbs.  Since January 2nd, I’ve had eggs in one form or another every day except a few where I’ve had something like smoked salmon with cream cheese.

When I feed my cats the same food at every meal, they don’t look at me with disdain, they simply eat their food.  When I fry up my eggs every day or microwave my frozen omelet, I don’t sigh and resignedly eat them, I just eat them.  I know most people get bored eating the same thing over and over.  Some say it’s one of the reasons many diets, even low carb, are hard to continue practicing… they just don’t feel like they’re worth it.  It’s hard for me to say where this propensity for variety in what we eat came from; from what little I’ve read, it seems with the advent of products made from flour and sugar starting in the 1800’s, people developed a taste for diversity.  Even in the line of meat, when I ask my wife what we should have for an entree, she’ll sometimes complain that it’s always the same thing: chicken or beef or lamb (this from a woman who would eat cereal or soup every meal of her life to avoid the bother of making choices).  And so it becomes a matter not of which meat to have, but what to do with it. 

I suppose this could be taken farther: I love cheese, and one of the joys of cheese is the amazing number of variations you can enjoy; I would likely find it less enjoyable an experience if there were only mozzarella or cheddar.  Would I relish eating the same cut of beef each night?  So, even in the basics, I too find some variety desirable.  But what about those things that are hold-overs from our high carb lives?  Can’t they be left behind?  Can’t we regard them as false friends with whom we need to break our relationships?

There was a television series in the late 1960’s called The Prisoner, which explored the attempts of a retired secret agent to retain his identity as an individual after having been abducted and trapped in an isolated village by unknown forces.  Many facets of regular society were mirrored in this microcosm of civilization, but were highly controlled by those in charge.  Although there were pubs and cocktail lounges, none of the inhabitants were allowed to be influenced by alcohol.  One’s waitress would appear at the table holding forth a tray bearing several glasses of liquid, saying, “Whiskey, gin, vodka.  Looks the same, tastes the same.”  The show’s hero naturally and vehemently railed against this while the other imbibers simply drank the offerings and enjoyed the social events associated with drinking alcohol.

Are you living in a “Village” of your own making?

Here are the basic details of my second week without drinking during this grand experiment in my 11th week of induction:

Monday, March 10, 2008
5:30am - no color on ketostick; 218.6 lbs (0.2 lb loss), 34.5%BF (body fat), 47.0%BW (body water)
     Very odd; second day in a row with no color on the stick.  Had less than 13 net grams of carbs yesterday, so what gives?  Have to assume for the time being that I am still in ketosis but am burning my ketones so completely that there aren’t enough left over in my urine to color the stick.  And what’s with the body fat increase lately?  The more I lose, the “fatter” I get, according to the Tanita.  On the other hand, I hadn’t taken in as much water over the weekend as I typically do during the week.  Every time my body water reading goes down, my body fat reading goes up, and vice versa.  If I’m lowering my hydration as the scale indicates I am, and the lean muscle and bone masses aren’t changing, wouldn’t that necessarily require that the other side of the equation (body fat) balance it out?  
     20.5 net grams of carbs and 1923 calories for the day.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008
6:00am - trace ketostick; 219.2 lbs (0.6 lb gain), 33.0%BF, 47.5%BW
     Some sawtoothing has to be expected.  (Doesn’t it?)
     16.2 net grams of carbs and 1780 calories (even with chocolate ricotta dessert!)

Wednesday, March 12, 2008
5:00am – no color on ketostick; 219.8 lbs (0.6 lb gain), 32.5%BF, 48%BW
     My brain is saying, “Here we go again,” and expecting tomorrow’s reading to be back in the 220’s for some reason.  What reason?  I don’t know.  What do you do when you run out of reasons?  Way under 20 net grams of carbs but no color on stick.  Under 2000 daily calories but not too much under, yet gaining weight.  It’s like in The Blair Witch Project where they kept going in the same direction according to the map and the compass day after day after day, yet they kept winding up going in circles.  Maybe I should call this The Blair Weight Project.
    11.3 net grams of carbs and 2588 calories

Thursday, March 13, 2008
6:05am – no color on ketostick; 219.2 lbs (0.6 lb loss), 32.5%BF, 48%BW
     I was chanting internally as I approached the Tanita, “222.2, 222.2.”  It would have disgusted me, but certainly wouldn’t have shocked me.  Losing shocked me.  Why is that?  All my expectations have been of loss, maybe not rapid loss, but consistent loss.  Everything I’ve been reading has pointed to this fact as inevitable.  I really am expecting too much too soon.  I’m currently 3.8 pounds less than I was at the beginning of the experiment, that’s in less than 2 weeks, so why am I complaining?
    19.5 net grams of carbs and 2285 calories

Friday, March 14, 2008
6:00am – no color on ketostick; 219.8 lbs (0.6 lb gain), 31.5%BF, 48.5%BW
     Yawn.  As I was saying… historically speaking, there had often been periods of stabilization before I start losing more weight, so I’m just going to have to ride this out and hope it stays as insignificant as it has been the past few days.  The other odd thing, beside no color on the ketosticks, is that I have cut through my old graph line six times, count ‘em, six, in just this one week.  Back in 2003, I’d started a plateau about a week previous in time, so I’m hovering around the same weight I was then.  That old plateau stretches out to beyond the end of the month, so I’m anxious to break through and drop below, for good.
    19.7 net grams of carbs and 2350 calories

Saturday, March 15, 2008
5:30am – no ketone check; 219.6 lbs (0.2 lb loss), 31.0%BF, 48.5%BW
     This appears to have broken the “streak.”  The past two weekends, I’ve had a pound-plus loss on Saturday morning followed by an even larger loss on Sunday (last Sunday it was 2.4 pounds).  The trend I’m noticing, though, is the body fat reading.  It had been bouncing around before, up and down a point or two, but since Monday it’s been on a steady decline from 34.5% to 31.0% today.  Meaningful?  Maybe.  And maybe tomorrow it’ll shoot up to 35% for some reason.  Crazy carbon-based lifeforms!
     I’m going to drift off here a little to a related item.  I was just looking at my weight chart and graph and remembering how my old scale was off eight pounds.  Right now, I feel like I have this huge road ahead of me and I haven’t been making much progress in the last 11 weeks.  I’m a hair under 220 after having lost just over 10 pounds.  So why do I believe I would have felt better on the old scale?  At this time, that scale would be telling me I’m 211.6 pounds.  I liked being 211; it just seemed like 200 was so much easier to get to since it was only ten pounds or so away.  Now it’s 20 pounds away and with the way things have been going since week 3, it feels like it may as well be 50 pounds away.  My original Atkins loss was about 30 pounds, and I maintained around 200, or so I thought.  I was really maintaining around 208, and if I’d known that, would I have worked harder to lose another ten?  Why is 200 such an important number to me?  If anything, I should be 175 or less according to standard weight charts.  The only time I got that low was following a 500 calorie diet in the late 1970’s.  I was never that thin before.  People told me I looked downright sickly.  When I started to regain the weight, I was told I looked great at 185.  Even 190 was good.  And that’s another 10 pounds beyond 200.  Good thing this is a lifestyle and not a diet; if it was a diet, there would be some sort of end in sight, like there was on the 500 calorie diet, and look how that turned out.
     And now for tonight’s World’s Dumbest Low Carb Blunders report.  We were planning to have tacos for dinner and I’d had enough carbs during the day that I had to keep deducting elements of the upcoming dinner to make up for it; first the onion, then the salsa, then the lettuce.  I was down to a small low carb tortilla with guacamole, sour cream, cheddar cheese and taco meat, and that was going to be it for the evening.  Mrs. Megamas had hers as a salad in what I thought was the last remaining taco bowl shell I’d bought in December.  As I finished my meager soft taco, I went to get some more meat and cheese, and added some more guacamole and sour cream since they’re low carb too.  Here comes the stupid part, and I can’t believe I did this after all my talk about difficulty getting to goals and replying to the post about mistakes that goof you up on low carb.  There was a broken taco bowl left in the box, so I ate that as big taco chips to go with the rest of it.  And then, after I was done, I read the nutrition panel: serving size, 1 shell; calories, 180; total carbs, 23 grams; fiber, 4 grams.  So I had almost my daily limit of net carbs in that one single shell.  Did it taste good?  It was tolerable.  Was it worth it?  Absolutely NOT.  So I can sit here and punish myself mentally or I can accept that I did some stupid thing, one stupid thing, and move on. 
     41.6 net grams of carbs (I’m going to Atkins hell) and 2734 calories
     If I don’t weigh more tomorrow, there’s something not quite right in our section of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.

Sunday, March 16, 2008
5:15am – no color on ketostick; 220.2 lbs (0.6 lb gain), 31.5%BF, 48.5%BW
     Aaah, all is well here in the carbohydrate-reduced Milky Way.  The piper has been paid.  Today I will Atone because there is No Carbland For Old Men.  There Will Be Fat, however.  (Sorry if those sounded like something from the Oscarbs.)
     20.1 net grams of carbs and 1585 calories

Monday, March 17, 2008 (Happy St. Paddy’s Day!)
4:45am – no color on ketostick; 220.2 lbs (no change), 32.0%BF, 48.0%BW
 

That’s the end of week two off alcohol.  To recap, I started (re)induction Jan 2 following the rules to the letter; two weeks into it, I resumed my routine use of alcohol and, during the third week, the weight loss stopped after 8.5 pounds.  For the next six week period, during which other odd things were going on physiologically, my weight increased, decreased, and increased again, from 221 to 225 pounds in a wildly varying sawtooth pattern.  In week ten, I began this experiment of abstinence. 

During the experiment, the first week showed a dramatic net loss, 4.4 pounds.  I lost weight after consuming between 1421 and 2032 calories the day before, and I gained weight after taking in more than 2200 calories the prior day.  The second week, however, seemed to flip that pattern 180 degrees and turned the graph line in a basically upward trend again.  I showed a net gain of 1.6 pounds for the week, gaining the days after eating less than 2065 calories, and losing the days following consumption of more than 2350 calories.  (The only day not consistent with this was Bonehead Error Saturday.)  Through the two week period (except the last Saturday), daily net carbs ranged between 11 and 22, averaging 16.7, but I cannot see any recognizable pattern in weight fluctuation with regard to this factor.

So what’s my analysis?  I don’t have one yet.  If the purpose of the experiment was to test whether cessation of alcohol consumption would indeed break a “stall” in weight loss, then I would say it indicated positively.  As to whether cessation of alcohol produces a change in the trend to lose weight over a period of time with all other factors being the same, I think two weeks is not a sufficient time-frame in which to measure this.  The aniticipated association of caloric decrease due to a decrease in alcohol intake does not seem to be a factor because I appear to have replaced those calories with other sources, for example, an increased consumption of hard cheeses and Italian deli meats.  If anything, I would assume I’ve increased the fat content of my diet in the last two weeks. 

I’m confused by the change in the second week, both in how the trends reversed and that I’m not showing color on the ketosticks.  If, as I’ve read elsewhere, I must be in ketosis due to severely restricted carb intake, regardless of the test strip indication, am I actually using the manufactured ketones that efficiently?  Have I increased my dietary fat content to the point that I’ve curtailed my need to draw fat from my adipose depots for fuel, and hence the change in weight management trends?  How does this correlate with the studies mentioned in Good Calories, Bad Calories, where subjects continued to lose weight no matter how many calories of fat were added to the diet as long as carbohydrates were severely limited? 

This all begs a third week of testing with a minor change: I’m going to abstain from high fat cured deli meats this week.  I do recall reading somewhere, possibly in other low carber’s comments, possibly in low carb plan advisements, to avoid eating a lot of processed meats like salami and sausage.  Let the new week begin, and I’ll report back next Monday.

Episode 2:  When The Inmates Run The Asylum, Madness Will Be A Virtue

Today, the head of the medical department where I work sent out a company-wide email announcing the latest efforts in the corporate-sponsored “wellness” initiative.  Classes in nutrition will be given to employees who wish to participate, and prizes will be awarded to those who complete “healthy” eating challenges based on the “new” U.S. government guidelines set up by the FDA. 

I was, of course, compelled to respond to this person and inform him of the error of his ways.  I suggested that if he hadn’t read Gary Taubes’ exposé yet, he should waste no time doing so.  Some small inkling of trepidation nagged at the back of my mind after I’d hit the ’send’ button.  Whose toes was I stepping on here?  I imagined being called to someone’s office to be grilled as to my scientific credentials and what authority I claimed to possess that would allow the audacious questioning of the lords and owners of the land.

But, thinking realistically, I suspect there will be no response, as if one small voice in the darkness cried out and was as noticeable as the brief flitting of a Mayfly’s wings.

The ability to maintain a comfortable lifestyle for one’s self and one’s family is a primary human motivation.  After basic physiological functions, security is the next highest priority in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  Taubes mentions in his book several scientists and researchers who over the last century dared discount the status quo and suffered for it.  If I were in a position that required I disseminate doctrine about what to eat and what not to eat, would I speak what I believed to be the truth once I’d had my eyes opened?  Or would I continue to dispense government-sanctioned misinformation, knowing it will have the opposite intended effect on those who trust me to have their best interests at heart?  How much authority do I have to be able to speak against conventional standards without putting my livelihood in jeopardy?

Fortunately, I’m not in such a position.  But what about my personal physician?  I told him I was reading Good Calories, Bad Calories,  and recommended it to him; he wrote the name down, but whether he will have the time or inclination to read it is another story.  One can hope.  How many recently released reports and how much medical news can one person indulge in and absorb in addition to the time-intensive duties to which they must attend?  (When do they supposedly get all this time to play golf, anyway?)  My feeling is that my doctor may accept my personal choice of nutritional lifestyle, and he may find the book interesting if he gets a chance to read it, but would he start prescribing this lifestyle to his patients?  Would he balk if I told him I wanted to stop taking cholesterol medication?  Would he consider that the administration of medication to reduce cholesterol in many of his patients may not be necessary based simply on common blood test measurements?  What kind of diet is he recommending to his diabetic patients: the now-standard high carbohydrate, low fat diet, or a low carbohydrate diet?  Would he remove all the informational posters now hanging in every one of his client visit rooms that advocates what the government and the medical associations and the pharmaceutical manufacturers say is a healthy diet and replace them with factual information?

The inability to profess one’s personal beliefs in consideration of maintaining one’s security is as wide-ranging as one can imagine.  How many people decline to discuss their personal notions with the majority of those around them who hold different views, particularly those who might have some sway over their security?  How much influence is exerted on what one believes or professes to believe by one’s being part of a group?  A mob may be incited to react in a way that would be inconsistent with how the majority of its members would react on an individual basis.  Strength of numbers has nothing to do with truth or with being right; it has only to do with power. 

As much as I’d like to admonish them, I can’t help but understand the very simple reasons so many of our fellows must necessarily continue on the path they’re walking regardless of what they might hold to be true.  The head of the medical department because, despite his position, he does not have the authority to change company policy from the conventionally accepted and government-sanctioned dogma.  My doctor, who, upon changing some of the ways he practices his profession, might likely be ostracized by his peers, by the hospitals and medical organizations with which he is associated, and by those whose livelihoods depend on him.  The food critic for the local newspaper who has no problem dispensing nutritional information to her readership as long as it doesn’t contradict misguided mainstream notions and who would probably have to find something else to do for a living if she had to write restaurant reviews from the viewpoint most of you reading this have come to accept as the only sane and acceptable one.  The world is an asylum, and while the grand majority of its population are inmates, it is the inmates who are in control at the time.

Common sense tells us it is easier to move in the same direction the river is flowing than to paddle against it.  Convenience, however, means little when we are drifting further downstream from our intended destination and we are approaching a waterfall. 

Suddenly, it seemed like the universe was conspiring to keep me from losing weight on low carb (or any diet).

I just finished the last chapter of Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories, and I can only hope there’s a silver lining in the Epilogue, because this chapter on Hunger and Satiety plunked down a couple new possible speed bumps on my road to low carb weight loss.

Many of you know I’m working on the alcohol speed bump right now. Although alcohol has no carbs (or at least low carbs depending on what you’re drinking), it will be used as fuel before the body starts burning fat, or so Dr. Atkins and others attest.  (I’ve been trying to find some site other than low-carb-friendly ones that might confirm this, but to no avail.)  A few weeks back, I read something that implied alcohol stimulates the pancreas to secrete insulin, and it seemed reasonable that if I were doing everything else by the book and was still on a plateau for an extended period, it might be from insulin secretion as a result of my martini routine, hence the “grand experiment.” Plenty of testimonials from those similarly afflicted played a big role in my decision as well.

I wish Taubes were here to help me cut to the truth with regard to alcohol and insulin. I’ve been out on the web and have found studies done, but the conclusions are ambiguous. Some say drinking has a positive effect on insulin sensitivity, some say it has a negative effect, and others say they found no difference at all. One abstract I read says alcohol by itself does not stimulate insulin secretion, but  strongly triggers early insulin secretion when administered with glucose. Another says alcohol inhibits gluconeogenesis (the manufacture of glucose in the liver). Well fine, if I’m not taking in carbs and my liver isn’t making sugar and I’m not secreting insulin, then what is it about the alcohol that could be stalling me? It can’t be just the several hundred extra calories, can it?  (Note - be sure to read David Brown’s comment to this post for some additional insight into the metabolism of alcohol.) 

Which brings me to the new speed bumps. First, it seems possible after all that there can be a seasonal regulation of basal insulin levels in the body. I’ve wondered about this several times since starting my “re-induction;” my first crack at Atkins started July 15, 2003, toward the beginning of summer, while this newest attempt began in the dead of winter. My physiology may be fighting any weight loss right now because it wants me to have a higher fat content during cold weather.

Then there’s speed bump number three. Research has established that insulin secretion is phasic, and when you first start eating, even before you have anything in your stomach, your pancreas starts sending out insulin to prepare the body for what’s coming. But here’s the fun part: this early insulin secretion also occurs when you see food, smell food, when you even think about eating!  So unless I pull a “Tommy” (blinders and a mouth cork), plug my nose, and get hypnotized so I think about anything but food, I’m going to be secreting insulin regardless of what I do or don’t eat.  And that stinks!

Bottom line, I am losing weight again since curtailing my evening cocktail activity.  I’m wondering, though, under different circumstances (like warmer weather), would I be losing more quickly?  If so, would it be because of a change in basal metabolism, or increased activity which typically accompanies the temperate seasons?  Why are there always more questions than there are answers?

Here are the basic details of my first week without drinking during this grand experiment in my 10th week of induction:

Monday, March 3, 2008
5:30am - moderate ketostick; 223.0 lbs, 31.0%BF (body fat), 48.5%BW (body water)
     So!  Something happened during or after the party on Saturday to make me lose, and, as expected, it didn’t last.  I regained 2.4 of the 3.2 pounds total dropped over the weekend.  Maybe blood alcohol is an excellent electrical conductor and was responsible for my lower fat (28%) and higher water (50%) readings Sunday morning.  I’m happy there was a small net loss, anyway.
     About 17 net grams of carbs and 2336 calories for the day.  Excited, expecting things to start moving soon.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008
5:40am – moderate ketostick; 223.8 lbs, 30.5%BF, 49.0%BW
     Well, things started moving alright; so much for my net loss.  Maybe I’m just not eating enough calories, enough fat.  All those studies in Taubes’ book where obese subjects lost even when eating huge numbers of calories composed of fat… surely I deserve the same!
     15.4 net carbs, 1421 calories.  Worst single carb factor: 1 cup of Brussels sprouts (9.4 net carbs).

Wednesday, March 5, 2008
5:30am - trace ketostick; 222.2 lbs, 31.5%BF, 48.5%BW
    I am not going to get excited about this.  Yet.  I had a six day straight loss several weeks ago before I started climbing again.  I’m not going to lie to you; after work, I really wanted to have a martini.  Stayin’ strong though, keepin’ it real.
    18 net carbs, 1867 calories

Thursday, March 6, 2008
5:25am – trace ketostick; 221.6 lbs, 31.5%BF, 48.0%BW
     Like I said yesterday, not getting excited yet, but at least it’s movement in the right direction.  Even if I sawtooth, there should be a net decrease over time as long as I’m staying the course.  Forge ahead.
     20 net carbs, 2703 calories

Friday, March 7, 2008
4:35am – trace ketostick; 222.4 lbs, 31.5%BF, 48.5%BW
     The .8 lb increase was likely from the extra 1000-odd calories yesterday.  I would imagine if one is eating a stable number of calories each and every day, the body would get used to utilizing them more efficiently regardless of how many.
     14.7 net carbs, 2032 calories

Saturday, March 8, 2008
4:30am – trace ketostick; 221.2 lbs, 33.0%BF, 48.0%BW
     This is the lowest weight I’ve measured since Feb. 18 (except for after the Mar. 1 party).  That was at the end of the six day loss I mentioned on Wednesday, and that loss had been followed by a general increase for eleven days.  I have GOT to get out of the 220’s soon or I’ll go stark raving mad.
     21.8 net carbs, 1854 calories.  Worst single carb factor: 1 cup of green beans mixed with cream of mushroom soup and garnished with fried onions (12.8 net carbs).

Sunday, March 9, 2008
7:45am – no color on stick; 218.8 lbs, 33.5%BF, 47.5%BW
     Well, hal-ee-LOO-yah!  That’s 3.6 pounds in two days!  It’s also the first time I’ve crossed my previous graph line since Feb. 2nd at 222.5 pounds.  I’m now a tenth of a pound less than I was the same day into the weight loss as in 2003, but keep in mind I started out 8 pounds heavier back then.  There was a little additional energy expenditure yesterday because of the snowstorm; I had to snowthrow and shovel, and I have to do it again today from what fell overnight, but what the hey, as long as I don’t put any weight back on, that’s fine.
     12.6 net carbs, 2019 calories

So, that makes a week.  And as bad as it was getting used to not having my cocktails at the beginning of the week, toward the end I became kind of resigned to it.  I’d even mix some of my wife’s for her and watch her enjoy them without much jealousy while I drank my glass of sugar-free lemonade.  Now, on to week two.  I’ll let you all know what happened next Monday.  Hopefully, there will be only good news!

Mrs. Megamas is rarely stuck for an idea when it comes to doing something different and impromptu with ingredients at hand.  Take the other night for instance: that morning, we’d taken out a pound of frozen hamburger to thaw for dinner but had no idea what to do with it.  During the workday, Mrs. M. fiddled in her head with it, taking into consideration what other goodies we had in the fridge and cupboard.  She came up with this little piece of heaven:

Fry up a slice of prosciutto in a pan (or you could use pancetta if you have it) and set aside.  Make a burger patty using a quarter pound of ground beef and cook that in the pan you used to fry the prosciutto.  When it’s close to being done, put the slice of prosciutto on top and lay over it a slice of mozzarella cheese.  Cover with a lid until the cheese melts.  Remove from pan, add a thin slice of red onion, then spoon on 2 tablespoons of prepared bruschetta topping.  Mangia (eat).

I’m figuring about 470 calories and 4.7 net carbs per burger.  Fantastico!

As I’m in bed this morning waiting for the precise perfect moment to roll out, I happened to dwell on the several ads that I’ve been glancing at in magazines and the newspaper recently.  I say recently, but they’re always there, just more so in the beginning of the year, it seems.  You’ve seen the ads, I’m sure: Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, the hypnosis ads, the food plan ads, all the health clubs, and plenty of before-and-after photos and testimonials to go with them.  When you’re at the supermarket checkout line, count the number of magazines that have a sure-fire diet plan on the cover.  (Even Dr. Atkins’ diet was the darling of the Vogue readership for years before he published his New Diet Revolution in 1973.)

I’m to the point in Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories that I firmly believe that the only effective way to lose weight is to cut out carbohydrates and make dietary fat a good percentage of your daily diet.  Exercise is not necessary and can actually work against you if you’re trying to drop pounds.  I’m in the middle of an experiment right now, so I can’t really carp for the time being that I haven’t lost any weight doing just this for the last seven weeks.

But come on… other people lose weight doing other things.  Even I have.  One year, I lost over 20 pounds by simply eating a bag of raw vegetables for lunch every day.  Boring as all get-out, but I got into a routine, stopped thinking about it, and the pounds came off.  (Yes, after I stopped that routine, they went back on.)  My first wife and I paid a lot of money to a chain called “Weight Loss Clinic” where we had to go every day to be weighed by a nurse and report what we were eating on a very low calorie diet.  We both lost over 50 pounds each and we both regained most of the loss within six months.  Around that time, we started getting postcards from the business asking if it wasn’t time to come back in if we needed to.  Perpetual customers, what a concept, but hardly original:  the obsolescense factor is a well-known marketing tool.

So why do all these other approaches work at all?

Maybe the key word is “effective,” as I used earlier to describe low carb.  Do you know anyone who lost weight through exercise who gained it back when (if) they stopped their routine?  How about eating low calorie?  I know plenty of people who’ve tried this, and for them it’s a continuous battle with hunger; all they ever seem to talk about is food and how much they want it and how many things they are tempted with.  I personally don’t know anyone who’s lost weight by being hypnotized, but my wife tried it once to quit smoking many years ago and she sat through one session and came back with the report that it was a bunch of nonsense.  (To this day she will occasionally cluck like a chicken, but she doesn’t realize it and I don’t say anything.)

If you’re overweight and you want and need to lose a significant number of pounds, isn’t keeping those pounds off the real issue?  Look at how many studies of subjects on various diets end with those people losing either an insignificant amount of weight or not being able to stay on the eating plan long enough to make a difference.  How many subjects maintain a significant loss for a year or more, a factor considered essential in rating the effectiveness of an eating plan?

I’m not saying low carb is going to work for everyone.  Not because the science is at fault, but because we’re human beings.  There’s a psychological element to dieting to lose weight, and even if we’re losing, we’re leaving something behind that we enjoyed.  Maybe some kind of special food or drink, maybe the camaraderie of joining friends eating things that we now know are very bad with regard to overall health.  Working out takes time away from other things we’d perhaps rather be doing.  Some people get bored doing anything for too long, especially if it takes effort and discipline.  Even some of the women in the Atkins group in the recent Stanford University study of popular diets strayed toward the end, although this group did better than any of the other groups in both weight loss and “sticktuitiveness.”

John Galt knows, I don’t consider myself a poster boy for low carb.  I’m just as guilty of regaining a lot of the weight I lost in 2003.  Almost all of it was because I returned to eating high carb foods, and it started immediately after I started eating carbs.  It was not difficult to eat a low carb diet month after month, year after year.  I never had a problem turning down celebratory cake slices at birthday parties, or dessert when eating out.  I haven’t felt a desire to patronize the snack machine at work except for an occasional bag of peanuts. 

When I read that eating carbs begets an urge to eat more carbs, I believe it because I’ve been through it and I see it all around me every day.  There’s little satiety in carbohydrates.  Conventional nutritional wisdom tells people to fill up on fiber to make them “feel full” and therefore fend off their appetite.  I’m amazed when I think about how infrequently I feel any hunger at all, in fact, I probably eat when I do because it’s “time” to eat more than for any other reason.

I’m still looking forward to correcting the results of my backsliding, and maybe, just maybe, this time I’ve learned my lesson for good.  Anything’s possible.

An experiment in keeping the djinn (I mean, gin) in the bottle.  For a while, anyway.

I wouldn’t have even been able to make that bon mot above if I didn’t play so much Scrabble on my PDA.

Now, about this alcohol business:  If you’ve been hanging around the Low Carb Confidential blog and have been reading any of my nonsense, you know I love my martinis.  Bombay Sapphire gin and Noilly Prat dry vermouth,  preferably, but I typically drink Beefeaters now because it’s still very good and costs somewhat less than Sapphire.  Three stuffed olives per drink, and they must be put on the pick in a particular order (first, Gorgonzola cheese stuffed, then anchovy stuffed, and then a random choice of either jalapeno, red pepper, garlic, or almond stuffed).   My standard evening is two drinks; three on the weekend nights.

My friend at work sometimes wears a T-shirt that says, “I can’t be an alcoholic; I don’t go to meetings.”  I know I’m not an alcoholic because I can live without it if necessary.  I’d rather not, because I enjoy it, but when it’s better to abstain for a while for any particular reason, it’s not a giant deal for me.

When I went back on the Atkins induction phase January 2nd to lose the pounds I’d regained since 2003 (here’s how), I cut out the martinis for the first two weeks as recommended, and I lost seven pounds.  A few days after resuming a one-cocktail-per-night routine, the loss stopped.  Some other weird things were going on at the same time, so I assumed there was some other reason or reasons for this abrupt stall.  After all, I’d been drinking wine, low carb beer, and martinis during the same period in my first loss in 2003, and I didn’t hit a plateau of any sort until the first month was over.  My doctor tested my thyroid function at my request in the beginning of February, along with some other factors, but all is well. 

Low carb readers and bloggers continue to advise me of their own experiences with alcohol stalls, and I’ve seen plenty of the same sort of comment when searching for information on it.  I just didn’t want to think it was what was stalling me.  But enough is enough.  I’m doing everything else by the book, and I’m in ketosis every day according to my ketosticks.  Six weeks of bouncing up and down in the same four pound range says I’m doing something wrong, and the only thing I haven’t seriously tried is giving up the booze.

Mrs. Megamas and I attended the huge annual party thrown by my employer on Saturday, and we took our own stock to make drinks in the room we booked at the hotel where the party’s held.  Knowing I was planning on starting an abstinence ritual when the weekend was over made the cocktails that much sweeter.  I ate strictly low carb, sticking to beef, turkey, cheese, and a few bites of broccoli served up at the “grazing stations” set up throughout the hotel.  It was a heck of an evening, and I felt the requisite blottoness on Sunday for many hours. 

The thing is, I’d been counting on greeting Monday with the same dopey stagnancy on the scale readout that I’d been living with for weeks so this experiment would have a good kick-off.  Saturday I lost 1.4 pounds.  “No biggie; I’m sure to gain that back and then some after the party,” I consoled myself.  Sunday morning, after an early hotel checkout, I weighed myself at home having had nothing to eat or drink prior.  WHAT?!?  Another 1.8 pounds off!  Not only that, my percentage of body fat that had been hovering around 32% since I got the scale plummeted to 28% overnight.  Body water inched up from 48% to 50%.

I’m not sure why I had such a “drastic” decrease.  It may have been water weight; after all, alcohol causes dehydration, but I didn’t really visit the men’s room that much at the party or afterward to get rid of anything any more than I do when I don’t drink that much.  If it was water, why did my fluid content increase and my fat content decrease?  Anyway, if I haven’t regained most of it by Monday morning, it’s going to throw off the whole point of the abstinence experiment.  Did drinking MORE break the stall, similar to eating more fat to accomplish the same thing?

Well, by putting this out there in our community, I’m committed to this for a minimum of two weeks.  I’ll let you know at the end of each week just what’s happened as the days have gone by.  If I wind up having the same experience as a lot of other low carbers, we’ll discuss the possibilities of why.  Decreased insulin secretion?  Decreased caloric intake?  Some other factor?  Was the alcohol involved at all, or did something else break the stall at a less than convenient time?  If I don’t have the same experience, then what’s going on?

Don’t be afraid of this zero carb delicacy that you can easily prepare at home!

I’m always amazed at the number of folks I run into who don’t have a clue about how to prepare lamb.  I shouldn’t talk so loud… my wife and I were just as clueless years ago, and that circle of cluelessness included salmon, of all things.  Lamb and salmon seemed to be items you found on five star restaurant menus for $30 or more that required a degree from culinary school to do correctly.  Trust me, it ain’t so.  You don’t have to go out to eat to enjoy lamb, just go out to your market or butcher shop.

Lamb chops basically come in two versions (that I’m aware of): shoulder chops and loin chops.  Shoulder is cheaper and it looks like you’re getting more meat, but to me, it isn’t as tasty; the bone is bigger, and there’s usually grizzle.  For my money, loin is the king of lamb.  In my area, I get it for between $7 and $10 per pound.  You may see differences in how the meat is cut.  Some chops are small and triangular, with a small bone, about 1.5 to 2 inches each side; three of these make a satisfying meal for one person.  Some chops have a “tail” as shown in the photo above.  Some have the meat removed from the “tail” so the bone is exposed like a handle; these are called “Frenched” chops.  When these are left intact in a strip with bones sticking out, it’s known as a “rack” of lamb, and two racks of these are what you’ll see in the expensive restaurants, connected together and pulled into a circle (sometimes with little paper ‘hats’ on the bone tips) to become a “crown roast” of lamb.

Chops are so easy to prepare.  You don’t need any elaborate equipment or ingredients.  The best spice to use with lamb is rosemary.  Rub some olive oil on each chop and sprinkle on some rosemary.  Heat a little olive oil in a frying pan and cook the chops on medium heat.  Watch carefully and be mindful not to overcook them, because lamb is best medium rare to medium, with pink showing; if they’re overdone, the meat will not be as tender and tasty. 

If you’re doing a rack, you can prepare the same way as chops; brown the rack on both sides in a skillet after seasoning, then put the rack in a baking dish or pan in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes.  It will still be rare after this, so let it “rest” for a while after you take it out of the oven, no longer than 8 or 10 minutes, and it will continue cooking internally.  If it’s still not done to your preference, slice the rack into chops and return to the frying pan for a few minutes on medium.

Now if I could only figure out how to prepare March Hare.

It occurs to me that I’ve reached an impasse of sorts.  As I’m learning more each day about the truth of things nutritive, I find I’m having trouble letting go of some of my ingrained notions in practice.

I’d said the biggest barrier to acceptance of the truth regarding carbohydrates and the associated changes in society may well be wanting to believe the prevailing notions about diet as it relates to health.

According to the science of nutrition as explained in Gary Taubes’ book, Good Calories, Bad Calories:

• cholesterol and triglycerides can be controlled by restricting carbohydrates
• fiber plays no significant role in weight loss or disease prevention
• meat essentially contains nearly everything a body needs to survive
• eating fat does not make one fat
• vegetables and fruits are only required to provide nutrients missing from a high-carbohydrate, low-protein diet

I’ll relate some thoughts on these as they apply in my life and then I’ll stop beating this “belief” horse (for a while).

Cholesterol and triglycerides 

In 1995, at 230 pounds, my total cholesterol was 180 (HDL 37, LDL 106, VLDL 37).  In early 1997, at 243 pounds, my total cholesterol was up to 320 and my triglycerides measured over 1300.  I was put on Lopid immediately.  By the end of the year my total cholesterol was down to 225 and the triglycerides were under 300.  Nearly a year later, total cholesterol had risen to 245 and I was started on Lipitor; as a result, my total cholesterol dropped to 132 and the triglycerides to 148 by early 2000.  These figures again began to inch up as time went by: total cholesterol ranged between 172 and 190, HDL between 40 and 49, LDL from 83 to 105, triglycerides between 144 and 306.

When I started Atkins in July 2003, I weighed 238 pounds but my cholesterol was down (total 128, HDL 40, LDL 66, triglycerides 112).  Three months into the diet, my total cholesterol had remained level at 130, but my HDL had risen to 53, the LDL was 67, and my triglycerides had plummeted to 51!  Without my doctor’s knowledge, I slowly weaned myself off Lipitor following those results; according to the Atkins Institute, the first thing they’d do with new inductees is take them off statins, and I felt I’d learned why.  Within six months off the medication, my total cholesterol had risen to 235 but my HDL had increased to 55; LDL had increased to 144 and the triglycerides I’d been so proud of were back up to 181.  My doctor put me on Vytorin in 2006 since the readings were still continuing to be higher than he liked, but after three months, he put me back on Lipitor since I’d complained about Vytorin being double the cost and my readings were actually going up instead of down.  It was “under control” again by the end of 2006, but after a six month slide into the underworld of high carbs in late 2007, the total was again over 200, HDL was down to 38, and the triglycerides were nearly 400.

During all this, even now, my physician says he is not overly concerned because the ratio of HDL to the other components is tolerable in his opinion.  My next bloodwork will be in June, so it will be interesting to see what six months on low carb and taking Lipitor does to the readings again.  I’ll again have to decide whether I want to believe taking the medication is necessary or if I’m just as well off without.

Fiber

A year or so ago, my wife’s doctor told her to start getting more fiber in her diet.  After realizing the easiest way to do this was via supplements, I began buying tablet form fiber for her.  I don’t know the exact reason her doctor prescribed this, but even after reading how the general belief came about that fiber has anything to do with avoiding disease or helping one to lose weight, I continue to buy these for her.  She’d rather not take them as they produce gas, but I buy her the ones with calcium in them as well, because she doesn’t eat a lot of dairy.  (I wonder if the calcium hypothesis is factual?)

Meat

Meat is the miracle food of the carnivore according to science.  It contains all the building blocks of life and can sustain a being on its own merits.  Entire populations existing on a meat and animal product diet maintain healthy bodies and are relatively disease free, according to descriptions of studies in Taubes’ book.  I think I could manage it for a while; I have been eating nothing but eggs, meat, cheese and fish for breakfast for two months without a problem.  But at lunch and dinner, would I eventually get bored and succumb to the widely held belief that a “balanced” diet is better for me?

Fat

A low carb friend of mine has been passing information to me about research and studies indicating that dietary fat is not stored as fat, and that increasing one’s intake of fat while reducing protein and carbohydrates actually enhances weight loss.  A segment of Dr. Atkins’ book is supposed to prescribe a “fat fast” (1000 calories daily of only fat, no protein, no carbs) to break a weight loss stall.  Taubes’ book also makes mention in many places that eating fat is not responsible for our being fat.  Bacon and eggs contain the same healthful substances as in highly-praised olive oil.  With all this good press, why am I so concerned that my Tanita scale tells me 32% of my body is fat and that I’m “obese?”

Vegetables and fruits and grains

“Strive for five.”  Heard of it?  It’s plastered all over anything having to do with buying food.  Five servings daily (now described as “cups” because people apparently had no idea what a “serving” of anything was) are recommended, and NINE servings of grains (preferably whole) on top of THAT.  If you’ve read Good Calories, Bad Calories, you know that adding fruits and/or vegetables to the diet of those afflicted by certain maladies simply served to replace what was missing from their high carbohydrate, low protein diet.  It’s the same reason manufacturers had to start adding vitamins and minerals to their products: they’d stripped them of whatever goodness they contained during processing.  The whole point of grains being heavily promoted for the last 150 years is that the world’s population is growing at a break-neck pace, and you can feed a whole heck of a lot more people on bread and cereal than you can if you feed animals with the same amount of grain and then turn them into meat.  Vitamins and minerals?  If I’m getting everything I need from meat, why am I still taking a multivitamin every day?

I wrote yesterday about the effects of wanting to believe something.  But, aren’t I equally guilty of this myself?

Why should I accept the precepts and explanations of any particular author?  Plenty of derisive comments were made by respected figures in the health field about Dr. Atkins’ theories and his nutritional approach, yet I chose to believe that what he was suggesting made sense.  His low carb diet certainly seemed to have a sound scientific floor-plan, and not being a scientist myself, I was depending on his knowledge and expertise to be legitimate.  This was no quack scheme, no fad based on unfounded notions.  Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Caloriesprovides evidence that the practice of restricting carbohydrates as a means of reducing weight has been around since at least the mid 1800’s, and the approach had been established, proven and tested repeatedly well before the doctor’s New Diet Revolution was published in the early 1970’s.

What about Taubes?  What purpose would he have in misleading the public?  His credentials (from his description of them) appear impeccable; the time and effort he spent researching for the book is considerable.  I haven’t yet found, and I’ve looked for it, any negative comments with regard to his credibility or qualifications.  I’ve found comments, some from low carb adherents, that allude to Taubes misunderstanding a process, or oversimplifying something, but these are few.  So, I want to believe that what he’s writing about is true.  It makes sense to my mind, but anyone can make many things seem plausible if they so desire (Ancel Keys’ correlation of dietary fat to heart disease, for example). 

I want to believe I’ll lose weight again during the “induction phase” that Dr. Atkins described, just as I did in 2003.   Although that isn’t happening as quickly as I’d like it to this time, I want to believe that something I’m doing, or not doing, is causing a stall in the loss.  I want to believe the science of fat partitioning and energy imbalance by means of hormonal and enzymatic regulation.  If fat isn’t leaving my cells to be turned into fuel, what is causing that to happen?  A sufficient fuel source otherwise?  My penchant for evening martinis, perhaps?  Enough studies are detailed in the book that describe an almost universal consistency of fat and weight loss, without injury to health, by simply restricting carbohydrates without restricting fat or protein.  Where’s my loss?  I want to believe it’s on the way.

In the matter of disease: I want to believe that all the explanations and experiments and research to date that implicate carbohydrates as the root cause of the ailments of civilization are correct, and not just more misinterpretations or false presentations.  I want to believe I can favorably improve my health and longevity by eating a carbohydrate-restrictive diet.

As to wanting to believe these principles will someday soon be regarded by the entire world as beyond question… that part is wishful thinking.